Showing papers in "Review of Metaphysics in 1996"

Aristotle on Human Nature and Political Virtue

Abstract: Aristotle gives us an account of [theta][upsilon][sigma][iota][sigma] or nature in the Physics which is adequate for his immediate purposes there, but gives little indication of his broad deployment in the ethical and political works of the concept of the natural. He never systematically investigates nature as an ethical or political concept. Had he done so, he could not have failed to see that there are some tensions within the roles he assigns to the natural. He might thereby have avoided several problems, including one of his most unfortunate legacies, that of reactionary political attitudes which have appealed to nature, often in Aristotle's name, to uphold existing inequalities in society, such as slavery and the subordination of women. Some of this legacy has got attached to Aristotle unfairly; appeals to his works to defend race-based forms of slavery, for example, are patently specious. However, Aristotle's own lack of precision about the role of nature in his ethical and political arguments must bear some of the responsibility. Nature in the Politics has been most extensively studied in the context of the book 1 argument that the polls is "by nature." Fred Miller's Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics is a landmark in this respect as in many others, and his discussion of the naturalness of the polls is, I think, definitive, and should put an end to the notion that according to Aristotle people find their natural end functioning as mere parts in some large organic social whole. However, nature in Aristotle's ethical and political works contains complications outside book 1, and I hope that there remain some points to be made and issues to be elucidated. One source of confusion is Aristotle's tendency, in the ethical and political works, sometimes to stress a particular strand in the Physics account and sometimes to ignore it, and even to say things which conflict with it. This is notably so with the idea that the natural is that which occurs always or for the most part. The main Physics discussion, which revolves around the idea of an internal source of changing or being changed, does not discuss this, but it emerges slightly later.(1) Something is natural or by nature if, starting from some internal principle, it develops continuously "always something going towards the same thing, if nothing interferes."(2) Thus the natural is the usual. We can see why this emerges as an assumption, expressed but never defended, in the physical works, where it is reasonable to assume that the kinds of changes that a thing can engage in which are due to its internal principle of change, rather than external interference, will be revealed by its usual behavior, rather than by any imposed or freakish occurrences. Sometimes Aristotle carries over to the ethical and political works this assumption that "nature is the cause of what is the same way always or for the most part, and chance of the opposite."(3) It is difficult to believe that this assumption plays no role in Aristotle's argument for the naturalness of the polls and of slavery. In Aristotle's world every known society contained slavery, a fact that clearly prevented Aristotle from being able to think of it as an institution based on force rather than nature. Furthermore, societies other than the Greek polls could well have seemed to Aristotle to be, like the Persian Empire, based on force. Thus the Greek polls might well seem like the usual form to develop when no interfering conditions were present.(4) Sometimes, on the other hand, he develops an argument based on nature that conflicts with this, as with his third major argument in book 1 (chapters 8-10), the one that establishes that only certain forms of money-making are natural. For the conclusion of this argument is that the only form of natural money-making is one which is extremely rare; indeed, for it to be usual the whole of the ancient economy would have to be revolutionized. …

Aristotle's Conception of Freedom

Abstract: Aristotle for Liberals. In the present struggle between liberals and communitarians,(1) it is most often the communitarians who are seen bearing the standard of Aristotle. Yet liberalism's Aristotelian roots are deep; a continuous line of influence can be traced from Aristotle through the Scholastics to Locke and Jefferson (the natural law strand), and alongside it a parallel line from Aristotle through Polybius to Montesquieu and Madison (the constitutionalist strand).(2) Fred Miller's recent book Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics(3) is the latest in a growing number of attempts to reclaim the Aristotelian heritage, at least in part, for liberalism. As a fellow laborer in the same field,(4) I very much admire what Miller has accomplished in his book. In particular, Miller argues persuasively for attributing to Aristotle thee following theses--theses traditionally rejected by communitarians as liberal innovations antithetical to the Aristotelian point of view:(5) a) individuals have rights; b) these rights are natural, not merely legal or conventional; c) these rights forbid any sacrifice of the individual's interests to the interests of the community; d) the state has an obligation to respect and protect these rights; e) in order to secure these rights, the state's constitutional structure should be arranged so as to provide checks on governmental power; f) legitimate political authority rests on the consent of the governed; and g) a government that fails to respect the rights of its citizens may legitimately be overthrown. I believe Miller's case for attributing these seven theses to Aristotle is sound, and I shall accept it as my starting point. However, in my opinion Miller does not go far enough; Aristotle's, affinity with modern liberal theory can be made even stronger. In particular, it can be shown that on four points Miller makes unnecessary concessions to the communitarian interpretation of Aristotle: Concession One: Aristotle, unlike the modern liberal, countenances no right to do wrong. Concession Two: Aristotle, unlike most liberal natural-rights theorists, recognizes no rights existing in a "state of nature." Concession Three: Aristotle, unlike the modern liberal, regards liberty as having only an instrumental and peripheral value. Concession Four: Aristotle, unlike the modern liberal, assigns no central place to autonomy in his conception of rights. All four of these concessions can be shown to be mistaken--in part on grounds that Miller himself provides. No attempt will be made to argue that Aristotle is a liberal. Clearly, he is not. In particular, his attachment to what Miller calls the Principle of Community and the Principle of Rulership must effectively bar him from the liberal ranks.(6) Moreover, Aristotle is willing to place serious restrictions on rights that liberals have traditionally held dear, including freedom of speech,(7) freedom of religion,(8) freedom of exchange,(9) and reproductive freedom.(10) Aristotle, however, is a complex thinker, and his normative social theory contains both liberal and communitarian tendencies, often closely intertwined. The claim to be defended here is simply that the liberal, individualist strand in Aristotle is still more robust than even Miller is prepared to maintain. II Does Aristotle Recognize a Right to Do Wrong? Miller's First Concession is that Aristotle, unlike the modern liberal, countenances no right to do wrong. Is this concession correct? In the course of arguing for the thesis that Aristotle has a theory of rights--thesis (a)--Miller considers an objection by Terence Irwin.(11) Irwin suggests that if rights are to have any genuine ethical punch--if they are to be "the kind of rights which are morally distinctive in that their possession and exercise cannot be replaced by other people's benevolence or sense of duty to the right-holder"(12)--they must have the following structure: If X has a right to A, then A is due to X, or X is morally entitled to A, whether or not we regard A's having X as morally best over all; and . …

