Showing papers in "Review of Metaphysics in 2010"

Kant, Hegel, and Habermas: Reflections on "Glauben Und Wissen"

Abstract: THIS ESSAY EXAMINES Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804), Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel's (1770-1831), and Jurgen Habermas's (1929-) accounts of God and of the interplay of belief about God (1) and philosophically justified knowledge. Hegel's account is central, because he responds to Kant's critical position that sets the stage for much of subsequent thought, including the context for Hegel's essay and Habermas's lecture "Glauben und Wissen." (2) The reflection on the death of God in Hegel's 1802 essay "Glauben und Wissen" (3) lies at a turning point in the Western intellectual appreciation of God. (4) This text is addressed both in its own right and as essential for appreciating Habermas's recent engagement with the idea of God. That Habermas names his lecture after Hegel's essay provokes the question of how to compare the authors' views concerning God, especially in their accounts of the relation between theological and philosophical claims, that is, between Glauben and Wissen. After all, Habermas engages the idea of God, even though he admits the impossibility of a "renewal of a philosophical theology in the aftermath of Hegel." (5) Although his assumptions regarding the possibilities for "communicative action" are more Kantian than Hegelian, yet his understanding of the role of God in philosophy depends on the major shift in Western philosophical understandings of God appreciated by Hegel in "Glauben und Wissen." From Kant through Hegel to Habermas, the concept of God and the place of theological claims have been progressively deflated. This paper shows why the idea of God and the theological images that after Kant and Hegel remain for Habermas to use in his "Glauben und Wissen" are insufficient to justify its proscription of human genetic engineering. (6) This insufficiency in Habermas's arguments is due to Kant's and, especially, to Hegel's foreclosure of God's transcendence, His independent existence qua God, even as they use the idea of God to serve moral and cultural goals. From Kant and Hegel to Habermas, the dialectic between philosophy and her master, theology (7), has led philosophy to master her master, rendering the claims of theology subject to the claims and needs of philosophy. Habermas is the inheritor of this history. The robust position that natural theology possessed in the mid-eighteenth century was undermined and recast by Kant so that God remained only to satisfy the needs of his epistemology and morality. Religion was then philosophically conceptualized by Hegel as Absolute Spirit understood representationally, but only conceptually by philosophy. Philosophy has the same content as God does for religion, though for Hegel categorized in terms of thought, its philosophically justified truth) Then finally, having been lodged within robust constraints of secularity, God is invoked by Habermas as a heuristic resource for bioethics. I Given the accent on Hegel, a cardinal difficulty must be acknowledged at the outset: any treatment of Hegel is complicated by the circumstance that there are numerous competing accounts of what Hegel really held his philosophical project to be. As Kreines aptly observes, "Recent work on Hegel lacks consensus concerning the central ambitions of his mature project in theoretical philosophy." (9) To approach Hegel is to do so within one of the numerous denominations of Hegel interpretations. Therefore, a confession of sectarian biases is in order: I concur with Klaus Hartmann (1925-1991) that Hegel's mature project was postmetaphysical, or as Hartmann's best-known article in English puts it, "noumetaphysical." (10) This view holds: that Hegel seeks to advance yet farther Kant's revolution against pre-critical metaphysics.... Hegel denies all need to even conceive of Kant's things in themselves, leaving no contrast relative to which our own knowledge could be said to be merely limited or restricted. That is, Hegel aims not to surpass Kant's restriction so much as to eliminate that restriction from the inside. …

Poetry Is More Philosophical Than History: Aristotle on Mimesis and Form

Abstract: IN CHAPTER 9 OF THE POETICS, Aristotle famously writes that poetry "is more philosophical and more serious than history: in fact poetry speaks (legei) more of universals, whereas history of particulars." (1) As many recent commentators have noticed, the philosopher's choice of words is precise. (2) He does not claim that poetry is philosophy, which occupies the highest place in the hierarchy of the forms of knowledge, or that it "speaks" of universals tout court. (3) Rather, he maintains that it is closer to philosophy than history, because it speaks more of universals. The problem for the student of Aristotle is thus to provide a precise determination of the epistemological standing of poetry and to offer an interpretation of the meaning of the universals of which poietike speaks more than historia. While scholars largely agree that the structure of the plot, which links all the events according to causal relations of probability or necessity, is central to the explanation of the philosopher's notion of universal in the context of the Poetics, they offer different accounts of katholou. Malcolm Heath, for instance, simply observes that "the historian reports series of events, while the poet constructs a sequence of events. And the poet's construction is subject to a constraint which does not apply to the historian's report: the events must be causally connected.... That is what gives poetic plots their universality." (4) Stephen Halliwell, who understands poetry as a form of fiction, claims that, far from being explicitly stated, "poetic universals" are "embodied and discernible only in and through ... the causally and intelligibly unified" structure of the plot. (5) For this reason they are "on a level between abstraction and common sense experience" and are present in poems "as implicit 'embodied' properties ... not explicit, let alone propositional, elements." (6) James Redfield writes that "the plot is the story conceived ... in terms of relations between ... causes and consequences"; for this reason it shows us the internal logic of the events represented and conveys "some universal pattern of human probability or necessity." (7) John Armstrong maintains that "poetic universals are plots, that is, special sorts of event types consisting of incidents linked by likelihood or necessity," whereas the particulars of history are "action-tokens." (8) This paper joins the camp of interpreters who try to illuminate the cognitive status of poetry concentrating exclusively upon conceptual resources offered by Aristotle, (9) and attempts to locate this issue in the larger context of his thought. It starts by identifying in the philosopher's writings a general criterion that enables us to compare all forms of knowledge and to determine their closeness to philosophy and its universals, namely, the notion of epistemic limit or determination. On this basis it proposes that both history and poetry are in between experience and philosophy. Specifically, historia begins to move beyond the epistemic indeterminacy of empeiria--taken as cognition of facts and particulars--because it brings to light (at least) some causal connections among the events that it reports. At the same time, however, it shares in the factual character of experience, because its function is to provide faithful representations of actual events (ta genomena), which are typically punctuated by chance and fortuitous happenings. Poetry, on the other hand, depicts a fully determined object, that is to say, an action (praxis) which is a whole with a beginning, a middle and an end, because mimesis is a representation not of human events, but rather of their nature (physis), understood as form (eidos) and that for the sake of which (to hou heneka). (10) A well made plot represents human events perfectly molded by eidos, and thus eliminates the accidental and organizes all pragmata according to causal relations. It is the essential connection between mimesis and form that explains why Aristotle discerns a meaningful kinship between poetry on the one hand, and philosophy and universality on the other. …

