The problem of other minds has widely been considered as a special problem within the debate about scepticism. If one cannot be sure that there is a world existing independently of one's mind, how can we be sure that there are minds - minds which we cannot even experience the way we experience material objects? This book shows, through a detailed examination of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, that these concerns are unfounded. By focusing on Hume's discussion of (...) sympathy - the ability to connect with the mental contents of other persons - Anik Waldow demonstrates that belief in other minds can be justified by the same means as belief in material objects. The book thus not only provides the first large-scale treatment of the function of the belief in other minds within the Treatise, thereby adding a new dimension to Hume's realism, but also serves as an invaluable guide to the complexity of the problem of other minds and its various responses in contemporary debate. (shrink)

By placing Hume’s account of communication in the context of some less known seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French resources on rhetoric and language, this essay argues that Hume based his und...

We discuss the variety of sorts of sympathy Hume recognizes, the extent to which he thinks our sympathy with others’ feelings depends on inferences from the other’s expression, and from her perceived situation, and consider also whether he later changed his views about the nature and role of sympathy, in particular its role in morals.

Hume holds that sympathy is both crucial for making moral judgments and a distorting influence that prevents us from assessing the virtue of characters impartially. He writes, When any quality, or character, has a tendency to the good of mankind, we are pleas’d with it, and approve of it; because it presents the lively idea of pleasure; which idea affects us by sympathy, and is itself a kind of pleasure. But as this sympathy is very variable, it may be thought, (...) that our sentiments of morals must admit of all the same variations. We sympathize more with persons contiguous to us, than with strangers: With our countrymen, than with foreigners. This essay will argue that Humean sympathy can play a .. (shrink)

David Hume gibt mit seiner Theorie personaler Identität Rätsel auf. Rätselhaft ist sie vor allem deshalb, weil er sich selbst in einem Appendix der Inkonsistenz bezichtigt, jedoch weder einen konkreten Grund dafür angibt, noch eine angemessen Lösung anbietet. Im Folgenden wird dargelegt, daß Humes Theorie personaler Identität für sich betrachtet keinen Grund für derlei Selbstbezichtigungen liefert. Tatsächliche Schwierigkeiten ergeben sich hingegen unter Berücksichtigung von Humes Wahrnehmungstheorie, in deren Zentrum der Begriff der Perzeption steht. Sowohl unseren Glauben an die eigene Identität (...) als auch unseren Glauben an materielle Wahrnehmungsobjekte erklärt Hume nämlich mittels desselben psychologischen Mechanismus. In beiden Fällen handelt es sich jedoch um ganz unterschiedliche Phänomene, die nicht auf dieselben Bedingungen zurückgeführt werden können. Gemäß dieser Interpretation ist eine Lösung des Problems für Hume unmöglich, weil sie zwangsläufig mit einer Revision seines Perzeptionsbegriffs, einer seiner zentralsten Kategorien, verbunden wäre. (shrink)

_Sensibility in the Early Modern Era_ investigates how the early modern characterisation of sensibility as a natural property of the body could give way to complex considerations about the importance of affect in morality. What underlies this understanding of sensibility is the attempt to fuse Lockean sensationism with Scottish sentimentalism – being able to have experiences of objects in the world is here seen as being grounded in the same principle that also enables us to feel moral sentiments. Moral and (...) epistemic ways of relating to the world thus blend into one another, as both can be traced to the same capacity that enables us to affectively respond to stimuli that impinge on our perceptual apparatus. This collection focuses on these connections by offering reflections on the role of sensibility in the early modern attempt to think of the human being as a special kind of sensitive machine and affectively responsive animal. Humans, as they are understood in this context, relate to themselves by sensing themselves and perpetually refining their intellectual and moral capacities in response to the way the world affects them. Responding to the world here refers to the manner in which both natural _and_ man-made influences impact on our ability to conceptualise the animate and inanimate world, and our place within that world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _Intellectual History Review. _. (shrink)

In this essay I will argue that although Rousseau often invokes the concept of nature as a fixed point of reference in the evaluation of personal traits, and individual and collective practices, a closer look at the dynamics of the educational programme laid out in his Emile shows that for him human nature has to emerge in a process that combines the influence of nature and artifice. This process is essentially enabled by Emile's sensibility that, as I will claim, can (...) be conceived as a natural property geared towards development and change in relation to a specific social environment. By confronting him with artfully orchestrated stimuli, this environment ensures that he “naturally” develops in line with a normatively laden conception of society. (shrink)