Are There Natural Rights in Aristotle

Abstract: I would like to begin addressing the question raised in my title by distinguishing two issues: First, does Aristotle have the concept of natural rights? Second, does he give this concept a central role to play in his political theory? The first question is one that I have found most difficult to answer, partly because I am not sure what is involved in having this concept. Nonetheless, I am inclined to say that Aristotle does have it. At the same time, I am convinced that the second question should be answered in the negative: the concept of a right plays no significant role in his thinking. For this reason, it is not a matter of great importance to decide whether or not he has the concept. My thoughts about these issues have been stimulated by Fred Miller's splendid new book;) although we disagree, I have benefitted enormously from the order he has brought to the study of Aristotle's political philosophy and from his efforts to show that the concept of rights plays a central role in it. Before going any further, something should be said about the word "natural" that appears in my title. Miller distinguishes two ways in which rights can be called natural, and holds that Aristotle recognizes natural rights in one sense but not the other. First, "natural" can be contrasted with "conventional," "legal," and "customary." This is the familiar distinction the Greeks made between physis (nature) and nomos (law, custom, and so on). Aristotle makes use of the distinction when he contrasts natural and legal justice.(2) According to Miller, Aristotle has a theory of natural rights in the sense that he has a theory of natural justice that serves as the basis for his recognition of rights.(3) It is naturally and not merely legally just that certain people be treated in certain ways; they have a valid claim, based on natural justice, to such treatment, and this claim is valid whether or not it is recognized by a legal system.(4) On the other hand, the term "natural right" can also be used in a second way, to designate a right that is possessed in a state of nature, that is, at a time prior to the existence of political communities. Miller holds that Aristotle does not recognize natural rights of this sort, but as he points out, this would not prevent Aristotle from recognizing natural rights in the first sense. The natural rights Miller finds in Aristotle are not possessed by all people at all times; rather, his thesis is that when the polls does come into existence, Aristotelian natural justice requires that political systems be structured in ways that recognize the rights of certain human beings. More specifically, when the polls arises, certain people have a natural right to hold various political offices and to own property. Miller makes another important distinction when he warns us not to assume that all theories of rights must be liberal theories.(5) Because theories of rights have come into their own in the modern period, we might be tempted to make it definitive of rights that they carve out a zone of freedom in which individuals are allowed to make their own decisions and pursue their good as they please (so long as they do not harm others). According to this familiar conception of rights, others are not allowed to treat me in certain ways without my permission, even if they would on balance do me some good. For example, they cannot interfere with my unhealthy eating habits, even though their prohibitions would make me better off; I have a right to injure my body, since it is my property. It should be obvious from the start that Aristotle does not have this conception of rights. His ideal city interferes with the lives of its citizens in all sorts of ways that contemporary rights theorists would find objectionable--for example, by requiring extensive participation in politics and demanding that all children be sent to public schools. However, Miller asks us not to infer that Aristotle has no conception of rights at all, and I am sympathetic to his point. …

Adam Smith on Friendship and Love

Abstract: Democracy does not create strong attachments between man and man, but it does put their ordinary relations on an easier footing. Tocqueville(1) The excellent person labours for his friends and for his native country, and will die for them if he must; he will sacrifice money, honours and contested goods in general, in achieving what is fine for himself. For he will choose intense pleasure for a short time over mild pleasure for a long time; a year of living finely over many years of undistinguished life; and a single fine and great action over many small actions. Aristotle(2) The centrality of "sympathy" to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments points to the centrality of love in the book. While Smith delineates a somewhat unusual, technical sense of "sympathy" ("fellow-feeling" for any emotion), his actual use of the term frequently slips into its more ordinary sense of "compassion" or affectionate fellow feeling. This no doubt intentional equivocation on Smith's part helps suffuse the book with these themes, to the point that, without much exaggeration, one could say that the Theory of Moral Sentiments is generally about love: our need for love and sympathy, love as friendship, self-love, the love of praise and praiseworthiness, the love of beauty.(3) Even in the Wealth of Nations, our loves are thought to be very important in explaining our behavior.(4) Smith is unusual among modern moral philosophers in according so central a place to love in this broad sense (a sense that includes friendship), although of course Christianity made love a central theme in reflection on ethical life, and philosophers such as Hutcheson (one of Smith's teachers) made benevolence a key virtue in their ethical systems. However, it is not our purpose to examine Smith's critique of Hutcheson(5) or indeed of any of his predecessors. Rather we aim in this paper to reflect on his treatment of this topic. We shall do so in part by means of comparisons with Aristotle and Plato, first with respect to friendship and then with respect to love generally. Smith's writing is replete with classical references, raising the issue of the degree to which his thought is "ancient" or "modern." Friendship is arguably the pinnacle of social relations for the ancients, and thus it provides us with a useful device for determining the degree to which Smith's thought embodies classical moral and philosophical principles. The subtlety of Smith's interweaving of traditions will become visible as we reflect not just on the ways Smith's thought exhibits classical conceptions of friendship and love, but also on the ways he departs from them. For in at least one important respect, love is a closed book from Smith's standpoint, and thus, as it turns out, also at odds with classical friendship. To reiterate, our purpose is not to provide a Quellenforschung, or a historical treatment of Smith's appropriation of the thought of his predecessors.(6) We seek to account for Smith's theory of friendship in light of his somewhat dialectical treatment of love, and do so first by outlining the components of classical friendship as one finds them in Aristotle, since this is the standard by which virtually all subsequent theories of friendship may be judged. We next argue that although Smith is "modern" in many respects, his theory of true friendship has some important structural similarities to Aristotle's conception of friendships of virtue. These similarities allow Smith to gain many of the benefits of Aristotle's theory without having to make the same theoretical commitments. Yet the commitments Smith is unwilling to make and the subsequent implications this has for love in general may, in the end, explain the ambivalence towards classical friendships Smith exhibits. We conclude by reflecting on the possible deficiencies of Smith's synthetic account of friendship and love. Our approach here, like Smith's own thought, is itself dialectical. …

Justice and Rights in Aristotle's 'Politics.'(Aristotle's 'Politics': A Symposium)

Abstract: In the nineteenth century, and even as late as the 1940s, when Barker's translation (or rather, paraphrase) appeared, most translators and commentators on Aristotle's Politics did not hesitate, in some contexts, to employ the language of "rights" in presenting Aristotle's political theory.(1) Here I mean the use of the word "right" as a noun, to denote something possessed by a person or persons, in a political context--not the use of the adjective "right," with its opposite "wrong," for example to formulate various claims about what is just or fair; the use of that, we can assume, would be quite uncontroversial. For example, Barker makes Aristotle speak of the judicial system as deciding the "rights of litigants," and of a constitution as establishing who shall have the "right of election" of candidates for the various magistracies.(2) Furthermore, in translating Aristotle's final, general account of what constitutes being a citizen he gives: "he who enjoys the right of sharing in the deliberative or judicial office attains thereby the status of a citizen of his state."(3) Now what is at issue in these three passages are legal rights, rights established by the laws of a given community or determined under them through the exercise of their legally established functions by constitutionally authorized bodies or officials (juries or magistrates, for example). Barker also, however, very occasionally, employs the same language of "rights" where Aristotle is discussing not what some set of laws does or does not establish as someone's rights (legal rights), but questions about what justice itself demands or forbids in the very establishment of such systems of legal rights. Thus in Politics 3.16 Aristotle presents an argument that "some people" make against rule by kings, namely, that it is unfair and indeed unnatural where the citizens are "similar" in political ability and merit for any one of them to rule permanently over the rest. Barker translates: "On this view those who are naturally equal must naturally have the same rights and worth.... The conclusion drawn is that justice for equals means their being ruled as well as their ruling."(4) Here we get Aristotle, in Barker's translation, presenting an appeal by these people to "natural rights," not "legal" or constitutional ones. Moreover, this claim about what justice demands is one that Aristotle himself accepts: it lies at the base of his own candidate for the best sort of political society, which is one where a body of more or less equally virtuous citizens rule in turn, as naturally and justly befits equals. Thus, for Barker, Aristotle speaks of both legal and natural rights in his own political theory, as well as in discussing the views of other theorists and the practices of different types of constitutional arrangement. If now we turn to the recent translation of the Politics by Carnes Lord we see that the language of "rights" is completely avoided.(5) Lord prefers to speak sometimes in terms of what a person or group of persons is "entitled to" under the laws, or of what is "open" or "permitted" to them; and he usually or always sticks to "justice" or a related term to translate [seven Greek words cannot be converted to ASCII text] and its derivatives--whether this is justice as established by the laws of a given community or type of community, or the true or correct account (according to Aristotle) of what justice is and demands. It is doubtful, though, whether Lord avoids rights-talk as a matter of interpretative principle. He aims to translate key terms of the Greek with a single English translation throughout, with the result that, since in any event Aristotle uses no single Greek term where we might be tempted to speak of rights, avoiding the language of rights may have seemed to him required simply by his conception of "literal" translation. In his glossary under the heading "Justice (nine Greek words cannot be converted to ASCII text])," he explicates [nine Greek words cannot be converted to ASCII text] in part as "a right or rightful claim" and adds that this sense is generally rendered in his translation by "[claim to] justice. …

