Here I discuss some theistic responses to the problem of animal pain and suffering with special attention to Michael Murray’s presentation in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. The neo-Cartesian defenses he describes are reviewed, along with the appeal to nomic regularity and Murray’s emphasis on the progression of the universe from chaos to order. It is argued that despite these efforts to prove otherwise the problem of animal suffering remains a serious threat to the belief that an (...) all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good creator exists. (shrink)

I propose some arguments suggested by Descartes' text for the conclusion that we are not identical to our bodies. I suggest that a natural extension of those arguments leads to Plantinga's Replacement Argument. I conclude that even if such an argument is plausible, its conclusion does not establish the further claim that we can exist without a body.

This article discusses some essential differences between the Cartesian and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of child development. It argues that we should prefer the neo-Aristotelian conception since it is capable of resolving the problems the Cartesian conception is confronted by. This is illustrated by discussing the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian explanation of the development of volitional powers, and the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian simulation theory and theory–theory account of the development of social cognition. The neo-Aristotelian conception (...) is further elaborated by discussing how it differs from both behaviorism and cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 132-133 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology Donn Welton. The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 496. Cloth, $54.95. Few philosophers have been as ill-served by their reception as Husserl. The books he managed to publish during his lifetime provide a very limited perspective (...) on his thought but have determined what Donn Welton, in this magnificent treatise, calls the "Standard Interpretation," shared by analytic and deconstructionist readers alike, in which Husserl is a neo-Cartesian wedded to epistemological immanentism, methodological solipsism, and ontological idealism. That a very different Husserl is found in his vast Nachlass has long been known, but because of its sheer volume and relative inaccessibility it has had little impact on the Husserl-reception beyond a small circle of specialists. Hence in recovering the "Other" Husserl, Welton's aim is not the usual historical one of stripping away anachronistic readings to arrive at an original reception, but one of negating this Rezeptionsgeschichte to reveal a philosophy that has, in a certain sense, never been present.In this, the book succeeds wonderfully. Welton threads through the tangle of the Nachlass to reconstruct the unfulfilled "great systematic work" that occupied Husserl off and on from about 1920 until his death, uncovering thereby the revolutionary implications of Husserl's move from "static" to "genetic" phenomenology that force us to reconsider the Standard Interpretation point by point. While admitting that Husserl never abandoned his Cartesian proclivities altogether, Welton shows how these can be read as dependent moments in a system of "transcendental phenomenology" that ends up "much closer to Heidegger's approach than is usually thought" (233). The relevance for current debates in philosophy is made plain, such that Husserl is, at last, our contemporary.Briefly reviewing a book as ambitious as this inevitably distorts it, but let me comment on its central methodological claim. Transcendental phenomenology emerged from the pre-transcendental phenomenology of the Logische Untersuchungen when Husserl began seeking the "ultimate ground" for scientific cognition (chapters 1-4). This approach, dubbed the "Cartesian Way" by Husserl himself, generated the "Cartesian Enclosures" (chapter 5) of the Standard Interpretation: demanding evidence that is apodictic, adequate, and directly intuitive, Husserl identifies "transcendental subjectivity" with the individual, indeed solipsistic, "stream of consciousness" and interprets this ontologically as the "relativity" of the world. In his pivotal chapter 6, however, Welton shows that Husserl's reflections on time and memory forced him to admit that the "transcendental field" could not be secured by appeal to "adequate evidence" (154). Hence Husserl adopted a "Kantian Way" (158) that supplements intuitive evidence with elements of transcendental "construction" (148). The concept of transcendental "subjectivity" is thereby transformed from an egocentric stream of consciousness to an intersubjective, communicative, embodied, and historical site of the "transcendental genesis" of meaning.Chapters 7-9 detail how Husserl's increasing interest in the genesis of meaning in the 1920s calls forth this transformation. Tracing the problem on the levels of "speech" and "experience," Welton carefully elucidates how, in moving from static through constitutive to genetic analyses, Husserl came increasingly to see that his original "leading clue"--the phenomenon of cognitive act-intentionality--depended upon the passive syntheses and contexts of "motivation" that make up the world-horizon of pre-cognitive "life." Chapters 10 and 12 argue that Husserl's desire to force these insights into a Cartesian framework yielded the dead-end of "transcendental psychologism" and the dubious teleology of an ethico-political "one-worldism." Meanwhile in chapters 13-15, Welton sketches a phenomenologically more defensible concept of world as "horizon"--a nonperceptual, inherently plural, space of meaning structured as "context" (speech) and "background" (embodiment).Chapter 11 is central to the argument, since it describes how the Kantian notion of transcendental deduction ("construction") is to be integrated into phenomenological method. Things move very quickly. Welton relies heavily on Jay Rosenberg's idea that transcendental deduction is a species of "practical reasoning," and on Charles Taylor's... (shrink)

