Showing papers in "Review of Metaphysics in 1997"

Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place

Abstract: Every body must be in a place. Philoponus, In Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quinque Posteriores Commentaria If there is no place thought about, there is no thought at all--no intelligible proposition will have been entertained. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference I begin with a puzzle of sorts. Time is one; space is two--at least two. Time comes always already unified, one time. Thus we say "What time is it now?" and not "Which time is it now?" We do not ask, "What space is it?" Yet we might ask: "Which space are we in?" (and we certainly do ask "Which place am I in?"). Any supposed symmetry of time and space is skewed from the start. If time is self-consolidating--constantly gathering itself together in coherent units such as years or hours or semesters or seasons--space is self-proliferating. Take, for example, the dimensionality of space. One dimension in space is represented by a point or a line, whose radically reduced format mocks the extensiveness of cosmic space. Two dimensions, as in a plane figure, also falls far short of our sense that space spreads out indefinitely far beyond the perceiving subject. Only with three dimensions do we begin to approach an adequation, between the structure and the sense of space. For then the subject is surrounded by something sufficiently roomy in which to live and move. (English "room" and German Raum are distant linguistic cousins.) Indeed, as Aristotle, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty all remark, the three-dimensionality of space directly reflects our bodily state, that is, the fact that as upright beings three perpendicular planes implicitly meet and intersect in us. Even here, proliferation abounds: our bilateral symmetry means that each dimension is doubled: one vertical plane bifurcates into "up" and "down," the other vertical plane into "front" and "back," and the horizontal plane into "right" and "left." Thus subject-centered space is triple, only to be redoubled. Further, if we think of spatiality not as body-based but as locatory--as determined by landmarks and other locales in the environment--the proliferation is more striking still. There are the four cardinal directions, which themselves split easily into the thirty two points of a compass. Nor need we be so arithmetically well-rounded. Even apart from fancy mathematical models of n-dimensional space, and recent technological instantiations of virtual space, there is no end to the number or ways in which we can be oriented in space--in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari call "the variability, the polyvocity of directions" by which we can move in any given spatial scene.(1) Beyond (or rather underlying) direction, however, is place. Heidegger remarks that "space has been split up into places."(2) The fact is that we continually find ourselves immersed in a multiplex spatial network whose nodal points are supplied by particular places. If space is infinitely large, place is indefinitely many. This suggests that the ultimate source of spatial self-proliferation is not the body or the way the world is but the placialization of space itself. If so, the distinction between space and place is not derivative but generative. That is why I began by saying that "space is two--at least two." Space is a doublet composed of itself (whatever that is) and place. You may well respond: time, too, is always different, not the same as it was even a moment ago, perhaps never the same as itself, self-split at its origin (as Derrida might put it), while space abides through the before and after of time. If I pitch a tent on a mountain in northern Maine just as the sun is going down, night comes on, bringing with it an ever-changing array of nocturnal sounds and sights, the scene never exactly alike from moment to moment. I fall asleep eventually in this evanescent world, and when I awaken in the morning I find myself reassuringly in the same circumambient landscape--the same "space. …

Between Transcendental and Transcendental: The Missing Link?

Abstract: I In the second edition (1787) of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in the Transcendental Analytic, just after the Table of Categories and just before his Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) added a section (Abschnitt 12, B113-14) which marked at once the deficiency of an older Scholastic doctrine of transcendentals and yet arguably an adumbration of his own doctrine.(1) He expressed his core thought thus: In the transcendental philosophy of the ancients there is included yet another chapter containing pure concepts of the understanding which, though not enumerated among the categories, must, on their view, be ranked as a priori concepts of objects.... They are propounded in the proposition, so famous among the Schoolmen, quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum. . . . These supposedly transcendental predicates of things are in fact, nothing but logical requirements and criteria of all knowledge of things in general, and prescribe for such knowledge the categories of quantity, namely, unity, plurality, and totality.(2) Among later commentators, the setting of Kant's Abschnitt within the Kritik, as well as the wider question of a link between Kantian transcendentals and earlier teaching, have gained some attention. Thus, near the turn of this century, relying particularly on earlier work of Benno Erdmann,(3) Hans Leisegang showed both some continuity of the Scholastic doctrine with Kant's precritical teaching and a possible anticipation in that doctrine of the structure of the Kritik itself.(4) As Leisegang saw it, the Scholastic transcendentals had been taken over successively by Christian Wolff (1679-1754) in his Ontologia and then by Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), whose Metaphysica was at the base of Kant's precritical lectures on metaphysics.(5) It was then Baumgarten's divisions of metaphysics, themselves taken from Wolff, which were transformed into the architectonic of Kant's critical philosophy.(6) "Transcendental," says Leisegang, was one of the those terms which Kant borrowed from the vocabulary of earlier philosophy and then changed for his own purposes.(7) The earlier vocabulary was reflected in Baumgarten's conception of ontology or metaphysics as "the science of the general predicates of being."(8) Leisegang, correctly I believe, observes that Baumgarten's understanding of such predicates itself reflected medieval doctrine, especially that of Duns Scotus (1266-1308).(9) Leisegang has further remarked Kant's initial high regard for Baumgarten's metaphysics, its influence on the architectonic of his critical writings, and yet his gradual growing away from it.(10) Thus, while the transcendentals of the Scholastics, of Wolff, and of Baumgarten may have endured in the structure of the Kritik, their doctrine itself had at last no substantive use for Kant.(11) Indeed, Abschnitt 12 appears to be Kant's final rejection of the basic ideas of the old ontology.(12) Although Leisegang afterwards revised and added to his work,(13) his principal thesis remained intact. While Norbert Hinske disagreed with Leisegang on the role of the transcendentals in Baumgarten's philosophy,(14) he too rejected Baumgarten's influence here on the content of Kant's doctrine.(15) For Hinske it was Wolff's "transcendental cosmology"(16) (with emphasis on its a priori character) which itself broke with the earlier Scholastic tradition, and was linked especially to Kant's use of the term "transcendental."(17) Hinske's views were challenged in a short article published in 1972 by Ignacio Angelelli, who argued that "a far more interesting `link' is to be found in Baumgarten."(18) Angelelli pointed to Baumgarten's doctrine of the transcendental unity of essences conceived as pluralities of predicates "held together" in a nonaccidental way.(19) In this he saw the Scholastic doctrine of properties flowing from an essence, which then seemed plausibly reflected in Kant's synthetic a priori and in the entire transcendental philosophy. …

Virtue, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Bypassing Self-Control