Anselm's Argument Reconsidered

Abstract: ANSELM'S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT in Proslogion 2 has been discussed and criticized so much that it is hard for us today to see its basic structure. The philosophical consensus seems to be that the argument is hopeless: it either begs the question against the atheist or it is invalid. The case against it appears to be closed. (1) No doubt one reason many philosophers consider the ontological argument hopeless is that they assume it to be an argument from the idea or concept of God to God's existence. On such a construal the argument would be this: (i) The idea (or concept) of God is the idea or concept of something than which nothing greater can be conceived (or perhaps the idea or concept of a Perfect Being). (ii) The idea (or concept) of something than which nothing greater can be conceived (or the idea or concept of a Perfect Being) includes the idea (or concept) of existence. Therefore, (iii) God exists. However, disappointingly, all that follows from (i) and (ii) is this altogether uninteresting conclusion: (iii*) If anything, x, fits the idea of (or satisfies the concept of), something than which nothing greater can be conceived (or the idea or concept of a Perfect Being), then x exists. In our view, this argument is a travesty of Anselm. However, if Anselm's argument in Proslogion 2 is not like this nonstarter, what is it? Although Anselm, in his Proslogion, speaks of God's nature (natura), he also speaks of God as an individual (id). (2) Anselm reports the Fool as saying, literally, "God is not" (non est deus). (3) So, we have good reason to think of Anselm's argument as pertaining to the existence of an individual and not a concept, essence, or nature. (4) To appreciate Anselm's argument, we must take note of an important feature of it that has gone largely unnoticed. Coming to appreciate that feature should give us cause to reassess the argument. In our view, Anselm's ontological argument can be formulated properly only by beings who have a certain cognitive ability. The cognitive ability on which the ontological argument depends is the ability to think of and refer to things quite independently of whether they exist in reality or not. In this paper, we shall explore this cognitive ability and try to make clear the role it plays in the ontological argument. Then, we shall offer a new version of the ontological argument, which, we shall argue, is sound: it is valid, has true premises, and does not beg the question against the atheist. However, the new reconstruction of the argument falls short of Anselm's goal of producing "a single argument that would require no other for its proof than itself alone; and alone would suffice to demonstrate that God truly exists." (5) The new reconstruction requires a subsidiary argument to show that God exists in the understanding. The subsidiary argument relies on premises that are both contingent and known a posteriori. However, the somewhat amplified argument, if it is sound, as we believe it to be, does show that God exists in reality. I Disagreement About Whether an Individual Exists. Ever since Parmenides, philosophers have been puzzled about nonexistence. How can it be that Santa Claus does not exist? What are we talking about when we talk about Santa Claus or the fountain of youth? In much of the 20th century, the predominant strategies for handling such questions were Russell's and Quine's. Russell treated proper names as descriptions, and then eliminated the descriptions in favor of quantified sentences. Quine proposed that instead of talking about things, we talk about words. For example, we may paraphrase "There are wombats in Tasmania" by "'Wombat' is true of some creatures in Tasmania." (6) These strategies avoid the problem by changing the subject. Russellian elimination of reference does not do justice to what people think they are arguing or wondering about when they argue about or wonder whether God, say, exists. …

Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning and the Ship Experiment Argument