Friendship and Political Philosophy

Abstract: They (the statesmen and lawgivers of old) shouldn't have legislated great ruling offices, or unmixed authority; they should have considered something like the following: that a city should be free and prudent and a friend to itself, and that the lawgiver should give his laws with a view to these things. Plato, The Laws, 693b(1) Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a22-28(2) I When this paper was first proposed for inclusion on the program of a social science conference, concern was expressed where indeed it might fit. The problem was graciously, if not curiously, solved by placing the paper on a panel entitled, "Love, Friendship, and the Great Books," in the political science section of the conference. Needless to say, friendship is an aspect of or kind of love. We are not automatically used to seeing that it is a proper and legitimate topic for consideration in political philosophy. As C. S. Lewis, among others, has pointed out, friendship (philia) is to be distinguished from and related to other kinds of love, to ergs, to storge, and to caritas.(3) Political philosophy, no doubt, may have to deal with every sort of love, including these days the love of animals, but its classical context is amicitia or philia. St. Thomas had already related caritas to amicitia as its natural basis, while the tractates on marriage, even in Plato and Aristotle, bring up the relation of eros to philia, as well as of both to some end or purpose. Friendship is prominently mentioned, to be sure, in the great books, including very often the great books in political philosophy. In addition to Aristotle, whose treatise on friendship remains unsurpassed as a philosophic examination of this exalted topic, we recall Cicero's great essay De Amicitia, Plato's Phaedrus, plus numerous references in The Republic, The Laws, The Symposium, and many other central dialogues.(4) The Gospel of John contains the great tractate on friendship at the Last Supper just before the Trial of Christ, an intellectual association between politics and friendship that is itself cause of the deepest human reflection. The topic of friendship is most familiar to Augustine and Aquinas and later to Montaigne and Francis Bacon. In short, if we moderns and post-moderns might perhaps have difficulty in associating the notions of friendship and political philosophy, our intellectual tradition did not. Some systematic reflection about the relationship between friendship and political philosophy seems a worthy one and especially about why we find this topic generally missing as a normal aspect of what we have come to call political philosophy. Initially, let us propose that friendship is missing in political philosophy because in modernity nothing is conceived to be higher than the state. The ancient tyrant, as Aristotle told us, worried lest there be good friendship among his citizens, something on which alone could be mounted a successful attack both on his regime's validity or truth and on its strength. If we reflect on the reasons that Aristotle gave for including friendship as a more important topic than justice, the political virtue, we should at first not be surprised that Aristotle is most forthright with us. "For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all, for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? …

Sharing in the constitution

Abstract: Fred Miller's Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics(1) is a heroic attempt to make the concept of rights central to Aristotle's political philosophy. The argument, although intriguing and richly rewarding, seems to me not to work. There is an inherent improbability in Miller's thesis, given what we know of the Athens in which the treatise was composed (section I below). Citizenship as Aristotle conceives it is a matter not primarily of possessing certain rights, but of "sharing in the constitution" (section II). Section III concedes that Aristotle's citizens have something like what we would call rights qua citizens, but rejects Miller's attempt to find in uses of to dikaion/ta dikaia ("what is just") an Aristotelian vocabulary for political rights. Section IV proposes that it is the notion of desert or merit (axia) which does the substantive foundational and explanatory work in Aristotle's theory of political justice which Miller would ascribe to rights. A brief conclusion (section V) sets the inquiry in the context of some wider issues of interpretation. I should say a preliminary word about the method I am adopting in this article, mainly to point out that there is nothing whatever remarkable about it. I take myself to be approaching the Politics in accordance with the interpretative canons standard in mainstream historical and Aristotelian scholarship. Compare the study of Aristotle's metaphysics. Everyone would grant that before we start considering whether hule or indeed any other Aristotelian concept anticipates or maps onto some modern notion of matter in any interesting or important way, it is imperative to acquire a full understanding of the way the idea functions within the whole matrix of concepts, analyses, and theses which make up Aristotle's physics and metaphysics. I am simply pursuing the same method with respect to that matrix of concepts in Aristotle's political philosophy within which Miller hopes to locate an anticipation of the idea of rights. My references to the work of John Pocock in section V have suggested to some readers that I am espousing a form of historical or cultural or Kuhnian relativism which rules Miller's project out of court ab initio. The only form of relativism to which I think this essay commits me is the methodological relativism (if that is what it is) that I have just described. I Athens. Historians of the institutions of classical democratic Athens have no qualms in introducing the topic of citizen rights into their accounts. Thus Douglas MacDowell begins Part 2 of The Law in Classical Athens with a chapter on personal status whose opening words are these: The rights of anyone in Athens, including his right to prosecute at law, depended on his status, on whether he was a citizen (polites or astos) or an alien (xenos) or a slave (doulos or oiketes).(2) Similarly, Mogens Herman Hansen has a section of the chapter in his The Athenian Democracy on "the people of Athens" entitled: "The Citizens, their Rights and Duties." Referring for support to Aristotle's Politics 3.1 he states: The principal privilege of an Athenian citizen was his political rights; in fact they were more than just a "privilege": they constituted the essence of citizenship.(3) This makes citizenship in ancient Athens sound not all that unlike citizenship in a modern western state. Things begin to look a bit different once we start listening to the social and cultural historians. Consider for example the following remarks of Sir Kenneth Dover in Greek Popular Morality, recently adjudged the most important and original of all his books by Sir Hugh Lloyd Jones. Whereas we "have become accustomed for a very long time to regard the law and the state as mechanisms for the protection of individual freedoms," "the Greek," says Dover, "did not regard himself as having more rights at any given time than the laws of the city into which he was born gave him at that time; these rights could be reduced, for the community was sovereign, and no rights were inalienable. …