Abstract: I Socrates' claim that virtue is knowledge implies that if we behave in an unvirtuous way we must be ignorant of what goodness really is. No allowance is made for the possibility that we may know what is good but act otherwise because we are too weak to resist temptation or fear--in other words that we may lack self-mastery. In a famous passage Aristotle rejects the Socratic model: It is problematic how someone with correct understanding can lack self-mastery [GREEK TEXT EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Some say this is not possible for someone who has knowledge; for it would be strange, as Socrates thought, if when someone possessed knowledge something else should master it and "drag it around like a slave." Socrates in fact used to attack the account altogether, on the grounds that there is no such thing as lack of self-mastery; for no one understands himself to act against what is best, but they do so only through ignorance. Now this account clearly goes against the evidence.(1) The evidence that Aristotle has in mind is the experience we have all had of sometimes going against our better judgment because of the pressures of the moment Most people agree with Aristotle and it is hard to see how Socrates could have believed that we never go against our better judgment.(2) The view that emerges from Plato's treatment of the subject is ambiguous, and disentangling that ambiguity will help us to understand why Socrates may have described virtue as he did. Aristotle's reference to "dragging knowledge around like a slave" is from the Protagoras,(3) and in other early dialogues as well Plato seems committed to moral intellectualism, the view that whether we are virtuous depends solely on our intellect and has nothing to do with the strength or weakness of a will that is distinct from the intellect. However, Plato's subsequent formulation of the concept of a tripartite soul seems to be an accommodation to precisely the kind of criticism that Aristotle later made. In the Republic Socrates says: Self-control(4) is surely some kind of order, the self-mastery [GREEK TEXT EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of certain pleasures and appetites, as they say, using the phrase "master of oneself" ([GREEK TEXT EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])--I don't know how--and other such phrases that are like traces that it has left behind. . . . Yet isn't the expression "master of oneself" ridiculous? He who is master of himself would also be subject to himself, and he who is subject master. The same person is referred to in all these statements.... But the saying seems to me to want to say that in the same person there is something in the soul that is better and something that is worse, and when the part that is better by nature is master of the worse, this is what is meant by speaking of being master of oneself... But when, on the other hand, because of bad upbringing or bad company the better part which is smaller is mastered by the multitude of the larger, we blame this as something shameful, and call it being subject to oneself and licentious.(5) Here it sounds as though there really is something that can overpower knowledge and "drag it around like a slave," and that not only knowledge is responsible for virtue, but also our upbringing and the company we keep. Later in the discussion internal obstacles are added to the external examples of bad upbringing and bad company, and we learn that vice occurs when either the spirited part of us, or the part of us that seeks pleasure and avoids pain and fear, dominates the knowledge-loving part. …

Heidegger’s Representationalism

Abstract: For at least the last twenty years, Anglo-American philosophers have displayed two interrelated tendencies in their efforts to make sense of Martin Heidegger. First, they have frequently mapped Heidegger onto debates and problems within contemporary cognitive science and North American philosophy of psychology. Second, they have often attempted to discern deep identities and affinities with more familiar philosophers and traditions, in particular, with Wittgenstein and American pragmatism. That these twin strategies of interpretation are so popular is in large part due to the work of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Dreyfus has pursued both lines of hermeneutic attack with a vengeance, and in so doing has devised an interpretation of Heidegger which makes him appear as a theoretical philosopher whom even hard-nosed cognitive scientists and analytical philosophers of mind can take seriously. As Dreyfus reads him, Heidegger's central achievement lies in his anticipating contemporary antirepresentationalist critiques of representational theories of mind. According to Dreyfus, Heidegger's prime innovation and novelty is to challenge the subject/object model of mind which has dominated philosophy and psychology from Descartes through Husserl to the present. The subject/object model construes the knowing and acting "self" as a "subject" which is always related intentionally to the world via "representations" of "objects." Heidegger, according to Dreyfus, rejects this: "Heidegger accepts intentional directedness as essential to human activity, but he denies that [all] intentionality is mental, that it is, as Husserl (following Brentano) claimed, the distinguishing characteristic of mental states."(1) In other words, while Heidegger concedes that intentionality is essential to being a "subject" or "self," he rejects the traditional idea that intentionality is always and only a feature of the standard folk-psychological states and experiences. It is not always and only what Dreyfus calls representational intentionality, that is, a matter of being in, or having, the standard folk-psychological intentional states and experiences.(2) While "we sometimes experience ourselves as conscious subjects relating to objects by way of intentional states such as desires, beliefs, perceptions, intentions, etc ....,"(3) Dreyfus's Heidegger also insists that our actually relating to objects by way of such standard folk-psychological states and experiences is "a derivative and intermittent condition."(4) Only when our normal, everyday dealings with familiar things become problematic, or even break down completely, do psychological states and experiences with any kind of mental or representational content arise.(5) In general, claims Dreyfus, Heidegger maintains that "all relations of mental states to their objects presuppose a more basic form of being-with-things which does not involve mental activity."(6) Elsewhere I have shown that Dreyfus really has no basis at all in Heidegger's texts for attributing to Heidegger the thesis that representational intentionality is an intermittent condition founded in such nonrepresentational "absorbed coping" with familiar things.(7) In this same paper, I also suggest that this purely negative demonstration must be complemented by a more positive account of what Heidegger is really getting at, an account which clearly entails the falsity of attributing this thesis to Heidegger. Sketching at least the broad outlines of, the Entwurf or Vorgriff for, just such an account is the task of the current paper. Specifically, I shall outline an account of what Heidegger means by Dasein, more precisely and specifically, by Dasein's self-comportment toward innerworldly entities, from which it clearly follows that Heidegger is not at all out to reject the traditional idea that subjects or selves relate to the world via representations, at least not when these notions are correctly understood.(8) Indeed, the account to be outlined here not merely does not entail Dreyfus's central thesis, it positively contradicts it. …