Abstract: THERE IS NO DOUBT that the most original recent works on the Galileo affair have achieved new heights of erudition, documentation, and sophistication. These achievements have been made possible by a number of circumstances: the maturation of various professional disciplines such as history of science and history of philosophy; the emergence of the new field of the scholarly study of the interactions between science and religion; and the discovery of a few new documents stemming from the Vatican Galileo Commission in 1979-1992 and from the formal opening to scholars of the Inquisition Archives in Rome since 1998. However, with few exceptions, these scholarly works tend to exhibit several key weaknesses. One is that they usually abound in over-inflated complications, concluding little more than that the Galileo affair is more complicated than previously thought. Another scholarly weakness is historiographical: that is, studies of Galileo's trial tend to be conducted with an inadequate knowledge of previous views, whose four-century old history contains insights that are not, but should be, appropriated and updated, and errors that are often repeated instead of avoided. A third weakness is the unwillingness or inability to learn from Galileo; that is, the practice of viewing the events and documents of the Galileo affair as inert material objects that can only be understood or interpreted, rather than as human actions (and thoughts) that can be evaluated and assessed, so as to derive from them useful lessons for us today. My investigation of this topic is animated by the desire to avoid inflated complications (while, needless to say, avoiding over-simplifications), aiming instead at a genuine and proper simplification of a bewildering mass of material; that is, it aims to articulate a simplifying synthesis, based on primary as well as secondary sources. The investigation is also animated by the desire to take into account the history of the historiography of the Galileo affair, by exploiting the insights and avoiding the errors of previous accounts. Thirdly, I do not shy away from using Galileo (his manner of thinking) as a model to be emulated, based on an accurate and correct understanding and interpretation; the understanding of the model is developed with regard to Galileo's trial (the original affair), whereas the model is then applied to the ongoing controversy about the trial (the subsequent Galileo affair). Finally, because of the features of the Galilean model as I interpret it, I follow an approach that involves defending Galileo from his many critics while mindful of the power and importance of the many objections which they advance, and similarly criticizing the Church while appreciating the power and importance of the many proclerical arguments. In accordance with such a motivation and such an approach, I have elsewhere (1) elaborated the following detailed argument and overarching thesis. The Copernican Revolution required that the geokinetic hypothesis be not only supported with new reasons and evidence, but also defended from many powerful old and new objections (stemming from astronomical observation, Aristotelian physics, biblical texts, and traditional epistemology). This defense in turn required not only the destructive refutation but also the appreciative understanding of those objections in all their strength. One of Galileo's major accomplishments was not only to provide new evidence supporting the earth's motion, but also to show how those objections could be refuted and to elaborate their power before they were answered. In this sense, Galileo's defense of Copernicus was reasoned, critical, open-minded, and fair-minded. Now, an essential thread of the subsequent Galileo affair has been the emergence of many anti-Galilean criticisms (from the viewpoint of astronomy, physics, theology, hermeneutics, logic, epistemology, methodology, law, social sensibility, and morals), but also various defenses of Galileo. …

Bernard Williams on Philosophy's Need for History

Abstract: IN A NUMBER OF RECENT WORKS published just before and just after his death, Bernard Williams explored in great detail the very timely idea that there is an important internal connection between the practice of philosophy and the practice of history. This idea is elaborated in Williams's final book, Truth and Truthfulness, the subtitle of which is An Essay in Genealogy. Prior to the publication of this book, Williams had considered the idea at length in such essays and addresses as "What Might Philosophy Become?" and "Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline." After his death, the publication of three volumes of various articles and lectures by Williams provides further evidence that over the past few decades his thinking had gradually evolved to a position in which he found that philosophical thought must thoroughly integrate historical practice into its work. Williams's attempt to take history seriously constitutes a significant departure from the traditional practice of analytic philosophy as it was passed down throughout much of the twentieth century. This departure is notable just insofar as Williams was among the most venerated practitioners of the relatively ahistorical style of analytic philosophy from which he gradually defected in his final decade or so of writing. Williams's Truth and Truthfulness might plausibly come to be seen as the last important work in ahistorical analytic philosophy or, and this is even more likely, as among the first important works in a new genre of historically-engaged analytic philosophy. Surely precedents for Williams's interest in a combination of philosophy and history can be found in a wide range of books from the past few decades inspired principally by impressive works by erstwhile analytic philosophers, including Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and Hilary Putnam's Reason, Truth, and History along with other works from the late 1970s by such thinkers as Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and Ian Hacking. (1) During the time that these and other philosophers were developing a historical flavor of analytic philosophy, Hans Sluga, in an important book about the first major analytic philosopher, Gottlob Frege, sought to redress "the analytic tradition's lack of interest in historical questions" by showing how Frege's founding gestures cannot be understand apart from their historical context. One of Sluga's most crucial points in his book was that "[t]he meaning of contemporary problems is ... a function of the meaning of the historical discourse within the tradition." (2) Sluga's point was that philosophy cannot even so much as understand the problems it sets itself without an appreciation of the historical context in which these problems evolved. Despite the enormous influence of the above named works on subsequent work in philosophy over the past three decades, it still remains the case that the discipline of philosophy today largely carries on as if concerns about the historicity of rational and moral thought do not need to be addressed. Analytic philosophy, that is, largely proceeds today with strongly ahistorical assumptions about the practice of philosophy itself. The cogent criticisms of analytic methodology voiced by MacIntyre, Rorty, Putnam, Sluga, and others have hardly received a reply from those perpetuating the vices described in these criticisms. It is for this reason that Williams's book might come to be seen in future decades as a crucial turning point in the history of analytic philosophy. Although it is undeniable that there has in recent years been a slowly increasing acknowledgment within analytic circles of the importance of history and historicity, nobody would equate this tolerant acknowledgment with enthusiastic embrace. While increasingly few analytic philosophers would deny that rationality is historical through and through, precious few of them know what to do with such a view, how to take it seriously, how to develop it, and how to mine it for philosophical insights. …