Aristotle's Place in the History of Natural Rights

Abstract: That Aristotle has a place in the history of natural rights would not have seemed a startling proposition a hundred years ago Ernest Barker declared in 1906 that for Aristotle, "the life-breath of the State is a justice which assures to each his rights, enforces on all their duties, and so gives to each and all their own" This conception of justice stands in some contrast with Plato's, according to Barker "While Plato's formula is that each individual should do his own, Aristotle's formula is that each individual should have his own Plato thinks of the individual as bound to do the duty to which he is called as an organ of the State: Aristotle thinks of the individual as deserving the right which he ought to enjoy in a society based on (proportionate) equality"(1) Not everyone agreed with Barker when he wrote those words Few students of the Politics would agree with him today Disagreement comes from different sides On one hand--the "rights" hand, one might call it--Karl Popper argued in 1945 in The Open Society and its Enemies that Aristotle's essentialism was less interesting than Platonism but equally congenial to modern totalitarianism(2) On the other hand--call it the "anti-rights" hand (although by no means the left or leftist hand)--scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre and the legal historian Michel Villey would have it that the whole modern conception of rights, especially human or natural rights, is a pernicious fabrication of the Enlightenment, with roots going back no further than the similarly pernicious nominalism of William of Ockham(3) As far as the current consensus is concerned, then, whether one favors rights or not, and whether one admires Aristotle or not, there are no rights--or at least no individual natural rights--in Aristotle Against this forbidding background Fred D Miller, Jr argues that for Aristotle "there is only one constitution which is everywhere according to nature the best" and that "that constitution is best according to nature which is unqualifiedly just and which guarantees the rights of its citizens according to this standard"(4) The paper is a necessarily sketchy attempt to determine, in effect, whether later thinkers read the Politics as Miller does or as Villey, MacIntyre, and others do(5) I will focus mainly on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the period in which Aristotle's political thought was taken more seriously than at any other time before or since and also the period in which something like a modern conception of natural rights becomes indisputably visible in contemporary theory(6) What is a modern conception of a natural rights? What sort of rights is the argument about? Within the Aristotelian tradition there is no doubt that some goods and some normative principles are natural or reasonable rather than conventional or arbitrary At least that is the professed position, although Aristotle has been criticized by philosophers as different as Thomas Hobbes and Alan Gewirth for following the values of his own time or class rather than following nature or reason(7) At least theoretically, however, there is no contradiction here between Aristotelians and modern defenders of natural rights Having mentioned Hobbes, let me concede at once that his concept of a natural right is in one respect quite different from anything in Aristotle Fundamentally or naturally, for Hobbes, everyone has rights to everything These rights are emphatically not compatible with one another as regards their full enjoyment On the contrary, the war of all against all is a necessary consequence of this situation with regard to natural rights It is therefore necessary for Hobbes that we give up our natural rights if we want peace and security Aristotle is no Hobbes(8) However, Hobbes is not the only modern theorist of natural rights The possibility remains of a connection between Aristotle and modern theories in which the function of political justice is the guarantee or defense of natural rights, not their replacement …

Why Mathematical Solutions of Zeno’s Paradoxes Miss The Point: Zeno’s One and Many Relation and Parmenides’ Prohibition.

Abstract: MATHEMATICAL RESOLUTIONS OF ZENO’s PARADOXES of motion have been offered on a regular basis since the paradoxes were first formulated. In this paper I will argue that such mathematical “solutions” miss, and always will miss, the point of Zeno’s arguments. I do not think that any mathematical solution can provide the much sought after answers to any of the paradoxes of Zeno. In fact all mathematical attempts to resolve these paradoxes share a common feature, a feature that makes them consistently miss the fundamental point which is Zeno’s concern for the one-many relation, or it would be better to say, lack of relation. This takes us back to the ancient dispute between the Eleatic school and the Pluralists. The first, following Parmenide’s teaching, claimed that only the One or identical can be thought and is therefore real, the second held that the Many of becoming is rational and real.1 I will show that these mathematical “solutions” do not actually touch Zeno’s argument and make no metaphysical contribution to the problem of understanding what is motion against immobility, or multiplicity against identity, which was Zeno’s challenge. I would like to point out at this stage that my contention

Aristotle and the Origins of Natural Rights

Abstract: In Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics, I attributed three main theses to Aristotle: that a metaphysical theory of nature is part of the foundations of political philosophy; that the virtue of justice is central to practical politics; and that a fully just constitution will respect and protect the rights of citizens. The third thesis is especially controversial because it challenges a widely shared view that the concept of rights is a modern discovery (or innovation) which is altogether alien to the thought of Aristotle and of classical writers and thinkers generally. However, this currently established view is itself a comparatively recent development. Commentators in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century translated and explicated Aristotle's Politics in terms of "rights." For example, Ernest Barker observed, "Plato thinks of the individual as bound to do the duty to which he is called as an organ of the State: Aristotle thinks of the individual as deserving the right which he ought to enjoy in a society based on (proportionate) equality."(1) I argued that these earlier scholars were correct, and I offered a philosophical reconstruction of Aristotle's politics which included a theory of justice and individual rights. The disagreement over whether Aristotle recognized rights in some form unavoidably involves disagreement over what rights are, and the theory of rights itself is still highly contested. There is no consensus concerning how "(a) right" is to be defined, how rights are to be theoretically grounded, or how rights theory is to be applied in particular circumstances. This is not, however, a good reason to dismiss the issue of whether there are rights in Aristotle: for Aristotle, like modern rights theorists, is concerned about the moral and legal status of the individual within the community, and he expresses this in terms of claims of justice. The issue is worthy of study not only because it can lead to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's conceptions of justice and the common good, but also because it may shed valuable light on the theoretical foundations of human rights, since he offers a theory of political justice which is based on a metaphysical theory of human nature. I shall discuss here the principal issues concerning the place of rights in Aristotles politics which are raised by the preceding essays.(2) Section I seeks to make clear the features which Aristotle's theory of justice shares (and does not share) with modern rights theories. Section II considers the relation of rights to the concepts of justice and merit (or desert) in Aristotles theory. Section III concerns the political dimension of rights in Aristotle's thought, and whether this makes them too "derivative and precarious" to play a serious role in his political theory. Section IV addresses problems in viewing Aristotle's proposed "best constitution" as a regime of rights. Finally, section V discusses the fundamental issue on which Aristotle and modern rights theorists disagree: the place of liberty in the exercise of individual rights. I Modern theories of rights take varied forms. Consider, for example, the opposing accounts of what it is that individuals have a right to. Libertarians maintain that individuals have only the right to negative liberty, that is, to freedom from the initiation of force by others. In contrast, social democrats contend that all individuals are entitled to welfare, which may require that the government use coercion against some persons in order to provide goods or services to others. There are also disagreements as to who should be counted as a rights-holder. Many persons (including those in various religious groups) hold that all living persons (including unborn babies) have the right to life, which would be violated by abortion, while many others deny that human fetuses have any rights. Through this din of discordant rights claims, however, a concordant theme may be discernible: a right is a claim of justice which a member of a community has against the other members of the community. …