This essay argues that Humean impressions are triggers of associative processes, which enable us to form stable patterns of thought that co-vary with our experiences of the world. It will thus challenge the importance of the Copy Principle by claiming that it is the regularity with which certain kinds of sensory inputs motivate certain sets of complex ideas that matters for the discrimination of ideas. This reading is conducive to Hume’s account of perception, because it avoids the impoverishment of conceptual (...) resources so typical for empiricist theories of meaning and explains why ideas should be based on impressions, although impressions cannot be known to mirror matters of fact. (shrink)

By investigating conceptions of experience from Descartes to Kant, this book shows that one of the central questions of the early-modern period was how humans can instantiate in their actions the principles of rational moral agency, while at the same time responding with their bodies to the causal play of nature. Through the analysis of this question, the book draws attention to the bodily underpinnings of the ability to experience thoughts and feelings. It thus challenges overly subjectivist interpretations that concentrate (...) on the inner realm of the experiencing mind and because of this fail to account for the worldly dimension of being experientially responsive to the affections of the body. (shrink)

In this essay I endeavour to discern a possible foundation for Hume's underlying assumption that human minds are similar to each other. The aim of this is to provide a new approach towards A Treatise of Human Nature that links Books II and III with Hume's epistemological discussion in Book I by providing a detailed analysis of the structural parallels and differences between sympathy and causal reasoning. Against this background, the belief in other minds will turn out to pertain to (...) the class of natural beliefs which draw their legitimacy from Hume's attack on the metaphysical notion of reason. (shrink)

Kant introduces empiricism as a deficient position that is unsuitable for the generation of scientific knowledge. The reason for this is that, according to him, empiricism fails to connect with the world by remaining trapped within the realm of appearances. If we follow Galen’s account of the debate ensuing among Hellenistic doctors in the third century B.C., empiricism presents itself in an entirely different light. It emerges as a position that criticises medical practitioners who stray away from the here and (...) now by indulging in theory-driven a priori forms of reasoning. In so doing empiricism remains at all times committed to the world and its agents. In this paper Galen’s account of empiricism will serve me as a means to unravel the dynamics of a discussion that aims to reassess the standards of a dogmatic scientific practice. By looking at Bacon’s and Gassendi’s perception of the ancient medical tradition I will furthermore show that the understanding of what empiricism is crucially depends on the understanding of what scepticism is. (shrink)

Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception, by OttWalter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 272.

Philosophen der Frühen Neuzeit werden gemeinhin als Ideen-Theoretiker verstanden, wobei Ideen als eine Barriere zwischen dem denkenden Subjekt und der Welt begriffen werden. In dem vorliegenden Artikel geht es mir darum, eine kritische Überprüfung des überholten Begriffsschemas anhand einer Auseinandersetzung mit Humes Theorie der Assoziation anzuregen. Es wird gezeigt, dass Ideen in der Interaktion zwischen dem Subjekt und seiner sozialen und natürlichen Umwelt entstehen. So ist es nicht die innere Privatheit des Bewusstseins, die für die Herausbildung von Ideen maßgeblich ist, (...) sondern auf Erfahrung gestützte Gewohnheitsbildung und Assoziation. Die Etikettierung als Ideen-Theoretiker verdeckt diesen grundlegenden Aspekt frühneuzeitlichen Denkens, so dass es oft zu einer Überbetonung skeptischer Probleme und anschließenden Rettungsversuchen kommt, die einem besseren Verständnis eher hinderlich als förderlich sind. (shrink)

Hume’s account of sympathy has often been taken to describe what the discovery of so-called mirror neurons has suggested, namely, that we are able to understand one another’s emotions and beliefs through experiences that require no mediating thoughts and exactly resemble the experiences of the observed person. I will oppose this interpretation by arguing that, on Hume’s standard account, sympathy is a mechanism that produces ideas and beliefs prior to the emergence of shared feelings. To stress this aspect of Humean (...) sympathy is to show that the experiences, which mirror neurons apparently cause us to have, may well count as inferentially derived emotion-laden beliefs, thus undermining the opposition between experience-grounded and inference-based accounts of mind-reading. (shrink)

