The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 1107173035, 9781107173033

Table of contents :
The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015
Contents
List of Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Philosophical Reflections on the Recent History of Philosophy
Part I: Analytic Philosophy
Section 1: Language, Mind, Epistemology
1 Analytic Philosophy of Language: From First Philosophy to Foundations of Linguistic Science
2 Analyticity: The Carnap–Quine Debate and Its Aftermath
3 Philosophy of Linguistics
4 Varieties of Externalism, Linguistic and Mental
5 An Analytic-Hermeneutic History of Consciousness
6 Computational Philosophies of Mind
7 Philosophy of Action
8 Contemporary Responses to Radical Skepticism
9 Post-Gettier Epistemology
Section 2: Logic, Metaphysics, Science
10 Logic in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
11 (Re)discovering Ground
12 Lewis’s Theories of Causation and Their Influence
13 Naturalism from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present: Quine’s “Hegelianism,” Armstrong’s Empiricism, and the Rise of Liberal Naturalism
14 The History of Philosophy of Science
15 A Modern Synthesis of Philosophy and Biology
Section 3: Analytic Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy
16 The Revival of Virtue Ethics
17 Kantian Ethics
18 Consequentialism and Its Critics
19 The Rediscovery of Metanormativity: From Prichard to Raz by Way of Falk
20 Constitutivism
21 John Rawls’s Political Liberalism
22 The Twilight of the Liberal Social Contract: On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism
23 Feminist Philosophy and Real Politics: Susan Moller Okin on “Multiculturalism”
Section 4: Analytic Aesthetics and Philosophy of Religion
24 Analytic Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
25 Philosophy of Religion
Part II: Continental Philosophy
Section 5: Central Movements and Issues
26 Existentialism
27 Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Freedom
28 Heidegger, Critical Theory, and the Critique of Technology
29 Authenticity and Social Critique
30 Hermeneutics in Post-War Continental European Philosophy
31 Feminist Philosophy since 1945: Constructivism and Materialism
32 Philosophies of Difference
Section 6: Continental Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy
33 The Concept of Autonomy in the History of the Frankfurt School
34 Emerging Ethics
35 Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy
36 Critical Environmental Philosophy
37 Philosophy of Technology
38 Philosophy of Education and the “Education of Reason”: Post-Foundational Approaches through Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault
Section 7: Continental Aesthetics and Philosophy of Religion
39 The Bearing of Film on Philosophy
40 Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis, and the Avant-Garde
41 Continental Philosophy of Religion
Part III: Bridge Builders, Border Crossers, Synthesizers, and Comparative Philosophy
Section 8: Bridge Builders, Border Crossers, Synthesizers
42 Rethinking the Analytic/Continental Divide
43 Phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy
44 Phenomenology Meets Philosophy of Mind and Language
45 The Impact of Pragmatism
46 Unruly Readers, Unruly Words: Wittgenstein and Lang
47 Anglo-American Existential Phenomenology
48 A Conceptual Genealogy of the Pittsburgh School: Between Kant and Hegel
Section 9: Comparative Philosophy
49 Authenticity and the Right to Philosophy: On Latin American Philosophy’s Great Debate
50 The East in the West: Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
51 Jewish Philosophy and the Shoah
Part IV: Epilogue: On the Philosophy of the History of Philosophy
52 Developments and Debates in the Historiography of Philosophy
References
Index

Citation preview

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, 1945–2015 This landmark achievement in philosophical scholarship brings together leading experts from the diverse traditions of Western philosophy in a common quest to illuminate and explain the most important philosophical developments since the Second World War. Focusing particularly (but not exclusively) on those insights and movements that most profoundly shaped the English-speaking philosophical world, this volume bridges the traditional divide between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy while also reaching beyond it. The result is an authoritative guide to the most important advances and transformations that shaped philosophy during this tumultuous and fascinating period of history, developments that continue to shape the field today. It will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary philosophy of all levels and will prove indispensable for any serious philosophical collection. kelly becker is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Epistemology Modalized (2007) and a co-editor of The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology (with Tim Black, Cambridge, 2012). iain d. thomson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Heidegger on Ontotheology (Cambridge, 2005) and Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge, 2011).

The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 e d ite d by K E L LY B E C K E R University of New Mexico I A I N D. T H O M S O N University of New Mexico

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107173033 doi: 10.1017/9781316779651 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-17303-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

page xi

Preface and Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction: Philosophical Reflections on the Recent History of Philosophy ke l ly b e c ke r and i a i n d. thoms on

1

I Analytic Philosophy

13

1 Language, Mind, Epistemology

15

1 Analytic Philosophy of Language: From First Philosophy to Foundations of Linguistic Science scot t s oam e s

17

2 Analyticity: The Carnap–Quine Debate and Its Aftermath gary e b b s

32

3 Philosophy of Linguistics g e off r ey k . p ul lum

49

4 Varieties of Externalism, Linguistic and Mental sanford c. g ol db e rg

60

5 An Analytic-Hermeneutic History of Consciousness benj hellie

74

6 Computational Philosophies of Mind margaret a . bode n

90

v

vi

Contents

7 Philosophy of Action mari a alvare z and john hyman

103

8 Contemporary Responses to Radical Skepticism duncan p ri tc hard

115

9 Post-Gettier Epistemology ke l ly b e c ke r

125

2 Logic, Metaphysics, Science

135

10 Logic in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century joh n p. burg e s s

137

11 (Re)discovering Ground m i c ha e l j. rave n

147

12 Lewis’s Theories of Causation and Their Influence sara b e rn ste in

160

13 Naturalism from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present: Quine’s “Hegelianism,” Armstrong’s Empiricism, and the Rise of Liberal Naturalism dav id macarthur

171

14 The History of Philosophy of Science jam e s ladyman

189

15 A Modern Synthesis of Philosophy and Biology marion g odman

210

3 Analytic Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy

221

16 The Revival of Virtue Ethics anne bari l and al lan haz let t

223

17 Kantian Ethics anne margaret baxley

237

18 Consequentialism and Its Critics richard arne son

249

Contents 19 The Rediscovery of Metanormativity: From Prichard to Raz by Way of Falk evan t if fany

vii

264

20 Constitutivism paul kat sa fanas

275

21 John Rawls’s Political Liberalism c had van sc hoe land t and g e ral d gau s

287

22 The Twilight of the Liberal Social Contract: On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism e n zo ros s i

297

23 Feminist Philosophy and Real Politics: Susan Moller Okin on “Multiculturalism” lorna f inlayson

310

4 Analytic Aesthetics and Philosophy of Religion

321

24 Analytic Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art ste phe n dav ie s

323

25 Philosophy of Religion t re nt dou g h e rty

334

II Continental Philosophy

347

5 Central Movements and Issues

349

26 Existentialism steve n c rowe l l

351

27 Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Freedom taylor carman

365

28 Heidegger, Critical Theory, and the Critique of Technology j ul ian young

375

29 Authenticity and Social Critique c har le s g u ig non and kev in ah o

389

viii

Contents

30 Hermeneutics in Post-War Continental European Philosophy dav id l i ako s and th e odore g e org e 31 Feminist Philosophy since 1945: Constructivism and Materialism ann v. murphy 32 Philosophies of Difference todd may 6 Continental Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy

399

416

427 443

33 The Concept of Autonomy in the History of the Frankfurt School b rian o ’connor

445

34 Emerging Ethics dav id m . pe n˜ a - g u z ma´ n and c y nth i a w il let t

458

35 Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy cath e rine z uc ke rt and m ic ha e l z uc ke rt

471

36 Critical Environmental Philosophy s i mon ha i lwood

485

37 Philosophy of Technology jan kyrre be rg fri is

497

38 Philosophy of Education and the “Education of Reason”: Post-Foundational Approaches through Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault m i c ha e l a . pe te r s and j e f f st i c k ney 7 Continental Aesthetics and Philosophy of Religion

513 527

39 The Bearing of Film on Philosophy rob e rt b. p i p p i n

529

40 Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis, and the Avant-Garde jonathan scot t le e

542

41 Continental Philosophy of Religion b e n jam in c rowe

550

Contents III Bridge Builders, Border Crossers, Synthesizers, and Comparative Philosophy 8 Bridge Builders, Border Crossers, Synthesizers

ix

565 567

42 Rethinking the Analytic/Continental Divide i a in d. thom son

569

43 Phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy ste phe n mul hal l

590

44 Phenomenology Meets Philosophy of Mind and Language dav id woodruf f sm ith

603

45 The Impact of Pragmatism c he ry l mi sak

624

46 Unruly Readers, Unruly Words: Wittgenstein and Language dav id r. c e r bone

634

47 Anglo-American Existential Phenomenology mar k a . w rathal l and pat ri c k londe n

646

48 A Conceptual Genealogy of the Pittsburgh School: Between Kant and Hegel car l b. sac h s 9 Comparative Philosophy 49 Authenticity and the Right to Philosophy: On Latin American Philosophy’s Great Debate car lo s al b e rto sa´ nc he z 50 The East in the West: Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Philosophy in the Twentieth Century laura g ue rre ro, leah kal mans on, and sarah mat t i c e 51 Jewish Philosophy and the Shoah c la i re katz

664 677

679

692

709

Contents

x

IV Epilogue: On the Philosophy of the History of Philosophy

723

52 Developments and Debates in the Historiography of Philosophy m i c ha e l b eaney

725

References

759

Index

851

CONTRIBUTORS

Kevi n Aho Florida Gulf Coast University

Dav id R . Ce rbone West Virginia University

M ari a A lvare z King’s College London

B e n jami n Crowe Boston University

Richard A rne son University of California, San Diego

Steve n Crowe l l Rice University

A nne Bari l Washington University in St. Louis

Ste phe n Davi e s University of Auckland

A nne M argaret Baxley Washington University in St. Louis

Tre nt D oug he rty Baylor University

M ic ha e l Beaney Humboldt University and King’s College London

Gary E b b s Indiana University, Bloomington L orna F inlayson University of Essex

Ke l ly B ec ke r University of New Mexico

Jan Ky rre B e rg F rii s University of Copenhagen

Sara B e rnste in University of Notre Dame

Ge rald Gaus University of Arizona

Margaret A . Bode n University of Sussex

The odore Ge org e Texas A&M University

John P. Burge ss Princeton University

M arion Godman University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge

Taylor Carman Barnard College, Columbia University

xi

xii

List of Contributors

Sanford C. Gol dbe rg Northwestern University

Todd M ay Clemson University

Laura Gue rre ro Utah Valley University

C h e ryl M i sak University of Toronto

Char le s Guignon University of South Florida

Ste phe n M ul hall New College, University of Oxford

Simon H ai lwood University of Liverpool A l lan Hazlett Washington University in St. Louis Be nj He llie University of Toronto John H yman University College London Leah K al mans on Drake University Paul K atsa fanas Boston University Claire Katz Texas A&M University Jam e s Ladyman University of Bristol

A nn V. M urphy University of New Mexico B rian O’ Connor University College Dublin Dav id M. Pe n˜ a-Guzma´ n San Francisco State University Mi chae l A. Pete r s Beijing Normal University Robe rt B. Pippin University of Chicago Duncan Pri tchard University of California, Irvine and University of Edinburgh Ge of frey K. Pul lum University of Edinburgh

Jonathan Scott Le e Colorado College

Mi chae l J. Rave n University of Victoria and University of Washington

Dav id Li akos University of New Mexico

Enzo Rossi University of Amsterdam

Patric k Londe n University of California, Riverside

Carl B. Sac hs Marymount University

Dav id M acarthur University of Sydney

Carlos Albe rto Sa´ nche z San José State University

Sarah Mattice University of North Florida

Dav id Woodruff Sm i th University of California, Irvine

List of Contributors

Scott Soame s University of Southern California Je ff Stic kney University of Toronto

xiii

Cy nthi a Wi l lett Emory University Mark A. Wrathall Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford

I ai n D. Thom son University of New Mexico

Jul ian Young University of Auckland and Wake Forest University

Evan Ti ffany Simon Fraser University

Cathe ri ne Z ucke rt University of Notre Dame

Chad Van Sc hoe landt Tulane University

Mi chae l Zucke rt University of Notre Dame

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We, the editors of this volume, began this project in early 2014, but its roots go back several decades. As long-time friends, philosophical colleagues, and dialogue partners working in quite different philosophical traditions, we always found it helpful to hear the other explain the history behind the latest debates. We thus hoped that our philosophical collaboration could produce a history of post-war philosophy that would be balanced yet expansive, authoritative yet accessible, pluralistic in its approach and yet respectful of the depth and complexity of the achievements of the overlapping and competing philosophical traditions that defined this fruitful and fascinating period. We thought it best to select leading authorities in these areas and give them as much freedom as possible to define, examine, and explain the most important philosophical developments in their areas of expertise. The happy result, we think, is a diverse volume filled with wonderfully clear and insightful chapters that illuminate almost all the most significant movements in contemporary philosophy. Some readers will notice the occasional gap, of course, and a few anticipated chapters were indeed dropped along the way for various reasons. We believe the volume remains impressively comprehensive nonetheless, and hope it will help contribute to a growing understanding of these diverse, overlapping, and often competing philosophical traditions, while also giving readers some sense of the most promising paths opening beyond them. *** Do we incur some debts in our philosophical formation that remain too profound merely to acknowledge with thanks? If so, then thirty years of close philosophical friendship ranks high on that list. In grateful acknowledgment of such immeasurable debts, we dedicate this book to philosophical friendships everywhere. Long may they prosper in unforeseen places and unexpected ways, bringing strangers together as friends to think through and beyond their differences. We would, moreover, like to thank Cambridge University Press for entrusting us with this important volume. Hilary Gaskin has been a continual source of expert guidance and advice since this book’s inception, and Sophie Taylor’s generous efforts have been invaluable in seeing it through to completion. xv