Heidegger, Humanism, and the Destruction of History

Abstract: Heidegger's blistering critique of modernity is among his most influential philosophical legacies. However, his account of modernity's ills--its reification, calculative reason, loss of the transcendent, tyranny of public opinion--is hardly unique. Elements of this critique can be found in numerous other thinkers, including Nietzsche, Max Weber, and the Frankfurt School, not to mention Spengler and Junger. What is peculiar to Heidegger and really questionable in his critique is his diagnosis of the cause of modernity's ills: not capitalism and its greed; not Protestant religious beliefs; not even runaway technology or the Gestalt of the worker; but rather the humanism of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, humanism lies at the root of the reification, technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world. Heidegger's attacks against humanism have come under renewed scrutiny, especially in France, as the latest wave of polemics over his political engagement has metamorphosed into a debate over the nature of humanism itself. Yet these recent discussions give rise to a number of perplexities. Firstly, for all their differences, it is remarkable how Heidegger's critics and defenders alike distort his position. On the one side, his French defenders hold that humanism is the attribution of a fixed essence to man, according to which definition "even Nazism is a humanism." The fact that the early Heidegger was still enmeshed in the snares of humanism (insofar as he provided a universalist characterization of Dasein) is then invoked to explain his political views in the thirties.(1) On the other side, certain critics have argued that Heidegger completely misrepresents the nature of humanism, and have offered a diametrically opposed definition. According to them, "reflection on the true nature of humanism" reveals that humanism is precisely the view that man has no essence, but rather decides what he will be through his choices and actions. In short, they affirm that humanism is an existentialism, inverting the Sartrean dictum. This humanism, they claim, can provide the foundation for human rights, democracy, the ideal of Bildung and the humanities, and so forth, but never anything as nationalistic or essentialist as Nazism or Heidegger's analytic of Dasein.(2) Yet as commonplace as its association with Heidegger has become, the equation of humanism with essentialism is not to be found in Heidegger's central statement on the subject, the "Letter on Humanism." Indeed, nowhere does Heidegger reject the view that man has an essence. To the contrary, his criticism of humanism is always that it has incorrectly or "metaphysically" determined the essence of man; that it conceives of man as animal rationale, and hence on the basis of a preconceived notion of `nature' or `animality' or `objects'. His claim is that such preconceptions close off the question of the relation between human existence and Being, thereby blinding us to the true human essence.(3) Heidegger himself is clearly concerned to provide a glimpse of this true essence, and it is for this reason that he faults humanism for not determining the essence of man "high enough." Thus the entire debate surrounding the early Heidegger's alleged humanism or anti-humanism presupposes an equation of humanism with essentialism which is not Heideggerian, but Sartrean or Marxian-Althusserian.(4) A second set of perplexities arises from the peculiar historical sense informing the current discussions. The vast majority of interpreters wholly neglect any consideration of the historical origins of humanism. They are content simply to define humanism as an abstract philosophical position, such as subjectivism, anthropocentrism, voluntarism, and the like.(5) From this we can infer one of two implicit positions. Either these interpreters think that Heidegger's assessment of humanism is historically adequate; or they believe the question of historical adequacy to be insignificant. …

Silence Revisited: Taking the Sight out of Auditory Qualities

Abstract: In the beginning of the thirteenth book of the Odyssey, Homer describes the end of a discourse given by Odysseus stating: He ceas'd; but left so pleasing on their ear His voice, that listening still they seem'd to hear. A pause of silence hush'd the shady rooms: ...(1) Such a passage expresses the most distinctive elements that separate humankind from other known forms of life, namely, the ability to speak, to listen, and to perceive silence. Of these three capacities, perhaps the perception of silence, while fascinating, is also the most misunderstood. At best, silence is a slippery topic. On the surface, silence might be easily explained as merely the absence of noise or the cessation of speech. Yet, these are only the dispositions for the experience of silence. Where silence can express itself in a solitary walk, the sadness of death, or in the calm of a serious argument, we are able to attribute various layers of meaning to the experience of silence as well as distinguish its presence qualitatively by employing such terms as deep silence,(2) true silence,(3) or open silence.(4) My purpose in this essay is to pursue a discussion of silence along two lines--one negative, the other positive--in hopes of broadening the margins of how we think silence philosophically. First the negative. Studies in the past have investigated silence far too narrowly and abstractly. One recent study, by Dauenhauer, for example, delimits "the complex phenomenon" of silence by contrasting its essential connection with utterance or discourse.(5) Yet, as critics pointed out, silence may not bear any essential relationship to discourse per se. The essential link seems to arise from the more obvious contrast between silence and sound.(6) In other words, the dialectic between utterance and silence must be preceded by a much larger dialectic that must be taken into account first, namely, the dialectic between noise and silence.(7) Meanwhile, other studies, while adding valuable insights to the study of silence, have too easily turned it into an abstraction. Picard's study, for example, referred to silence as "an autonomous phenomenon," or worse, "a substance."(8) In places, Ihde refers to silence as a "non-experience" that lacks humanly perceived presence.(9) In regard to the perception of silence, I am suspicious of studies like the one by Dufrenne which disperses the unique significance of auditory perception into a general discussion of synaesthesia.(10) Undoubtedly, to my mind, there is something like synaesthesia at work in our embodiment in the life-world,(11) but such discussions of this general sensibility do not really account for the fact that the eye and ear are two distinctly different perceptual fields.(12) A general synthesis of this sort is a type of reductionism that tells us very little about the unique contribution of each of the physical and cognitive senses. Then, there is the positive line of inquiry. Silence is essentially intertwined or equiprimordial with the fact that we make oral sounds, that we hear, and that we listen.(13) Silence is not an ideal presence that exists between the oral sounds of our verbal discourse. The oral sound, and the silence it punctuates, are both differing levels of audition. The sound of spoken words and silence do not stand in opposition to one another-they are modulations in our ability to perceive auditory qualities in the ambient environment. It seems futile to continually insist on pitting silence against what we think to be its opposite, namely, what we hear and listen to. Is silence ever the ideal and the total other of sound? Does silence not lie somewhere on the scale that marks the entire range of sonic perceptions in the life-world? Are not the oral rhythms of voice and speech an integral part of these sonic-perceptions? In short, before any philosophical analysis of silence can be fruitful, it must be presumed that silence is foremost an aural perception that draws on our ability to make oral sounds and to listen. …

Sortal Essentialism and the Potentiality Principle

Abstract: I Introduction. The "Potentiality Principle" (PP) asserts that any entity which is potentially rational and potentially self-conscious has, in virtue of its potential, a strong right to life. Let us use `person' to mean `entity which is actually rational and actually self-conscious'. This will enable us to formulate PP succinctly: potential personhood confers a strong right to life. PP is prominent not only in the controversy over abortion, but also in debates concerning in vitro fertilization, embryo experimentation, and medical uses of embryo extracts. The positive support for PP consists mainly of two arguments, each open to challenge. One is that PP accords with common-sense morality in assigning a right to life to normal human infants (and is the most philosophically defensible of the secular principles that do so). The other, an argument which requires considerable elucidation, is that since life as a person is something of great value, potential persons have a strong interest in realizing their potential and, in consequence, a strong right to realize it.(1) Against PP (as clarified in section II) there are four types of arguments. By far the most popular is the fourth, which is the focus of this paper. (1) There are arguments that depend on the theory of rights peculiar to one or another of the competing theories of right and wrong. For instance, a contractarian might argue that rights are possessed only by contractors, and hence not by beings whose personhood is merely potential. Or a consequentialist might argue that the only moral rights are those associated with optimific rules and that rules protecting the lives of certain classes of potential persons, fetuses perhaps, or experimental embryos, are not optimific. Of course, arguments of this type have force only for those who accept the moral theories on which they are based. They cannot provide what many philosophers have sought: a refutation of PP convincing to those of virtually any ethical persuasion. (2) There is the argument of Joel Feinberg, widely known if only because it appears in all three editions of a popular anthology: The remaining difficulty for the strict potentiality criterion [which, for present purposes, need not be distinguished from PP] is much more serious. It is a logical error, some have charged, to deduce actual rights from merely potential . . . qualification for those rights. . . . As the Australian philosopher Stanley Benn puts it, "A potential president of the United States is not on that account Commander-in-Chief [of the U.S. Army and Navy]." This simple point can be called "the logical point about potentiality." Taken on its own terms, I don't see how it can be answered as an objection to the strict potentiality criterion.(2) As pointed out by Michael Wreen,(3) among others, to subscribe to PP is not to "deduce actual rights from merely potential qualification for those rights." Rather, it is to accept the proposition that potential personhood is itself a qualification; and that proposition generally is accepted on the basis of such arguments as the two mentioned above, not inferred from the proposition that potential persons are potentially qualified for the rights in question. (3) There are arguments based on analyses of the relations among rights, interests, and desires. An example is Michael Tooley's argument,(4) which rests on these premises: (a) an entity has a strong right to life only if it has a strong interest in continued life; (b) an entity has a strong interest in continued life only if it is sufficiently developed intellectually to be capable of desiring continued life; and (c) some potential persons, such as human embryos, obviously lack that degree of intellectual development. Presumably, `has an interest in continued life' means 'would be harmed if denied continued life', not `is consciously interested in continued life'. …