Early modern philosophers after Ren? Descartes are commonly distinguished as either rationalists or empiricists: rationalists are understood to agree with Descartes that reason is the source of knowledge, while empiricists are seen to emphasize the role of the senses within processes of knowledge acquisition. In recent years, this classic distinction has increasingly come under scrutiny. It is objected that, in its simplicity, the distinction tends to conceal the various cross-categorial influences thinkers of the early modern era had on each other.1 (...) In "The History of Scepticism,"2 Richard Popkin provided an alternative approach to early modern philosophy: instead of focusing on the opposition between the two rival camps of empiricists and rationalists, he tells us to concentrate on "la crisepyrrhonienne,"3 for it is this crisis that lay at the heart of early modern philosophy and preoccupied rationalists as much as empiricists. (shrink)

This text is an outgrowth of notes prepared by J. Y. Girard for a course at the University of Paris VII. It deals with the mathematical background of the application to computer science of aspects of logic (namely the correspondence between proposition & types). Combined with the conceptual perspectives of Girard's ideas, this sheds light on both the traditional logic material & its prospective applications to computer science. The book covers a very active & exciting research area, & (...) it will be essential reading for all those working in logic & computer science. (shrink)

State Violence, Coalitions, Subjects After a consideration of the reception of her work in France , Judith Butler assesses the political contribution of queer movements and minority struggles. She addresses the need for the left to reappropriate the forthright critique of the State and its violence and to examine the way minorities are produced. To do so, her analysis starts from the question of immigrant persons. She highlights the issues and the difficulties which are involved, if there is to be (...) a productive critique of the State, the aim of which is to contest it. As part of a dynamic political perspective, she proposes the creation of coalitions. She outlines the main lines of such a coalition, its dynamics and singularities, its articulation with the subject, but also its limits. In conclusion, she examines the issue of revolution and her relation to Marxist thought, indicating the outlines of her current thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CriticsExperience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in NatureAnik Waldow (bio)I would like to thank Dario Perinetti and Hynek Janoušek for their thoughtful comments and the time and effort they invested into my work. Their reflections drive attention to important questions and make helpful suggestions about how some of the arguments of the book can be further developed and clarified. In what follows, I (...) will first discuss the proposal to distinguish between a narrow and a broad sense of experience, then specify how I understand the connection between having a body and being able to engage in experiences. In this context, I will also discuss Janoušek’s suggestion to draw further distinctions between the different senses in which the concept of body relates to experience in Descartes and Hume. In the last section, I address the question of whether the focus on bodies risks undermining the claim that experience is intersubjectively constituted.1. Narrow versus Broad Concept of ExperienceDario Perinetti raises the worry that during the early modern period, and even before, the concept of experience was mainly used to discuss epistemological questions, and that therefore the Broad Experience Thesis fails. According to this thesis, it is reductive to think of experience in exclusively epistemological terms, since this ignores that many early modern writers approached questions about the benefits and dangers of experience from a wider moral perspective. This perspective, as I argue in [End Page 329] Experience Embodied, was concerned with the training of the mind’s intellectual and moral capacities, the role of pleasure and pain (and other affects) in epistemic and moral judgement, and, more generally, the question of how it is possible to be self-determined agents who do more than simply respond to the experiences they have.To support his claim, Perinetti cites the Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Cauvin’s Lexicon Rationale sive Thesaurus Philosophicus, but also Aristotle, Bacon, and Hobbes. The approach I pursue in my book is based on the usage of the concept of experience by the authors examined (Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, Kant). I will turn to the analysis of this usage in a moment, but before this let me say a few words about dictionaries.It is in principle not surprising that a dictionary like the Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie—and its discussion of Aristotle, Bacon, and Hobbes—supports the traditional approach to experience as a centrally epistemological concept. Its entry on “experience” revolves around the idea that philosophers are either empiricists or rationalists.1 Yet it is precisely the establishment of this distinction that has substantially contributed to promoting a reductive concept of experience. After all, rationalism and empiricism are labels typically used to describe competing epistemological positions.2 It is also worth noting that the dictionary’s entry is from the 1970s. Because of this, it operates with a picture of the history of philosophy that has long been challenged by studies that show that there is far more to early modern philosophy than the standard works of some selected canonical figures.3 When dealing with Locke, the entry for instance exclusively focuses on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and does not even mention that experience is a key concept in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.The rather short and general entry on experience in Chauvin’s Lexicon Philosophicum (1692) is not very telling either—at least not if treated in isolation from other dictionaries and encyclopedias of the period, such as D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encylopédie: a tremendously influential work, that, according to its editors, is in itself committed to the Baconian method.4 And here César Chesneau Du Marsais’s entry on experience straightforwardly highlights the moral dimension of the knowledge acquired through experience:Experience, abstract term, commonly means the knowledge acquired through a long life, combined with the reflections made on what one has seen, and on the good and bad that has happened to us. In this sense, reading history is a highly profitable way of gaining experience; it tells us of events, and shows us the good or bad repercussions and consequences of these events.5The... (shrink)