Pluralism, Invariance, and Conflict

Abstract: During the past two hundred years, uncertainty and suspicion about the philosophical enterprise have become acute. The educated public is confused about the intellectual and cultural importance of philosophy, and philosophers themselves are divided on its theoretical purpose and meaning. There are, to be sure, specifically philosophical sources of this condition. They include Kant's critique of traditional metaphysics, the logical positivists' debunking of ethics and theology, Wittgenstein's restrictions on the scope of meaningful discourse, Richard Rorty's call for an end to epistemology, and the deconstructionist attempt to envisage a postphilosophical world. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the unease of philosophers is solely the result of an intramural debate. The practice of philosophy has always been responsive to the cultural context in which it occurs. The extended crisis of philosophy through the last two centuries is the natural reflection of an ongoing crisis in modernity. Since the French Revolution, the enlightenment culture shaped by Galilean science and Cartesian philosophy has had to accommodate a new set of intellectual pressures. Foremost among these pressures are a profound and pervasive historical consciousness, an increasing drive towards specialization as cultural practices have become effectively autonomous, and a new appreciation of communal belonging as a formative influence on mentality and character. In conjunction these factors have undermined the early modern understanding of rationality and science. They have also weakened our confidence in the human capacity for objectivity and self-transcendence. This diminished confidence is reflected philosophically in the resurgence of epistemic and ethical theories that are skeptical or relativistic in character. Its influence, however, has not been confined to the philosophical community. Our common expectations of political and ethical life and our convictions about education and the worth of tradition have been shaken by this extended period of intellectual confusion. In The Crisis of Philosophy,(1) I explored the effect of these theoretical and cultural changes on traditional conceptions of philosophy and defended the position that the permanent aim of philosophy is the integrated unfolding of the unrestricted human desire to know. That relentless desire is at the core of all theoretical inquiry and it prefigures the goal of unified knowledge which philosophy actively seeks. As human intelligence develops in the individual person and in the community of inquiry, the diversity of knowledge dramatically increases and the task of epistemic integration becomes more difficult. Philosophical strategies of synthesis adopted in an earlier stage of meaning no longer appear promising or plausible. It appears that we stand at a decisive historical juncture in which development and decline are occurring simultaneously. The dynamic developments of modernity are the product of unprecedented specialization. The hard-won autonomy of science and culture has encouraged a dispersion of spiritual energy. The arts and the sciences have been transformed by this liberation, but the integrative practices like politics and philosophy have suffered. The human price we have paid for our centrifugal development is a loss of coherence and unity. There exists a justified fear among contemporary philosophers that the integration now sought will only be achieved through Procrustean measures. This fear has led to incessant reminders of our finitude, our fallibility, and our rootedness in history. As a check against philosophic hybris, these reminders are welcome; but at this time the love of wisdom needs tempering rather than repression. If the invariance and unity to which philosophy aspires precluded multiplicity and change, or if the quest for integration were inconsistent with the fact of historicity, then the contemporary critics of philosophy would surely be right. …

Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger

Abstract: Of the numerous legacies bequeathed by Leo Strauss, his influence on the study of German philosophy frequently goes least mentioned. Apart from some early reviews and other occasional pieces, Strauss left no major work on any German thinker.(1) With the exception of the chapter on Max Weber in Natural Right and History and a short essay on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil written near the end of his life, there are no works on such giants of the German Aufklarung as Mendelssohn, Kant, and Hegel to rival his studies of other seminal figures in the history of political thought.(2) Why, for example, did Strauss not write a Thoughts on Kant to parallel his study of Machiavelli, or The Argument and Action of Hegel's `Philosophy of Right' to complement his commentary on the Laws of Plato, or The Literary Character of Nietzsche's `Zarathustra' modeled after his essay on Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed? In any case, for a thinker like Strauss who has emphasized that what a person does not say is almost as important as what he does, such a startling omission calls for comment. The one partial exception to Strauss's generally curt treatment of German philosophy is, of course, Martin Heidegger.(3) One could almost say that Heidegger is the unnamed presence to whom or against whom all of Strauss's writings are in large part directed. Strauss's acquaintance with Heidegger went back to the early twenties. He described how upon hearing Heidegger in 1922, it slowly became evident that Heidegger was preparing a "revolution" in thought the likes of which had not been experienced since Hegel.(4) Heidegger brought to the study of philosophy a "passion" to the problems which showed up the "lostness" and emptiness of the then regnant academic orthodoxies, including that of his erstwhile dissertation adviser, the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. The famous confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in 1929 confirmed this fact for anyone with "sensitivity to greatness."(5) At the same time that Heidegger commanded Strauss's highest respect, he also elicited many of his sharpest criticisms. Heidegger accepted Nietzsche's proposition that human life and thought is radically historical. The meaning of Heidegger's "radical historicism" was not void of political consequences.(6) Heidegger was not the only thinker of note but he was the greatest thinker to embrace Hitler's revolution of 1933. Since the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism in 1989 the now infamous "Heidegger problem" has become something of a public scandal.(7) Strauss pointed to this scandal long ago. "One is bound to misunderstand Heidegger's thought radically," he wrote, if one does not see its "intimate connection" to the events of 1933.(8) Heidegger may have surpassed all his contemporaries in terms of "speculative intelligence," yet he was "at the same time intellectually the counterpart of what Hitler was politically."(9) Indeed, Strauss notes that Heidegger, who had never praised any other contemporary political movement or leader, even refused to repudiate National Socialism long after Hitler had been "muted."(10) It is one thing to trace the influence of Heidegger on Strauss, quite another to evaluate it. Does Strauss's alleged "Heideggerianism" provide the reader with a critical perspective on some of the problems of modernity not available to those operating within a more standard liberal democratic framework? Or does Strauss's appropriation of certain Heideggerian tropes lead to dangerous antiliberal doctrines crucially at odds with the spirit of individualistic modernity? This latter possibility has been developed at considerable length by the French critic Luc Ferry in his book Rights--The New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns.(11) Here we find the most impressive case to date alleging Strauss's indebtedness to Heidegger and bemoaning the political consequences of that indebtedness. The core of The New Quarrel is that Strauss took over Heidegger's wholesale critique of modernity, but turned it away from first philosophy or "fundamental ontology" and gave it a more directly political meaning. …