INTRODUCTION Philosophical Reflections on the Recent History of Philosophy

k e l ly b e c ke r an d i a i n d. t h o m s o n

This volume endeavors to explain the most important developments in philosophy since the end of the Second World War. Yet even when we restrict our focus primarily to those insights and movements that most profoundly shaped the English-speaking philosophical world (as we reluctantly found it necessary to do), it still remains the case that no one – and no one volume (not even a volume like ours, filled with more than fifty chapters from a diverse range of leading philosophers) – can tell this whole story. This is not only because there is no one single overarching story to tell, but also because the overlapping and sometimes conflicting stories that together constitute this complex history are still being written – here in this book, for example. Two of the reasons for the history of philosophy’s necessary incompleteness came to the fore of (what we risk calling) the general self-understanding of Western philosophy during this historical period. These interconnected philosophical reasons (or self-realizations) merit emphasis here, especially because they remain subtle undercurrents throughout the book. The first reason – emphasized by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, and many others – is that the history of philosophy is a collective, hermeneutic (or interpretative) endeavor that, at its best, helps constitute the very historical understanding it seeks to describe. History of philosophy reconstitutes itself repeatedly as it seeks to disclose the truth of what happened. As we philosophical historians attempt to coherently articulate and critique the philosophical ideas and events we choose to focus on, we inevitably reinforce, challenge, revise, overturn, or supplement existing accounts of philosophy’s own historical self-understanding. Such historical disclosure always remains partial (in both senses), that is, never exhaustive of the truth it seeks to convey nor wholly uninterested in the history it thereby presents. As partial or non-exhaustive, history of philosophy remains selective; and as selective, it remains partial or somehow implicated in the very story it chooses to tell. This brings us to the second philosophical reason for the necessary incompleteness of the history of philosophy – a reason or realization foregrounded by Martin 1

2

Kelly Becker and Iain D. Thomson

Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others – namely, that the partly self-constituting history of our philosophical self-understanding can never finally be told, once and for all, owing to the pervasive and defining nature of our existential finitude. Our existential finitude entails inescapable limits on those forms of human understanding that philosophy takes as its own (since these include questions without definitive empirical or mathematical answers). Put simply, our evolving philosophical understanding remains temporally and historically located, and so always marked by blind spots (to which, as the term suggests, we remain blind in turn), whether that understanding is individual or collective.1 The significance of our existential finitude winds like a blood-red thread through the history of Western thought, but it came to the fore of Western philosophy’s self-understanding near the beginning of the historical period this book addresses – owing in large part to the World Wars, which forced even the youth to confront their mortality, and which later came to stand, in retrospect at least, as philosophically humbling tragedies of failed mutual comprehension. But there are also many other reasons philosophy has increasingly moved to consider its own partly blinding embeddedness within the very age it seeks to understand – such as our burgeoning awareness of the sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, classism, ableism, etc., endemic to the Western philosophical tradition (reasons that some contributors to this book discuss in detail). In all its forms, however, this growing realization that our existential finitude imposes inescapable limits on philosophy has had to push back against millennia of philosophical resistance. Such resistance long took shape, for example, as overcompensatory fantasies of finally complete philosophical, theological, and scientific systems, as well as in ongoing quests to escape from our finitude into various form of endless or timeless immortality, or anonymous universality, or even to bring history itself to an end (whether in philosophy or literally, in a thanatological impulse that still rages throughout the Western world, as Marcuse and others warned). As such compensatory strategies suggest, the finitude of humanity’s philosophical self-understanding initially struck us as tragic – and so lent a 1

Our existential finitude includes our temporal finitude (such as the fact that time runs out for each of us), our historical finitude (such as the fact that we exist in a finite number of particular times and places, with their own traditions and taken-for-granted assumptions), as well as our spatial (or placebound) finitude (such as the subtle ways in which our very ways of seeing and understanding get shaped by our environments, natural and human-made). Of course, some of our blind spots can be brought to consciousness and ameliorated or overcome; indeed, philosophy often proceeds in just such a progressive way. Nonetheless, history teaches us that other blind spots will always remain, more or less glaring in retrospect but unnoticed or underemphasized at the time, even among the society of the most enlightened (who are nevertheless right to complain whenever this fact is used as an excuse not to try to correct those blind spots of which we have become aware).

Introduction

3

somber tenor to the existentialist tradition that foregrounded this message. More happily, however, the apparent tragedy of our finitude is at least partly offset by some of its converse or corollary implications, more edifying implications that can also come to our philosophical self-awareness when we study the period this book examines. For example, the impossibility of ever completing philosophy means that philosophy will always have a future, as long as we do. As long as finite beings do history (that is, as long as beings who live in time seek to understand themselves), we will always have left something important out of our existing accounts, which (conversely) means that there will always be something important to add, some other viewpoint still to be considered, some outstanding insight no one has yet noticed, since we had not yet been looking from just that perspective, or in precisely that way, and so on. The emerging consolations of philosophical finitude also include the fact that the nature of any complex phenomenon seems to remain inexhaustibly rich for a finite understanding like our own, which constitutes itself in and through time and history, collectively and in a non-uniform rate and manner. Acknowledging the initially tragic-seeming fact of our philosophical finitude has thus led philosophy to discover liberating truths about our seemingly endless philosophical pluralism (a pluralism the significance of which philosophers themselves continue to debate, of course, as the contributors to this book attest). Most importantly for us, if it is indeed true that the philosophical selfunderstandings of finite beings like us remain necessarily incomplete – hence true that the complex phenomena philosophy seeks to understand will always partly exceed our ability to understand them – then this also means that philosophy itself necessarily takes shape as the history of philosophy. For, rather than ever being complete in time (or frozen outside of it), philosophy happens in and as its historical formations and transformations. This ever open-ended history will continue to change and develop as long as there remain those who continue to take it up, from new or rediscovered perspectives (even if they do so only to try, once again, to end or complete it). What this means for us here, then, is that rather than yearning after some impossible and outdated ideal of exhaustive completeness (and then torturing ourselves about our various failures to achieve it), we prefer to acknowledge the inevitable incompleteness of our coverage, the internal tensions between the different lines of interpretation advanced here, and the undeniable fact that, even after more than fifty chapters, there remain many important stories left to tell – undoubtedly, even more than any of us now realize.2 That last fact, we would suggest, should lead 2

We are, of course, well aware of some of the gaps; our contributor on the philosophy of race, for example, dropped out too late in the game to be replaced.

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Kelly Becker and Iain D. Thomson

us not into despair at our finitude but, instead, into hope that the future of philosophy will continue to improve, to become not only more precise and clear (where it can and should be) but also more inclusive and imaginative, more open to other perspectives, methodologies, and traditions – however slow and painstaking the progress. Confronting the sometimes glacial pace of historical progress (which moves much slower in the collective than in the individual, a fact that can become especially disheartening during reactive or regressive times), that old slogan “two steps forward, one step back” should perhaps be replaced with (the slightly more accurate) “ten steps forward, five steps back,” so as to account for the fact that history advances and then partly retreats on multiple fronts at a time. In philosophy as elsewhere, historical progress moves neither at a uniform pace nor in a unilinear direction. Seen from a distance, philosophical insight often seems to leap forward and then retract in reaction, as if waiting for the world to catch up before moving on yet again. Progressing in some dimensions while regressing in others, philosophy sometimes even buries its own advances, if only to unearth and develop some of them later. Indeed, the impossibility of exhaustively surveying the philosophical history since 1945 testifies not only to the great fecundity of the period but also to its often deeply problematic nature – its many important insights and advances as well as its undeniable tendencies to marginalize, ignore, or exclude topics that (philosophers have only slowly come to recognize) deserve our attention as matters of central human concern along with those new perspectives well posed to help us think more clearly and creatively about these pressing issues – issues which press in on us from the future, from a world to come which we can never fully see, but which comes, inexorably, nonetheless.3 Looking back over the history of philosophy since 1945, we are struck, moreover, by the fact that it is significantly easier to characterize our more distant than our more recent self-understandings. Compare the two sets of questions: “What kind of a child were you?” or “What were the 1980s like?” (on the one hand) and “What kind of a person are you now?” or “How would you characterize the current decade?” (on the other). Answering the latter set of questions is not impossible, of course, just more difficult. The greater difficulty stems in part from what Heidegger called the law of proximity (or the paradoxicalsounding “distance of the near”), which recognizes that the closer something is to us – that is, the more profoundly it shapes our immediate self-understanding 3

Such matters addressed here include feminisms and applied ethics, some non-Western philosophies, and even Continental philosophies, and yet many others remain, as absences any philosophical readers will likely register in light of their own perspectives and concerns.

Introduction

5

(like the lenses through which we see) – the harder it is to bring it into focus and characterize it explicitly. But the difficulty also arises, we would suggest, because something in the living present seems to bristle against being neatly labeled and pinned to the historical wall like some dead entomological specimen, and so continues “wriggling” (as T. S. Eliot [1917] memorably put it) against our attempts to nail it down once and for all.4 It is indeed easier to dissect the dead than the living, easier to understand things after they are over. Perhaps G. W. F. Hegel was even right that “the Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” or that we only begin truly to understand matters once they are coming to an end. If so, however, then this also means that where a philosophy is most alive, where it continues most profoundly to shape our ongoing concepts and concerns, we will have the greatest difficulty bringing it into view and understanding it clearly. Just as it is more difficult to answer the question “What kind of person are you now?” than “What kind of a child were you?” so it is more difficult to understand our own most recent philosophical history. For our recent history often shapes us in ways we barely notice or recognize but simply take for granted – at least until that living understanding fails or otherwise has its limits revealed, unlike our more distant past, the contours of which stand out more starkly in their obvious difference from our current ways of thinking. Indeed, it is precisely when our taken-for-granted ideas get challenged – from within or from without – that these ideas begin to show up explicitly as important matters of philosophical concern, as issues open to debate rather than obvious truths. In this way too, the history of philosophy plays a crucial role in the ongoing process by which philosophy evaluates, transforms, and reshapes itself. Doing philosophy historically (and there is no other way to do it, whether we acknowledge that or not) means asking what philosophy is, even when this implicit question takes the form of an argument for a particular (and always partial) answer, as it often does in philosophy. To do philosophy is inevitably to take a historical stand (whether implicitly or explicitly, boldly or tentatively, broadly or narrowly) on those never finally resolvable questions of what philosophical concepts and concerns matter the most (to a particular philosopher at a specific time, at least) and on what philosophical movements, approaches, and perspectives can best address them. In this sense, the history of philosophy is itself an element of our perennial but evershifting historical enterprise of collective self-understanding, a (sometimes more and sometimes less) important part of our never-ending search to make sense of our ever-growing past in light of our shifting present (and vice versa), as we

4

T. S. Eliot began writing “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” while studying philosophy at Harvard (in 1909–10).

6

Kelly Becker and Iain D. Thomson

“lovers of wisdom” continue to seek to help chart our way into an always partly unknown future. Put in such abstract terms, it becomes easier to see how unlikely it is that there could be some single overarching metanarrative to which we could subordinate all the different (and often competing) historical moments and movements that make up the last seventy years of philosophy (even when our focus is restricted primarily to the English-speaking world). And yet, as Immanuel Kant argued only twenty-four decades ago, the very structure of reason drives us to pursue a completeness that our empirical knowledge can never attain; despite its tragic impossibility, we cannot help but pursue a final, allencompassing account. After Kant, that striving for a final overarching account often takes the paradoxical form of denying the very possibility of all such accounts. Indeed, building on Kant (and Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom Kant had thus killed “God”), Heidegger deconstructed our very ambition for completeness, calling it philosophy’s “theological” impulse (our drive for an all-encompassing, God’s-eye view of the whole from somewhere outside it, as in Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere”). This “theological” pursuit of the all-encompassing perspective – together with philosophy’s “ontological” ambition (our seemingly endless quest to dig down to the final foundation of things, thereby discovering the final component elements out of which everything else is composed) – provides philosophy with the apparently impossible and yet still enduring impulses that have driven Western metaphysics (understood as “ontotheology”) from Thales to Nietzsche and beyond.5 The legacy of Heidegger’s challenge to metaphysics (as ontotheology) looms large in the subsequent Continental tradition, in which Heidegger’s thinking forms an orienting point of departure for almost all the most significant figures and movements that followed, whether these took shape as a direct reaction against Heidegger’s deconstruction of the eternal verities of metaphysical foundationalism (as with Strauss), as immanent critiques of his later thinking (in the “philosophies of difference” of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and others), as challenges to some of Heidegger’s own axiomatic assumptions (as in Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas), as radicalizations of his incipient postmodernism (in the likes of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard), or even as a development of Heidegger’s views in ways he never imagined (as in Hubert Dreyfus’s

5

See Thomson 2005. This brings out the rather ironic fact that the arch-analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, on the one hand, and the arch-Continental Heidegger, on the other, were unknowingly in agreement in rejecting traditional metaphysics of the Hegelian variety. (On their lasting disagreements about metaphysics, however, see Thomson forthcoming.)