Fichte on the Vocation of the Scholar and the (Mis)use of History

Abstract: GIVEN ITS STATUS AS A FOUNDATIONAL TEXT in nationalist political thought, the main emphasis in discussions of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) has not surprisingly tended to be on the issue of the kind of nationalism that is to be found in this work, particularly the question as to whether it contains an ethnic nationalism, based on descent, or a cultural nationalism, which defines nationality in terms of linguistic and cultural differences, or a mixture of both these forms of nationalism. (1) While the Addresses to the German Nation clearly do constitute an attempt on Fichte's part to shape a German national identity, in what follows I focus on the question of the relation of this attempt to shape a German national identity to Fichte's ideas concerning the vocation (Bestimmung) of the scholar (der Gelehrte) in society. Among philosophers, Fichte developed what is arguably one of the most self-conscious accounts of the role of the scholar in society. Already in 1794, shortly after having taken up his first academic appointment as a professor at the University of Jena, he gave a series of lectures that were later published under the title Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation (Einige Vorlesungen uber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten). In these lectures, Fichte sets out his own understanding of the significance and social function of his own scholarly activity as well as that of the scholar in general. I intend to compare Fichte's conception of the scholar's vocation as developed in these lectures to the role that Fichte assumes for himself in the case of his Addresses to the German Nation. These addresses were delivered in the period 1807-8 under very different circumstances, namely, in the wake of Napoleon's defeat and subjugation of Prussia, where Fichte had settled in 1799 after losing his professorship at Jena in the wake of accusations of atheism that had been made against him. I suggest that the Addresses to the German Nation represent an attempt on Fichte's part to intervene in history in a way that accords with, and thus realizes, the conception of the scholar's vocation and duties that he developed in his Jena lectures on the vocation of the scholar. This attempted intervention in the course of human history will be seen to raise questions, however, concerning Fichte's understanding of the role that the scholar's knowledge of history plays in relation to the task of fulfilling his moral vocation; a role that is exemplified by the use to which Fichte himself puts history in the Addresses to the German Nation. Fichte will, in fact, be shown to use history in a way that might be considered to be immoral, despite his insistence on the moral nature of the scholar's vocation. This point will be illustrated by comparing Fichte's use of history in the Addresses to the German Nation to Nietzsche's claim that history should be made to serve the needs of life and action, together with his account of how a "monumental" form of history can be made to serve this end. I Fichte begins the first of his lectures on the vocation of the scholar that he gave in Jena by stressing the social nature of this vocation. He does this by pointing to the fact that when one speaks of the scholar, one does so in contradistinction to other human beings engaged in different activities within society. The scholar's vocation is consequently said to be one that is conceivable only within society. (2) The scholar is not simply a member (Mitglied) of society, however; he is also the member of a particular estate (ein Glied eines besondern Standes) within society, that is, the estate of scholars. (3) For the scholar dedicates himself to performing a particular function within society, rather than another function whose ultimate end is also to bring about the ennoblement of humankind by means of the advance of culture with respect to all human beings. Fichte accords the scholar pride of place in this process, describing the vocation of the estate of scholars as "the supreme supervision of the actual progress of the human race in general and the unceasing promotion of this progress. …

A Reexamination of the Hylomorphic Theory of Death

Abstract: RECENT ADVANCES IN MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY, especially the introduction of various intensive-care and life-support machines, have necessitated a reassessment of traditional medical and philosophical beliefs regarding the criteria of death. Many philosophers have sought to give accounts of the principles involved in death as well as the ethical consequences of these accounts. Among such philosophers have been those who employ a hylomorphic conception of the human person as matter configured by a soul. (1) This is a complex theory and it has led to widely varying accounts of death. Though these philosophers agree that death involves the loss of the unified functioning of the human organism, different hylomorphists have accepted each of the three criteria of death proposed in the literature today, that is, the higher-brain criterion for death, (2) the whole-brain criterion, (3) and the circulatory-respiratory criterion. (4) Many of the same passages in Aristotle and St. Thomas, whose works are generally taken to be the primary sources on hylomorphism (as they are in this paper), have been used to support each of these theories. In this paper I shall attempt to sort out various aspects of hylomorphic theory which relate to the issue of death by examining some key passages in Aristotle and St. Thomas as well as in contemporary literature on the subject. I shall seek to discern those positions regarding the cessation of the functioning of the human person to which the hylomorphist must be committed. The most important issues here are the multiple ways in which the soul relates to the body and its parts, the unity of the soul, and the principal organ through which the soul moves other organs. By sorting out these passages, I shall argue that in light of medical evidence interpreted in terms of the different ways the soul relates to the body, the hylomorphist ought to be committed to the circulatory-respiratory criterion in most situations, with certain exceptions for some extreme cases. I shall show that this allows the hylomorphist to offer solutions to such thought experiments as Alan Shewmon's cerebrum-transplant thought experiments, without treating a cerebrum transplant in the same way as a persistent vegetative state, and without dismissing such thought experiments as irrelevant to the issue of the criterion of death. (5) Employing the circulatory-respiratory criterion of death also allows problems encountered by hylomorphists who employ a brain criterion, as well as problems encountered by those who espouse an animalist or closest continuer account of personal identity, to be overcome. I shall first present the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of the nature of the human person, focusing on the soul's functions as the act or form of the organism's matter, as the telos of the matter, and as the motor of the body. In light of these functions, I shall present the hylomorphic definition of death as the loss of the soul by the organism; this will be explained as a loss of functioning, organization, and teleology. Next, I shall consider the issues of the unity and persistence of the soul and of the primary organ. This discussion will provide the evidence for my claim that, in the case of the use of certain modern technologies and in various thought experiments, aspects of death are pulled apart in such a way that the death of the whole brain does not necessarily indicate the death of the organism. Given the basic ideas of hylomorphism, the criteria for death will vary in different cases, but in normal situations the proper criterion for death is the cessation of the capacity for circulation of oxygenated, nutrient-bearing blood. I An Account of Hylomorphism. We must first consider the reasons for positing a theory of hylomorphism in the first place. Hylomorphism is the theory that things are composites of matter and form. (6) This idea is interpreted in different ways in different places in Aristotle's writings; this paper will attempt to remain true to St. …

Aristotle on the Difference Between Plants, Animals, and Human Beings and on the Elements as Instruments of the Soul (De Anima 2.4.415b18)