At the core of the essay that follows is a set of intuitions that distinguish the mental and subjective from the public and objective. I call these intuitions Cartesian intuitions even though Descartes himself ignored some of them. I argue that some of them survive the best efforts of critics to explain them away. This, I contend, is the basis of the mind-body problem, which should be seen as a paradox, in which both materialist and dualist lines of argument (...) seem conclusive. My aim is thus to clarify and to bolster what I call the neo-Cartesian half of the mind-body paradox, to show that there really is a paradox, one that remains with us, undissolved. ;I use two forms of arguments to accomplish this. One is the Knowledge Argument, according to which there are certain things which you can know everything physical about but not know everything about and which, because of that, make physicalism false. The Knowledge Argument says that your having this extra knowledge depends on the existence of special properties called qualia, which are supposed to be separate from any physical or functional properties. I argue that the Knowledge Argument is what survives from Descartes's original critique of materialism. I defend the Knowledge Argument, or at least I defend the claim that it has not so far been refuted. ;The other form of argument is the Absent Qualia Argument. I use it further to support the case against functionalism, the approach to the mind according to which mental states are definable by their causal relations to behaviors, perceptions, and each other. Against this position, I argue that there might be so-called absent qualia states which filled the causal roles of some of our genuine mental states but did not look or feel like anything. The functionalist response to this position is that since absent qualia states cause the same beliefs as genuine states do we could never know whether we were having real states or absent qualia replicas. I argue that there is no such skeptical problem. ;At the heart of both arguments is an account of our direct reference to our own phenomenal states. Critics of the Knowledge Argument have argued that the Cartesian intuitions the argument exploits can be explained away as a result of two distinct forms of reference: roughly, the direct reference distinctive to the mental, the descriptive reference distinctive to our neurophysiological talk. But I argue that we could not refer directly to our phenomenal states unless we did so by way of properties distinct from any neurophysiological properties. Critics of the Absent Qualia Argument can argue that our direct reference to phenomenal states requires mental processing with phenomenal aspects, processing that necessarily runs outside any causal role that might be shared with absent qualia replicas. These side-effects mean that absent qualia are impossible in us. I grant that but argue that this would not rule out the possibility of absent qualia in nonsentient creatures. They might be similar enough to have states with identical causal roles to our phenomenal states; but since they would be free of experience, there would be no chance for the side-effects that make absent-qualia states impossible to realize in us. (shrink)

In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as "analytical Thomism," though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the (...) twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser's academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas's Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional "perverted faculty argument.". (shrink)

Several influential philosophers and scientists have advanced a framework, often called Neo-Cartesianism (NC), according to which animal suffering is merely apparent. Drawing upon contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind, Neo-Cartesians challenge the mainstream position we shall call Evolutionary Continuity (EC), the view that humans are on a nonhierarchical continuum with other species and are thus not likely to be unique in consciously experiencing negative pain affect. We argue that some Neo-Cartesians have misconstrued the underlying science or tendentiously appropriated controversial views (...) in the philosophy of mind. We discuss recent evidence that undermines the simple neuroanatomical structure-function correlation thesis that undergirds many Neo-Cartesian arguments, has an important bearing on the recent controversy over pain in fish, and places the underlying epistemology framing the debate between NC and EC in a new light that strengthens the EC position. (shrink)

Proponents of the problem of animal suffering claim that the millions of years of apparent nonhuman animal pain and suffering provides evidence against the existence of God. Neo-Cartesianism attempts to avoid this problem mainly by denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. However, neo-Cartesian options regarding animal minds have failed to compel many. In this essay, I explore an answer to the problem of animal suffering inspired by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Instead of focusing on phenomenal (...) consciousness, the neo-Thomistic view of animal minds focuses on self-awareness. After proposing and providing evidence for this view, I conclude that nonhuman animal suffering is not morally significant. (shrink)