The Problem of Language and Mental Representation in Aristotle and St. Thomas

Abstract: Introduction. In the opening passages of his De interpretatione,(1) Aristotle provides a simple summary of how he thinks language relates to the mind and the mind to reality, a sketch which has often been called his "semantic triangle." He writes: Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of--affections of the soul--are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of--actual things--are also the same. These matters have been discussed in the work on the soul and do not belong to the present subject.(2) It has been called a triangle because of the three vertices, words, affections of the soul, and actual things. It is semantic because it has been interpreted to be providing a sketch of the meaning of words, and how they relate to things. As Norman Kretzmann points out, in the form of Boethius's sixth-century Latin translation, this passage "constitute[s] the most influential text in the history of semantics,"(3) having an enormous influence on the subsequent philosophical tradition of reflection upon the interrelations of language, mind, and the world, or as Hilary Putnam often puts it, "how language hooks onto the world." This is particularly true of the Middle Ages, but also beyond into modern philosophy. Indeed, among some contemporary philosophers, there is a vision of this opening passage that one might call a standard or received view, namely that Aristotle's reflections upon language in the De interpretatione planted a seed that grew relatively continuously in Western philosophy, flowered within British empiricism, and continues to influence the philosophy of language to this day. In light of criticism in this century directed at this relatively continuous tradition, however, these contemporary philosophers characterize the Aristotelian tradition as fundamentally flawed. Consider Michael Dummett's remarks: A continuous tradition, from Aristotle to Locke and beyond, had assigned to individual words the power of expressing `ideas', and to combinations of words that of expressing complex `ideas'; and this style of talk had blurred, or at least failed to account for, the crucial distinction between those combinations of words which constitute a sentence and those which form mere phrases which could be part of a sentence.(4) Perhaps the most important of all the contributions made by Grundlagen to general philosophy is the attack on the imagist or associationist theory of meaning. This is another of those ideas which, once fully digested, appear completely obvious: yet Frege was the first to make a clean break with the tradition which had flourished among the British empiricists and had its roots as far back as Aristotle. The attack that was launched by Frege on the theory that the meaning of a word or expression consists in its capacity to call up in the mind of the hearer an associated mental image was rounded off by Wittgenstein in the early part of the Investigations, and it is scarcely necessary to rehearse the arguments in detail, the imagist theory now being dead without a hope of revival.(5) In fact, even recent translators and commentators on the De interpretatione make oblique reference to the "notorious" problems with Aristotle's remarks.(6) Norman Kretzmann, on the other hand, hopes to protect Aristotle from these kinds of criticism by distancing Aristotle's text from its Latin tradition of interpretation. He believes that the "traditional misreading of [these] passages" in the West is a product of Boethius's unfortunate translation of the Greek words for "symbols" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and "signs" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) by the single Latin word "notae," thereby "obliterating the Aristotelian distinction between symbols and symptoms. …

The Nonfixity of the Historical Past

Abstract: In a book that first appeared in 1965 entitled Analytical Philosophy of History, Arthur Danto argues that historical inquiry cannot be conceived as an attempt to reconstruct the past along the lines of an "ideal chronicler."(1) The ideal chronicler "knows whatever happens the moment it happens, even in other minds. He is also to have the gift of instantaneous transcription: everything that happens across the whole forward rim of the Past is set down by him, as it happens the way it happens."(2) Historians cannot aspire to this ideal because they inevitably use what Danto calls "narrative sentences," that is, sentences that describe one event by referring to one or more later events. For example, "The Thirty Years War began in 1618" is a sentence typical of historical inquiry but unavailable to the chronicler because it goes beyond what could have been known at the time it occurred, that is, that the war was to last thirty years. Danto reasons that because of the indispensability of narrative sentences to historical understanding, we can never (even in principle) give a complete description of past events since this presupposes knowledge of all relevant later events. The consequence is that our descriptions of past events will inevitably change as history unfolds. This discovery is remarkable and incontrovertible: descriptions of past historical events will and must always be reconceived not just because of the unearthing of new documents or the changing interests of the historian but because of the peculiar narrative structure of historical understanding.(3) I want to show that there is more to Danto's discovery than meets the eye and more than he himself saw. I will argue that it is not merely that our descriptions of the past inevitably change, but also that the historical past itself is, in an important sense, not fixed. While Danto's claim was epistemological, mine is ontological. It is a claim that violates our common-sense intuition that the past is, as C. S. Peirce once put it, "absolutely determinate, fixed, fait accompli, and dead, as against the future which is living, plastic and determinable."(4) Briefly, my thesis is that the past is unfixed or plastic because later events reshape not just what we know or how we describe what happened, but indeed what happened in the first place. I Let me begin by presenting a few more examples of past events described in terms of later events. The first three examples are from Danto. After presenting them, I will briefly restate Danto's point and the reasoning behind it, then offer four examples of my own, a statement of my position and its underlying rationale. 1. In 1713 the author of Rameau's Nephew was born. 2. Aristarchus anticipated in 270 B.C. the theory which Copernicus published in A.D. 1543. 3. Petrach opened the Renaissance.(5) Danto's point is that these sentences are typical of history as practiced but unavailable to the ideal chronicler because they describe earlier events in terms of later events. He also insists that the later events did not in any sense transform the earlier events. The only thing that changed, on his account, is that we describe those earlier events differently in light of the later events. Danto writes: [A]n event at t-I acquires new properties not because we (or anything) causally operate on that event ... but because the event at t-I comes to stand in a different relation to events that occur later. But this means that the description of E-at-t-I may become richer over time without the event itself exhibiting any sort of instability.... The Past does not change, perhaps, but our manner of organizing it does.(6) Thus, for Danto the existence of narrative sentences does imply a fact about our epistemic relation to the past, but it does not have any ontological implications. Whatever action or event occurred is not at all affected by later events. …

What Makes Language Possible? Ethological Foundationalism In Reid and Wittgenstein

Abstract: Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the twentieth made strong cases for the existence of "communication systems" that must be in place if there is to be the acquisition of any language; language in the full sense of a system of words, displaying distinctions into word classes and ordered by a grammar that is sensitive to those word classes. Although their pre-languages have something of the character of language proper, Reid and Wittgenstein offer a very different conception of the necessary conditions for the existence of language from that proposed by Chomsky, much criticized for its implausible cognitivism. (For a recent and devastating criticism see Malcolm.(1)) In this paper we compare and contrast Reidian and Wittgensteinian conceptions of what there must be for language to be possible, and draw some morals for the vexed, but in our view, empty question of the demarcation of language from all other intentional and normative systems in use amongst people and animals. I Reid on Natural Language. There is a long philosophical tradition, beginning with the Stoics, which sets humanity apart from the balance of the animal economy on the basis of linguistic prowess.(2) It is centrally featured in the works of Descartes. In part 5 of his Discourse on the Method, for example, he offers two tests that would be failed by any machine, no matter how complex, designed to match or simulate genuinely human life. First, it would be unable to use language creatively, even if it could utter words connected with its actions. Second, it would not be able to adapt itself to the welter of changing conditions which rational beings easily accommodate. From this he concludes, "Now in just these two ways we can also know the difference between man and beast.... This shows not merely that the beasts have less reason than men, but that they have no reason at all."(3) On this account language is innate and restricted to human beings, an ability that is unnatural and thus outside the order of nature. John Locke's philosophy of mind explicitly eschews such nativistic explanations--or nonexplanations--by emphasizing the experiential sources and social purposes of language. On Locke's account language becomes the means by which the "invisible ideas" in consciousness are given public expression. Communication being necessary to the "comfort and advantage of society", he says, "it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others." Thus, it must be by local conventions that words come to serve as the signs of thoughts; or else, says Locke, "there would be but one language amongst all men."(4) Superficial evidence to the contrary, however, neither Descartes nor Locke closely examined the basis upon which linguistic signs come to function within patterns of shared meaning. The Cartesian account offers an essentially nativistic theory of linguistic and rational powers, citing the fact, in Chomskian fashion, as if it were an explanation. No argument is developed to establish the nonexperiential sources of language. The Lockean account, which does locate sources of meaning in the domain of experience, remains reliant on invisible ideas while passing over the difficulty of explaining how others might come to share them. Thomas Reid, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), attempted to reconcile both of these positions, supplying at once something of a formal proof of a version of the nativistic thesis and, at the same time, an essentially ethological theory of meaning. His thesis is expressed with commendable efficiency: I think it is demonstrable that, if mankind had not a natural language, they could never have invented an artificial one by their reason and ingenuity. For all artificial language supposes some compact or agreement to affix a certain meaning to certain signs, therefore there must be compacts or agreements before the use of artificial signs; but there can be no compact or agreement without signs, nor without language; and therefore there must be a natural language before any artificial language can be invented: Which was to be demonstrated. …