Why Possible Worlds Aren't

Abstract: Here is an uncommon argument for doubting the existence of possible worlds. It calls into question the whole spectrum of supposed possible worlds, from Lewis's radically plural real worlds to the world-stories of Adams and Plantinga. More than that, it challenges the tacit presuppositions of most of those who have attacked such views. Yet despite its strangeness I cannot but think this unorthodox position is correct. I shall furnish metaphysical reasons for thinking that it is, and then proceed to show why the possible worlds taken for granted in contemporary discussions are based on a misconception, a metaphysical mistake that we would be better off without. I rest this unusual claim on the ground of a metaphysics that is at odds with the metaphysical viewpoint implied in the theories of possible worlds. I suggest a different and, I think, superior way of conceiving the world, experience, and what we mean by possibility. We are faced here with the deliberate choice of philosophic first principles, not with demonstrations proceeding from commonly acknowledged or even tacitly presupposed principles. So there can be no knockdown argument for such a choice, only reasons for thinking it better than its alternatives. Lewis himself has noted that "one man's reason is another man's reductio,"(1) and, after arguing against "ersatz" substitutes for his thoroughgoing modal realism, he advises: "Join the genuine modal realists; or foresake genuine and ersatz worlds alike."(2) On the view that I shall propose, Lewis's modal realism turns out to be itself a reductio rather than a reason, and so I must set it aside with all its variants, ersatz or otherwise. Philosophic beginnings are chosen, but their consequences are not. As Gilson put it "Philosophers are free to lay down their own sets of principles, but once is is done, they no longer think as they wish they think as they can."(3) These first principles are chosen not only for their initial plausibility, but most importantly because they appear to make more intelligible sense of experience than do their opposites. Consonance with experience is the final criterion for accepting or rejecting any philosophic standpoint. As Whitehead mentioned, it has been said that systems of philosophy are never refuted, they are only abandoned, either by reason of the mutual incoherence of their principles or because they are inadequate to account for experience as we find it.(4) I begin this consideration, then, by recommending the plausibility of three metaphysical principles that suggest themselves, both initially and in their consequences, as characterizing our immediate, ongoing, changing experience. I Three Principles of Becoming and Being.(5) These principles are meant to express, at least partially, the character of human experience viewed in terms of its changing patterns over time. They link the dynamism of activity with its own formal patterns; they link temporal actuality with possibility. PRINCIPLE (A): Past actuality, whether immediate or remote, is definite, exact, unambiguous. Lady Macbeth observed that what's done cannot be undone. But also, what's done, being done, has its own definite character. Though knowledge of the past fades, including knowledge of one's own past self, this past is not in itself ambiguous. We have to cope in the present with what has in fact been decided, by us and by others, in the past. The pattern of that past is settled, now and always. And how does this settled pattern come about? PRINCIPLE (B): Present actuality involves a process of determination whereby from the indefiniteness of what might be (the range of possibility), there is created the definiteness of what actually is (actuality).(6) Take the writing of a philosophic essay. It is a process by which more general initial thoughts take on the definition of exact formulation, a process by which the vagueness of what might be written takes on the definiteness of what is written. …

The puzzle of names in Ockham’s theory of mental language

Abstract: In his writings on semantics and logic, William of Ockham combines two very strong claims about mental language: that mental terms are naturally prior to and determinative of the signification of conventional signs and that mental language contains neither synonymous nor equivocal terms.(1) The first claim represents the role mental language has in explaining the origins, structure, and content of thought and language. Ockham was, as many commentators have observed, a conceptual empiricist but it would be a mistake to think that he was primarily concerned with the psychological processes that underlie our representational system. The second claim indicates that the theory of mental language is primarily a theory of signification or a semantics. The notion of a redundancy-free mental language is an idealization crafted for its explanatory role in Ockham's semantics. The notion of a mental language devoid of synonymous and ambiguous terms raises puzzles which threaten the internal coherence of the project. These puzzles concern a species of categorematic terms in mental language, Ockham's absolute terms, and are not unlike the puzzles about proper names in Kripkean semantics. Although I am skeptical that Ockham's theory is adequate to the dual tasks of being a semantics as well as a psychological thesis, I shall argue that the wrong response to these puzzles is to forfeit the theory's status as a semantic theory by giving up the commitment to parsimony. The Basic Principles of Ockham's Theory of Terms. When John Trentman referred to Ockham's notion of mental language as analogous to the ideal languages of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, he focused our attention on how Ockham, in both word and methodology, was committed to the notion of a redundancy-free mental language.(2) Trentman was replying to Geach who had incautiously accused Ockham of maintaining the absurd position that Latin was the language of thought.(3) Trentman simply pointed out Ockham's practice of pruning from mental language all features which, although present in conventional languages, do not add to the significative power of those languages. In this way, Ockham eliminates gender, declension, corgugation, and inflection from his characterization of mental language and considers whether it is necessary to have mental correlates of both participles and verbs.(4) Ockham's strategy for eliminating features from the mental language is always the same: if the difference between two (or more) terms in spoken or written language is not a difference in signification (and hence substitution of one for the other in a sentence preserves the truth value of the sentence) then there is no corresponding pair of synonyms in mental language and no grammatical feature corresponding to the feature which distinguishes the terms in spoken language. As Ockham justifies this procedure, it is because whatever is signified by all synonyms can be sufficiently ex pressed by one of those terms, and therefore a multitude of concepts does not correspond to such a plurality of synonyms.(5) So, for example, if the Latin verbs rogare and petere are synonymous in meaning "to ask," the fact that they belong to different corjugations does not entail that they will have distinct correlates in the mental language. Compare this to differences in mood, number, tense, voice, and person, regarding verbs, and case and number, regarding nouns which do affect the truth conditions of sentences.(6) Ockham concludes that synonymy in spoken and written language is largely a matter of ornamentation.(7) What is striking about Ockham's discussion of what grammatical features are and are not to be found in mental language is the idea that signification is the definitive characteristic of mental terms. Mental terms are defined only by their semantic properties. Where there is no difference in signification between terms there cannot be more than one mental correlate. …