Several well-known theodicies, whatever their merits, seem to make little sense of animal suffering. Here we argue that the problem of animal suffering has more layers than has generally been acknowledged in the literature and thus poses an even greater challenge to traditional Judeo-Christian Theism than is normally thought. However, the Neo-Cartesian (NC) defence would succeed in defanging this Expanded Problem of Animal Suffering. Several contemporary philosophers have suggested that recent evidence either supports the NC view or at least (...) should decrease our incredulity with respect to it. We discuss new evidence that undermines the NC position and thus reassert the gravity of the Expanded Problem. (shrink)

Neo-classical liberals aim to offer a more consistent, coherent, and morally ambitious form of liberalism than the traditional classical and social liberal alternatives by providing grounds for a strong commitment to both individual economic liberty and social justice. The key neo-classical liberal claim is that the stringent protection of negative economic liberty does not conflict with, but is rather an essential component of, a commitment to political and social justice. My focus in this article is not on this key neo-classical (...) claim itself, but rather on the conceptually prior question of the meaning and institutional implications of the negative conception of individual economic liberty. In addressing this question I trace some lines of argument which derive from the classical political economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing in particular on ideas and arguments developed by the American economist and social critic Henry George, I argue that a fully coherent and defensible conception of negative economic liberty is compatible with a commitment to a strongly conditional form of private landownership, but is incompatible with a commitment to absolute private property in land. (shrink)

The existence and extent of animal suffering provides grounds for a serious evidential challenge to theism. In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, this strain of natural atheology has taken on substantially greater significance. In this essay we argue that there are at least four neo-Cartesian views on the nature of animal minds which would serve to deflect this evidential challenge.

I develop and defend the following neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation: an action is supererogatory if and only if it is overall virtuous and either the omission of an overall virtuous action in that situation would not be overall vicious or there is some overall virtuous action that is less virtuous than it and whose performance in its place would not be overall vicious. I develop this account from within the virtue-ethical tradition. And I argue that it is intuitively defensible and (...) fully compatible with the doctrine of the mean. (shrink)

This essay attempts to describe the neo-Lamarckian atmosphere that was dominant in French biology for more than a century. Firstly, we demonstrate that there were not one but at least two French neo-Lamarckian traditions. This implies, therefore, that it is possible to propose a clear definition of a (neo) Lamarckian conception, and by using it, to distinguish these two traditions. We will see that these two conceptions were not dominant at the same time. The first French neo-Lamarckism (1879-1931) was structured (...) by a very mechanic view of natural processes. The main representatives of this first period were scientists such as Alfred Giard (1846-1908), Gaston Bonnier (1853-1922) and Félix Le Dantec (1869-1917). The second Lamarckism - much more vitalist in its inspiration - started to develop under the supervision of people such as Albert Vandel (1894-1980) and Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895-1985). Secondly, this essay suggests that the philosophical inclinations of these neo-Lamarckisms reactivated a very ancient and strong dichotomy of French thought. One part of this dichotomy is a material, physicalist tradition, which started with René Descartes but developed extensively during the 18th and 19th centuries. The other is a spiritual and vitalist reaction to the first one, which also had a very long history, though it is most closely associated with the work of Henri Bergson. Through Claude Bernard, the first neo-Lamarckians tried to construct a mechanical and determinist form of evolutionary theory which was, in effect, a Cartesian theory. The second wave of neo-Lamarckians wanted to reconsider the autonomy and reactivity of life forms, in contrast to purely physical systems. (shrink)

The conflict between Christianity and Islam is a core issue for all varieties of European neo-nationalist and nativist right-wing ideo­logical organisation, from populist and far-right parties to extra-parliamentary groups and individuals. As a mundane political-social critique, this defensive and nationalistic form of anti-Islamism focuses on the downsides of mass immigration from Northern Africa and the Middle­ East, stressing the incompatibility of gross gender inequality, sexual intolerance and religiously motivated Islamist terrorism as well as the theocratic sharia system of laws with (...) the secular European model of society. Antisemitism makes an appearance in the guise of the old Nazi concept which portrays ‘World Jewry’ as a community of international financial exploiters, allegedly inspired in their misdeeds by their religion. However, this notion is being countered by a stronger, pro­semitic ideology, portraying the state of Israel as an ally in the struggle against Islam. As ‘traditional’ European religions, Christianity and the different historical and local varieties of paganism serve as important points of positive identification. (shrink)

