My contribution is a review of the Proceedings of the V Meeting of Italian-American Philosophy Autonomy of Reason? Autonomie der Vernunft? that toke place in Rome . American and European philosophers established a fruitful dialog aiming to show the complexity of the notion of “Reason” and, in particular, the possibility of its “Autonomy”. As we will see in the following discussion, human reason seems to be characterized by somewhat vague borders.

Immanuel Kant is often viewed by educational theorists as an individualist, who put education on “an individual track,” paving the way for political liberal conceptions of education such as that of John Rawls. One can easily find evidence for such a view, in “Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” as well as in his more metaphysical, moral inquiries. However, the place of reason in Kant’s philosophy––what I call the “autonomy of reason”––spells out a negative rather than (...) positive conception of freedom, from which stems a less individualistic or political liberal education than many presume. I cite both well known and lesser known works in the essay to demonstrate that Kant defended universal freedom only as a means towards developing the “autonomy of reason”, and I consider comparatively the education it entails with that spelled out by Rawls, despite the common conflation of the two. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:482 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY with Diderot, in 1773, did not generate any excitement on either side: Diderot found the philosopher far less interesting than the patroness; Hemsterhuis, for his part, thought Diderot in person a disappointment, after reading his works. I wish I could say that I found Hemsterhuis an exciting thinker, as he is presented in Moenkemeyer 's useful and informed study. I cannot. On the other hand, (...) this quiet philosopher from Holland stood at one of the great crossroads in the history of European thought. In his struggle against the Atheism he saw emerging from the French Enlightenment, in his stress on essences, known and unknown, as opposed to the atheistic concept of matter, in his doctrine of total personality rather than faculty psychology, in his idea of perfectibilityand the Golden Age that he likened to the afterlife--in these he had found a way out of the sterile impass confronting the disciples of Diderot and d'Holbach. In short, this is a figure of undeniable consequence historically, and he has been too long ignored by American students of philosophy. We should be grateful both to the author and to the publisher for making him known to us in this monograph, the first comprehensive study of Hemsterhuis ever published in English. WALTER E. REX University of California, Berkeley The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals." By Robert Paul Wolff. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Pp. x + 228. $12.50) The Autonomy of Reason reflects Wolff's determination to get out of Kant's system what is good and to get out of Kant's system for good. It thus burns with the conflicting passions of a devoted student who has learned much from a reserved teacher but who now finds it imperative to break with him for precisely the reasons that attracted him initially. This explains why much of the book reads like a declaration of independence yet is based on a sympathetic, even immanent, critique of Kant addressed to Wolff himself. Although he is addressing himself, others may share and will certainly benefit from Wolff's two decades of intense study of Kant. Without question Wolff has written a provocative and important book. Contrary to its title, however, it is not really about the autonomy of reason; and contrary to its subtitle, it is only partly a commentary on Kant's Groundwork. It serves, rather, as a propaedeutic to Wolff's own moral and political views. I believe this at least accounts for some of the puzzling features of the book: its highly personal nature, its style of philosophical commentary, and its devastating introduction. Wolff does not see his task as one of either historical exegesis or philosophical criticism. In the place of both Whiff proposes a "philosophical reconstruction" of the text. This is both desirable and necessary, he says, because "of all the great philosophers, there is none so rich in insights and so plagued by inconsistency as Kant" (p. 4). The resulting reconstruction will be worthwhile provided that affirmative answers can be given to two questions: "Does the interpretation developed here illuminate the text, so that at least some of what Kant says is clearer and more plausible in the light of it; and, more important still, does the interpretation result in an argument whose independent philosophical merit justifies the effort spent grappling with Kant?" (p. 5). A third question suggests itself: would Kant recognize himself as the author of the reconstructed text? This question one must answer in the negative, for the Groundwork that emerges, although certainly Kantian, does not accurately reflect Kantianism. To the extent that this is a criticism, it is so only because the book advertises itself as a commentary. In short, Wolff's book is similar to Strawson's Bounds of Sense in that the value of both lies in salvaging something of worth from the sunken hulk of Kantianism. Wolff's Introduction is particularly revealing, for it consists of a sustained attack on several BOOK REVIEWS 483 of Kant's central metaphysical claims, an attack which, if successful, undermines much of his ethics. As an introduction to a commentary, it prejudices the... (shrink)