Abstract: WHY DO ALL ANIMALS POSSESS SENSE PERCEPTION while plants don't? Should the difference in quality of life between human beings and wolves be explained by supposing that wolves have degenerated souls? This paper argues that for Aristotle differences in quality of life among living beings are based on differences in the quality of their soul-principle together with the body that receives the soul. A new interpretation is proposed of On the Soul 2.4.415b18: "For all the natural bodies are instruments of the soul," against all current interpretations. Aristotle there means that each of the four sublunary elements can be a part of the instrumental body of a soul. The paper continues with discussing the way in which Aristotle connects the several sublunar elements with different levels of life activity, and the troublesome passage in Generation of Animals 3.11.761b22, where Aristotle speaks about a fourth category of living creatures related to the fourth sublunary element, Fire, and the region of the Moon. I The Soul Principle as the Basis for Difference in Quality of Life. How does Aristotle explain differences in level and quality of life? The answer seems obvious. Aristotle divides the realm of (sublunary) living creatures into three subrealms, plants, animals, and human beings. To each subrealm he assigns a different soul-principle. Plants have a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals have a sensitive soul; human beings have a rational soul. (1) For Aristotle there is a difference in "value and lack of value" between these levels of life. For plants produce nothing but seed, for the continuation of their own kind. Animals, however, all have a certain level of "knowledge," though for some kinds this is restricted to the lowest level of perception. This worthiness of only a form of perception may seem minimal in comparison with the human mind, but compared with the condition of a plant or a stone it is something astonishing. (2) On this view, the soul-principle is the basis for difference in level of life. But this signally fails to do justice to the great variation within each of the subrealms. It also falls to explain why a sensitive soul never manifests itself in a plant or tree. Another question to be decided is whether perhaps a monkey or a wolf or fish possesses a human soul which has degenerated. (3) II "The Body that Receives the Soul" as the Basis for Difference in Quality of Life. There is also another side to the problem. The soul as "the first entelechy of a natural body that potentially possesses life" (4) is never "without soma," says Aristotle. (5) So it is relevant to pay attention to "the body that receives the soul," for "a craft must use its instruments, and a soul its body." (6) A carpenter does not hammer in a nail with a flute. A flautist has no use for a hammer. It thus seems as if the body with which the soul is connected imposes restrictions on the soul and that the quality of the body that receives the soul determines the quality of life (just as the menstrual fluid can only be fertilized by semen of a male partner of the same species). Note, too, that it is not the structure of a visible animal body which can impose restrictions on a soul-principle. (7) For this visible body is itself the product of an animal soul-principle. And the same applies to the structure of a visible plant body and a visible human body. Aristotle was aware that it is necessary to speak about the specific quality of "the body that receives the soul," and that it is unsound, as the Pythagoreans did, to put all souls in the same category (8) and not explain why the various kinds of animals and humans (and plants, Aristotle would add) are so different. III The Soul in Combination with "the Body that Receives the Soul" is the Basis for Difference in Quality of Life. However, a famous passage in his great work Generation of Animals (2. …

Negation and Being

Abstract: NEGATION IS SOMETHING THAT WE DO. It is typically a judgment that we make, a judgment that something is not the case, and it usually--albeit by no means exclusively--takes the form of a statement. We make negative existential judgments ("There is no longer a Cold War," "Inflation doesn't exist in this economy") and negative predicate judgments ("Two is not greater than three," "The suspect's not ready to talk"). (1) Negations such as these are commonplace, in our lives and in our grammar, and they may well be a distinctive feature of human communication. Almost two decades ago Jon Barwise made the observation: "All human languages contain one or more mechanisms of a negative character; no animal communication does." (2) Even if this last observation overreaches, there can be no doubt about the foundational role that negation traditionally plays in thinking and knowing. Consider how Wittgenstein, with the Sheffer stroke, introduced a negation operation to generate all truth functions. (3) Whether one analyzes knowledge claims as suitably justified or as reliable true beliefs, it hardly suffices to show that someone believes what is the case; for both epistemological theories, it must be shown that either the reasons an alleged knower has for his true belief or the behavior he exhibits rule out beliefs to the contrary. (4) Thus, negation appears to be a primitive element of our processes of thinking and knowing anything. Not surprisingly, negation also plays a central role in scientific reasoning in the form of counterfactuals. Moreover, even if we reject the notion that an absence signaled by a negation could be a cause, we have to contend with the fact that standard analyses of causation are forced to have recourse to negation inasmuch as they suppose that a process or fact can only be a cause if it is not the same as its effect. (5) So construed, causation requires a real distinction that is the counterpart of a negation. Nor has the fundamental role of negation been lost on metaphysicians. For Aquinas, access to the very subject matter of metaphysics is crucially dependent upon the distinctive negative judgment he labels separatio. (6) The subjectivity of a living substance, Hegel tells us, is "sheer negativity" and his own metaphysics relies on what he calls "absolute negativity," that is, the absolute's "movement and activity of mediating itself with itself." (7) We hear echoes of this role of negativity in Whitehead's characterization of consciousness as "the feeling of negation" and "negative perception" as "the triumph of consciousness." (8) Nonetheless, the status of negations presents well known problems. The very grammar of negation seems to point to its secondary status. Thus, negation typically takes the form of an adverb or adjective, requiring a copula or a predicate to modify, respectively. By contrast, the copula or predicate can fulfill its grammatical function without the negative modification. The grammatical structure of negation and what it modifies suggests that negation supposes the foregoing presence of what is negated, but the presence does not require negation. Not surprisingly, given the hold of grammar on our thinking, negation, in the sense of a negative judgment, appears necessarily derivative, piggybacking on affirmations. In keeping with this apparently secondhand status, a negative judgment typically tells us a lot less than an affirmative judgment. Above all, if ontology is supposed to help us figure out what there is and what it means for anything to be, then negation appears to be spectacularly inept since negative judgments function to tell us what is not the case. In sum, negation seems to be a singularly inappropriate theme for elucidating what it means to be. The purpose of the following paper is to contest this conclusion and to argue, to the contrary, that negation is fundamental to our understanding of what it means to be. …