Joel Pust has recently challenged the Thomas Reid-inspired argument against the reliability of the a priori defended by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, and Michael Bergmann. The Reidian argument alleges that the Cartesian insistence on the primacy of a priori rationality and subjective sensory experience as the foundations of epistemic justification is unwarranted because the same kind of global skeptical scenario that Cartesians recognize as challenging the legitimacy of perceptual beliefs about the external world also undermine the reliability (...) of a priori rationality. In reply, Pust contends that some a priori propositions are beyond doubt and that fact can be used to support the overall reliability of reason. This paper challenges Pust’s argument. I argue that while Pust successfully undermines a radical skeptical view of reason, he does not refute a more modest skepticism. I conclude with some suggestions for Cartesian a priorists. (shrink)

In a recent book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan discusses the Cartesian, or agent causation, view of free will. According to this view, when a person acts of his own free will his action is not caused by antecedent events but is caused by the agent himself, and in acting the agent acts as an uncaused cause. Flanagan argues at length that this view is false. In this article, I defend the agent causation view against Flanagan’s criticisms (...) and I go on to critically address his own ‘neo-compatibilist’ alternative to the agent causation view. In doing so, I hope to exhibit some common misconceptions about the nature of the agent causation view and to show that this is a view that deserves more serious consideration. (shrink)

In a recent book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan discusses the Cartesian, or agent causation, view of free will. According to this view, when a person acts of his own free will his action is not caused by antecedent events but is caused by the agent himself, and in acting the agent acts as an uncaused cause. Flanagan argues at length that this view is false. In this article, I defend the agent causation view against Flanagan’s criticisms (...) and I go on to critically address his own ‘neo-compatibilist’ alternative to the agent causation view. In doing so, I hope to exhibit some common misconceptions about the nature of the agent causation view and to show that this is a view that deserves more serious consideration. (shrink)

This essay attempts to describe the neo-Lamarckian atmosphere that was dominant in French biology for more than a century. Firstly, we demonstrate that there were not one but at least two French neo-Lamarckian traditions. This implies, therefore, that it is possible to propose a clear definition of a (neo)Lamarckian conception, and by using it, to distinguish these two traditions. We will see that these two conceptions were not dominant at the same time. The first French neo-Lamarckism (1879–1931) was structured by (...) a very mechanic view of natural processes. The main representatives of this first period were scientists such as Alfred Giard (1846–1908), Gaston Bonnier (1853–1922) and Félix Le Dantec (1869–1917). The second Lamarckism – much more vitalist in its inspiration – started to develop under the supervision of people such as Albert Vandel (1894–1980) and Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985). Secondly, this essay suggests that the philosophical inclinations of these neo-Lamarckisms reactivated a very ancient and strong dichotomy of French thought. One part of this dichotomy is a material, physicalist tradition, which started with René Descartes but developed extensively during the 18th and 19th centuries. The other is a spiritual and vitalist reaction to the first one, which also had a very long history, though it is most closely associated with the work of Henri Bergson. Through Claude Bernard, the first neo-Lamarckians tried to construct a mechanical and determinist form of evolutionary theory which was, in effect, a Cartesian theory. The second wave of neo-Lamarckians wanted to reconsider the autonomy and reactivity of life forms, in contrast to purely physical systems. (shrink)

Causal powers, say, an electron’s power to repel other electrons, are had in virtue of having properties. Electrons repel other electrons because they are negatively charged. One’s views about causal powers are shaped by—and shape—one’s views concerning properties, causation, laws of nature and modality. It is no surprise, then, that views about the nature of causal powers are generally embedded into larger, more systematic, metaphysical pictures of the world. This dissertation is an exploration of three systematic metaphysics, Neo-Humeanism, Nomicism and (...) Neo-Aristotelianism. I raise problems for the first two and defend the third. A defense of a systematic metaphysics, I take it, involves appealing to pre-theoretical commitments or intuitions, and theoretical issues such as simplicity or explanatory power. While I think that Neo-Aristotelianism is the most intuitive of the available general metaphysical pictures of the world, these kinds of intuitions do not settle the matter. The most widely held of the alternative pictures, Neo-Humeanism, is accepted in great part because of its theoretical power. In contrast, a systematic Neo-Aristotelian metaphysic is, at best, nascent. The way forward for the Neo-Aristotelian, therefore, is a contribution to an ongoing research program, generating Neo-Aristotelian views of modality, causation and laws of nature from the Neo-Aristotelian understanding of causal powers. The central argument of this dissertation is that such views are defensible, and so the Neo-Aristotelian metaphysic ought to be accepted. (shrink)

The paper presents an account of the concept of existence that is based on Brentano’s work. In contrast to Frege and Russell, Brentano took ‘exists’ to express a that subsumes objects and explained it with recourse to the non-propositional attitude of acknowledgment. I argue that the core of Brentano’s view can be developed to a defensible alternative to the Frege-Russell view of existence.