Sellars was committed to the irreducibility of the semantic, the intentional, and the normative. Nevertheless, he was also committed to naturalism, which is prima facie at odds with his other theses. This paper argues that Sellars maintained his naturalism by being linguistically pluralistic but ontologically monistic . There are irreducibly distinct forms of discourse, because there is an array of distinguishable functions that language and thought perform, but we are not ontologically committed to the array of apparently non-natural entities or (...) relations mentioned in the metalanguage. However, there is an underlying relation between language and world presupposed by all empirically meaningful language. In his early work Sellars sought to describe this relation in linguistic terms as a form of 'pure description', but inadequacies in that notion drove him towards the naturalistic relation between language and world that he came to call 'picturing'. (shrink)

This essay will defend a causal conception of action explanations in terms of an agent’s reasons by delineating a metaphysical and epistemic framework that allows us to view folk psychology as providing us with causal and autonomous explanatory strategies of accounting for individual agency. At the same time, I will calm philosophical concerns about the issue of causal deviance that have been at the center of the recent debates between causalist and noncausalist interpretations of action explanations. For that purpose, it (...) is important to realize that the domain of folk-psychological action explanation is also the domain of skillful and goal-directed bodily movements, a domain to which we have independent epistemic access. (shrink)

This essay will defend a causal conception of action explanations in terms of an agent’s reasons by delineating a metaphysical and epistemic framework that allows us to view folk psychology as providing us with causal and autonomous explanatory strategies of accounting for individual agency. At the same time, I will calm philosophical concerns about the issue of causal deviance that have been at the center of the recent debates between causalist and noncausalist interpretations of action explanations. For that purpose, it (...) is important to realize that the domain of folk-psychological action explanation is also the domain of skillful and goal-directed bodily movements, a domain to which we have independent epistemic access. (shrink)

This paper questions the assumption of the bulk of Western philosophy that reasoning in general, and moral reasoning in particular, can be undertaken without any consideration of the unique cultural experiences of those who engage in it. It proposes a communitarian alternative for thinking about subjecthood. It further contends that there is need for professional African philosophers to assist their people in the quest for solutions to current pertinent socio-economic challenges facing them.

There is hardly any feature of Hegel’s philosophy whose current significance is greater, or more neglected, than the unique place given the analysis of thought. Unlike any other thinker before or after, Hegel begins his philosophical system with a logic conceiving categories without regard for their reference to reality or how a given knower might think them. He allows thinking itself to figure as an object of investigation only within the subsequent theory of reality comprising the philosophies of nature and (...) spirit. There Hegel treats thinking as a real activity of living individuals, inhabiting a common world of which they are conscious and able to speak. Consequently, thought becomes something properly analyzable only after not just categories, but nature and such worldly features of mind as consciousness, representation, and language have been determined. As unsurprising as this ordering may appear, it represents a fundamental break from ordinary philosophical practice, a break bearing crucial importance for the nonmetaphysical, antifoundational character of Hegel’s philosophy, as well as signaling the genuine alternative he provides to the dilemmas plaguing so much contemporary thought. (shrink)

This chapter offers a fresh perspective on Fichte’s controversial critique of dogmatism in the “First and Second Introductions” to the Attempt at a New Presentation of the Science of Knowledge. It argues that the issue at stake in Fichte’s anti-dogmatism is the demand that reason be thoroughly determined from within itself and hence not be determined by anything outside it. It then addresses the charge of Fichte’s two-mindedness about the effectiveness of his refutation of dogmatism by arguing that the (...) absolute autonomy of reason deprives the idealist of any objective foothold upon which to refute the dogmatist outside of moral belief, it furnishes him with the subjective ground of rational justified by means of which the dogmatist can be refuted in his own terms. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide autonomy-based reasons in favour of limitarianism. Limitarianism affirms it is of primary moral importance that no one gets too much. The paper challenges the standard assumption that having more material resources always increases autonomy. It expounds five mechanisms through which having too much material wealth might undermine autonomy. If these hypotheses are true, a theory of justice guided by a concern for autonomy will support a limitarian distribution of wealth. Finally, the (...) paper discusses two issues autonomy-based limitarianism would raise. First, insofar as coercion invades autonomy, do autonomy-based reasons legitimate coercive measures to secure a limitarian distribution of wealth? Second, is a limitarian ethos consistent with the incentive to produce enough wealth to secure distributive justice? (shrink)

The eminent philosopher Keith Lehrer offers an original and distinctively personal view of central aspects of the human condition, such as reason, knowledge, wisdom, autonomy, love, consensus, and consciousness. He argues that what is uniquely human is our capacity for evaluating our own mental states (such as beliefs and desires), and suggests that we have a system for such evaluation which allows the resolution of personal and interpersonal conflict. The keystone in this system is self-trust, on which (...) class='Hi'>reason, knowledge, and wisdom are grounded. (shrink)