Descartes on Causation

Abstract: In the Third Meditation, Descartes suggests that God, and only God, is self-caused.(1) This claim results in objections, first from Caterus and then from Arnauld, that an efficient cause must be distinct from its effect, and therefore the notion of self-causation is unintelligible.(2) In the course of his reply to Arnauld, Descartes distinguishes between a formal cause and an efficient cause, contends that God's essence is properly the formal cause of God's existence, and attempts to find a cause midway between a formal cause and an efficient cause. In this paper, we examine Descartes' discussion of the distinction between formal and efficient causes in the reply to Arnauld. We show that Descartes' account of the formal/efficient causation distinction is consistent with prominent accounts of that distinction from Aristotle to Suarez: an explanation by formal cause is an explanation based on the essence of a thing, while an explanation by efficient cause is an explanation based on agency. We then ask whether Descartes' concern with formal causation is limited to God's self-causation. To answer that question, we examine the ontological and epistemic status of Descartes' natural laws. We argue that Cartesian natural laws are ontologically and epistermically indistinguishable from eternal truths: they constitute the form of the world. If we are correct, it follows that, apart from God's action in creating and sustaining the world and acts of the human will, all Cartesian causes are formal. Such a position makes intelligible Descartes' remarks on the union of mind and body.(3) I In the Third Meditation, Descartes considers the possibility that he, a thinking thing with an idea of God qua supremely perfect being, is caused by something distinct from himself. Either he is caused by God, or he is caused by something less perfect than God, and if the latter, he can raise the same question regarding the cause of that being. As he wrote: In respect of this cause one may again inquire whether it derives its existence from itself or from another cause. If from itself, then it is clear from what has been said that it is itself God, since if it has the power of existing through its own might, then undoubtedly it also has the power of actually possessing all the perfections of which it has an idea -- that is, all the perfections which I conceive to be in God. If, on the other hand, it derives its existence from another cause, then the same question may be repeated concerning this further cause, namely whether it derives its existence from itself or from another cause, until eventually the ultimate cause is reached, and this will be God.4 The argument is a variation on the cosmological argument, and as Descartes tells Caterus in his reply, he takes this self-causing God to effectively alleviate any possibility of an infinite causal regress.(5) Descartes' commentators found the argument puzzling. Caterus asked what Descartes meant by "from itself." Caterus distinguished between a positive and a negative sense of that expression. In the positive sense, it means "from itself as from a cause," and in this sense a cause from itself "bestows its own existence on itself; so if by an act of premeditated choice it were to give itself what it desired, it would undoubtedly give itself all things, and so would be God."(6) However, Caterus considered the negative sense of "from itself," that is, "not from another," as what is more commonly understood by that phrase. So, he naturally concludes, "it does not derive existence from itself as a cause, nor did it exist prior to itself so that it could choose in advance what it should subsequently be."(7) Caterus further relates this negative sense of "from itself " to the essence or form of a thing by focusing on the question of limitation. …

Plato's 'Theaetetus': On the Way to the Logos

Abstract: THE OPENING OF THE THEAETETUS(1) is curious. The report we have of another opening of nearly the same length indicates that it was always a curiosity.(2) If both openings are Plato's, and the rest of the dialogue they preface were not different, then Plato changed his mind about how to start off the trilogy to which the Theaetetus belongs. If the second version is spurious, someone thought he could surpass Plato and make a more sensible introduction. If ours is spurious, however, then we cannot hope to interpret it. If we assume its genuineness and that it represents Plato's only or final recension--the other one is said to be spurious and rather frigid--then the Theaetetus opens with our listening in on a recital of the conversation Socrates had with Theaetetus and Theodorus shortly before his death, while we supposedly are hearing it in Megara many years after the conversation occurred. The temporal and spatial layers of the dialogue are these: (1) the original conversation; (2) Socrates' report of it to Euclides, in which every speech, explicitly or not, had a parenthetical "I said" or "He said"; (3) Euclides' notes on Socrates' report which Euclides corrected after his frequent returns to Athens; (4) Euclides' retranslation of Socrates' report into nonnarrated dialogue; (5) Plato's eavesdropping on Euclides and Terpsion in Megara, and his subsequent transcription of the slaveboy's reading of the dialogue after their return to Euclides' house; and (6) our reading or hearing the dialogue at another time and another place. It is possible to ticket each of these layers, but it seems impossible to do anything with our careful discrimination of them. We are left with a logos whose indices of space and time alter while it itself presumably remains the same. It carries a reminder of the irrecoverable particularity of the original setting no less than of its subsequent transpositions, but the logos stands clear of what occasioned it and remains to be viewed without distortion under strata of nonillusory transparency. The publication of the logos is due to Plato. Euclides was content to render an illusion of the original conversation, in conformity with Socrates' recommendation in the Phaedrus, as his own private reminder. One might suppose, however, that he would not have gone to so much trouble had he not intended to publish it at some time or other. Had not Plato intervened, and Euclides got around to bringing it into the light, we might have had a non-Platonic Socratic dialogue, which would have had a purely accidental link with Plato's Sophist and Statesman. They could still be taking up where the Theaetetus left off, but the difference in authorship would have hindered us from reading the Theaetetus in light of Plato's twins. The Theaetetus would not be standing at the head of the seven dialogues that now constitute a single logos about the trial and death of Socrates. It seems, then, that Plato has imagined what the transmission of Socrates' teaching would have been like had his illness at the time of Socrates' death been fatal,(3) and Socrates had had to rely on Euclides for getting out his message. The extreme skepticism of the Megarian school, with its reliance on nothing but logos, would have received its imprimatur in Euclides' Theaetetus. The solution to such a radical skepticism that we now find in the Sophist and the Statesman would have been missing. The Theaetetus of course would not have been entirely free of the circumstantial. Socrates implies in his first speech to Theodorus that he is tied down to the local more than Theodorus is, and he does not fail to bring the dialogue down to earth by mentioning at the end that he must go to the stoa of King Archon to face the indictment Meletus has drawn up against him. Socrates the gossip, who knows all about Theaetetus's father, cannot possibly be the philosopher whom Socrates describes to Theodorus, whose body alone remains in the city but whose thought flies above and below the earth. …