This article reexamines Vico’s early critique of Cartesian reasoning and of how the Cartesian method, which comes from epistemology, creates problems for the sciences once embedded into their methodologies and given a foundational role. The focus will be on De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), where Vico argues against generalizing the Cartesian method and overemphasizing clarity and distinctness in the search for truth. To this end, Vico’s relation to Cartesianism is first carefully contextualized. Then, Vico is presented (...) as a hylomorphist when it comes to how scientific disciplines and their instruments interrelate, something key for understanding why he questions the “instrumentalization” of the Cartesian method in the first place. Afterwards, Vico’s account of the impossibility of maximal scientific progress when the Cartesian method is prioritized across the sciences is presented, as probabilistic reasoning and the importance of the imagination and memory take centerstage. Lastly, the article looks at Vico’s opposition to the geometrical method’s role in physics and his defense of visual thinking in mathematics. The hope throughout is to advance a picture of the early Vico as being not only a neo- Baconian pragmatist, but a hypermodern ”meta-Cartesian” thinker concerned with humanity’s optimizing its creative potential in order to achieve scientific advances. (shrink)

Robert Fogelin agrees that arguments for Cartesian sceptism carry a heavy burden of theoretical commitment, for they take for granted, explicitly or implicitly, the foundationalist's idea that experimental knowledge is in some fully general way 'epistemologically prior' to knowledge of the world. He thinks, however, that there is a much more direct and commonsensical route to scepticism. Ordinary knowledge-claims are accepted on the basis of justificatory procedures that fall far short of eliminating all conceivable error-possibilities. As a result, it (...) is always possible, by bringing new errorpossibilities into play, to raise the 'level of scrutiny' to which a given knowledge-claim is subject, so that it no longer seems adequately justified. Philosophical theories of justification can be seen as attempts to repair this fragility of ordinary knowledge. But they fail, all succumbing to the Pyrrhonian modes of assumption, circularity or infinite regress. I argue that Fogelin's conception of varying levels of scrutiny leads at most to fallibilism and not to radical scepticism. More importantly, I show that changing the range of relevant defeaters to a given knowledge claim can do more that impose stricter standards for justification: it can change the subject by altering the direction of inquiry. We see from this that the introduction of 'sceptical hypotheses' (such as that Descartes's Evil Deceiver) are not best seen as raising standards to some maximal level but as introducing a new kind of evaluation which, without commitment to what I call 'epistemological realism,' does nothing to impugn the justificational status of ordinary knowledge-claims entered in ordinary contexts. (shrink)