The Ultimate Final Argument

Abstract: I PROPOSE HERE A NEW INTERPRETATION of the "Final Argument" for immortality in Plato's Phaedo. Although the "Final Argument" is sometimes taken to encompass, even, Socrates' entire reply to Cebes (95a-107b), I am most interested in the very last and brief consideration of this section--which I shall call the "Ultimate Final Argument" (106c9-107a1)--where Socrates argues that the soul, because it is immortal, is imperishable. This is the argument in response to which Cebes, at last, relinquishes any degree of doubt and declares Socrates' view to be "absolutely necessary" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Thus, the work of the dialogue is completed here, (1) and a sound interpretation of the dialogue must explain why this is so. I shall maintain that this brief passage gives what might be called a "cosmological argument" for the everlastingness of the soul, a kind of argument which has analogues in other dialogues. My goal in this paper is to explain what Plato thought was needed for this argument, and how he meant to supply it, and, in the course of my doing so, the argument and its actual weaknesses will become clear as well. The Objections of Simmias and Cebes. The first step in construing the Final Argument is to understand precisely what it is meant to accomplish, since only then can we discern its method and correctly judge its success. In order to discern what it is meant to accomplish, we need to pay attention to the objections of Simmias and Cebes, and especially that of Cebes, and try to determine, from details of the text, the precise weight and significance that Plato assigns to these objections. So that we can have both objections before us, here is Socrates' elegant summary of them: Simmias, I believe, is doubtful and afraid that the soul, though more divine and lovelier than the body, may still perish before it, being a kind of attunement [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Whereas Cebes, I thought, agreed with me in this much, that soul, is longer-lived than body; but he held that no one could be sure [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] whether the soul, after wearing out many bodies time and time again, might not then perish itself, leaving its last body behind, and whether death might not be just that, the perishing of the soul--since body, at any rate, is perishing incessantly and never stops [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (2) Now I want to draw attention to three details of the text which signal that Plato does not himself consider these arguments to be weighty. The first is that Socrates makes the agreement of the objections with each other a condition of those objections having weight; yet then it becomes clear, in the statement of those objections, that they are radically in conflict with each other. After Simmias states his objection, Socrates says, using a courtroom metaphor, that "before answering I think we should first hear from Cebes here what further charge he has to bring against the argument [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" and that "when we've heard from them both, either we should agree with them, if it seems they're at all concordant [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; or if not, we should at that point take up advocacy of our argument [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]." (3) The implicit suggestion is that witnesses who contradict each other discredit each other; their lack of agreement makes their testimony worthless. Plato has Simmias and Cebes state their objections in a way that makes it clear that they are in disagreement with each other on the most fundamental point. Indeed, almost Cebes' first words, when he states his objection, is that he disagrees with Simmias: "I don't agree with Simmias' objection [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], that soul isn't stronger and longer-lived than body: because I think it far superior in all those ways." (4) And afterwards the nature of the disagreement becomes sharp and clear: Simmias premises his objection on the view that the soul perishes with or before the body (compare 86b2); whereas Cebes' starting point is that the soul perishes after the body (87d1, e2, that is, except in the last case). …

Stanley Rosen's Critique of Leo Strauss

Abstract: Was there ever a pupil, wise or foolish, who in fact agreed with his master in every point? --Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern STANLEY ROSEN'S CRITIQUES OF HIS TEACHER, Leo Strauss, are invariably brisk and stylish philosophic polemics. Over the course of more than forty years they have ranged in tone from the pugnacious to the laudatory. As critiques of Strauss go they are consistently in the highest philosophic echelon. What, then, are we to make of their frequent rough-handling of their subject? Even at their most temperate and even-handed--as in Rosen's chapter on Wittgenstein and Strauss in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary--Rosen ' s interpretations of Strauss rely on unsympathetic, distorting readings of Strauss. (1) A number of scholars have interpreted Rosen's critiques of Strauss as unfair. While they are not dismissive of Rosen, they present an account of his relationship to his teacher that makes him seem either careless, ungenerous in his manner of reading Strauss, or both. (2) These interpretations of Rosen correctly report a litany of false inferences, misplaced claims, forced conclusions, strident pronouncements, and in one case, an important misquotation. Surely the unique combination of brusqueness and celerity that characterizes Rosen's treatments of Strauss gives them warrant. (3) These accounts fail, however, to credit the genuinely philosophical character of Rosen's encounter with Strauss and Rosen's manner of writing. Those who have written on Rosen's philosophical thought are closer to the mark. (4) They remark on Rosen's differences with his teacher but do not at any length account for the extreme peculiarity of Rosen's critiques of Strauss. Without sufficiently addressing themselves to these critiques, these authors have not successfully answered the charge that Rosen's discussion of Strauss rests on a series of willful exaggerations and distortions. Rosen distorts Strauss because according to his own understanding of the nature of philosophy, such a distortion is required. This mode of speech is, for Rosen, an intrinsic element of philosophy. At the same time, paradoxically, Rosen's distortion of Strauss is the mark of respect shown by one thinker of high rank for another. Rosen claims that philosophers do not really argue with other philosophers, they instead distort and "punish" them for their mistakes. Rosen writes, "Fair-mindedness and objectivity are (sometimes) the traits of scholars, not of thinkers of the highest rank. Philosophers educate nonphilosophers; they punish other philosophers for their mistakes." (5) Philosophers, on Rosen's account, do not speak to one another, they punish one another: No great philosopher that I am familiar with has ever done justice to his great teacher. The same could be said of Hegel's critique of Kant, Heidegger's critique of Husserl, Derrida's critique of Heidegger and so on. All major thinkers, all people of the highest standing, the first thing they want to do is to destroy their teachers. Aristotle is very respectful towards Plato, but he always presents Plato's view in such a way as to make it implausible, or indefensible, in his own, Aristotelian terms, which makes it possible for him to establish how superior his own doctrines are to those of Plato. I can understand that. (6) The same could be said of Rosen's critique of Strauss. Rosen distorts Strauss, presents Strauss in "Rosenian" terms, to punish him. Someone could object, in sympathy with those writers who present Rosen's critique of Strauss as a cataract of misinformation and distortion, that Rosen's remark on philosophers getting other philosophers wrong is a back-handed attempt to certify his own classification with thinkers of the highest rank. This objection fails to account for the consistency of Rosen's distortion of Strauss. As we shall discuss presently, in Rosen's most interesting, even-handed, and temperate critique of Strauss, presented as the fourth chapter of Rosen's book, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary, the features of Rosen's various points of critique all derive from the same principle: Rosen's distortion of Strauss on the issue of opinion. …