Robert Spaemann's 'Philosophische Essays.'

Abstract: In 1983 the Stuttgart publishing firm of Philip Reclam brought out a slim volume containing an introduction and seven essays by Robert Spaemann, then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich. Entitled Philosophische Essays, it presents and illustrates Spaemann's philosophical project: to understand the phenomenon of modernity, to criticize the deficiencies of modern thought, and to preserve what is good in modernity by rehabilitating the teleological understanding of nature that modernity largely rejected. A second edition in 1994 included three more essays.(1) As little of Spaemann's work has yet appeared in English,(2) the aim of this paper is modest: to present as clearly and accurately as possible his position in the Philosophische Essays. Spaemann's project is, first of all, a venture in intellectual history: to understand modernity. Study of modernity discloses a dialectical progress of opposed abstractions. Modernity has developed in two directions: as a transcendental philosophy or philosophy of consciousness, and as a reductionist naturalism: Modernity has tended to interpret itself as a radical emancipation from what preceded it, and in particular from a teleological view of nature. But a philosophy of consciousness that tries to proceed without reference to teleology falls prey to the objections of a reductionist naturalism that spells the end of philosophy and the death of reason. The second element in Spaemann's project is, then, to rescue modernity from its own interpretation of itself as a radical emancipation from what has preceded it, and to infuse it with a teleological outlook.(3) Modernity is beset by terrible conflicts that it cannot resolve, but there is no question of returning to a premodern outlook. The task is to take the great positive contributions of modernity--enlightenment, emancipation, human fights, and modern natural science with its accompanying mastery of nature--into a kind of protective custody (10-17). I Spaemann understands philosophy as a continuing unsettlable controversy. The essay "Die kontroverse Natur der Philosophie" (The controversial nature of philosophy) examines the distinctive character of philosophical controversy, and especially the differences between scientific and philosophical controversy. All science involves controversy, but science normally operates with a degree of consensus on certain basic assumptions. In philosophy, by contrast, everything is controversial, including what counts as philosophy. Spaemann proposes three theses: (1) philosophy is by its very nature thoroughly controversial; (2) the attempt to resolve philosophical controversy only intensifies it; and (3) despite this, philosophy is neither senseless nor superfluous (106). Spaemann defines philosophy as a continuing discourse about ultimate questions, such as we face in life-decisions, in crises, and in confronting death. As discourse, it is a matter of argument, not to be settled by religious or political authority. Philosophy has always been marked by controversy, but in the modern period the differences go even deeper (106-11). Modernity has seen three attempts to put an end to these differences: self-evident foundations (Descartes, Fichte, Husserl); drawing of boundaries between theoretical and practical (Kant, Comte); and method (Leibniz, followed by ideal language analysts in the twentieth century). All these moves presuppose that philosophy ought to make cumulative and consensual progress by following the path of mathematical natural science, but Kuhn has shown that the model of cumulative consensual progress does not apply in science (111-13). If we can no longer use that model to understand philosophy, can we use the Kuhnian model of paradigm shifts? No, says Spaemann. He gives three reasons. The first is that philosophical shifts are even more radical than paradigm shifts in science. There is no pragmatic control in philosophy. Philosophy is not defined by sets of questions to which there are agreed-on answers; it is always trying to think out and express the unspoken things that make ordinary discourse possible, but can never do so completely (113-16). …

The Constitution of the Object in Immanuel Kant and John Poinsot

Abstract: In the twentieth century, the advance of modern particle physics and the discovery of an inherent probabilism at the heart of the natural order has thrown scientific determinism into doubt,(1) The central question that issues from such findings in physics is whether nature is inherently indeterminate or simply defectively known. If the answer is the former, then this development calls into question the central theoretical justification for the Kantian project.(2) For although Kant makes rhetorical allusion to Nicholas Copernicus, his theory plainly stands in defense of Sir Isaac Newton's classical mechanics. Kant embraced the Newtonian view that nature is inherently determinate and thus saw the science of probability as "truth, known however on insufficient grounds, and the knowledge of which, though thus imperfect, is not on that account deceptive; and such doctrine, accordingly, is not to be separated from the analytic part of logic."(3) In order to preserve the classical mechanics of Newton in the face of the Humean attack upon the universality and objective necessity of scientific judgment, Kant believed that he had to locate the attributes that constitute an object as a scientific object within the very cognitive forms of intuitive and conceptive cognition. Kant was unaware, as are most academic philosophers today, that late Latin scholastics, especially on the Iberian peninsula, had also struggled for an account of the intellect's ability to order our experience of the real and so constitute a properly scientific object. The results of this effort were, of course, quite unlike those of the Kantian solution and compatible with a completely different view of the natural order. Even more important for the history of Western philosophy, the results were immediately and thoroughly eclipsed by the rise of Cartesianism. The great scholastic effort to understand how scientific objects are constituted passed from the modern period into intellectual oblivion. Yet there are ample reasons to think that an exploration of these forgotten, pre-Kantian views might shed some light on contemporary efforts to fashion a postclassical epistemology and philosophy of science. Despite the more primitive cosmology, basic concepts of epistemological theory developed by the Latins are far more easily disengaged from medieval physics than are Kantian concepts from Newtonian mechanics. Kant is committed in principle to the view that space, for example, is mathematizable a priori in a completely deterministic manner. This is a much more wide-ranging and deeply-rooted metaphysical commitment than is the claim, for example, that there are only six observable planets. What follows is an examination of a generally forgotten theory of objective constitution--one that avoids unnecessary entanglements with the determinism of Newtonian mechanics if only by predating the Cartesian and Kantian turns. It is a theory that in principle allows nature to live by other rules than those of mechanical necessity and one that, I believe, rightly recognizes that nature's laws can suffer exception without thereby destroying the possibility of scientific knowledge. Moreover, it is a "bridge" theory that unites classical and contemporary philosophic tendencies, for despite its strong medieval roots, it is a theory largely committed to the fundamental insight of modernity that the knower, in some measure, must condition the object known. Just as Immanuel Kant best illustrates the epistemology of classical modern times, so John Poinsot does the same for late Latin developments in epistemology.(4) Both come at the end of their respective ages, and both undertake to synthesize the work of all their main predecessors in the light of the problem of objectivity as they understand it. The seventeenth-century philosopher John Poinsot was certainly not the only figure from within the "second scholasticism" to hold an interest in the question of how the knower conditions the known. …