The schism between ‘ordinary’ and scientific perception and knowledge implies that we lack any total or systematic means of describing the world or identifying any framework -independent reality. Philosophers as diverse as Kant, Putnam, Strawson, Barthes, and Foucault have attempted to overcome this epistemological divide by constructing a unified, continuous theory of knowledge capable of accounting simultaneously for an allegedly primitive, unreflective, unmediated view of the world and an abstract, highly technical, scientific product. Rather than identifying analytic and continental epistemologies, (...) adverting to continental philosophy to resolve the analytic problems of defining knowledge or determining its necessary and sufficient conditions, as in Gettier problem cases, or homogenizing ordinary and scientific cognition, I assess diverse epistemological responses to the Cartesian problem of bridging perceptual experience and conceptual knowledge in order to catalog and validate the turn from a structuralist phenomenology to a historical deconstruction of isolated, ahistorical notions of subjectivity and objectivity. However, in place of Foucault’s closed, tripartite model of space, time, and power, I use certain late nineteenth-century, neo- Kantian scientific models to develop and justify an open, critical, pragmatically validated, historical heuristic for scientific explanation able to account nonreductively for ordinary experience, ordinary perception, and ordinary knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 121-140 [Access article in PDF] The Rhetoric of Modal Equivocacy in Cartesian Transubstantiation Julian Bourg Everyday language, in which words are not defined, is a medium in which nobody can express himself unequivocally. Robert Musil 1René Descartes's attempt to explain Eucharistic transubstantiation has long been understood as a dramatically significant moment in his tightrope walk across the medieval-to-modern divide. 2 (...) Modeled on the Last Supper in the New Testament, the Eucharistic rite had been explained in the Catholic tradition after the twelfth century in the scholastic philosophical language of substance and accident. 3 As the Council of Trent reaffirmed in 1551, this transubstantiation was a conversion "of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the Body and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood... the appearances [speciebus] only of the bread and wine remaining." 4 Christ was [End Page 121] held to be "truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things," under what still appeared to be bread and wine. 5Descartes's dilemma was that on one hand he was dead set against the hylomorphic theory of substance and accident, and on the other hand he found himself obliged by some of his interlocutors to comment on transubstantiation. It was a balancing act that pleased no one for very long, since despite his sometimes eager discussions of the Eucharist, he was not, as he admitted, "a theologian by profession." 6 The putative heterodoxy of Cartesian transubstantiation was principally responsible for his works being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1663 and for his thought being banned from schools under Louis XIV in 1671. 7 His treatment of the Eucharistic question also distressed others in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as Thomas Hobbes and Isaac Newton, who were unhappy that Descartes had bothered with such a theological non-issue. 8 For the many post-seventeenth-century advocates of a proto-secular Descartes as the godfather of modern philosophy, Cartesian transubstantiation has proved similarly inconvenient.The indisputable connections between Descartes and his scholastic forerunners, exemplified by the Eucharistic question, service a basic question of contemporary Cartesian scholarship. As Émile Boutroux put it, how was new wine poured from old bottles? 9 Accepting as axiomatic that there was something both radical and original in the Cartesian project but without falling back on pieties about his turn toward the modern subject, we must ask how Descartes put forth novel claims in conceptual language regarded by his contemporaries as resonant, if not consonant, with the scholastic intellectual culture of Catholic Reform France. More precisely, setting aside the not-very-defensible position that such language was merely incidental to Cartesian thought (a position that dehistoricizes Descartes as a precocious Enlightener), the dilemma then becomes explaining how original positions were elaborated within scholastic language. One important task is accounting for what Descartes did with that vocabulary--how he pointed words and concepts in new and surprising directions. The Eucharist becomes crucial in this perspective. [End Page 122]Though the question of Cartesian transubstantiation has been discussed for some time, the topic is worth revisiting again in light of two themes, rhetoric and the Cartesian theory of modes. My argument is that Descartes used one particular scholastic term, "mode," in equivocal ways and that this equivocation was in multiple senses rhetorical. This rhetoric coalesced and came to the fore around the Eucharist because, given the intellectual-political climate of the Catholic Reformation, the stakes of transubstantiation were so high. That Descartes used certain scholastic terms in equivocal or ambiguous ways should come as no surprise. Of interest, though, is the fact that by definition "mode" meant many things. This ambiguous term facilitated ambiguous intellectual positions about the Eucharist that allowed Descartes more generally (no matter what he "really" intended) to skirt between an orthodoxy that represented the past and an originality, not without dangers in his time, that seem to gesture toward our day. Foregrounded with regard to... (shrink)

This paper responds to Professor John McMurtry, primarily to his critique of my recent book, Economics as Moral Science. Although agreeing with my attribution of a "moral a priorism" to orthodox or neo-classical economics, McMurtry takes issue with my "conversion thesis", that an a priori, ethically committed theory can be transformed into a testable empirical science of actual behaviour through the application of institutional constraints to individual motivations. McMurtry views such a thesis as "logically possible but morally abhorrent". In so (...) doing, he ascribes a version of economic determinism to me which, he claims, leads me to mistakenly understand the neo-classical paradigm as circumscribing the "boundaries of reality itself" and thereby entrenching the life-destructive values presupposed by this paradigm. I reject such a reading of Economics as Moral Science and explain the manner in which it is inconsistent both with the theoretical substance and practical agenda of my work. I propose that the irreducible basis of disagreement remains one wherein I believe that a more radical reform of the capitalist market order is mandatory to establish more defensible moral ideals than does McMurtry. My reply closes by recommending a constitutional partitioning of material goods such that we may more securely act outside the ethical constraints of neo-classical theory. (shrink)