Introduction

7

critique of the Cartesian and Husserlian assumptions driving early artificial intelligence, as well as in contemporary work on extended and embodied cognition). This diverse Continental tradition – partly in reaction to Heidegger’s own grievous political faults, partly owing to its Marxian, feminist, and other roots, and partly in virtue of its outsider status (both celebrated and bemoaned, and partly mythical, given its undeniable influence) – has long prided itself on being a place where the leading social and cultural debates would be discussed at the highest levels, even if on a sometimes forbidding plane of eloquence or abstraction. As the narratives collected in this book suggest, however, the Continental world(s) can no longer claim a monopoly (or hegemony) on philosophical work of direct political relevance. To begin to see how philosophy in the English-speaking world has slowly but surely become increasingly pluralistic and ecumenical, it helps to understand where it started from. In order to help orient readers in this way, we will conclude this introduction with a brief overview of the recent history of analytic philosophy. *** In recent decades, the aims and methods of analytic philosophy have proliferated. The old taboos that helped distinguish analytic philosophy in its earliest days – starting with Bertrand Russell’s and G. E. Moore’s denunciations of Hegelian absolute idealism, and from there to the logical empiricists’ rejection of appeals to intuition, rationalist epistemology, and (perhaps inconsistently) metaphysics – have fallen like dominoes. Mainstream English-speaking philosophy now appears to be increasingly unrestricted in scope and method. Its practitioners theorize reasons, norms, and values, for example, without presupposing that they must somehow, on pain of such concepts lacking cognitive content, be either reducible to some respectable science or definable in naturalistic terms. They even look once again to Hegel for insight on these and other issues. Prominent philosophers appeal to intuition in theory construction and counterexample generation. How did we get here? An oft-told tale has it that logical empiricism was hoist by its own petard when W. V. Quine elicited its radical skeptical and eliminativist implications. Analytic philosophy was soon thereafter liberated from the imposition of empiricist scruples when Saul Kripke distinguished necessary truth from a priori knowledge, and both from analyticity. Thereafter, even setting aside Quine’s criticisms of analyticity, it became obvious that one could no longer appeal to “truth in virtue of meaning alone” in order to ground necessary truth and a priori knowledge. These were recognized as three distinct categories – not without interesting relations, of course (for analytic truths, if they exist, are arguably still necessarily true and a priori knowable) – each

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deserving investigation in its own right, with whatever methods may be suited to the task. Presented as the most important events in analytic philosophy, this old tale does serious injustice to analytic philosophy’s rich and diverse history. We invoke it, instead, primarily to raise a question about that history: If analytic philosophy was originally rooted in Gottlob Frege’s rationalism and Platonism, in ideas not amenable to logical empiricism, then logical empiricism became dominant, and now there is no clear unifying set of topics, approaches, or methods to “analytic philosophy” itself, then how do we understand the history of analytic philosophy? What is it a history of, if anything?6 Do these questions have answers? Attempting to define “analytic philosophy” has become a fool’s errand; but if the term isn’t completely devoid of content, then is there some thread of common concern running throughout its history? We believe that the chapters on the history of analytic philosophy in this volume help show us this thread. Here some broader historical context is useful. It is worth reminding ourselves of the central aims and motivations of the “Father of Analytic Philosophy,” the aforementioned Frege. Frege sought to reduce arithmetic to logic, and, with the logic he developed to serve as the foundation, he tried to produce a perspicuous language for the expression of scientific thought. In its inception, then, analytic philosophy was an area of inquiry for which its relationship to science was a concern. This concern never disappears. It implies nothing about reduction, verification, or Quinean naturalism (indeed, it does not always even presume a positive relationship to science), but it provides a broad frame for understanding the evolving consciousness of analytic philosophy as a historical tradition, and one more diverse than is often recognized. Between Frege and the Second World War stand the towering figures of Russell and (early to middle period) Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell shared Frege’s philosophical ambitions, noted above, and similarly sought to ground knowledge of the external world in knowledge by acquaintance (directly to consciousness) of simple objects. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, explicitly juxtaposed philosophy to science, taking philosophy to be a kind of activity involved in clarifying 6

In a provocative piece on a similar topic, James Conant (2016) phrases the question almost identically. His basic answer is that analytic philosophy constitutes a tradition (see also Glock 2008 and Thomson, this volume). We do not disagree, nor do we disagree with him when he says: “The unity and identity of a tradition is not explicable in terms of a collection of features each of its members fortuitously happens to instantiate. It is explicable only through a form of understanding that seeks to grasp a specific sort of historical development – one in which each moment is linked to the others in a significant way” (55). But what form of understanding? What historical development? What significant way? One often hears that “analytic philosophy” is a family resemblance term (see e.g. Glock 2008; Conant 2016). But which resemblances are most significant here, and why?

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thought through logical analysis (not unlike Frege’s and Russell’s projects) but not itself part of any scientific theory (unlike Frege’s and Russell’s projects). The difference, for Wittgenstein, is that scientific propositions have sense, whereas logical truths and falsities lack sense but limn the bounds of sense. Outside the bounds of sense lie the claims of metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics – the realm of “the mystical,” of “nonsense.” Given Frege’s, Russell’s, and Wittgenstein’s shared emphases on logical clarity and rigor, one could think, with some justification, that this clarity and rigor is what defines “analytic philosophy” and unifies its practice. That is indeed a common conception. Although much contemporary analytic philosophy still employs logic as a tool for the analysis and clarification of arguments, the majority of contemporary analytic philosophy does not. So that just leaves the idea of a shared commitment to clarity and rigor. But that is both false and patently offensive if it is meant to suggest that Continental philosophers do not care about rigor (as long as “rigor” is understood not as the use of logic to achieve monosemic exactitude but, instead, as the attempt to write in a way that does justice to the matters under consideration) – a common stereotype, its patent superficiality notwithstanding. Let us continue, then, to pursue the more expansive unifying theme of analytic philosophy intimated above. Regardless of Wittgenstein’s actual attitudes toward metaphysics, the Vienna Circle (the core group of the original logical empiricists) were inspired by Wittgenstein’s linguistic approach to philosophy and the seeming implication, in calling metaphysics nonsense, that statements that did not purport to say something factual about the world lacked content. Thus we arrive at the emergent picture of analytic philosophy with which our story in this volume begins (a picture dominated by logical empiricism), according to which it is the philosopher’s task to articulate the logico-linguistic conceptual framework and confirmation rules required for scientific investigation. The framework consists in analytic statements, a priori knowable and necessarily true because, despite empiricist aversions to such notions, they are set down by convention. A tooneat theory of meaning served to provide conceptual foundations for science: (Aside from analytic statements) a sentence is meaningful only if it is verifiable by observation. In short, meaningfulness is either a matter of mere convention or a matter of verification or, more broadly, confirmation conditions, and it is science’s task to do the confirming. We do not mean to denigrate logical empiricism in calling the verification theory of meaning too neat. The logical empiricist movement was a response in part to the political turmoil of the World Wars, in reaction to which the logical empiricists attempted to liberate thinking from ideas that were not scientifically grounded in reality. Verificationism was an inspired cornerstone of these

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laudable ideals. But it is worth pointing out the ironic fact that post-war, analytic philosophy’s close relationship to science hinged on a fairly simple, unscientific, “philosophical” theory of meaning and language. This set the stage for attacks on many fronts, attacks each of which would ultimately serve to reconceive analytic philosophy’s relationship to science. First, the “ordinary language philosophy” movement, inspired by J. L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein, enjoined us to focus on actual linguistic use to see how many philosophical problems arise precisely from philosophical language. Second, Quine would accept verificationism but construe it as applying to whole theories (or theory chunks), and thereby deny that individual sentences, each part of the whole, have their own confirmation conditions, whether empirical or null (/analytic). The upshot for Quine? Philosophy is not foundational to or in any principled way distinct from but rather is continuous with science; all statements are susceptible to revision in light of further experience. Third, from a completely different direction, Noam Chomsky would turn the study of language itself into a science – albeit one the logical empiricists probably wouldn’t recognize as such because it was grounded less in concrete evidence than in reflection on the very nature of and commonalities between human languages – and therewith usher in “the cognitive revolution,” as traditional philosophical questions were approached with the latest tools of neuro- and computer science. Ordinary language philosophers, still influential in contemporary philosophy, were skeptical about early analytic philosophy’s attempts to regiment language for scientific purposes, and indeed saw this as a source of philosophical problems (as several chapters in this volume show). Quine’s ultimate skepticism about meaning and Chomsky’s new science have each spurred, in different ways, much recent work in the philosophy of language, which no longer presumes a simple theory to deploy for scientific and philosophical purposes but instead aims to lay the foundations for a science of language. Beneath such deep differences, however, analytic philosophy’s relationship to science remains a central concern for it. In other words, analytic philosophy discloses itself historically as being-toward-science. It is at this point that Kripke enters the story. His influential appeals to intuition based in reflection on merely imagined examples, no longer forbidden (given the persuasive force of Kripke’s examples), made a convincing case that reference (of names and natural kind terms) was not determined by definite descriptions (a descriptivism that Kripke attributed to Russell and Frege); indeed, more generally and more interestingly, reference was not even determined by any set of empirical procedures available to a speaker. Hilary Putnam reached similar results and also taught us about the Division of Linguistic Labor.

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And together these ideas inspired work like that from Tyler Burge, who develops these insights beyond their application to names and natural kind terms – indeed, beyond language – and applies them to understanding thought and mental representation more generally. We emphasize this trend in recent philosophy not to suggest the relative importance of “core analytic philosophy” over other areas – and certainly not to imply that the associated philosophical views are uncontested. The point, rather, is that as analytic philosophy strayed from its original, always evolving but clear and direct relation to science, and indeed returned to its Fregean roots by embracing elements of rationalism, we may ask: What are we to make of the claim that analytic philosophy is an area of inquiry for which its relationship to science (its being-toward-science) is an issue? The answer is that there is an ineliminable strand of naturalism (often associated with a contested notion of “physicalism”) that runs throughout analytic philosophy. It is sometimes no more than a denial of supernaturalism, a request to be taken seriously in a world where science is the gold standard of success in inquiry. Naturalism is not universally accepted but is all but universally up for debate. On just about every issue, the questions of whether a scientific account is viable, or, far more broadly, whether all the facts about the relevant phenomena supervene on physical facts, constitute fundamental choice points. In this volume, chapters on moral philosophy, normativity, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and epistemology all invoke notions such as grounding, supervenience, cause, and confirmation. But what are the relevant grounds and supervenience bases? Ultimately, they are assumed to be physical (even if there is not wide agreement on what that is). Usually the causes are, too, but in any case they remain empirically knowable. There are an increasing number of philosophers who question physicalism, but, in so doing, it is important to note that they are reacting to an idea deeply embedded in contemporary analytic philosophy. It means something to reject naturalistic, physicalist bases for, say, consciousness, intentionality, and normativity. This is all we intend, then, in saying that one’s relation to science remains a central issue for analytic philosophers. Many analytic philosophers are anxious not to be dismissed as unscientific; even those who do not believe physicalism holds the key to understanding the phenomena of most concern to them argue explicitly for that claim. Prominent figures such as John McDowell, perhaps inspired by the later Wittgenstein or even Hegel, seek to achieve a level of description of mind’s relation to world, or of some kind of normativity, that assuages traditional philosophical concerns. For such thinkers, the natural sciences are not merely insufficiently illuminating but often beside the point. And yet, even here, one might be forgiven for reading into the label “liberal

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naturalism,” often attributed to views like McDowell’s, an anxiety not to be dismissed as unscientific. Setting that point aside, shall we say that neoWittgensteinians are not analytic philosophers? Such claims always rang hollow. Why not say instead that they, too, like physicalists and naturalists, situate themselves vis-à-vis science? After all, to downplay the relevance of science is still to maintain a relationship to it.7 One hears that analytic philosophy is enjoying a heyday, deeply entrenched in the English-speaking philosophical world and spreading far beyond – which means it must meet the challenges that arise from the different traditions and approaches with which it increasingly comes into contact. The dangers of a difference-denying colonization loom large here, but there will always be “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in” anyone’s philosophy. (“And therefore as a stranger give it welcome” [Hamlet, 1.5.167–70]!) As the scope of analytic philosophy broadens, the number and variety of sanctioned philosophical topics, methods, and approaches continues to expand – so much so that it becomes all the more unclear that there is any philosophical point behind the label “analytic.” Except for some anxious need to situate oneself toward naturalism – even if by denying the physicalist thesis that all facts are (somehow) determined by the physical facts – or by taking a stance toward scientism in its many guises, what remains of the analytic tradition? Perhaps the liberation from logical empiricism will continue to such an extent that those trained in this tradition will progressively learn to recognize, outside it, a shared search for answers to deep questions about mind and world, the good and the right, beauty and meaning, as well as important and challenging new ideas, insights, and approaches. If the historical period this book examines is predominantly characterized by that two-headed beast of “analytic or Continental” philosophy, on the horizon we are perhaps beginning to discern not these two heads becoming one (as the analytic absorbs what it can from the Continental), but, instead, a many-headed philosophical hydra, a strangely beautiful if unwieldy beast suggested by the richly pluralistic work that fills the pages that follow.8

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Even John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which dominated discussion of political philosophy after 1971, argues that parties in the original position generally (would) know science and that political decisions in a just society are based on science. That virtually all analytic philosophers feel it incumbent on them to take a stance on the relevance of science to their inquiries (even if that is not a major focus for them) marks a noteworthy difference from philosophers in the Continental traditions, who seem to feel freer to ignore this question, even if they increasingly do not. Thanks to Paul Livingston for invaluably thoughtful comments.

Part I Analytic Philosophy

section one LANGUAGE, MIND, EPISTEMOLOGY

1 ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE From First Philosophy to Foundations of Linguistic Science

sc o t t s oam e s THE INITIAL ANALYTIC TURN TO LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

In 1945, the turn to logic and language that initiated the analytic tradition in philosophy was sixty-six years old. The tradition was founded in 1879 when Gottlob Frege invented the predicate calculus as a necessary prerequisite to his goal of deriving all mathematics (except geometry) from logical axioms and definitions of mathematical concepts. His aim – to identify what numbers are and explain our knowledge of them – fit what he, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore then took to be the main tasks of philosophy – to give a general description of reality, to explain what, and how, we know about it, and to discern moral facts capable of guiding action.1 One part of reality, numbers, were, for Frege, whatever they had to be to explain our arithmetical knowledge. His explanation was based on taking natural numbers to be sets of concepts the extensions of which can exhaustively be paired off, without remainder. Related definitions of arithmetical notions allowed him to derive the axioms of Peano Arithmetic from what he took to be self-evident logical axioms, without which thought might prove impossible. In this way, he thought, he could reduce arithmetical knowledge to logical knowledge. Unfortunately, his system embedded naïve set theory, which generated a contradiction found by Russell in 1903, after which he inherited the task of reducing arithmetic to logic. By 1910, Russell was mathematically successful, though at some philosophical cost.2 Whereas Frege dreamed of deriving mathematics from self-evident logical truths, today we recognize some of Russell’s principles to be neither self-evident nor truths of logic. Although the simple type theory of Ramsey (1925) improved Russell’s product, we now recognize

1 2

A detailed description of these aims is given in lecture 1 (delivered in 1910) (Moore 1953). See Russell and Whitehead 1910; Soames 2014: chapter 10, §§4 and 5. See also the reply to Pigden, in Soames 2015b.