Being, Seeing, and Touching: Machiavelli's Modification of Platonic Epistemology

Abstract: That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses. I It has often been thought that Machiavelli and Plato stand on opposite sides of the highest watershed in Western intellectual history.(1) Prior to Machiavelli wisdom had always been identified with the acceptance of some higher authority, ancient thinkers dividing chiefly over the question whether that higher authority lay in the more or less mysterious laws of God, or in the more or less coherent principles of nature. In Machiavelli's writings independence replaces acceptance as the basis of wisdom; his point of departure begins with the insight that "no moral laws exist, not made by men, which men must abide by."(2) Machiavelli's rejection of Plato in particular and all ancient thought in general thus stands as a lofty peak from which one can see the greatest distance in both directions. This paper will argue, however, that Machiavelli's moral and epistemological innovations will be better understood as modifications of the Platonic approach than as consequences of a complete rejection of Plato. Both the Athenian wrestler and the Florentine clerk, it turns out, demonstrate a persistent concern with the moral problematic--that is, the tendency of human beings to do what they want to do at the cost of that which they ought to do. Both thinkers see man's vulnerability to fortune as a symptom of this tendency, and they agree as to its ultimate cause: the inability of men to accurately weigh that which is present here and now against that which is far removed in time and space. Machiavelli does not part company with Plato until it is time to suggest a remedy. Here he indeed accomplishes a radical innovation--perhaps as radical as was suggested above. Whereas Plato resolves the problematic by founding the soul on that which is, and which is better than and prior to man, Machiavelli supposes that man, starting from scratch, can construct his own foundations. Nonetheless, the Florentine walks a long way with the Athenian before he takes his leave; it may be best, then, to interpret Machiavelli's writing less as a monologue than as a dialogue, the dramatis personae of which include himself and Plato. I will not attempt to demonstrate here that this conversation was conscious. I will, however, bring the reader's attention to two facts that bear on the question. The first is that Machiavelli tells us, in his famous letter to Francesco Vettori, that he invested in his Prince the capital accumulated from numerous nocturnal conversations with ancient men. The second is that one of the most famous passages in that book--the first paragraph of the twenty-fifth chapter--is lifted from Book IV of Plato's the Laws.(3) This is especially remarkable because Plato's passage comes just as the Athenian stranger is about to suggest an alliance between philosophy and tyranny. Further, both Plato's Athenian Stranger and Machiavelli seem to view the world in the same way. To all appearances fortune exerts so powerful an influence over man that "no mortal ever legislates anything, that almost all human affairs are matters of chance."(4) At least, the Athenian tells us, this is what someone might be "eager" to say, and Machiavelli confesses that he himself is sometimes inclined to this opinion. …

'Republic' 467d6-E2: Plato's Dialectical Requirement

Abstract: This paper calls into question a conventional way of reading the passage concerning knowledge and belief at the end of book 5 of Plato's Republic. On the conventional reading, Plato is committed to arguing on grounds that his philosophical opponents would accept, but this view fails to appreciate the rhetorical context in which the passage is situated. Indeed, it is not usually recognized or considered important that the passage has a rhetorical context at all. Philosophers typically reduce the questions asked by Socrates and the answers given by Glaucon in the presence of a large audience, to one continuous argument of Plato's. Unfortunately, this way of reading book 5 ignores two points that are crucial to its interpretation: (1) the Socrates-Glaucon dialectic is directed to hostile (not merely intellectually opposed) interlocutors, and (2) the relation between Socrates and his audience (Glaucon excepted) is one of antagonism.(1) I shall argue that scholars have for a long time been trying to find more philosophical fruit in the passage than it has to bear, largely because they have misconstrued its role in the argument of the Republic. The passage I want to reappraise runs from 476d-480a, and its immediate context is as follows: Socrates has just suggested that philosophers should be kings. In order to clarify his meaning, he attempts to say what a philosopher is, and to do that he finds it necessary to distinguish between knowledge ([one Greek word cannot be converted in ASCII text]) and belief ([two Greek words cannot be converted in ASCII text]. According to his distinction, philosophers are people who crave understanding, while another group, the lovers of sights and sounds ([two Greek words cannot be converted in ASCII text]), care only for belief. Interpretations of this passage have been called controversial, (2) but the controversy has so far been limited to details. A broad consensus has it that the argument of this passage is central to Plato's middle period epistemology. There is a bit of text, however, on which the consensus largely depends, and it has been overinterpreted. The text, a speech by Socrates, consists of a mere four lines, and runs as follows(3): 476 d 8 [nine Greek words cannot be converted in ASCII text] 9 [ten Greek words cannot be converted in ASCII text] e 1 [eight Greek words cannot be converted in ASCII text] 2 [four Greek words cannot be converted in ASCII text] What, then, if he should become hostile to us, that man who we say believes but does not know, and disputes what we are saying as not true? Have we some means to soothe him and persuade him gently, while concealing the fact that he is not sound?(4) It is customary to treat this text as establishing a "dialectical requirement" for the argument that follows, namely that it must be conducted on grounds acceptable to the lovers of sights and sounds.(5) The general view is that Plato himself is committed to both fairness and cogency here; in fact most controversy over the passage stems from attempts to identify a suitable argument for the text to bear.(6) As we shall see, however, the evidence in favor of Plato's commitment is slight and the evidence against it is substantial. The "dialectical requirement" of 476d-e will turn out to be a fiction, and once that fiction is dispelled it will become difficult to see the argument that follows it as a settled part of Plato's epistemology. That is not to say that the argument plays no significant role in the Republic (on the contrary, it does), or even that Plato puts no stock in its conclusion, but it is to say that Plato is not committed to the argument as it stands. II Let us begin by seeking general evidence for Plato's dialectical requirement. Do we have any unrestricted reasons to believe that Plato is committed to such a requirement? …

Dynamic Resemblance: Hegel's Early Theory of Ethical Equality

Abstract: I In the voluminous literature on the young Hegel, it has been generally overlooked that the cornerstone of his early moral theory concerns the possibility of ethical "equality."(1) This project first explicitly emerges in the late 1790s in Frankfurt, against the background of his incipient critique of Kantian morality. Hegel specifically rejects Kant's promotion of the moral law over sensuous inclination, and what he views as the ungrounded autonomy possessed by the principle of "moral freedom" in the Second Critique. In the course of his confrontation with Kant, Hegel would derive the antecedent condition for moral freedom from another principle, also drawn from the cardinal values of the French Revolution which was so instrumental to his early thinking: that is, rather than moral freedom, Hegel promotes a unique interpretation of ethical equality (Gleichheit) as the foundation for the religious community. In Hegel's view, freedom can emerge only as the product of an infinite striving for ethical equality with God. Hegel's reflections depend on the unique semantic richness of the German term Gleichheit, which has a wider range of application than the English term "equality." While Gleichheit can certainly mean equality or "parity" in the sense of sharing the same set of rights or status as another, it can also mean "to resemble" or "to be like" something (etwas zu gleichen) in a certain respect. For Hegel, however, resemblance is not merely a relation between shared external properties, but rather two things are said to be "equal" or "alike" to the extent they are united within the same horizon of existential conditions. Consequently, Gleichheit can mean both a kind of parity in respect of some external set of shared properties or rights, or to be alike in respect of some fundamental condition of existence. The originality of Hegel's conception of equality is to explicitly segregate these two senses of Gleichheit, so that he may reject the status of mere parity or "equivalence" of individuals before the law, in favor of a conception of complete ethical "likeness" or similarity between moral agents, in which Self and Other are united within the same ethical horizon. Consequently, although his use of terminology is not always consistent, Hegel persistently distinguishes a bad or abstract form of equality-which imposes a "formal equivalence" (Gleichheit) between individuals on the basis of a moral law heteronomous to the confines of ethical life from a nonreflective form of equality, understood in the sense of a consummate "likeness" (Gleiche) between individuals, which emerges in the condition of love (Liebe). Love for Hegel indicates a completely shared sense of being with another, or a "living union between the individual and his world." This fundamental similarity or likeness (Gleiche), then, overcomes the positing of conceptual and ethical opposition between individuals--which he diagnoses in Kant's principle of moral freedom--and bonds the members of a religious faith into a true community (Gemeinschaft), in that they are inherently "alike" in and through their devotion to God. This affirmative equality or likeness for Hegel should therefore be understood as a mode of dynamic resemblance between individuals, which links them through a manifold of relative modifications (Modifikationen) of difference within a united existential horizon, rather than through a posited opposition (Entgagensetzang). This understanding of Gleichheit or equality is also not reducible to a Fichtean sense of "identity" (A=A), because it is a relation of manifold resemblance between autonomous moral agents rather than opposing aspects of an identical self-consciousness. Hegel's Gleichheit therefore aspires to offer a medial condition between identity and opposition. However, Hegel will ultimately concede that his ideal of ethical equality cannot avoid extinguishing that vestigial difference between particulars that can distinguish a relation of similarity from formal identity. …