Fichte, Kant's Legacy and the Meaning of Modern Philosophy

Abstract: Today even ambitious philosophers are ironic about pretensions to wisdom. Perhaps their single most characteristic pose in this age of debunking criticism is as "conversationalists" in the "great conversation of mankind" anxious "to help the argument along." The metaphor of culture as a conversation is telling in itself. It has replaced the "enlightened" image of "the republic of letters," that lost common homeland of intellectuals. The polity of ideas has given way to the marketplace on the one hand and the "private" conversation on the other. It is, then, immensely difficult for us to understand a thinker like Fichte who saw himself as not only a sovereign citizen in the Republic of Letters, but as one of its magistrates, who perceived his thinking not as a "voice in the conversation of mankind" but as a "science of sciences," the embodiment of "reason's own self-produced knowledge of itself," the articulation of a principle from which all other sciences must be, in principle, strictly "deducible."(1) It would be utterly quixotic for a contemporary philosopher to write a Wissenschaftslehre. How, then, are we to understand the work of a thinker like Fichte? It is not just that, unfashionably by today's standards, he produced a philosophical system. Our difficulty in understanding him lies more deeply yet in the kind of system he articulated, namely, a system echoing the Cartesian ideal of a philosophy more geometrico, in which all knowledge was conceived as founded in a single, self-evident principle. Our philosophical imaginations can hardly comprehend what Fichte could have meant by saying that "every science requires a first principle," and further, that "a science can have no more than one first principle, for if it had more than one it would be several sciences instead of one."(2) Even more alien to us is Fichte's conviction that such a relentlessly theoretical enterprise as transcendental science could be necessary not only to cognition generally, but to our prospects of fulfilling our "vocation" as human beings.(3) We are closer, temperamentally, to the therapeutic philosophizing of a thinker like Wittgenstein, who held that "the real discovery is one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to,"(4) than to a thinker with Fichte's combative determination to achieve a philosophical archimedean point on which not only his system of philosophy, but the whole modern age, indeed, the fate of humanity itself, can pivot. For us, the stakes in philosophizing are less; we are more likely to anticipate the dissolution rather than the necessity of philosophizing. For us, philosophy has lost its preeminence among the attractions of civilized life. As Hegel would recognize in the years shortly after Fichte's death, for modern thinkers "their philosophy is only by the way, a sort of luxury and superfluity." Modern philosophers are no longer the "self-sufficing individualities" that ancient thinkers were, but, for the most part, academic bureaucrats, their calling sunk in "the ordinary commonplace of state or class relationships."(5) Unlike Fichte and his compatriots in the heroic age of the German Aufklarung and the French Revolution, we cannot seriously see our philosophical labors as a master key to a total transformation in human nature. Fichte's contrary, and in his day, unremarkable, attitude inevitably makes him seem archaic. It is, then, hardly possible to reflect on the tasks of philosophy as Fichte understood them without situating him in historical context. This requires not only that we stimulate some sympathy for the system building of classical German philosophy, and recollect something of the intellectual struggles of the Aufklarung, but more fundamentally that we reflect on Fichte's self-understanding of his own historical position. When we do this, the central fact that confronts us is that Fichte saw himself as, in essence, the first post-philosophical thinker, the thinker who successfully completed the Kantian project and substituted Wissenschaftslehre for "mere" philosophy, science for the aspiration to it. …

Beyond Postmodernism: Langan's Foundational Ontology

Abstract: The philosophical question par excellence, then, is this: How can we entice ourselves to widen our horizons to take into account the experiences of others, which challenge the fragile ideological structures of explanation we have built to cope with the world? As anthropological -- indeed psychological -- as this sounds, I hope to show that at its base it is first of all an ontological question.(1) Thomas Langan's Latest Work, Being and Truth, sets as its object of inquiry the possibility of a genuine and meaningful intersubjectivity wherein both self and other come fully to nurture one another. The very condition for the possibility of such a significant onto-poetic relation is grounded and intertwined within a metaphysical Fundierung of Being illumined by Truth. In order to answer the aforementioned philosophical question, Langan maintains that the philosophical question must be cast as an ontological question. In other words, the key to understanding and responding to the possibility of a genuine inter-subjective relationship where both self and other come to fully interact with one another lies within the framework of a serious attempt to comprehend reflectively the constitutive dynamic between being (in the sense of all that is and can be), esse (Langan's symbol for the reality of things in themselves) and Sein (being interpreted in consciousness). Central to a genuine understanding and "holy"(2) living out of self, other and the communal relationship which exists between the two is responsibility -- the ability to respond (re-spondeo, I commit) to the exigencies and gifts of being. Hence, the need for our question to be cast in an ontological light. Langan thus takes up the challenge of postmodern philosophy which has sought to address the same philosophical question affirming both its primacy and relevance. Postmodern philosophers like Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard have dismissed the possibility of a foundational "grand narrative" that would permit a universal discourse. What is maintained, however, is the need to acknowledge and preserve the radical difference or alterity which is constitutive of every individual. By actualizing or acting upon these differences,(3) we can make room for all individuals to exist in the fullness of their own respective alterity. Dismissive of the grand narrative of the foundational ontological ground, postmodern philosophers see the condition for the possibility of a genuine intersubjective relation or in Lyotard's words, smaller communities of difference, lying within the individual or differentiated ego of alterity.(4) What distinguishes Langan's response from the postmodern response to the "philosophical question par excellence" is that Langan grounds his response within a broader and more encompassing reality, namely the ontological, whereas the postmodern ground their response within the human ego -- an all too egological enterprise. Moreover, Langan sees an intimate relation between the ontological and the ethical. Traditionally, postmodern philosophers have been wary of introducing the ethical into philosophical discourse;(5) however there is a growing trend in philosophers like Lyotard, who through a rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment, is attempting to rethink the ethical by casting it in terms of a relation between the sensus communis (aesthetics) and politics.(6) Without a doubt the question of the relation between unity and plurality, self and other, has occupied a preeminent place not only within the world of philosophy, but also within the world of politics, economics, and law. How do we meaningfully incorporate the individuality or radicality which is self and other into the larger community of selves and others? This paper will have as its focus the preceding question. The first part of this paper will present the postmodern response to the question. The second part of this paper will show how Thomas Langan's response may be employed to demonstrate not only how the contemporary, postmodern response is insufficient, but how his ontological view is a more comprehensive approach to the question. …