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that the systems to which mathematics was then reduced weren’t logical principles governing all reasoning; they were versions of a foundational mathematical theory now called set theory. This, however, is hindsight; it wasn’t widely evident then. Consequently Russell’s reduction, along with the theory of descriptions (in Russell 1905), enhanced the reputation of logical analysis as a powerful philosophical tool. Building on this reputation, Russell applied his reductionist program to material objects and other minds (Russell 1914; 1918–19). The result was an epistemically driven metaphysical system of logical atomism in which apparent talk of mind and matter was reduced to talk of momentary instantiations of simple n-place perceptual properties.3 The relation between that system and our pre-philosophical knowledge of the world was, he thought, like the relation between the “logical” system to which Principia Mathematica reduced arithmetic and our ordinary arithmetical knowledge. Just as the later reduction aimed not at giving us new arithmetical knowledge, but at validating the knowledge we already had, and connecting it to other sorts of knowledge, so Russell’s logical atomism aimed not at adding to our ordinary and scientific knowledge, but at validating it and revealing its internal structure. Elaborating this idea, Russell says: Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical. (Russell 1914: 33) [P]hilosophical propositions . . . must be a priori. A philosophical proposition must be such as can neither be proved or disproved by empirical evidence . . . philosophy is the science of the possible . . . Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes indistinguishable from logic. (Russell 1917: 111)

Since for Russell a priori necessary connections were logical connections, he took explaining them to require definitions, as in the reduction of arithmetic to logic, or reductive analyses, as in his analysis of mind and matter as recurring occurrences of perceptible simples. But, since his analysans weren’t even approximately equivalent to his analysanda, the term analysis that he used was misleading. His system was less an analysis of our pre-philosophical worldview than a proposal to replace it with a revisionary metaphysics dictated by a view of what reality must be like if it is to be knowable. For Russell during this period, linguistic analysis was logical analysis, which required using logical tools to craft philosophically justified answers to the traditional questions of metaphysics and epistemology. 3

For discussion see Soames 2014: 621–9.

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THE EMERGENCE OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY

The logical atomism of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus sprung from a different philosophical vision. Whereas Russell gave us an epistemologically grounded metaphysics, Wittgenstein gave us a theory of intelligibility. Whereas Russell was driven by a vision of what reality must be like if it is to be knowable, Wittgenstein was driven by a vision of what thought and language must be like if they are to intelligibly represent reality. For Russell conceptual connections were logical connections; for Wittgenstein metaphysical and epistemic possibilities were logical possibilities. Russell believed the aim of philosophy was to discover logical truths and devise definitions which, when applied to statements of science and everyday life, would reveal their true contents; Wittgenstein believed there are no philosophical truths or informative philosophical contents to identify. Wittgenstein’s conclusions were grounded in a conception of language in which every intelligible statement S falls into one of two categories: Either (i) S is true at some world-states and false at others, in which case S is a truthfunction of elementary (i.e. atomic) statements and knowable to be true, or false, only by empirical investigation, or (ii) S is a tautology or contradiction that can be known to be so by purely formal calculations. From this he concluded that there are no unanswerable questions and no inherently mysterious propositions. In the Tractatus, anything about which we can speculate is a scientific topic. Since philosophy isn’t science, its job is limited to clarifying thought and language. Because Wittgenstein believed that everyday language disguises thought by concealing true logical form, he left philosophy the job of stripping away the disguise and illuminating the form. With this, it seemed, traditional philosophy had come to an end. The message was well received by the Vienna Circle, which initially gave the Tractatus the phenomenalistic reading described by one of its members, Viktor Kraft. Wittgenstein identified [atomic propositions] with the propositions he called “elementary propositions.” They are propositions which can be immediately compared with reality, i.e. with the data of experience. Such propositions must exist, for otherwise language would be unrelated to reality. All propositions which are not themselves elementary propositions are necessarily truth functions of elementary propositions. Hence all empirical propositions must be reducible to propositions about the given. (Kraft 1953 [1950]: 117)

After operating informally for years, the Vienna Circle announced its existence in a manifesto (Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath 1929), dedicated to Moritz Schlick.

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Hailing Einstein, Russell, and Wittgenstein as exemplars of the scientific worldconception, it proclaimed a new philosophical vision, logical empiricism, that would systematize all fact-stating discourse into a single, unified, scientific system. The primary activity of the philosopher was to give the logical analyses of scientific concepts and theories. The first and most ambitious effort of this sort was the attempt to demonstrate the possibility of a unified science given by Carnap (1928). In this work Carnap identified four domains: the autopsychological or phenomenal domain of a single mind, the physical domain, the heteropsychological domain of all psychological facts, and the broader cultural domain. Carnap’s central claim was that it is possible to reduce all domains to the autopsychological, and also to reduce all domains to the physical – where the direction of reduction was not supposed to confer metaphysical prominence on the chosen base. Unfortunately, the only reduction developed in detail was the autopsychological, which proved to be hopeless.4 The metaphysical neutrality attributed to the imagined reductions was more significant, signaling an implicit holistic verificationism that was later to become prominent (Soames 2018: chapter 6, §§2 and 3). After this beginning, the search for a precise, acceptable statement of the empiricist criterion of meaning preoccupied logical empiricists for decades. Significant milestones included Popper 1935; Ayer 1936; Carnap 1936–37; Ayer 1952; Church 1949; Hempel 1950; Quine 1951. Since natural science had to count as cognitively meaningful, it was quickly recognized that neither conclusive verifiability (entailment of S by a consistent set of observation statements), conclusive falsifiability (entailment of the negation of S by a consistent set of observation statements), nor the disjunction of the two was necessary and sufficient for S’s meaningfulness (Soames 2003a: chapter 13). Attention then focused on more holistic approaches in which S could be deemed meaningful by its place in a larger system of meaningful sentences, even if S was not itself conclusively verifiable or conclusively falsifiable. One such proposal was presented by Carnap (1936–37), which suggested that S is empirically meaningful if and only if it can be translated into what Carnap then defined to be “an empiricist language.” Although this idea had some attractive features that earlier proposals lacked, it too failed to recognize many obviously meaningful scientific statements, as shown by Hempel (1950).5 A different, and initially more intriguing proposal, was offered by Ayer 1952). The idea here was that non-analytic, non-contradictory statements are empirically meaningful if adding them to a set N of non-observational claims already 4 5

See Friedman 1987 and Soames 2018: chapter 6, §5. For further detailed discussion and criticism see Soames 2018: chapter 11, §5.

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certified to be empirically meaningful would result in entailments of observational statements (predictions) not entailed by N alone. When tests of the meaningfulness of individual statements based on this idea were shown by Church (1949) and Hempel (1950) to fail spectacularly, the conclusion, drawn by Quine (1951), was that since confirmation is holistic, meaning must also be, if cognitive meaning is to be identified with confirming experience.6 Unfortunately for verificationism, the appeal to holism was insufficient to block reconstructed versions of the problems of non-holistic verificationism.7 Thus, the attempt to use philosophically inspired theories of meaning as all-purpose philosophical weapons suffered a setback. The attempt to reduce apriority and necessity to truth by convention suffered a similar fate. The linguistic theory of the a priori, advocated by Hahn (1933), held that a priori truths, paradigmatically those of logic, are both true and knowable without appeal to justifying experience because they are stipulated to be true by linguistic conventions. However, Quine (1936) raised a problem. He observed that since proponents of the linguistic theory of the a priori recognize infinitely many a priori truths, they can’t hold that speakers adopt a separate convention for each one. Rather, he argued, they must maintain that speakers adopt finitely many conventions from which infinitely many truths logically follow. But this was no solution. Since appealing to logic presupposed the very apriority it was supposed to explain, Quine’s attack threatened to deny linguistic theory of the a priori its starting point.8 The attack on the conception of necessity as analyticity in Quine (1951) was similarly effective against logical empiricists (see Ebbs, this volume), who maintained that necessity was problematic and incapable of being accommodated by empiricists unless it was explained as analyticity, which was assumed to be unproblematic.9

PHILOSOPHY, LOGIC, AND THE LOGICAL ANALYSIS O F T H E LA N G U A G E O F S C I E NC E

Looking back at the role of logic and language in analytic philosophy from 1879 to the end of the Second World War, one is struck by its fluidity. Initially, advances in logic, and the ideas about language and linguistic meaning 6 7 8 9

Soames (2018: chapter 11, §4) explains and extends the Church and Hempel critiques. This is shown in Soames 2003a: chapter 17, which explains and criticizes Quine’s holistic verificationism. For related criticism, see Soames 2013. See Soames 2003a: chapter 16. See also Soames 2013.

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accompanying them, fueled the belief that philosophical logic and philosophy of language provide philosophical tools needed to solve, not dissolve, traditional problems in metaphysics and epistemology. After the tractarian reverse, in which traditional philosophical problems were to have been shown to be illusory, logical empiricists like Carnap saw philosophy as providing tools needed to unify the sciences and articulate an all-encompassing scientific worldview. That part of the work of philosophers which may be held to be scientific in nature – excluding the empirical questions that can be referred to empirical science – consists of logical analysis. The aim of logical syntax is to provide a system of concepts, a language, by the help of which the results of logical analysis will be exactly formulable. Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science – that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing more than the logical syntax of the language of science. (Carnap 1937: xiii)

Nearly all of Part 5 (in Carnap 1937) is given over to translations designed to reveal the explicitly linguistic content of the study of the logic of science, which was to be the enterprise that “takes the place of the inextricable tangle of problems which is known as philosophy” (363). In effect, it was to be an empirical science of applied logic, the subject-matter of which is the logical structure of the several sciences, and of science itself. In contrast to this sort of highly contentious philosophizing about logic and its relation to philosophy, the era’s lasting achievements in logic came from its philosophically minded logicians. In 1935 Alfred Tarski defined truth for formal languages of mathematics; in the following year (Tarski 1936) he defined logical truth and logical consequence for such languages. Following this, his work was routinely used to interpret formal languages.10 To give such an interpretation is to identify a domain of objects the language is to be used to talk about, to assign each name an object in the domain, each 1-place predicate a subset of the domain, and so on for all non-logical vocabulary. The interpretations of sentences are then derived from the interpretation of that vocabulary using recursive clauses encoding meanings of the logical vocabulary. This allows the interpreter to derive an instance of the schema “S” is a true sentence of L iff P for each sentence of L, where instances arise by replacing “P” with a paraphrase of the sentence replacing “S.” This conception of interpretation remained dominant for many decades. In all, the period from the early 1930s through the early 1960s was one of 10

The complex and conflicted relationship between Tarski’s project of defining truth for formal languages and the use of his work in giving interpretations of those languages is discussed by Soames (2018: chapter 9).

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unprecedented advance in logic. Looking back at logical empiricism, one finds that although there were many informal descriptions of philosophical analysis as logical analysis, the real study of logic and its relation to mathematics was independent of more flamboyant philosophical concerns. Those were the years when logic and metamathematics were transformed by Gödel, Tarski, Church, and Turing. With the emergence of model theory and recursive function theory as mature disciplines, logic and metamathematics separated themselves from earlier, more epistemological and metaphysical investigations by focusing on rigorously defined domains of study. At the same time, a new subdiscipline, often called “philosophical logic,” was born. Whereas classic logic arose from the desire to advance our knowledge of the timeless, non-contingent subject-matter of mathematics, philosophical logic arose from the desire to extend logical methods to new domains. The first steps were to formalize reasoning about the temporal and contingent. Proof-theoretic systems of the modal propositional calculus were given by Lewis and Langford (1932), followed by extensions to include quantification and, finally, the addition of model theories. Milestones included Marcus 1946; Carnap 1946; 1947; Kripke 1959; 1963a; 1963b. Prior (1967) pioneered tense logic. Modal logic introduced an operator, “□,” prefixing of which to a classical logical truth produces a truth. Apart from initial confusion about which notion was to be captured – logical truth, analyticity, or metaphysical necessity – the needed formal ideas soon emerged. (See Burgess 1998; 1999.) Since the new operator is defined in terms of truth at model-like elements, logical models for modal languages had to contain them, now dubbed possible world-states and thought of as ways the world could have been. This development strengthened the Fregean idea that for a (declarative) sentence S to be meaningful is for S to represent the world as being a certain way, which is to impose conditions it must satisfy if S is to be true. With this, truth conditions were for the first time strong enough to approximate meanings. To learn what the world would have to be like to conform to how S represents it is to learn something approximating S’s meaning. At this point we had a putative answer to the question – What is the meaning of a sentence? – plus a new way of studying it. TWO VIEWS OF LANGUAGE AND ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD

Philosophical activity in the analytic tradition immediately following the Second World War was centered in two main groups – one led by Quine and the other led by Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, John Austin, and Paul Grice. The first tended to reject necessity, apriority, and philosophy as

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linguistic analysis, in favor of a conception of philosophy as continuous with science. The second continued to identify philosophy with linguistic analysis, while insisting that analysis is not logical analysis. Neither group fared very well. Quine’s skepticism about necessity, apriority, and analyticity extended to a host of other intensional, and intentional, notions. Challenged by Grice and Strawson (1956), who argued that sameness of meaning can’t be repudiated without repudiating translation and meaning too, Quine in Word and Object (1960) responded by repudiating both. Challenged by Carnap (1955), who argued that meaning and reference are scientifically on par, Quine repudiated reference in Ontological Relativity (1969). Together, these joint repudiations led, as argued by Soames (2013), to an inadvertent reductio of his eliminativism concerning intension and intention. Ordinary language philosophers suffered from two main difficulties. The first was the inability to distinguish necessity from apriority and analyticity – which crippled the anti-Cartesian, analytic behaviorism of Ryle (2002 [1949]; 1953) and undermined what might have been a salvageable insight behind the paradigm case argument of Norman Malcolm (1942).11 The second difficulty was their anti-theoretical approach to language. One can’t successfully maintain that philosophical problems are linguistic confusions to be eliminated by understanding ordinary meaning, without having a well-confirmed theory of meaning. The slogan Meaning is use! isn’t enough, because factors other than meaning affect our use of words. When this lesson was established by Grice (1967), the multiple failures caused by neglecting it – illustrated by Strawson’s performative theory of “true,”12 R. M. Hare’s performative theory of “good,”13 and Austin’s argument that empirical knowledge is sometimes possible without empirical evidence14 – triggered the realization that a more theoretical approach to language was needed.

P H I LO S O P H I C A L F O U N DA T I O N S O F A S C I E N C E O F L A N GU A G E A N D I N F O R M A T I O N

Some found it in Donald Davidson (1967a; 1967b), who advocated finitely axiomatized theories the theorems of which are material biconditionals stating the truth conditions of sentences. Davidson’s innovation was to extract the structure of Tarski’s definition of truth for formalized languages, and to 11 12 13 14

See Soames 2003b: chapters 3, 4, and 7; also Soames 2007. Strawson 1949, critiqued in Soames 2003b: chapter 5. Hare 1952, critiqued in Soames 2003b: chapter 6. Austin 1962, critiqued in Ayer 1967 and Soames 2003b: chapter 8.