Cantor’s Concept of Set in the Light of Plato’s Philebus

Abstract: IN THE OPENING SENTENCE of his final mathematical publication, Beitrage zur Begrundung der transfiniten Mengenlehre, Cantor states in a few words what h.e means by a set. By a "set" we understand every collection M of definite well-distinguished objects m of our intuition or our thinking (called the "elements" of M) into a whole.' Here, however, we shall focus on an earlier "definition" that intimates concerns about the ontological status of collections. It appeared in Cantor's Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannichfaltigkeitslehre (2) which summed up the quintessence of his deepest contribution to mathematics--the transfinite numbers--both from a mathematical and a philosophical point of view. In an end note Cantor emphasizes that Mannichfaltigkeitslehre is to be understood in a much more encompassing sense than that of the theory of sets of numbers and sets of points he had been developing up to that stage. For by a "manifold" or "set" I understand in general every Many which may be thought of as a One, i.e., every totality [Inbegriff] of determinate elements that can be united by a law into a whole. He then goes on to explicate this further by drawing upon Plato's Philebus. And with this I believe to define something related to the Platonic eidos or idea, as well as that which Plato in his dialogue "Philebus or the Supreme Good" calls mikton. He contraposits this against the apeiron, i.e., the unlimited, indeterminate which I call inauthentic-infinite, as well as against the peras, i.e., the limit, and he declares the [mikton] an orderly "mixture" of the latter two. That these two notions are of Pythagorean origin is indicated by Plato himself; cf. A. Boeckh, Philolaos des Pythagoreers Lehren. Berlin 1819. (3) The aim of this article is to shed some light on these two passages in Grundlagen. Specifically, I propose a substantive connection between Plato's mature theory of ideas and an interpretation of Cantor's 1883 definition that, arguably, is in accordance with the meaning of "set" in contemporary set theory. Among other things this will allow a construal of the term "law" that does not entail any restriction to definable sets. For the most part, the perspective from which Cantor's thought will be presented here is that of Grundlagen. In particular, this means that the ordinals are conceived of as numbers "constructed from below" by the principles of generation described in [section] 11 of that work in contrast to the "purely mathematical" treatment of ordinals as canonical representatives of order types of well-ordered sets adopted by Cantor in all of his subsequent publications. (4) I also incorporate notions which, although they found their explicit expression at later stages, were undoubtedly known to the author of Grundlagen. (5) Similarly, ideas from contemporary set theory such as large cardinals are discussed. They are not explicitly present in Cantor's writings but nevertheless can be traced back to the fundamental intuitions underlying Cantorian set theory. The question in what sense Cantor's 1883 definition differs from the one of 1895 as well as other aspects of the latter will be investigated on another occasion. Our interpretation of Plato relies, to the extent possible, on the systematic exposition by Eduard Zeller. (6) The intention, however, is not to vindicate this author against numerous studies that have been undertaken since then, but to use a source that Cantor evidently regarded as congenial to his own reading of Plato. (7) I Set, Eidos and Idea. On ontological grounds, Cantor's comparison of sets with the Platonic eidos or idea is thoroughly intelligible. Either one of those notions may be conceived of as a One over Many insofar as they denote what is common to a plurality of individuals of the same name. (8) For Plato, this One over Many is an autonomous entity just as, for Cantor, a set is distinct from the multiplicity of its elements. …