This book explicitly addresses policy options in a democratic society regarding cognitive enhancement drugs and devices. The book offers an in-depth case by case analysis of existing and emerging cognitive neuroenhancement technologies and canvasses a distinct political neuroethics approach. The author provides an argument on the much debated issue of fairness of cognitive enhancement practices and tackles the tricky issue of how to respect preferences of citizens opposing and those preferring enhancement. The author persuasively argues the necessity of a laws (...) and regulations regarding the use of cognitive enhancers. He also argues that the funds for those who seek cognitive enhancement should be allocated free of charge to the least advantaged. The work argues that the notion of autonomy has been mistakenly associated with the metaphysical concept of free will, and offers a political definition of autonomy to clarify how responsibility is implicitly grounded in the legal and political system. As such, this book is an essential read for everyone interested in neuroethics, and a valuable resource for policy makers, as well as scholars and students in philosophy, law, psychiatry and neuroscience. (shrink)

Essential to Peirce's distinction among three kinds of reasoning, deduction, induction and abduction, is the claim that each is correlated to a unique species of validity irreducible to that of the others. In particular, abductive validity cannot be analyzed in either deductive or inductive terms, a consequence of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods. But when the full structure of abductive argumentation — as viewed by the mature Peirce — is clarified, every inferential step in (...) the process can be seen to dissolve into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, the final stage is a special type of practical inference which, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, surprisingly, is not inferential at all. In neither is abduction a type of inference to the best explanation. The result is a major reassessment of the relevance of Peirce's views to contemporary methodological studies. (shrink)

Kant takes the idea of autonomy of the will to be his distinctive contribution to moral philosophy. However, this idea is more nuanced and complicated than one might think. In this chapter, I sketch the rough outlines of Kant’s idea of autonomy of the will while also highlighting contentious exegetical issues that give rise to various possible interpretations. I tentatively defend four basic claims. First, autonomy primarily features in Kant’s account of moral agency, as the condition of (...) the possibility of moral obligation. Second, autonomy amounts to a metaphysical property as well as a normative principle and a psychological capacity. Third, although there is legitimate scholarly disagreement about whether or not autonomy involves self-legislation of the moral law, there is good reason to believe it underwrites an ‘inside-out’ (as opposed to ‘outside-in’) conception of the relationship between the will and moral requirements. Fourth, persons have dignity because their autonomy makes them members in the set of beings over whom the categorical imperative requires us to universalise our maxims, not because autonomy is an independently important property. (shrink)

In The Autonomy of Morality Charles Larmore challenges two ideas that have shaped the modern mind. The world, he argues, is not a realm of value-neutral fact, nor does human freedom consist in imposing principles of our own devising on an alien reality. Rather, reason consists in being responsive to reasons for thought and action that arise from the world itself. Larmore shows that the moral good has an authority that speaks for itself. Only in this light does (...) the true basis of a liberal political order come into view, as well as the role of unexpected goods in the makeup of a life lived well. (shrink)

The First World War was supposed to end all wars, though soon followed WWII. Since 1945 wars continued to abound; now we confront a real prospect of a third world war. Many armed struggles and wars arise in attempts to end repressive government; still more are fomented by repressive governments, few of which acknowledge their repressive character. It is historically and culturally naive to suppose that peace is normal, and war an aberration; war, preparations for war and threats of war (...) belong to ‘normal’ human life. Our tolerance, acceptance or fostering of such repeated injustices and atrocities indicate pervasive failures to understand fundamentals of justice, and what we owe morally to ourselves and to all others, together with our responsibilities to preserve the biosphere, not merely our own store(s) of reserves. As matters both of justice and prudence we must re-orient ourselves, individually and collectively, to promote justice, peace and ecological responsibilities by identifying and instituting just forms of social cooperation, domestically and internationally. All of these are our problems, whether we recognize them or continue our pervasive negligence. We urgently require cogent understanding of the social dimensions of human judgment, rational assessment, right action, and public reason. This requires understanding (inter alia) how Kant’s explication of rational judgment and justification is fundamentally social, how these features of rational judgment and justification are constitutive of Kant’s account of individual autonomy, and how they are central to Kant’s account of proper public use of reason. Reasoning publically remains precarious, not because – as often alleged – the ‘Enlightenment project’ has failed. It has not failed, it has been thwarted, and in our public responsibilities we have too often failed it. (shrink)