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reinterpret it to play the role of an empirical theory of meaning for spoken human languages. In so doing, he connected many philosophers, particularly those friendly to the ordinary language school, to a logical tradition they had once disdained. However, his advance didn’t go far enough.15 At the same time, a more powerful approach, growing out of Saul Kripke’s semantics for quantified modal logic, was being applied to the empirical study of linguistic meaning by philosophers and logicians including Richard Montague, David Kaplan, Hans Kamp, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker. This was when philosophical interest in language decisively turned to laying the foundations of the empirical science of linguistic meaning, and the analytic tradition entered its next stage. This new stage was also signaled by the revival of normative theory by John Rawls (1971) and the articulation, by Kripke (1972), of a philosophically important conception of necessity that is both nonlinguistic and noncoextensive with apriority. From this point on, philosophy was seldom identified with linguistic analysis. Today, what remains of the original turn to language and logic in the analytic tradition isn’t a set of doctrines, but a pattern of interests and ways of philosophizing. All the original interests – in logic, language, mathematics, and science – continue in new forms. Although logic and linguistic analysis are still important tools in advancing traditional concerns, the main philosophical interest in language lies in contributing to the foundation of the emerging science of language and information. Whereas in earlier days of the tradition, language was often viewed as an easily grasped means of achieving antecedent philosophical ends, today it is seen as the complex subject-matter of a young science to which philosophers have already made great contributions, and to which they continue to add new ideas. Recent progress in this effort extends from the mid-sixties to the present. During this period philosophers and theoretical linguists have expanded the original framework provided by Kripkean possible-world semantics to cover large fragments of human languages. Familiar modal operators now include it is necessarily the case that, it could have been the case that, and if it had been the case that S, then it would have been the case that R’. Operators involving time and tense have been treated along similar lines. Generalized quantifiers have been added, along with adverbs of quantification, and propositional attitude verbs such as believe, expect, and know. Philosophical logicians have also given us accounts of adverbial modifiers, comparatives, intensional transitives, indexicals, and demonstratives. At each step, a language fragment for which we had a truth-theoretic semantics

15

Soames (2008b) discusses the attractions, as well as the shortcomings, of Davidson’s program.

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has been expanded to include more natural language constructions. As the program advances, the fragments of which we have a good truth-theoretic grasp become more fully representative of natural language. Although one may doubt that all aspects of natural language can be squeezed into some version of this paradigm, there is little doubt that key elements of the program will eventually find their place in a mature science of language and information. Despite this progress, it would be a mistake to think that the foundations of this science are now in place. If all that remained were to fill gaps in systems of possible-world semantics and to flesh out details of applying them to natural languages, philosophers would already have done most of what was required to secure the foundations of the aspiring science. But there is much more to be done. To date, we have used truth conditions to model representational contents of sentences, but we haven’t paid enough attention to the demands sentences place on their users. Given the history of formal semantics, it could hardly have been otherwise. When the chief goal was to capture the logical, analytic, and necessary consequences of mathematical and scientific statements, there was little need to focus on the cognitive and communicative aspects of language use, or to individuate thoughts beyond necessary equivalence. Now that the goal is a genuine science of language and information, there is. It is well known that taking the proposition semantically expressed by S at a context of use C – its semantic content at C – to be a function from circumstances of evaluation (pairs of times and world-states) to the truth value of S at C (and those circumstances) creates intractable problems for accommodating propositional attitudes and other hyperintensional constructions (Soames 1987; 2008c). It is also known that quick fixes haven’t worked (Soames 1987; 2005a; 2006). It is less well known that this lack of success is related to conceptual issues about truth and representation. Meanings and semantic contents are interpretations of (uses of ) sentences on which speakers and hearers converge. As such, they can’t, on pain of regress, depend on further interpretation. But interpretation is what sets of truth-supporting circumstances, or functions from such to truth values, require (Soames 2010a). Is the set containing only world-states 1, 2, 3 true or false? The question is bizarre. Since no set of worldstates represents anything as being any way, no set of world-states is true or false. We could, if we wished, decide to take the set containing worlds 1–3 to represent the actual world-state as being in the set, and so as being true iff no state outside it were instantiated. We could also decide to take it as representing the actual world-state as not being in the set, and so as being true iff no state inside it were instantiated. Without interpretation by us, neither the set, nor the related function, represents anything, or has truth conditions. Since propositions

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are primary bearers of truth, which have their truth conditions intrinsically, they aren’t these sets or these functions.16 Truth is, as Aristotle intimated, the property a proposition p has when the world is as p represents it. It is also a property which, when predicated of p, gives us a claim, that p is true, which we are warranted in accepting, believing, or doubting if and only if we are warranted in accepting, believing, or doubting p. Since we have to presuppose propositions to explain what truth is, propositions are conceptually prior to truth (Soames 2015a). Propositions are also conceptually prior to world-states, which are properties of making sets of propositions that tell complete world-stories true. Hence truth and world-states aren’t the building blocks out of which propositions are constructed.17 For these reasons propositions aren’t what possible-worlds semantics have said they are. Nor is the two-place predicate true at w the undefined primitive it has been taken to be. If it were, then nothing about the meaning of S would follow from the theorem, For all world-states w, S is true at w if and only if at w, the earth moves, just as nothing follows from the pseudo-theorem For all world-states w, S is T at w if and only if at w, the earth moves (when no explanation of T is presupposed). To say that S is true at w is to say that S expresses a proposition that would be true if w were actual (instantiated).18 To understand true at w in this way is to presuppose prior notions of the proposition S expresses and the monadic notion of truth applying to it. Employing these notions, we appeal to the triviality, If S means, or expresses, the proposition that so-and so, then necessarily the proposition expressed by S is true if and only if so-and-so plus the theorem S is true at w if and only if at w, the earth moves to derive that S means, or expresses, some proposition necessarily equivalent to the proposition that the earth moves.19 In short, possible-worlds semantics requires a conceptually prior notion of proposition, if it is to provide any information about meaning at all (Soames 2015a: 12–13). For all these reasons, the next major philosophical contribution to the foundations of a science of language and information must be an empirically defensible, naturalistic conception of propositions as primary bearers of truth conditions, objects of attitudes like belief and assertion, meanings of some sentences, and contents of some mental states. To articulate a naturalistic conception, one must provide a conception of propositions that allows us to explain 16 17 18

19

See King, Soames, and Speaks 2014: chapter 3; also Soames 2015a: chapter 1. See Soames 2010b: chapter 5; 2015a: chapter 1. It won’t do to take the claim that Sentence S is true at w to say that if w were instantiated, then S would be true, because S might fail to exist, or S might exist but not mean what it actually means, at some world-state at which the earth moves. Here “S” is a metalinguistic variable over sentences and “so-and-so” functions as a schematic letter.

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relations, like belief, that all cognitive agents bear to them, as well as the knowledge of propositions that normal humans have, but some less sophisticated cognitive agents, e.g. infants and animals, don’t. To provide an empirically defensible conception of propositions, one must show that it offers new solutions to currently intractable problems – such as Frege’s puzzle (see Salmon 1986), Kripke’s (1979) puzzle about belief, Perry’s (1977; 1979; 2001a; 2001b) problem of the essential indexical, Jackson’s (1986) problem about knowing what red things look like, and Nagel’s (1974) problem about what it’s like to be a bat. Fortunately, work along these lines is well under way. Although no consensus has yet emerged, largely complementary research programs are pursued by King (2007), King, Soames, and Speaks (2014), Soames (2015a), Hanks (2015), Jesperson (2010; 2012; 2015), and Moltmann (2017). Another foundational issue receiving attention is the distinction between two senses of meaning: the semantic content of an expression E versus what is required to fully understand E. The semantic content of E is what one’s use of it must express or designate, if that use is to conform to the linguistic conventions governing E. If, like the natural kind terms “water” and “gold,” E isn’t contextsensitive, then, ambiguity aside, a use of E is normally expected to contribute its semantic content – e.g. the natural kinds H2O and AU – to the illocutionary contents of utterances of sentences containing E. If, like indexicals “I” and “now,” E’s semantic content is relativized to contexts, then one’s use of it in a context will standardly designate, not its linguistic meaning, but its semantic content there – e.g. the user of the first-person pronoun or the time at which the temporal indexical is uttered. Part of understanding E is being able to use it with its semantic content. But that isn’t the whole story. Nor is it either necessary or sufficient for understanding to know, of the semantic content of E, that it is E’s content. It’s not necessary, because when a proposition p is the semantic content of a sentence S, understanding S doesn’t require making p an object of one’s thought (Soames 2015a: chapters 2, 4). It’s not sufficient, because understanding S often requires a different sort of knowledge (chapter 4). To understand a word, phrase, or sentence is to be able to use it in ways that meet the shared expectations that language users rely on for effective communication. This involves graded recognitional and inferential capacities on which the efficacy of much of linguistic communication depends. Not only do “water” and “H2O” have the same kind k as content, one can know, of k, that “water” stands for it, while knowing, of k, that “H2O” stands for it, without understanding either term, or knowing that they designate the same kind. Understanding each involves knowing the body of information standardly presupposed in linguistic interchanges involving each ibid., chapter 4.

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A third foundational issue is the relationship between the information semantically encoded by (a use of ) a sentence (in a context), on the one hand, and the assertions it is there used to make, the beliefs it is there used to express, and the information it is there used to convey, on the other. In the past, it has often been assumed that the semantic content of a sentence is identical, or nearly so, with what one who accepts it thereby believes, and with what one who utters it thereby asserts. But there is a growing recognition that this is far too simple. As observed by Sperber and Wilson (1986), Recanati (2010), Bach (1994), Carston (2002), and Soames (2002; 2010b: chapter 7; 2015a: chapters 2–5, 9), the contextual information available to speaker-hearers is much more potent in combining with the semantic content of the sentence uttered to determine the (multiple) propositions asserted by an utterance than was once imagined. Although the semantic content of S always contributes to the propositions asserted by utterances of S, that content isn’t always itself a complete proposition, and even when it is, that content isn’t always itself one of the propositions asserted. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indexicals, demonstratives, incomplete definite descriptions, first-person and present-tense attitudes, perceptual and linguistic cognition, and other aspects of language and language use.20 Additional foundational issues needing attention involve the use of interrogative sentences to ask questions and imperative sentences to issue orders or directives. Although these are neither true nor false, they are illocutionary contents of linguistic performances that are closely related to assertive utterances that express propositions. Somehow the different sorts of contents – propositions, questions, and orders/directives – fit together as seamlessly as do uses of the interrogative, imperative, and declarative sentences that express them. Attention must also be paid to uses of declaratives that may have non-representational, or expressive, dimensions – e.g. epistemic modals and moral, or other evaluative, sentences. We don’t yet have a unified theory of all this, but we are beginning to assemble the pieces.

THE MULTIPLE ROLES OF LANGUAGE IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

To sum up, the story of the philosophy of language in analytic philosophy has been one of dramatic change. Initially, in the hands of Frege and Russell, language became, along with the new logic, the object of systematic 20

See Soames 2002; 2005b; 2005c; 2008a; 2009c; 2010a; 2015a: chapters 2–6.

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philosophical inquiry aimed first at advancing the philosophy of mathematics, and then at transforming metaphysics and epistemology. Later, vastly oversimplified models of language were mistaken for the real thing and used as philosophical weapons in attempts to sweep away metaphysics, normativity, and much of the traditional agenda of philosophy, in favor of a logico-linguistic conception of the subject. When this vision failed, ordinary language philosophers attempted to retain the conception of philosophy as linguistic analysis, while divorcing the latter from logical analysis, and continuing to identify epistemic and metaphysical modalities with linguistic modalities. During the same period, Quine and his followers went to the opposite extreme, retaining, in their philosophy, the scientific spirit of the logical empiricists while rejecting the very possibility of an empirical science of linguistic meaning, reference, and the intensional contents of mental states of language users. When these two competing mid-twentieth-century philosophical visions came to grief, the relationship between language and philosophy had to be rethought yet again. No longer the heart of philosophy, nor a disorderly collection of empirical phenomena to be studied, if at all, without using mentalistic notions like meaning and reference, language again became just one of many important objects of philosophical study. Only this time there is a difference. Thanks in part to philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, Alonzo Church, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Hans Kamp, and David Kaplan, the now mature disciplines of formal logic, philosophical logic, and computation theory have helped launch the empirical sciences of language and information and their application to natural languages. This is the emerging scientific enterprise to which today’s analytic philosophers of language are contributing. Finally, it must be remembered that the relevance of philosophy of language to other aspects of philosophy has always transcended the programmatic pronouncements made for it at the time. Many effective uses of philosophical insights gained from the investigation of language have come, not in advancing programmatic goals, but in criticizing prominent philosophical doctrines of the day. One early example is the critique by Russell (1910) and Moore (1919–20) of the Absolute Idealist argument that all properties of an object, including its relational properties, are essential to it, and that, because of this, Reality is an indissoluble whole every part of which is essential to every other part. As Moore and Russell showed, that argument suffered from a classic Russellian scope ambiguity involving a modal operator. On one resolution the argument is logically invalid; on the other it is question begging (Soames 2014: 414–19). Another example can be found in Moore (1903). There Moore criticizes the

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doctrine that to exist is to perceive or be perceived, which Idealists used to support their claim that nothing exists outside of consciousness, and hence that reality is spiritual. Their key mistake, according to Moore, was based on an ambiguity in their talk of sensory experience that led them to confuse the object of perception – e.g. the color blue that we see – with their seeing it. The mistake is similar to one that still has some currency today – namely that of confusing pain, which is a fallible internal perception of bodily damage, with the object of that perception. As persuasively argued by Byrne (2001), many philosophers make this mistake (in part) because we ordinarily speak of pain both as what we experience and as our experience of it (Byrne 2001: 227–30). We speak of it as something we feel, just as we speak of blue as something we see, an explosion as something we hear, a stone as something we touch, and food as something we taste. The object of these perceptual verbs – “see,” “hear,” “touch,” and “taste” – is the thing perceived, just as the object of “feel” seems to be the pain in one’s leg. But we also speak of pain, not as the thing felt but as the feeling itself. We say that pain is a feeling, even though we don’t say that colors are seeings, explosions are hearings, stones are touchings, or foods are tastings. Because we speak of pain both as the thing that we feel and as our feeling of it, we take the idea of unfelt pains to be absurd, just as Idealists took the idea of unseen colors to be absurd. Unfelt pains are absurd, but not because pains are things we perceive that couldn’t exist without being perceived. Unfelt pains are absurd because pains are perceptual experiences, and it is absurd to speak of unexperienced experiences. It’s not absurd that the objects of pain perceptions – the damage they report – might exist without being perceived. That occurs when we are given a pain-killing – i.e. a perception-of-damage-killing – anesthetic. Similarly it’s not absurd that the patch of blue seen by the Idealist continues to exist when it isn’t perceived. Idealists missed this point because they used the same word, sensation, to cover both what is perceived and our perceiving it. Examples like this, which don’t invoke questionable linguistic doctrines to advance predetermined philosophical ends, are as relevant today as they ever were.