Self, Community, and Time: A Shared Sociality

Abstract: Community and pluralism are often held to be at odds with each other, with a choice to be made between group conformity and individualism, community obligations or individual liberty, and this dilemma in large part structures much contemporary debate. Indeed, Alasdair MacIntyre thinks America may well be founded on incompatible moral and social ideals. On the one hand, a communitarian vision of a common "telos," and on the other hand, an ideal of individualism and pluralism. Thus he holds that "we inhabit a kind of polity whose moral order requires systematic incoherence in the form of public allegiance to mutually inconsistent sets of principles."(1) These tensions, which tend to dominate reflections on community, are rooted in incompatible understandings of the nature of the self and its relation to the communal order which it inhabits, understandings which are in turn inextricably intertwined with implicit temporal issues. These interrelated issues of self, community, and temporality will be the focus of the present paper. Before developing a pragmatically based account of this interrelationship, the ensuing discussion will very briefly explore the positions of John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty to elicit certain relevant features. As a sketchy caricature, and with all the dangers sketchy caricatures involve, it can be said that Rawl's position exemplifies the individual as the source of important community arrangements, MacIntyre's the individual as the product of community arrangements, and Rorty's the freeing of the issue from ontological entanglements and presumptions. Rawl's position is rooted in the self-interest driven principles of abstract justice formed by isolated, presocial individuals operating through a veil of ignorance as to their own position in society. It emphasizes the primacy of the individual, and the social features stem primarily from the aggregate decisions of individual selves stripped of any particular attributes. While his position, at least in A Theory of Justice, can be seen to involve an atomism in which separate individuals are ontologically prior to their unity, in "Justice as Fairness," he reinterprets his position in light of communitarian criticisms. Here he argues that the concept of "artificial agents" deliberating in the original position is a device that does not imply any particular substantive conception of the self,(2) that the artificial or abstract self does not involve a metaphysical conception of the person.(3) Yet, even this modified position does assume that a self abstracted out from its concrete relations and roles can be coherently thought of as a functioning self, and that such a "self" can be a decision maker. The self that decides in Rawl's position is a peculiarly a temporal self, isolated from its historical attributes, ends, and attachments,(4) and the frame which emerges from the debate is a peculiarly atemporal, rationally constructed frame imposed from above upon the contingencies of real life existence and isolated from the historically changing conditions within and among types of identities.(5) Although throughout A Theory of Justice Rawls speaks of the formation of these principles though "our" intuitions, in "Justice as Fairness" he again modifies these claims in light of certain objections. In this latter work he clarifies that there is a certain ideal implied--that of Western liberal democracies--(6) and he allows that the basic values of the agent, now called "citizen," are not derived from basic intuitions but from an overlapping consensus. However, Western liberal democracies seem to embody a pluralism such that there is no considered judgment that "we" must, as Rawls claims, "look for a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance as counters in quest for political and economic advantage."(7) Thus, while the formation of this frame is done from a basis of atomic self-interest driven individualism, it is peculiarly nonpluralistic. …

Doubting Castle or the Slough of Despond: Davidson and Schiffer on the Limits of Analysis

Abstract: I At present there would seem to be two main camps in Anglo American philosophy of language, the split falling out much as Richard Rorty described it in the preface to his 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn.(1) His editorial policy there was to give even-handed coverage to both sides of the emergent dispute while suggesting that their differences could not be resolved, and therefore that the only way forward was to adopt a sensibly pragmatist view, which entitled one to pick and choose without any need to take sides. On the one hand were those "analytical" types in the Frege-Russell line of descent who took it that "ordinary language" was too fuzzy, imprecise, or ambiguous to provide an adequate basis for the conduct of philosophical enquiry. It could be rendered fit for that purpose only through a rigorous analysis of its underlying logical grammar, or a method--such as Russell's Theory of Descriptions or Frege's canonical distinction between Sense and Reference--for effectively dispelling the manifold sources of "commonsense" error and illusion.(2) On the other side were those in the "ordinary language" camp, influenced chiefly by Wittgenstein and Austin, who rejected the idea that language could or should be subject to such forms of abstract logical regimentation. In their view, as Austin famously expressed it, our "common stock of words" embodied all the distinctions, nuances, connections and refinements that speakers had "found worth marking in the lifetimes of many generations." From which it followed that "these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, . . . and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you and I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon--the most favoured alternative method."(3) To Rorty this seemed just one more example of the kinds of dilemma that philosophers typically got into by supposing that there must be a right way of doing things and that theirs was the method (or, in Austin's case, the modestly unmethodical approach) by which best to do it. His own work up to this point had been largely analytical in character, or addressed to problems within and around that first (Frege-Russell) line of descent. However, thereafter--that is to say, in his writings subsequent to The Linguistic Turn--he swung right across to a pragmatist view which left little room for such specialized concerns. Thus Rorty now argued that philosophy is not a "constructive" or problem-solving exercise; that the analytic enterprise had reached a dead-end with the difficulties uncovered by "post-analytical" thinkers like Quine, Sellars, and Goodman; and hence that the most useful ("edifying") job of work for philosophers was to help this beneficial process along by debunking the discipline's old pretensions and maybe-once in a while-coming up with some novel metaphor or narrative slant on its own history to date.(4) Another route "beyond" analytic philosophy is that taken by Donald Davidson in a series of influential essays, among them "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" and (more recently) "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs."(5) Davidson has shifted ground to some extent during the roughly ten-year period that separates these two publications. Nevertheless, one can see how he traveled the path from a truth-based (Tarskian) compositional semantics to a position that Rorty can cheerfully endorse--if somewhat to Davidson's discomfort--as one more feather in the gathering wind of post-analytical fashion.(6) For as Davidson now sees it the only "theory" that is needed is one that effectively puts itself out of business by taking each utterance as it comes, attributing intentions on a one-off (adhoc or intuitive) basis, and assuming that context--or circumstantial cues and clues--can make up any deficit supposedly created when we drop all that otiose philosophic talk about "knowing," "possessing," or "sharing" a language.(7) At which point the question arises: why adopt this line of last resort when there exist alternative approaches with a far greater claim to technical refinement and conceptual-explanatory grasp? …