In recent work, Robert Hopkins has argued that aesthetic judgements are autonomous. When a subject finds herself diverging in judgement from a group of others who, while independently applying the same method, have come to some opposing conclusion, then for ordinary empirical matters this is often reason enough for her to suspend judgement, or even to adopt their view, but this happens much more rarely in the case of beauty. Moreover, the opposing view does not act as a defeater (...) to her belief to the same extent as it does in the empirical case. Hopkins argues that this phenomenon, properly understood, poses a distinctive problem for aesthetic cognitivism. Such a result might seem to support a non-cognitivism about aesthetic judgement, but Hopkins argues that one of the most promising such accounts, a particular form of aesthetic quasi-realism, cannot account in a satisfactory way for aesthetic autonomy either. In this paper, I argue that Hopkins's argument is crucially enthymematic. Supplying the relevant premise makes space for an independently motivated explanation of autonomy, which is open to cognitivists and non-cognitivists alike. (shrink)

Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved. Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempts to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights. When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive account of reason and morality emerges. Kant offers a "constructivist" vindication of reason and a (...) moral vision in which obligations are prior to rights and in which justice and virtue are linked. O'Neill begins by reconsidering Kant's conceptions of philosophical method, reason, freedom, autonomy and action. She then moves on to the more familiar terrain of interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, while in the last section she emphasizes differences between Kant's ethics and recent "Kantian" ethics, including the work of John Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers. (shrink)

This review article is a discussion of Charles Larmore's book The Autonomy of Morality. After presenting an outline of Larmore's position, it focuses on three critical issues: whether Larmore is right to see Kant as an anti-realist; whether he deals adequately with the threat to autonomy posed by the apparent obligatoriness of morality; and whether he establishes that the constructivist idea of practical reason as self-legislating must really be as unconstrained and empty as he suggests.

In this paper, I provide a novel account of gaslighting according to which gaslighting involves mistakenly failing to see oneself as a source of reasons with respect to some domain. I argue that this account does a nice job of explaining what's gone wrong in various popular examples of gaslighting, and that it captures what different instances of gaslighting have in common even when they are quite different in other respects. I also show how this account of gaslighting explains a (...) common intuition according to which gaslighting is autonomy-undermining--something other accounts, I argue, have failed to do. And finally, I show that this explanation of why gaslighting is autonomy-undermining also shows that certain forms of oppressive socialization are autonomy-undermining as well, thus providing us with an argument in favor of more substantive theories of autonomy according to which a certain kind of self-respect is necessary for autonomy. (shrink)

In Between Facts and Norms, Jürgen Habermas points out an ambiguity in the Kantian concept of autonomy that would lead to an antagonism between human rights and popular sovereignty. He charges Kant of introducing this concept from the private point of view of the individual subject who judges morally and of elucidating it from the point of view of the discursive and democratic political formation of the will. Against this reading, Ingeborg Maus argues that Kant develops human rights and (...) popular sovereignty in the closest reciprocal complementarity. Nonetheless, she agrees with Habermas’s critique of the monological character of the Kantian principle of morality and reaffirms the ambiguity of the concept of autonomy. The aim of this article is to to shed light on Kant’s conceptions of Enlightenment and “public use of reason” developed in his political writings, in order to suggest that far from devaluating the political formation of the will, Kant establishes it as a fundamental step towards the realization of morality and, therefore, of the autonomy of the will. First, I will argue that in explaining the principle of autonomy with the idea of self-legislation of the will, Kant does not introduce ambiguity in this concept. On the contrary, it establishes a common normative structure between the domains of moral and right. Finally, I will return to the Doctrine of Right to argue that for Kant, interaction and communication between citizens is not lateral to the legitimation of right, since the members of the political community must consent and be convinced by reason. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Schaefer et al. proposed to enhance autonomy via improving reasoning abilities through cognitive enhancement [1]. While initially their idea additionally seems to elegantly avoid objections against genetic enhancements based on the value of autonomy, we want to draw attention to several problems their approach poses. First, we will show that it is not at all clear that safe and meaningful methods to genetically or pharmaceutically enhance cognition will be feasible any time soon. Second, we (...) want to provide a deeper discussion of the role of cognition and reasoning abilities in philosophical concepts of autonomy, as discussed in the mentioned paper. In doing so, we wish to demonstrate that using reasoning abilities as the common denominator in different accounts of autonomy in the context of enhancement does not do justice to the highly complex interrelations between cognition, reasoning abilities and autonomy. Neither should this way of arguing be accepted as a basis to call for practical outcomes, such as funding research into e. g. genetic cognitive enhancements, if the examined concepts of autonomy are taken seriously. (shrink)