Taking the Universal Viewpoint: A Descriptive Approach

Abstract: Today, in an epoch of the proclamation of radical incommunicability between ethnic groups, between the sexes, and between individuals sunk in the privacy of their own gratifications, supported by a theoretical rejection of principles or universals of any sort, I want to explore the possibility of "taking the universal viewpoint" and thus finding a way out of a situation of radical cultural disintegration without succumbing to one or the other mode of intellectual imperialism, theological or otherwise I will attempt to do so by attending to what, I would claim, is the most obvious and showing what is implicit in recognizing that In focusing our attention, let us attempt to set aside for the time being everything we might think we know from other sources, science included: bracket temporarily all theories, all dogmas, all preferences, all commitments other than that of paying attention to what presents itself to careful attention here and now Nothing should intrude except the evidence present to us, since, I would claim, that evidence is presupposed in appealing to these other factors, including arguments for the "theory-ladenness" of evidence(1) Besides this more general framework of concern, however, we should keep in mind the direct presence of the written page both I and my readers have in each of our sensory fields, though differently located spatially and temporally Further, since it is most likely that each of us is reading a different reproduction of the same text -- I on the computer screen, the readers on paper -- we should keep in mind the differentiation between the sentences which are the same and their spatio-temporal sensory instantiations which are different in each case Further still, since I might also read the paper to an audience, keep in mind the differentiation between the sameness of the sentence in the difference of sensory medium, visual and audile We will return to that later I Let us begin within those two frames -- that of the general cultural situation today and that of the status of the vehicle of delivery of this essay -- and attend to the simple, trivial, and seemingly uncontroversial recognition that something is Of any entity we consider, the most obvious and yet the least articulated thing we can say about it is that "It is" "It is" can be said of an indeterminate number of instances of whatever sort, including the visible marks on this page or the sounds of my voice as I utter "It is" to myself or to my interlocutors "It is" is an eidos, a universal, a one-over-many, capable of being applied to an indeterminate number of instances Further, "It is" exhibits my recognition that whatever "it" might be, it stands outside of not-being-at-all Yet simultaneously we recognize that it is an object of awareness, so that there is an essential distinction between awareness and its objects "Being" can be said of whatever "it" we might consider, including oneself as considering it "Being" is an eidos or universal, object of reflective awareness; but it is also more than an eidos, including as it does all instances of being, eidetic and individual, and everything about them We quickly see then that there are at least six eide which show themselves as sharing in being and as involved in the most universal and indeterminate consideration which forms the framework for any consideration: the eide of being, of instance, of object of awareness, of awareness itself and, at another reflective level, of eidos itself and of individual They articulate what is implicit in our beginning with the simple "It is"; they articulate being An eidos, in addition to its distinction from and relation to its instances, involves a distinction between its universal mode and its content As eide all eide are the same in their universal mode but differ in content The instances of eide are either other eide -- as we have shown thus far -- or ultimate individuals, functioning spatio-temporal unities …

A Case of Bad Judgment: The Logical Failure of the Moral Will

Abstract: I In this paper I attempt to understand Hegel's claim that the moral will is finite, or incompletely free, as a consequence of the moral will being structured by the logical concept of judgment. Section 2 begins with a brief discussion of judgment. It then identifies the defining features of the moral will and compares them to those of judgment, enabling us to conclude that judgment is the logical structure of the moral will. Section 3 considers the limitations that plague judgment and produce the finitude of the moral will. Section 4 examines three separate attempts of the moral will to overcome this finitude, all of which fail in virtue of their own logical structures. This allows us to conclude that the moral will is insuperably finite, and that the will must be reconceived as having a different logical structure in ethical life if it is to be free.(1) II Judgment appears in the last of the three main sections of Hegel's Logic, the subjective logic, or the doctrine of the Concept The subjective logic is itself divided into three sections--subjectivity, objectivity, and the Idea--each of which is further subdivided. Our concern is with subjectivity, of which the judgment (das Urteil) is the second moment The first moment of subjectivity is the concept (der Begriff), and the third moment is the syllogism (der Schluss). The concept, the judgment, and the syllogism are similar in that each is composed of the three moments of universality, particularity, and individuality. They are differentiated because in each of them these three moments are interrelated in a unique way. In the concept, universality, particularity, and individuality are understood as being immediately identical to each other. This means that none of the three is understood to have an existence or character independently of the others. On the contrary, "since in the concept their identity is posited, each of its moments can only be grasped immediately on the basis of and together with the others."(2) Consequently, "the moments of the concept cannot be separated," but must be thought as a single unity.(3) The interrelation of universality, particularity, and individuality is otherwise in judgment Hegel calls judgment the particular moment of subjectivity, by which he means two things. First, in judgment universality, particularity, and individuality are understood to be separate from each other. Each of the three is now understood to exist and be what it is independently of the existence and character of the others; they are not understood to be identical.(4) Second, and at the same time, the three moments are understood to be related to each other in judgment in such a way that they are inseparable; they are understood to be implicitly identical.(5) The contradiction between these two distinctive features--the fact that the moments of judgment are understood to be both separated and inseparable--is evident in the form Of judgment itself: "the subject is the predicate." In such an expression it is clear that the subject and the predicate are separated from and independent of each other. [S]ubject and predicate are considered to be complete, each on its own account, apart from the other the subject as an object that would exist even if it did not possess this predicate; the predicate as a universal determination that would exist even if it did not belong to this subject.(6) At the same time, however, the expression also makes clear that the one is the other, that the subject and predicate of a judgment are inseparable and identical. The link between discussing judgment in terms of subject and predicate, and discussing it in terms of universality, particularity, and individuality, lies in the fact that the subject of a judgment is an individual and the predicate is a universal. More specifically, the subject is a concrete unity of particular determinations (which makes it an individual), and the predicate is a universal determinacy that defines the nature, essence, concept, or in-itself of the subject, in virtue of which their identity is posited in the copula, the is. …