Comte argued against the Cartesian conception of the mind that the thinker cannot simultaneously think or perceive and observe itself so doing. Based on insights from cognitive neuroscience, Dehaene has recently given a contemporary answer to Comte’s challenge. He has extended some ideas of Helmholtz on unconscious inferences and argued that we can resolve Comte’s problem by reformulating it in terms of the brain. Since the brain consists of different parts having different functions, it is possible that some parts (...) are involved in observing (they unconsciously process information) while other parts integrate the received information resulting in conscious experiences to which we have access. Dehaene’s answer is criticized and the alternative neo-Aristotelian resolution of Comte’s challenge is discussed. Explanations of blindsight are used to illustrate the differences between the two responses to Comte’s challenge. (shrink)

This article assesses’ Susan Haack’s theory of foundherentism and her position that this approach provides a solution to the meta-epistimeological problem. Using a Cartesian model, the paper shows the circularity of Haack’s arguments, ultimately arguing that a combination of foundherentism and an a priori strategy may provide a more fruitful approach.

This article examines two early modern feminist works, Woman Not Inferior to Man and Woman's Superior Excellence Over Man, written by “Sophia, A Person of Quality.” Scholars once dismissed these texts as plagiarisms or semi-translations of François Poulain de la Barre's De l’égalité des deux sexes. More recently, however, Guyonne Leduc has drawn attention to the original aspects of these treatises by highlighting Sophia's significant variations on Poulain's vocabulary. In this article, I take Leduc's analysis a step further by demonstrating (...) that Sophia's variations amount to unique and distinctive arguments for the restoration of women's rights, based on both the natural equality and the moral superiority of women compared to men. I argue that Sophia goes beyond Poulain's Cartesian insights to mount a critique of male tyranny characterized as a lack of generosity toward women. My contention is that Sophia's texts represent a culmination in a line of reasoning that extends from the querelle des femmes of the Renaissance to Poulain's Cartesian feminism of the seventeenth century, through to arguments for women's rights in the eighteenth century. Her works thus warrant greater recognition as significant turning points in the history of feminist thought. (shrink)

With the possible exception of the first volume of the Ideas, no single work published by Husserl has caused as much controversy among philosophers otherwise sympathetic to his philosophical endeavor as the 5th Cartesian Meditation. The controversy centers around the constitutive analysis of the sense "another subject," an analysis the elaborate detail of which seems out of place in the otherwise programmatic Cartesian Meditations. This analysis, which marks the first step in Husserl's account of consciousness of the other (...) as another subject, consciousness of self as a subject among other subjects, and consciousness of the world as an Objective 1 world, a world shared by a plurality of different subjects, is regarded to be a test of the philosophical status of transcendental phenomenology as such, a test Husserl seems to have failed. The present essay will examine this constitutive analysis as well as the role it plays in the argument of the 5th Meditation. As the title suggests, I shall side with Husserl's critics in that the analysis will be found to be wanting. However, the essay will not be simply critical, nor will it be a review of the various criticisms and defenses of the 5th Meditation which have appeared in the phenomenological tradition. Rather, an attempt to rethink the problem of intersubjectivity, the title that will be adopted for the problems posed by meanings founded upon the sense "another subject," will be made, and, in light of this attempt, a new approach to the constitutive analysis of the sense "another subject" will be presented. The specific thesis of this essay, viz., that a new approach to the constitutive analysis of the experience of the other as another subject is required, one different from Husserl's approach in the 5th Meditation, is based upon the rejection of Husserl's position that consciousness of the other as another subject is originally founded upon a connection made by the I between the other qua phenomenal object and itself qua phenomenal object, a connection that makes the extension of mental predicates to the other possible. The question I shall pose is this: Is the proper locus for the constitutive analysis of the sense "another subject," the analysis of the various motives and resulting intentional accomplishments in virtue of which the other presents himself as another subject, the distinction made on the level of the fully constituted, intersubjective world between the "privacy" of mental life and the "publicness" of the body? It will be argued that the attribution of mental life to the other (and to the I, for that matter) has the status of an explanation for observed phenomena the basis for the recognition of which is intersubjective (e.g., conflicts between subjects regarding their opinions of an Object, the difference between the behavior of subjects vis-a-vis that of inanimate objects, etc.), and hence that the distinction between "mind" and "body" cannot guide the analysis of the intentional situation that motivates the distinction. (shrink)