Crosswords and coherence

Abstract: A COMMON OBJECTION TO COHERENTISM is that it cannot account for truth: if a true theory and a false theory are equally coherent (and equally simple, comprehensive, and so forth), coherentism gives us no reason to prefer the former over the latter. By stretching Susan Haack's crossword metaphor to its limits, we show that there are circumstances under which this objection is untenable. Although these circumstances may seem remote, they are in accordance with our most fundamental and ambitious physical theories. Coherence might be truth conducive after all. I Susan Haack famously launched foundherentism as a fitting portrayal of the way in which we build up knowledge of the world. (1) A foundherentist explicitly has an ecumenical intent, encompassing requirements of both coherentists and foundationalists. Like the coherentist, a foundherentist stresses that our beliefs about the world must hang together in one way or another, and like the foundationalist, he emphasizes that they must somehow be grounded in the world around us. Foundherentism is thus an amalgam which draws on important insights of two factions that are often pictured as being opposed to one another. In a happy clarification of the nature of foundherentism, Haack introduced her metaphor of the crossword puzzle. The solution to a crossword combines features that are reminiscent both of foundationalism and coherentism. It mirrors the coherentist creed by demanding that words must intersect other words on the same letter, while it reflects the foundationalist stance by including "clues" that provide grounds, as it were, for each entry in the puzzle. While it is true that many scientific theories can be successfully modeled on the basis of this crossword metaphor, our most advanced and ambitious theories of the world resist such modeling. A Theory of Everything, in particular, will typically fail to fit a crossword metaphor of the sort that Haack has in mind. Such a TOE, as it is familiarly dubbed, aims to account for all the elementary particles in nature, including those that mediate nature's basic forces, like the photon in electromagnetism. As such it is called on to explain why there are quarks and leptons and gauge bosons, but not how, for example, a storm in the north Atlantic can be triggered by a butterfly flapping its wing in the Amazon. Given the expectation of many scientists that there can only be one TOE, the best way to apply the crossword metaphor to a TOE is to picture the latter as a crossword that has a unique solution, which can be found without using any external clues. Such crosswords transcend the Haackian metaphor, and in this paper we will explore their potentialities. More particularly, we will stretch the crossword metaphor in two directions: first, to the point where only one solution is possible and then to the point where the foundationalist requirement disappears. After we have shown that crosswords exist which are unique and clue-free, we speculate on their appositeness as metaphors for a TOE. We start, in Section II, by referring to a standard objection to coherentism, namely that it does not enable us to choose between different coherent systems of propositions (or beliefs): since we can always come up with a rivaling system that is equally coherent, the existence of a unique coherent system is excluded. On the basis of the crossword metaphor we show that there are circumstances under which this objection misses its mark: sometimes a particular system of propositions is indeed unique. We argue in Section III that such a system might not only be unique but also clue-free, in the sense that it is not grounded in external clues or data. In Sections IV and V we speculate about the origin of the structure of the world-crossword (where "world-crossword" refers both to a TOE and to a metaphor for a TOE). In Section VI we tentatively conclude that coherentism might be truth conducive after all. …

Heidegger's Kantian Reading of Aristotle's Theologike Episteme

Abstract: Aristotle's Metaphysics is probably further than we ourselves are today in philosophy. --Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Phanomenologie der Religion HEIDEGGER'S AFFINITY for Aristotle's and Kant's works is probably what best describes his trajectory during the 1920s. After a passionate dialogue with Augustine and before turning his attention towards Holderlin, these two philosophers served as privileged interlocutors in the elaboration of Sein und Zeit's fundamental ontology, as well as in the reformulation of this same project in what would be called a metaphysics of Dasein. The importance given to the two of them at that time is obviously tied to their respective reflections on the essence and the conditions of possibility of metaphysics. Before initiating a discussion with the metaphysical tradition under the sign of an overcoming [Uberholung, Uberwindung] in the 1930s, Heidegger first tried to examine the possibility of metaphysics. In the 1920s, in fact, he spoke of a "retrieval" or a "repetition" [Wiederholung] of the ontological and metaphysical questionings. Guided by Aristotle's efforts to establish a first philosophy that would give an account of beings both in their universality and in their primacy, Heidegger also attached fundamental importance to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the sole, explicit attempt known to history to question metaphysically the possibility of metaphysics. However, Heidegger was not merely inspired by these philosophical attempts: he proposed to retrieve or repeat these two metaphysical investigations so that the questions that had been hidden under concealments brought about by tradition might come to light. The great retrievals to which Heidegger then proceeds are well known: the first pages of Sein und Zeit evoked an "explicit retrieval [ausdruckliche Wiederholung] of the question of being," (1) while the fourth and last part of Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik spoke of a "laying of the ground for metaphysics in a retrieval [in einer Wiederholung]." (2) However, besides these two attempts, Heidegger retrieved other traditional problems. A retrieval exercise that is not so well known is that of Aristotle's problem of the divine [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which Heidegger tried to interpret in a nonreligious sense, as an endeavor concerning the world. This paper will approach this peculiar retrieval, which disclosed a previously unknown bond between the metaphysical projects of Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger. Even though Kant's Critique of Pure Reason constitutes the principal model for Heidegger's Metaphysics of Dasein it would be impossible to understand this project without taking into account his interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics and the questions this text left open. (3) Confronted with the contemporaneous interpretations of Aristotle's works--those by Werner Jaeger and Paul Natorp-Heidegger proposed to revive Aristotle's questioning process. Convinced that the traditional readings of Aristotle's works concealed problems that Aristotle himself could not solve, Heidegger wanted to return to the source and try to read with new, phenomenological eyes the texts that gave birth to what would later be called "metaphysics." On this path, Kant was to give Heidegger a helpful hand. As this paper will show, Heidegger found arguments in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to legitimize his interpretation of Aristotle's concept of the "divine." I If the Heideggerian endeavors of the 1920s can all be considered as retrieval attempts, the methodological implications of such an undertaking were rarely a subject of discussion in the published texts, (4) and this is quite problematic insofar as the concept played an essential role in the very structure of Sein und Zeit. (5) Not only does the retrieval concern the basic task of the essay--the "explicit retrieval of the question of being" (6)--it is also a basic methodological concept of "phenomenological destruction," which describes Heidegger's relation to the history of philosophy in the 1920s. …