L’objection la plus ancienne et la plus redoutable à la démocratie fait valoir que le gouvernement par le peuple dessert le gouvernement pour le peuple. Les citoyens manquant pour la plupart de sagesse ou de compétence, le bien commun serait mieux assuré en confiant le pouvoir à un individu éclairé ou à une élite experte. Une réponse commune à cette objection concède la prémisse mais affirme la priorité au gouvernement par le peuple sur le gouvernement pour le peuple : le (...) droit égal à la participation devrait l’emporter sur la promotion de la compétence, même si celle-ci est requise par le bon gouvernement. La démocratie se trouve alors réduite à un ensemble de procédures équitables, traitant les citoyens en égaux ; elle ne se définit plus par la poursuite du bien commun. Il est toutefois une autre réponse à l’objection, qui évite cette dérive vers un procéduralisme étroit. Elle consiste à nier la prémisse et à affirmer la sagesse politique du peuple. Il n’est pas vrai que le gouvernement pour le peuple serait mieux assuré en confiant le pouvoir à un petit nombre de sages ou d’experts, fussent-ils les meilleurs parmi les citoyens. Cette thèse remarquable peut paraître improbable. Sa défense peut pourtant s’appuyer sur l’un des arguments les plus intrigants élaborés par la philosophie politique aristotélicienne, qui inspire et éclaire les controverses philosophiques contemporaines sur la valeur du régime démocratique : l’argument de la sagesse de la multitude. (shrink)

This book sets out to reorient our understanding of Hume by arguing against a realist reading of Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature. For De Pierris, Hume does not stipulate that, behind the veil...

This monograph is an important book for anyone interested in the topic of consciousness and personal identity in early modern thought. It offers a rich overview of the vast array of writers reflecting on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of persons, their responsibilities, the issue of immortality, and the development of an account of consciousness based on the way in which minds relate to their own thoughts and feelings. It traces the lines of influence from the scholastic background to Descartes and (...) through French, Scottish, and German debates on consciousness and personhood. The book thus represents an impressive attempt at offering a complete account of the different ideas that were passed... (shrink)

L'univers de René Girard est un univers complexe dans lequel se mêlent étroitement les éléments biographiques et les différentes disciplines auxquelles il a fait appel pour mener à bien ses travaux. Centrés sur le phénomène du désir mimétique, ces entretiens dévoilent la genèse de sa théorie dans les domaines littéraires et religieux. Le fil conducteur en est le principe des doubles mimétiques qu'il a analysés chez des auteurs comme Stendhal, Proust, Dostoïevski et Shakespeare. Il se réfère également à la (...) Bible, considérant que " la donnée fondamentale de notre temps est la crise du religieux ". Ses ouvrages relèvent à la fois de la littérature comparée, de l'anthropologie et de l'histoire des religions. Il trouve aussi, dans les échanges économiques, la confirmation de sa théorie. En effet, selon lui, le monde moderne est à la recherche du sacré qu'il a perdu, et, dans ce processus, il se retrouve victime d'un mimétisme exacerbé. René Girard déploie son esprit critique à l'encontre de la société de concurrence et de la consommation ; ce faisant, il compare les sociétés française et américaine du point de vue d'un intellectuel français installé au coeur de l'Amérique. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDo truth tables—the ordinary sort that we use in teaching and explaining basic propositional logic—require an assumption of consistency for their construction? In this essay we show that truth tables can be built in a consistency-independent paraconsistent setting, without any appeal to classical logic. This is evidence for a more general claim—that when we write down the orthodox semantic clauses for a logic, whatever logic we presuppose in the background will be the logic that appears in the foreground. Rather than (...) any one logic being privileged, then, on this count partisans across the logical spectrum are in relatively similar dialectical positions. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with the queries, comments, and suggestions raised by my commentators. I proceed in the order of the original contributions, which more or less follows the order to the ch...