What I call “Rorty’s Dilemma” has us caught between the Scylla of Cartesian Dualism and the Charybdis of eliminativism about the mental. Proper recognition of what is distinctively mental requires accommodating incorrigibility about our mental states, something Rorty thinks materialists cannot do. So we must either countenance mental states over and above physical states in our ontology, or else give up altogether on the mental as a distinct category. In section 2, “Materialist Introspectionism—Independence and Epistemic Authority”, I review reasons (...) for being dissatisfied with materialist introspectionism as a way out of the dilemma. In section 3, “Constitutivism”, I outline two constitutivist alternatives to materialist introspectionism. In section 4, “A Neo-Expressivist View”, I offer my neo-expressivist view (defended in Bar-On, Speaking my mind: Expression and self-knowledge. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004 ), according to which the distinctive status of mental self-ascriptions is to be explained by appeal to the expressive character of acts of issuing them (in speech or in thought). This view, I argue, allows us to stay clear of eliminativism without committing to Cartesian substance dualism, thereby offering a viable way of slipping between the horns of Rorty’s dilemma. (shrink)

This paper challenges current dominant thinking in Universities about the processes of ethical appraisal of research studies in the Social Sciences. It considers this to be founded on unjustifiable and inappropriate principles, the origins of which are presented before discussing alternative, more inclusive and ethically defensible approaches. The latter are based on dialogic processes to sustain respectful and empowering ethical reviews which appreciate the situated nature of research. The empirical evidence for this comes from papers about ethnographic studies with children (...) and adults in various educational spaces in Western Europe, originally a symposium on the practice of ethics in educational ethnography at ECER, 2017, now forming a book published by Routledge, 2019. The dialogic processes help researchers to carry out culturally-appropriate research with the demonstrable ethical integrity that participants and stakeholders reasonably expect. The authors argue that currently risk-averse Universities need to change their research cultures to support all research methodologies and fieldwork practices that have ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial, to enhance their lustre. (shrink)

This paper challenges current dominant thinking in Universities about the processes of ethical appraisal of research studies in the Social Sciences. It considers this to be founded on unjustifiable and inappropriate principles, the origins of which are presented before discussing alternative, more inclusive and ethically defensible approaches. The latter are based on dialogic processes to sustain respectful and empowering ethical reviews which appreciate the situated nature of research. The empirical evidence for this comes from papers about ethnographic studies with children (...) and adults in various educational spaces in Western Europe, originally a symposium on the practice of ethics in educational ethnography at ECER, 2017, now forming a book published by Routledge, 2019. The dialogic processes help researchers to carry out culturally-appropriate research with the demonstrable ethical integrity that participants and stakeholders reasonably expect. The authors argue that currently risk-averse Universities need to change their research cultures to support all research methodologies and fieldwork practices that have ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial, to enhance their lustre. (shrink)

Research has shown that individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits are likely to cause harm to others in the workplace. However, there is little academic literature on the potentially adaptive outcomes of corporate psychopathy, particularly because the “boldness” psychopathy domain has largely been under-acknowledged in this literature. This study aimed to elaborate on past findings by examining the associations between psychopathy, as operationalized using scales from the relatively new triarchic model of psychopathy, and both adaptive and maladaptive workplace (...) behaviors. Participants were 343 working community adults who completed a series of self-report questionnaires that measured psychopathy and various workplace behaviors, including counterproductive work behaviors, tactics of influence, unethical decision-making, leadership strategies, team play, and creativity. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the associations between latent constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, and the eight different constructs related to workplace behaviors. It was found that boldness preferentially predicted the use of soft tactics of influence, adaptive leadership, and team play, and negatively predicted passive leadership. Meanness predicted unethical decision-making, poor team play, and hard tactics of influence. Disinhibition positively predicted CWB and passive leadership. Meanness also moderated the association between disinhibition and CWB, in that greater scores on both psychopathy domains indicated greater levels of CWB. These findings provide conceptual support for the triarchic model, including the “boldness” domain, which measures adaptive aspects of psychopathy in addition to maladaptive ones, as well as suggest that not all individuals high on psychopathy would be an overt menace to the workplace. The different psychopathy traits may also interact with each other to predict different types or levels of workplace behaviors. (shrink)