2 ANALYTICITY The Carnap–Quine Debate and Its Aftermath

gary e b b s W. V. Quine’s criticisms of Rudolf Carnap’s efforts to draw a boundary between analytic and synthetic sentences shook mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy to its foundations, leaving logical empiricism in ruins and sparking the development of radically new ways of theorizing that continue to shape philosophy today. Despite decades of discussion, however, neither Carnap’s analytic–synthetic distinction nor Quine’s criticisms of it are well understood. My central goals here are to summarize and clarify them, evaluate influential objections to Quine’s criticisms, survey related work on analyticity and apriority by Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, David Chalmers, Paul Boghossian, and Gillian Russell, among others, and briefly discuss whether meaning is determinate in ways that recent explications of analyticity require. HOW ANALYTICITY CAME TO BE REGARDED AS CENTRAL TO PHILOSOPHY

Since at least as early as Kant, philosophers have distinguished between analytic statements, which they suppose to be true solely by virtue of what the statements mean, and synthetic statements, which they suppose to be true, if true at all, by virtue both of what the statements mean and of extralinguistic facts. Kant’s version of this distinction focuses not on statements, but on judgments, and, in particular, on judgments “in which the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought” (Kant 1929 [1781]: 48). A judgment of this form is analytic, according to Kant, if the predicate is “contained” in the subject; otherwise the judgment is synthetic. Kant argued that one can know a priori, i.e. independent of empirical evidence, that an analytic judgment is true. He also argued that our knowledge of arithmetic and geometry is a priori. Limited by the traditional syllogistic logic of his day, however, he saw no way to view such knowledge as analytic. Even the simplest axioms of arithmetic, such as “Every number has a successor,” resist paraphrase in the monadic quantificational terms of traditional syllogistic logic (Friedman 2010: 591). Kant concluded that our knowledge of 32

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arithmetic and geometry is synthetic a priori. The leading question in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is “How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?” His revolutionary answer implies that much of traditional philosophy is misguided and fruitless, the result of efforts to answer questions that transcend reason’s powers. Kant labeled all such efforts “metaphysics.” Kant’s view that arithmetic and geometry are synthetic a priori was challenged and gradually discredited by a series of advances in logic, geometry, physics, and philosophy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Friedman 2010). Building on these advances, in the 1910s and 1920s a group of scientifically oriented philosophers, including Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Moritz Schlick, devised ways of formulating Albert Einstein’s revolutionary theories of special and general relativity in terms of a new conception of analyticity that encompasses polyadic quantificational logic and axioms of arithmetic and even set theory, as needed, and an exclusively empiricist conception of synthetic statements. Contrary to Kant, these new philosophers, the logical empiricists (also known as the logical positivists), concluded that there are no synthetic a priori truths. They nevertheless endorsed the spirit of Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics: Just as Kant dismissed any question that transcends (what he regarded as) reason’s powers as misguided and fruitless, so the logical empiricists dismissed any supposed question that cannot be formulated in a well-defined formal system with empirical applications as devoid of cognitive content. C A R N A P ’ S A N A L Y T I C – S Y N T H E T I C DI S T I N C T I O N

The logical empiricist’s efforts to clarify their conception of cognitively meaningful discourse culminated in Carnap’s work in the 1930s and 1940s. Starting in Logical Syntax of Language (1937, henceforth Syntax), Carnap fashioned a new form of logical empiricism, Wissenschaftslogik, or the logic of science, rooted in the principles that everything that can be said is said by science (Carnap 1934a: 47) and that if investigators are to agree or disagree at all, they must share clear, explicit criteria for evaluating their assertions (Carnap 1963a: 44–5). Carnap rejects both rationalism and empiricism about logical and mathematical truths. To explain how a logical or a mathematical truth can be acceptable yet not justified by a rational perception or empirical evidence, Carnap formulates such truths so that they are analytic, or “true in virtue of meaning” (1963a: 46–7, 63–4). Carnap’s development of these ideas in Syntax is inspired and shaped by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (Gödel 1931). Using methods Gödel devised to prove his new theorems, Carnap shows how to construct syntactical

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definitions of “logical consequence” for what he called language systems – artificial languages with built-in syntactical and semantical rules.1 Each language system LS is characterized by its formation rules, which specify the sentences of LS, and its transformation rules, which together settle, for every sentence s of LS and every set R of sentences of LS, whether or not s is a logical consequence of R in LS. A typical language system contains finite transformation rules – primitive sentences and rules of inference each of which refers to a finite number of premises – otherwise known as rules of deduction. Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem shows that if LS contains elementary arithmetic, the rules of deduction of LS do not together define the logical consequence for LS. Carnap therefore proposed that we define the logical consequence relation for such languages either by laying down transfinite rules of transformation (also known as omega rules), which are defined for an infinite number of premises, or by adopting a syntactical definition of truth for the logical and mathematical parts of a language system (Carnap 1937: §§14, 34, 43–5). It is in terms of the logical consequence relation of a given language system that Carnap defines “analytic,” “contradictory,” and “synthetic” as follows: A sentence s is L-valid (analytic) in LS if and only if the L-rules of LS together settle that s is a logical consequence in LS of the empty set of sentences of LS; s is L-contravalid (contradictory) in LS if and only if the L-rules of LS together settle that the negation of s is a logical consequence of the empty set of sentences of LS. s is synthetic in LS if and only if s is neither analytic nor contradictory in LS. (1937: §52)

A language system suitable for empirical science also contains synthetic sentences, some of which, the so-called protocol sentences, such as “That spot is red,” “This piece of paper is blue,” are classified by their syntactical form as suitable for expressing empirical observations (Carnap 1936–37: 454–6; 1937: 317). In pure syntax or semantics we may specify any language system we please and investigate its logical consequences in abstraction from any actual language. In descriptive syntax and semantics, we may stipulate that the sentence forms of a language system we have constructed in pure syntax or semantics are to be correlated with particular strings of sounds or marks that we can use to make 1

Soon after publishing Syntax, Carnap learned of Tarski’s method for defining truth for formalized languages (Tarski 1935), and he began including Tarski-style truth definitions among the rules of a language system. He noted that a syntactical definition of truth for the logical and mathematical parts of a language system “can be brought into a technically more simple but not essentially different form by a procedure . . . (originated by Tarski) of defining ‘true’ in semantics” (Carnap 1942: 247). In the exposition that follows this note, the phrase “transformation rule” should be understood to encompass both syntactical and Tarski-style semantical rules of a given constructed language system.

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claims (Carnap 1942: §5). Once we have stipulated such correlations, a sentence of our physics, for instance, will be tested by deducing consequences on the basis of the transformation rules of the language, until finally sentences of the form of protocol-sentences are reached. These will then be compared with the protocol-sentences which have actually been stated and either confirmed or refuted by them. (Carnap 1937: 317)

Carnap emphasized that although our decision as to which sentences of physics state laws of nature is based upon the observations made so far, “nevertheless it is not uniquely determined by them” (Carnap 1936–37: 426). He concluded that such decisions are partly “conventional” despite their “subordination to empirical control by means of the protocol sentences” (Carnap 1937: 320). In short, “the [physical] laws [of a language system] are not inferred from protocol sentences, but are selected and laid down” in accord with one’s commitments regarding the existing protocol sentences (1937: 317–18). To make explicit the conventional element in our decisions as to which physical laws to accept, and thereby forestall unscientific questions about whether our acceptance of such laws is justified, Carnap proposes that we build physical laws into a language system by stipulating P-rules, or physical rules, for the system (1937: §51). With P-rules in place, we can define P-validity as follows: Sentence s is P-valid in language system LS if and only if s is a consequence in LS of the set of L- and P-rules of LS and s is not L-valid (analytic) in LS.

The key methodological significance for Carnap of this and the previous definitions is that if a sentence of a language system is L-valid or P-valid then (first) anyone who has chosen to use the system, understands its rules, and has derived the sentence from the rules is thereby committed to accepting the sentence; and (second) there is no legitimate “higher” or “firmer” criterion for judging whether the sentence is true (Carnap 1934a: 46). The rules for language systems are specified in such a way that they can be regarded as part of science – the science of arithmetic – via Gödel numbering and recursion theory. Since mathematicians freely propose and derive consequences from any definitions they like, and logical syntax can be viewed as part of arithmetic, it is in accord with scientific practice to adopt any formation and transformation rules we like (Carnap 1937: §17). This attitude is encapsulated in Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance: In logic, there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build up his own logic, i.e. his own form of language, as he wishes. All that is required of him is that, if he wishes to discuss it, he must state his methods clearly. . . (1937: 52).

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When combined with Pierre Duhem’s observation that a statement has empirical consequences only if it is conjoined with other statements, Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance engenders a radically permissive view of how rules of a language system may be revised in the face of unexpected observations: If a sentence which is an L-consequence of certain P-primitive sentences contradicts a sentence which has been stated as a protocol-sentence, then some change must be made in the system. For instance, the P-rules can be altered in such a way that those particular primitive sentences are no longer valid; or the protocol-sentence can be taken as being non-valid; or again the L-rules which have been used in the deduction can also be changed. There are no established rules for the kind of change which must be made . . . All rules are laid down with the reservation that they may be altered as soon as it is expedient to do so. This applies not only to the P-rules but also to the L-rules, including those of mathematics. (1937: 317–18, my emphasis)

Although we are committed more firmly to some rules of a system than we are to other rules of the system, according to Carnap, “In this regard there are only differences of degree; certain rules are more difficult to renounce than others” (1937: 318). QUINE’S CRITICISMS OF CARNAP’S ANALYTIC– SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION

Quine traveled to Prague in the early 1930s to meet Carnap, thus beginning a decades-long intellectual exchange with him (Quine 1986: 11–13). In “Truth by convention” (Quine 1936) Quine explains that logic cannot be true by explicit convention, since there are infinitely many logical truths and one needs to presuppose logic to derive those truths from any set of finitely many explicit conventions. This observation supplements Carnap’s earlier observation in Syntax that due to a syntactical version of Tarski’s Undefinability Theorem, if LS is a consistent language system rich enough to express elementary arithmetic, then “analytic-in-LS” cannot be defined in LS, and therefore depends for its formulation and application on the logic of a stronger metalanguage (Carnap 1937: Theorem 60c.1; Ebbs 2011a). These technical points, on which Carnap was clear, make plain that Carnap does not hold that the logical or mathematical truths of a given language system are “made true” by its transformation rules (as Boghossian 1996: 365, claims), or that such truths are a priori in a traditional sense (as Sober 2000: 259–60, and Soames 2003a: 264, claim). Quine’s goal in “Two dogmas of empiricism” (Quine 1953a, henceforth “Two dogmas”) is to demonstrate that “empiricists,” especially Carnap, have failed to explain their term “analytic” in a language suited for and used in the sciences. As Quine later explained, his doubts about Carnap’s analytic–synthetic

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distinction were an expression of “the same sort of attitude, the sort of discipline that Carnap shared and that I owed, certainly, in part to Carnap’s influence: I was just being more carnapian than Carnap in being criticial in this question” (Quine 1994: 228). Quine places two constraints on a successful explication of “analytic”: (first) sentences that are analytic “by general philosophical acclaim” (“Two dogmas,” 22) should be analytic according to the explication; and (second) a sentence should be analytic according to the explication only if it is true (“Two dogmas,” 34). He assumes that first-order logical truths, defined as true sentences that “remain true under all reinterpretations of [their] components other than the logical particles,” are among the acclaimed “analytic” sentences (“Two dogmas,” 22–3). In taking this first step, Quine follows Carnap, who proposed it himself in discussions with Tarski and Quine in 1941 (Frost-Arnold 2013: 156). Quine then proposes that a sentence is in the wider class of analytic truths if “it can be turned into a logical truth by putting synonyms for synonyms” (“Two dogmas,” 23), and notes that to specify the wider class of analytic truths, we need a precise, unambiguous notion of synonymy. In taking this second step, Quine again follows Carnap, who writes, “A precise account of the meaning of the L-terms [including “L-true” (analytic)] has to be given by definitions for them” (Carnap 1942: 62; see also Carnap 1963c: 918). Quine’s question in §2 of “Two dogmas” is whether the wider class of analytic truths can be regarded as true by definition. His answer is that with the sole exception of explicitly adopted definitional abbreviations, the synonymies we would need to clarify in order to specify the wider class of analytic truths are not “created” by definitions, but presuppose independent and prior relations of synonymy that do not hinge on our adoption of definitions (Ebbs 2017b). In §3 of “Two dogmas,” Quine considers whether one can define synonymy for two linguistic expressions in terms of their inter-substitutivity in all logically relevant grammatical contexts without a change in truth-value. He points out that this strategy will satisfy the above constraints on a successful explication of “analytic” only if inter-substitutivity is defined relative to a language that contains the word “necessarily.” The strategy is therefore ultimately circular, if, as he, Carnap, and other scientific philosophers assumed, modal notions such as necessity and possibility are themselves unclear, and should be explicated, if at all, in terms of analyticity. Carnap can agree with all of the arguments in §§1–3 of “Two dogmas.” The main point of these sections is to clear the ground for Quine’s criticism, in §4, of Carnap’s method of drawing an analytic–synthetic distinction. Quine’s criticism is that Carnap’s methods of defining analyticity allow us to classify the sentences