In 1988, Nadine Dormoy conducted a series of interviews with Rene Girard after a number of books and conferences had situated his work in a new context of research on self-organizing systems. In these interviews, Girard discusses the intellectual activity that followed the 1982 Stanford University conference, Disorder and Order. Girard also discusses Theater of Envy, his book on Shakespeare, as well as corrects several misunderstandings of his mimetic hypothesis.

By examining the concept of experience in the theorizing of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder and Kant, Experience Embodied ventures to provide a re-evaluation of one of the most firmly esta...

Individuals living with rare conditions are faced with important challenges derived from the rarity of their conditions and aggravated by the low priority given to rare disease research. However, current realities of rare disease research require consideration of the relationship between subjectivity and ‘traditional’ objectivity. Objectivity in research has traditionally been associated with processes and descriptions that are independent of the investigator. The need for researchers to provide unbiased knowledge and achieve a balance between objectivity and the underlying values in (...) nursing and scientific research requires an examination of how objectivity is conceptualized within the context of rare disease research. The aim of this paper is to examine scientific objectivity in rare disease research from a philosophical viewpoint and, in doing so, demonstrate the need to redefine it to reflect the current scientific environment. As such, healthcare providers working on this field need to redefine objectivity around ethical and moral obligation to advance science in an equitable manner with the end goal to produce knowledge that is trustworthy and beneficial to our patients. (shrink)

In the process of completing his critical edition of Marcus of Orvieto's Liber de Moralitatibus, Girard J. Etzkorn happened upon a set of questions attributed to Henry of Ghent at the end of Rome's Bibliotheca Angelica codex 750. These questions are edited in this volume under the proviso "attributed to" so that scholars may compare the texts with other works of the Ghentian master known to be authentic. Etzkorn concludes that the ten questions appear to be of two literary (...) genres. Moreover, the ten questions seem to be "selected" questions and were not likely disputed at the same time. Future investigations are essential to find out if the questions may indeed be attributed to Henry himself or whether they were written by one of Henry's disciples who was copying the thoughts and words of the master. (shrink)

Thirteen scholars offer new essays exploring the question at the heart of J. G. Herder's thought: How can philosophy enable an understanding of the human being not simply as an intellectual and moral agent, but also as a creature of nature who is fundamentally marked by an affective openness and responsiveness to the world and other persons?

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...) Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self-determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus-response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents. (shrink)

This essay argues that Herder’s conception of history as a form of natural growth is grounded in his claim that humans are a part of nature and develop historically situated forms of reason in communication with the features of their natural and social environments. By stressing this developmental aspect of human reason, Herder not only helps us to correct an overly universalistic conception of reason that ignores the importance of situational contexts in the shaping of cognitive structures; he also allows (...) us to comprehend that the very capacity that has traditionally been seen as distinguishing humans from all other animals—namely human reason—evolves out of a capacity we share with them, namely the capacity to adapt to specific environmental demands. (shrink)

Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On (...) this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications. (shrink)

In the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Condillac argues that humans develop reason only once they have discovered the function of signs and the use of language in their encounters with others. Commentators like Hans Aarsleff and Charles Taylor believe that a precondition for this discovery is the presence of a special human capacity: the capacity to reflectively relate to what is given in experience. The problem with this claim is that it returns Condillac to a form of (...) innatism from which he was keen to escape, because it assumes that human minds are reflective qua original endowment. I argue that Condillac attributed limited value to explanations based on the static analysis of innate natures and instead opted for a dynamic examination of developmental trajectories enabled through species-specific embodied experiences. Through this dynamic approach, he was able to do two things at once: explain how it is possible that human cognition is of a unique superior kind, while at the same time defending the view that humans are like any other species in that they form species-specific mental features through their experiential engagement with the contingent circumstances of life. (shrink)

By investigating one of the major inconsistencies that Hume's parallel treatment of the identity of persons and objects issues, this essay offers an unconventional account of what it needs to avoid a dualist picture of mind and world. It will be argued that much hinges on the question of whether or not one is willing to allow the principally unperceivable to enter into one's concept of reality. Hume, as will be shown, rejects this approach: he denies that we have reason (...) to think that there are substances that divide the world into two separate realms. The strategic value of this move is that it enables us to think of minds in terms similar to those underlying our conception of physical objects without urging us to engage in reductionist or eliminativist projects. (shrink)