Psychology has been considered to have an autonomy from the other sciences (especially physical science) in at least two ways: in its subject-matter and in its methods. To say that the subject-matter of psychology is autonomous is to say that psychology deals with entities—properties, relations, states—which are not dealt with or not wholly explicable in terms of physical (or any other) science. Contrasted with this is the idea that psychology employs a characteristic method of explanation, which is not shared (...) by the other sciences. I shall label the two senses of autonomy ‘metaphysical autonomy’ and ‘explanatory autonomy’ The question of whether psychology as a science is autonomous in either sense is one of the philosophical questions surrounding the (somewhat vague) doctrine of ‘naturalism’: questions concerning the extent to which the human mind can be brought under the aegis of natural science. In their contemporary form, these questions had their origin in the ‘new science’ of the 17th century. Early materialists like Hobbes (1651) and La Mettrie (1748) rejected both explanatory and metaphysical autonomy: mind is matter in motion, and the mind can be studied by the mathematical methods of the new science just as any matter can. But while materialism (and therefore the denial of metaphysical autonomy) had to wait until the 19th century before starting to become widely accepted, the denial of explanatory autonomy remained a strong force in empiricist philosophy. Hume described his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) as an ‘attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’—where ‘moral’ signifies ‘human’. And subsequent criticism of Hume’s views, notably by Kant and Reid, ensured that the question of naturalism—whether there can be a ‘science of man’—was one of the central questions of 19th century philosophy, and a question which hovered over the emergence of psychology as an independent discipline (see Reed 1994). In the 20th century, much of the philosophical discussion of the autonomy of psychology has been inspired by the Logical Positivists’ discussions of the UNITY OF.... (shrink)

A child is a developing person with evolving capacities that include autonomy, mental capacity and capacity to assume responsibility. Hence, children are entitled to participatory rights in South Africa as observed in the Children’s Act 38 of 2005. According to section 129 of the Act a child may consent to his or her own medical treatment provided that he or she is over the age of 12 years and is of sufficient maturity and decisional capacity to understand the various (...) implications of the treatment including the risks and benefits thereof. However, the Act does not provide a definition for what qualifies as ‘sufficient maturity’ nor does it stipulate how health professionals ought to assess the decisional capacity of a child. In addition, South Africa is a culturally diverse country. The Western liberal notion of autonomy may not necessarily find equal prominence in the mores of people with a different worldview. Hence we demonstrate a few salient comparisons between legal liberal moral theory and African communitarianism as pertinent to the autonomy of the child. Children are rights-holders by virtue of their humanity. Their dignity as individual human persons affords them the entitlement to human rights as contemplated under the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. However, contrary to the traditional Western notion of individual autonomous persons African societies hold a communalistic notion of person hence there is less regard for individual autonomy and rights with more emphasis on the communal good and maintaining the continuity of relationships and interdependencies shared within a community. A child considered in this view is not regarded as a full person. This implies that decisions concerning the child, including consent to medical treatment are discussed and determined by the community to which the child belongs. Lastly, in this article, we draw on the notion of capacity for responsibility to produce a pragmatic definition of sufficient maturity. It seems reasonable to suggest a move away from a general legal age of consent for medical treatment toward more individualised, context-specific approaches in determining the maturity of a child patient to consent to medical treatment. Perhaps, decision-making with respect to consent to the medical treatment of a child belonging to a traditional African community where the notion of a person is embedded in communitarianism ought to involve the child’s parents/guardians/caregivers where possible provided that the best interests of the child are awarded priority. (shrink)

It is a common view that artificial systems could play an important role in dealing with the shortage of caregivers due to demographic change. One argument to show that this is also in the interest of care-dependent persons is that artificial systems might significantly enhance user autonomy since they might stay longer in their homes. This argument presupposes that the artificial systems in question do not require permanent supervision and control by human caregivers. For this reason, they need (...) the capacity for some degree of moral decision-making and agency to cope with morally relevant situations (artificial morality). Machine ethics provides the theoretical and ethical framework for artificial morality. This article scrutinizes the question how artificial moral agents that enhance user autonomy could look like. It discusses, in particular, the suggestion that they should be designed as moral avatars of their users to enhance user autonomy in a substantial sense. (shrink)