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of a given natural language as “analytic”or not only relative to a conventional decision about which language system corresponds with, or describes, the natural language. (Recall that it is the task of descriptive syntax and semantics to specify such correlations.) Even assuming that analytic sentences are supposed to be true, by deciding to label sentences “analytic-in-L1,” “analytic-in-L2,” etc., we do not explain “analytic in L” for variable L. In short, Quine argues, Carnap’s methods fail to explain what the labels “analytic-in-L1,” “analytic-inL2” mean. This difficulty is compounded by Carnap’s distinction between L-rules and P-rules. As noted in §2 above, Carnap stresses that all rules are laid down with the reservation that they may be altered as soon as it is expedient to do so. This applies not only to the P-rules but also to the L-rules, including those of mathematics. (Carnap 1937: 318)

From this methodological point of view, the distinction between L-valid (analytic) or P-valid sentences, hence also the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, looks arbitrary (Quine 1963: 398; Hempel 1963: §vii; Friedman 2010: 671–3). To make matters worse, when Quine wrote “Two dogmas,” Carnap had still not explained how to draw the distinction to his own satisfaction,2 and none of the explications of it that Carnap later proposed, many of which (e.g. Carnap 1958; 1963b: 964) are complicated and technical, provided a language-system-independent criterion for classifying a sentence as Lvalid (analytic), not P-valid. (For a carnapian reply to these concerns, see Friedman 2010: 673–8.) In §5 of “Two dogmas,” Quine argues that one cannot draw a boundary between analytic and synthetic sentences directly in verificationist terms. Following Duhem and Carnap (1958: 318, cited above), Quine argues that since no sentence can be tested by experience in isolation from other sentences, one cannot define analyticity directly in terms of confirmation by experiences. Some readers (e.g. Hookway 1988: 36–7) have taken this argument as a criticism of Carnap. In Carnap’s view, however, the analytic–synthetic distinction, including the relationships between theoretical sentences and protocol sentences, can be drawn only relative to a language system defined by explicit formation and transformation rules. Since Quine assumes in §5 that there are no such rules, his reasoning in §5 does not directly engage or conflict with Carnap’s views. 2

In 1966, Carnap writes, “although I did not share the pessimism of Quine and Hempel [about the prospects of drawing an analytic–synthetic distinction for theoretical vocabulary] I always admitted that it was a serious problem and that I could not see a satisfactory solution . . . Finally, after many years of searching, I found this new approach [in Carnap 1958 and Carnap 1963b: 964]” (Carnap 1995 [1966]: 276–7).

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In §6 of “Two dogmas” Quine recommends that we view science as a “field of force whose boundary conditions are experience” (“Two dogmas,” 42). He sees no need to draw a boundary between analytic and synthetic sentences of a language. It is enough to apply scientific method, and to note that some statements are more firmly accepted and accordingly less likely to be revised in the face of surprising new experiences than others. In this way Quine aims to purge Carnap’s terms “L-rule,” “P-rule,” “analytic,” and “synthetic” from his description of scientific methodology, while remaining true to the radical spirit of Carnap’s scientific philosophy, by rejecting the traditional philosopher’s goal of providing justifications that are “higher” or “firmer” than any that science provides.

GRICE AND STRAWSON IN DEFENSE OF ANALYTICITY

In “In defense of a dogma” H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson (1956) raise several influential objections to Quine’s reasoning in “Two dogmas.” One of their objections presupposes that Quine requires of a satisfactory explanation of an expression that it should take the form of a pretty strict definition but should not make use of any member of a group of interdefinable terms to which the expression belongs. (1956: 148)

Grice and Strawson object that this requirement is in general too strong. In particular, in the case of “analytic” they believe we should be permitted to make use of other terms in the same family, including “synonymous” and “necessary.” This objection rests on a misunderstanding. Quine does not in general require of a definition that it “not make any use of any member of a group of inter-definable terms to which the expression belongs,” as Grice and Strawson claim. Quine assumes, instead, that the ordinary language terms “analytic,” “synonymous,” and “necessary” are not clear enough to help us to settle a boundary between the analytic and the synthetic sentences of the sort Carnap and other scientific philosophers would need to carry out their logical empiricist project. As I noted above, Carnap himself emphasizes this point (1942: 62). Grice and Strawson also challenge Quine’s claim in §6 of “Two dogmas” that any sentence, no matter how firmly held, may be revised. If this observation is to be relevant to the claim that a firmly held sentence is analytic, they reason, then it must be understood as the claim that any sentence can be revised without changing its meaning. Grice and Strawson correctly point out, however, that from the fact that any sentence may be revised it does not follow that any sentence may be revised without changing its meaning. They believe that

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Quine has missed this obvious point, and so one of his central arguments against analyticity is fallacious (Grice and Strawson 1956: 243). While superficially plausible, this influential criticism rests on three related misunderstandings. First, Quine does not deny that some changes in theory bring about changes in meaning. When he wrote “Two dogmas,” he had already developed his well-known view that “the laws of mathematics and logic . . . are so central, any revision of them is felt to be the adoption of a new conceptual scheme, the imposition of new meanings on old words” (Quine 1950: 3). His point in §6 of “Two dogmas” that the truths of logic can be revised is not about meaning, but about methodology: It amounts to the claim (reminiscent of the view Carnap expresses in the quote on p. 36 above) that no statement we now accept, not even a logical truth that we find obvious, is guaranteed to be part of every scientific theory we will later come to accept (Ebbs 2016). Second, Quine held that we do not need to classify the simple truths of logic as analytic to explain why we firmly accept them and regard rejections of them as changes in their meanings. It is enough, he thinks, that we take the simple truths of logic to be so obvious that apparent evidence that another speaker rejects them is evidence that we have badly translated his words (Quine 1960: 59, 66–7). Third, as I stressed above, Quine’s central target in “Two dogmas” is Carnap’s proposed account of the analytic–synthetic distinction. According to Carnap, however, the truth-values of an L-valid (analytic) or a P-valid sentence do not change; a decision to cease affirming such sentences is a decision to cease using the language system of which they are a part and to adopt a language system with different rules. To draw an analytic–synthetic distinction of the sort that Carnap and other scientific philosophers sought, it is therefore not sufficient to show that there are some truths one cannot cease to affirm without ceasing to use the language system of which they are a part, for this is also true of P-valid sentences, as Carnap points out in his reply to “Two dogmas” (Carnap 1963c: 921). HILARY PUTNAM’S REJECTION OF CARNAP’S A N A L Y T I C – S Y N T H E T I C DI S T I N C T I O N

Unlike Grice and Strawson, in the early part of his career Hilary Putnam was deeply sympathetic with the principles of scientific philosophy, knew the literature in logical empiricist philosophy of science, and contributed to it himself. Putnam studied with Quine at Harvard, where he did his first year of graduate studies. He then transferred to UCLA, where he studied with Hans Reichenbach. Soon after completing his Ph.D. at UCLA, Putnam also worked closely for a time with Rudolph Carnap. After learning of Quine’s criticisms of the analytic–synthetic distinction in 1950 from Carl Hempel (Putnam

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2015: 16–17), Putnam became one of the earliest converts to Quine’s project of developing a new scientific philosophy that does not rest on the logical empiricists’ analytic–synthetic distinction. In his first major contribution to the debate, “The analytic and the synthetic” (Putnam 1962a), Putnam emphasizes that there are some statements in natural language, such as “Bachelors are unmarried,” for which (first) there is only one criterion for applying the subject term, in this case “Bachelor,” and (second) by this criterion, the sentence is true. The existence of such statements apparently demonstrates that there are some analytic sentences in natural language, contrary to what Quine claims. As Putnam knows, however, this is not a deep challenge to Quine’s arguments in “Two dogmas,” for two main reasons. First, as noted above, in §2 of “Two dogmas” Quine grants that explicit acts of definitional abbreviation create synonymies. The relationship between a word we introduce by an explicit act of definitional abbreviation and the expression we introduce the word to abbreviate is similar to the relationship between our uses of a one-criterion word of an unregimented natural language and the longer phrase of that language that states the generally accepted criterion for applying the word. It is therefore not a big step for Quine to acknowledge the existence in natural language of one-criterion words, such as “bachelor,” and the corresponding sentences, such as “Bachelors are unmarried,” to which everyone assents. Quine took this step, acknowledging Putnam, in chapter 2 of Word and Object (Quine 1960: 56–7). Second, and more important, like Quine, Putnam saw that for any two words at least one of which is not a one-criterion word, the question whether the words are synonymous is at best unclear. In “The analytic and the synthetic” Putnam develops and extends this part of Quine’s criticism of the logical empiricists’ analytic–synthetic distinction by highlighting a range of examples of theoretical statements that are not fruitfully classified as either analytic or synthetic. For instance, before the development of relativity theory, Putnam explains, physicists were unable to see any way in which “e = ½ mv2,” an equation for kinetic energy, could be false. They held it immune from disconfirmation by new empirical evidence, and it was reasonable for them to do so. By Carnap’s logical empiricist principles, Putnam notes, the methodological role of the equation is best explained by describing it as true by definition of “kinetic energy.” After Einstein developed relativity theory, however, scientists revised “e = ½ mv2,” replacing it with a more complicated equation that fits the new theory, and concluded that “e = ½ mv2,” while approximately true, was strictly speaking false, hence not true by definition. To make sense of such cases, Putnam introduces the idea of a “law-cluster” term, which figures in many different laws of a theory. He observes that we can

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give up one of the laws in which such a term figures without concluding that the reference of the term has changed. For instance, we can continue to use a given term to refer to kinetic energy while radically changing our theory of kinetic energy. Such terms are, in a word, trans-theoretical. In “It ain’t necessarily so” (Putnam 1962b) Putnam observes that our theories of the geometry of physical space have changed since the eighteenth century, when the principles of Euclidean geometry were so fundamental to our way of thinking about physical space that we could not then conceive of any alternatives to those principles. Putnam argues that while our theory of physical space has changed radically since the eighteenth century, it is nevertheless correct to regard the terms that scientists in the eighteenth century used to refer to paths through physical space as trans-theoretical and to conclude that many of the sentences about physical space that scientists accepted in the eighteenth century, such as “The sum of the interior angles of any triangle formed by joining three points in physical space by the shortest paths between them is 180
,” are false. Putnam concludes that some statements are so basic for us at a given time that it would not be reasonable to give them up at that time, even if our failure to be able to conceive of alternatives to them is no guarantee that they are true. This observation simultaneously discredits both Kant’s view that the theory that physical space is Euclidean is synthetic a priori and the logical empiricists’ alternative view that the development of relativistic non-Euclidean theories of space changed the meaning of such theoretical terms as “straight line” and “shortest path between two points in physical space.” Putnam’s emphasis on trans-theoretical terms is in tension with Quine’s thesis that translation between theories is indeterminate (Quine 1960: chapter 2). Each in his own way, however, Putnam and Quine accept that for any given sentence that we now accept, there is no methodological guarantee that we will not one day regard the sentence as false, while still translating our past uses of the words in the sentence into our new theory homophonically. Moreover, like Quine, Putnam rejects the traditional absolute conception of apriority and replaces it with theory-relative methodological observations about which statements we are least likely to revise in the face of unexpected experiences (Putnam 1962a; 1979). PUTNAM’S EXTERNALIST SEMANTICS AND ANALYTICITY

Putnam’s compelling observations about theory change, first published in the 1960s, discredited the then standard theories of reference and meaning. His proposal that we view some of our terms as law-cluster (i.e. trans-theoretical) terms was a first step away from standard theories. A second step was to extend

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his notion of trans-theoretical terms, which he first introduced primarily to make sense of cases in which a single inquirer changes her view from one time to another, to cases in which two or more inquirers (or speakers) simultaneously use a term with the same reference despite large differences in the theories or beliefs they associate with the term. In this key step Putnam observes that we typically assume that ordinary English speakers can use the term “elm” to refer to elm trees, and “beech” to refer to beech trees, even if they know very little about elms and beeches, and cannot tell them apart. To distinguish elms from beeches, or to learn about these trees, such ordinary speakers rely on others who know more about them. We rely, in short, on what Putnam calls the Division of Linguistic Labor. He proposes that we reject any theory of reference that implies that ordinary speakers cannot refer to (or think about) elms when they use the term “elm,” even though they do not know much, if anything, about elms, except, perhaps, that they are trees. Putnam also argues that the references of such “natural kind” terms are dependent in part on the environment in which they are applied, even if it takes years of inquiry and theorizing to discover what the references are. He argues that to discover the reference of a term and learn about its properties is also to clarify what it is true of, and thereby also to clarify one key component of the meaning of the term, namely, its contribution to the truth conditions of sentences in which it occurs. Appropriating the causal picture of reference that Saul Kripke sketches in Naming and Necessity (1980), Putnam also theorizes that the meanings and references of a speaker’s words are determined in part by causal relations the speaker bears to other speakers in her community and to the environment in which she applies the terms. All these points lead him to his famous conclusion that “meanings ain’t in the head” (Putnam 1975a: 227). The resulting externalist semantic theory extends and clarifies points that Putnam had already made in “It ain’t necessarily so,” including that many of the statements traditional philosophers had regarded as analytic, such as “Gold is a yellow metal” and “Cats are animals,” are, in fact, synthetic and theoretical, and may therefore be undermined by new evidence. (On externalism, see Goldberg, this volume.) KRIPKE’S RETURN TO APRIORITY, NECESSITY, AND ANALYTICITY

Quine’s and Putnam’s revolutionary work on the methods of inquiry freed Anglo-American philosophy from the narrow confines of Carnap’s logical positivism. Their liberating work created a new intellectual environment in which all types of philosophy, even profoundly unscientific ones, could once

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again seem worth taking seriously. In the 1970s Saul Kripke took advantage of this opening to develop a possible-world semantics for proper names and kind terms that is rooted not in our reliance on trans-theoretical terms in scientific inquiry, but in our everyday intuitions about epistemic and metaphysical possibility (Kripke 1980: 41–2). In a fundamental departure from the spirit of scientific philosophy that runs through the logical empiricists, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, Kripke’s externalist possible-world semantics revives and distinguishes between traditional philosophical concepts of necessity, apriority, and analyticity. Philosophers who applaud Kripke’s revival of these traditional philosophical concepts tend to dismiss Carnap’s, Quine’s, and Putnam’s alternative methodological principles, and to favor methods of inquiry that are very different from those of Carnap, Quine, and Putnam. Kripke regards the concept of analyticity not as a replacement for and clarification of the traditional concepts of necessity and apriority, as the logical empiricists did, but as less fundamental than, and hence to be defined in terms of, these traditional concepts. He stipulates that an “analytic statement is, in some sense, true by virtue of its meaning and true in all possible worlds [i.e. necessary] by virtue of its meaning . . . [so that] something which is analytically true will be both necessary and a priori” (Kripke 1980: 39). He does not explain in detail what “true in virtue of meaning” comes to, however, and his judgments on particular cases depart from the logical empiricists’. Kripke claims, for instance, that Goldbach’s conjecture (that every even number greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers), if true, is necessarily true, but that it is “nontrivial” to claim that one can determine a priori whether or not Goldbach’s conjecture is true (1980: 37). It follows that for Kripke it is non-trivial to claim that Goldbach’s conjecture, if true, is analytic. In sharp contrast, Carnap would not rely on the vague traditional term “a priori” to address this question. In Carnap’s view, Goldbach’s conjecture either is or is not a logical consequence in a given language system LS of the empty set of premises; if it is such a consequence, it is analytic in LS, otherwise not. THEORIES OF APRIORITY AND ANALYTICITY AFTER KRIPKE

To clarify the nature and limits of our supposed a priori knowledge in a way that incorporates something like Kripke’s externalist semantics for proper names and kind terms, David Chalmers (1996) and Frank Jackson (1998) distinguish between a part of a word’s meaning that we can know a priori (its “primary intension”) and a part of a word’s meaning that we can know only via empirical inquiry (its “secondary intension”). I shall focus here on Chalmers’s version of

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this view, known as two-dimensionalism. (See also Goldberg, this volume.) Chalmers defines the primary intension of a word as a special sort of function from (agent-centered) worlds to extensions: In a given (agent-centered) world w, the primary intension of a word picks out what the extension of the word would be if w turned out to be actual (Chalmers 1996: 57). To grasp the primary intension of “water,” for instance, we must grasp a function that yields the set of all and only portions of water as value if the actual (agent-centered) world has water in its rivers, lakes, and oceans, and that yields the set of all and only portions of twin water (a superficially similar liquid whose molecular structure is radically unlike H2O) as value if the actual (agent-centered) world has twin water in its rivers, lakes, and oceans. According to Chalmers, the existence of primary intensions for our words makes it possible for us to identify items to which our words apply, and to make empirical inquiries into the nature of those items. In this way we may come to believe that water is H2O, just as Kripke and Putnam claim. Such a discovery yields a secondary intension expressed by our actual applications of “water.” If the stuff to which we actually apply our word “water” is H2O, the secondary intension of our actual applications of “water” picks out H2O in every counterfactual world (1996: 57). As noted above, the semantic externalism developed by Putnam and Kripke implies that many of the statements traditional philosophers had regarded as analytic, such as “Gold is a yellow metal” and “Cats are animals,” are, in fact, synthetic and theoretical, and may therefore be undermined by new evidence. Chalmers concedes the point, but insists that our knowledge of the primary intensions of our words, including “gold” and “cat,” is a priori. For instance, he claims we can know a priori what would be the case if we were to discover that the things to which we apply our word “cat” are not animals. As Putnam stresses, however, statements that we cannot now imagine giving up without changing the subject are not thereby guaranteed to be true. What we actually judge when we find ourselves in a previously imagined situation almost always trumps our earlier speculations about what we would say if we were to find ourselves in that situation. Chalmers concedes this point also, but retreats to the view that one might always be mistaken about one’s a priori claims, so the fact that we have revised many of our previously deeply held beliefs about how to apply a given word does not show that we cannot in principle know a priori how to apply that word in any given possible world. The methodological significance of Chalmers’s conception of the a priori is unclear, however, since in practice, on his view, we may be no more confident of our a priori claims about how to apply our terms than we are of many of our empirical theories, and for the same basic reason – new evidence may undermine them.

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Paul Boghossian aims to do better than this for at least some of the propositions that we take ourselves to know a priori. He argues that some of the sentences we accept implicitly define the meanings of our logical constants and that these sentences are epistemically analytic for us, in the sense that our grasp of their meanings constitutes epistemological warrant for believing the propositions they express, and our warrant for believing the propositions they express is not defeasible by any future empirical evidence (Boghossian 1996: 362). In sharp contrast to Carnap, who explicates analyticity solely in terms of explicitly adopted rules, including rules that implicitly define some of the words of a language, Boghossian proposes that we can define analyticity in terms of implicitly adopted implicit definitions of words. A central problem for his position is that he does not provide an informative criterion for distinguishing meaning constituting sentences from other sentences we tacitly accept now but might revise later. Unless and until we know such a criterion, or we know at least that we judge in accord with it, it will not be transparent to us which of our sentences, if any, is analytic in Boghossian’s sense. A related and even more fundamental problem for Boghossian’s position is that the Quinean methodological considerations discussed above apparently show that “it is objectively indeterminate which principles are true by virtue of meaning and which are substantive” (Harman 1996: 397). One might respond to this Quinean methodological challenge by claiming that a statement that members of a community take to be true and indefeasible should not be translated by a false, defeasible statement. On this view, as developed by Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis, if s is a sentence that a speaker stipulates to be true and indefeasible, then s 0 is a good translation of s only if s 0 is also true and indefeasible (Juhl and Loomis 2010: 224–5). Quine and Putnam reject this view of translation: When we change our theory, they argue, we sometimes also thereby change our view of how best to translate statements we or others previously regarded as true and indefeasible. This theory-relative account of translation is supported by cases from the history of science, such as Putnam’s Euclidean space case, but there is no completely neutral argument for or against it. A very different tack is to abandon the search for a theory of epistemic analyticity and focus instead on explicating the idea that analytic truths are “true in virtue of meaning.” Following Gillian Russell, for instance, one might regard the sentence “I am here now” as analytic, in the sense that any utterance of it is guaranteed to be true, yet also contingent, since wherever a person is when she utters it at a given time, she might have been elsewhere at that time. Generalizing from such examples, Russell isolates a component of word’s meaning that she calls its “reference determiner,” and argues that analyticity, or truth in virtue

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of meaning, should be understood as truth in virtue of reference determiner. A consequence of her view is that analyticity cannot play the epistemic role that some philosophers have imaged for it, since, while “analytic justification is justification on the basis of reference determiners alone,” competent speakers might not know what the reference determiners of their words are, and therefore might not be able “to avail themselves of analytic justifications” (Russell 2008: 176). A N A L Y T I C I T Y A N D I N D E T E R M I N A C Y O F ME A N I N G

Whether one finds a given explication of analyticity acceptable depends in part on whether one believes that meaning is determinate in the ways that the account requires. Some philosophers have argued that it is incoherent to suppose that meaning is indeterminate, and hence that criticisms of explications of analyticity that imply that meaning is indeterminate are unacceptable for purely logical reasons, independent of empirical inquiry. According to Grice and Strawson, for instance, “If talk of sentence-synonymy is meaningless, then . . . talk of sentences having a meaning at all must be meaningless too” (Grice and Strawson 1956: 146). As Quine points out, however, barring philosophical prejudices to the contrary, it is neither logically incoherent nor puzzling to reject this conditional (Quine 1960: 206). For similar reasons, John Searle’s efforts (in Searle 1987) to reduce Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of reference to absurdity are also ultimately unsuccessful (Ebbs 2011b: 624–7). There is unlikely to be a decisive demonstration that indeterminacy of meaning is incoherent. In the 1960s and 70s, at the start of the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology, some prominent linguists and philosophers claimed that empirical research in these sciences, especially Noam Chomsky’s work and his criticisms of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis (Chomsky 1969a), establishes that meaning is determinate, despite Quine’s and Putnam’s methodological arguments to the contrary. (See Pullum, this volume, on philosophy of linguistics and Chomsky.) It is still often claimed, for instance, that Quine’s arguments for indeterminacy of meaning rest on an outdated and discredited linguistic behaviorism (Burge 2010: 223–7; Antony 2016: 26–9). But this judgment is not universally shared even by those who oppose Quine’s arguments against analyticity and the determinacy of meaning. According to Jerrold Katz, who rejects Quine’s arguments for indeterminacy, for example, “Quine’s behaviorism merely takes linguists out of their armchairs and puts them in the field facing the task of having to arrive at a theory of language on the basis of the overt behavior of its speakers in overt circumstances” (Katz 1990a: 180; quoted in Hylton 2007: 374

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n. 8). The feeling nevertheless persists that cognitive psychology and linguistics somehow demonstrate that Quine and Putnam are wrong about meaning and analyticity. Eliot Sober writes, for instance, that, “If cognitive science produces predictive and explanatory theories that attribute to speakers a knowledge of what their terms mean, then the concept of meaning is on a safe footing, and so is the concept of analyticity” (Sober 2000: 277; see also Williamson 2007: 50). Unless we are confident that successful explanatory theories in cognitive science and linguistics can support philosophical claims about the analyticity of certain public language sentences, however, we should hesitate to affirm Sober’s conditional. And doubts about the scientific respectability of contemporary philosophical theorizing about meaning and representation have been growing. Chomsky himself has apparently changed his mind on this crucial point, arguing against standard truth-conditional semantics that when it comes to reference, the proper scientific focus is “internal” and “syntactical,” not semantical in a sense that relates expressions to non-linguistic things (Chomsky 2000: 42). Despite Chomsky’s doubts, numerous philosophers and linguists continue to develop externalist semantics for natural languages and to assume that the semantic relations they describe are objective and determinate. Among cognitive scientists more generally, however, as William Ramsey reports, there is “disarray and uncertainty” about the very ideas of meaning and mental representation, including “disagreements about how we should think about mental representation, about why representations are important for psychological and neurological processes, about what they are supposed to do in a physical system, about how they get their intentional content, and even about whether or not they actually exist” (Ramsey 2007: xi). In short, the proliferation over the past sixty years of competing accounts of the nature and role of meaning and mental representation in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive psychology raises serious doubts about the often-repeated claim that cognitive science establishes that “the concept of meaning is on a safe footing, and so is the concept of analyticity” (Sober 2000: 277). Such doubts call for an open-minded investigation that starts by getting clear, as I try to do in outline above, on the strengths and weakness of the most promising theories of analyticity.3

3

For comments on previous drafts I thank Kate Abramson, Albert Casullo, Cory Juhl, and Savannah Pearlman. Parts of pp. 41–43 are lifted verbatim from my paper “Putnam on methods of inquiry” (Argumenta 3 (December 2016): 157–61), and the discussion of two-dimensionalism on p. 45 draws on material from §§6.9–6.10 of my book Truth and Words (2009).

3 PHILOSOPHY OF LINGUISTICS g e o f f r e y k . p u l lu m

Linguistics in 1945 was a modest discipline, with much to be modest about.1 Very few universities had linguistics departments; the profession was tiny. The history of American linguistics (on which this brief chapter concentrates, because it has been the main focus of philosophical interest) goes back barely a hundred years. Its foundational documents include the Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas 1911), a posthumously reconstructed lecture course by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), and Leonard Bloomfield’s general survey Language (1933). Linguistics may not have been on the radar for philosophers of science in the 1940s, but linguists had philosophical interests. Much influenced by the positivism and operationalism of the Vienna Circle, they sought general analytical procedures, not just for practical use by field linguists working on undocumented languages, but to provide theoretically rigorous methods, applicable to any language, that would both yield a scientifically adequate analysis and confer epistemological justification upon it. They were divided between realists and antirealists: Householder (1952) introduced the epithets “God’s-truth” and “hocus-pocus” for the two camps. God’s‑truthers believed linguistic expressions had structure that linguists sought to discover. The hocus-pocus position was that no structural properties inhered in the acoustic blur of utterances: Linguists imputed structure and systematicity to them to render language more scientifically tractable. Householder drew his distinction in a review of a major work by Zellig Harris (1909–92), whom he saw as a mainly hocus-pocus man. Harris’s 1

Winston Churchill supposedly said this about Clement Attlee during a 1946 British election campaign, but the attribution is unverified, hence available for stealing without acknowledgment. However, I do need to acknowledge my intellectual debt to the late Barbara C. Scholz, my philosophical collaborator until her untimely death in 2011. Writing this jointly with her would have made the task much harder, because she would have insisted that it be done much better. I have done what I could alone, helped by useful comments from Fiona Cowie, James Donaldson, John Joseph, Robert Levine, Ryan Nefdt, Brian Rabern, and Pramay Rai, to all of whom I am grateful.

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monograph (1951) was a meticulous survey of linguistic analysis procedures (originally called Methods in Descriptive Linguistics; “descriptive” was later changed to “structural”). It had reached preliminary proof stage by 1947, and Harris sought proofreading assistance from a precocious 16-year-old who had begun taking courses at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 but was thinking of dropping out and going to live on a kibbutz. Attracted to Harris’s left-wing politics, the apprentice discovered a keen interest in linguistics. Together with a high school friend of his, he took several of Harris’s classes, and studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman. This all had considerable importance for future relations between philosophy and linguistics, because the school friend was Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), perhaps the most insightful of all philosophers of linguistics (see both Ebbs and Goldberg, this volume), and Harris’s young proofreader was Noam Chomsky. THE CHOMSKYAN ERA

Having earned his B.A. in 1949 and his M.A. in 1951, Chomsky went on from Penn, with a recommendation from Goodman, to the Society of Junior Fellows at Harvard. The stellar Cambridge intellectual community at the time included Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1915–75), Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), and B. F. Skinner (1904–90). During his fellowship, Chomsky produced his first paper, a dense application of logic to the formalization of Harris-style analytical procedures, published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in1953 and rarely cited since. He also labored over his massive work The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (revised after Chomsky joined the MIT faculty in 1955, and distributed on microfilm through the MIT library in 1956, but not printed until 1975). In retrospect, the year 1957 defines a remarkable watershed in linguistics publishing. The classic anthology Readings in Linguistics I (Joos 1957) encapsulated American descriptive linguistics from 1926 to 1956. Firth (1957a; 1957b) coincidentally did the same for the London School in Britain. The extreme empiricist methodological views of the day were crystallized in W. Sidney Allen’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge University (Allen 1957). A radical behaviorist psychology of language, foreshadowed a decade earlier in B. F. Skinner’s 1947 William James Lectures, was given its definitive formulation in Verbal Behavior (Skinner 1957). A half-century of research on language had offered its final report, as if clearing the decks for the arrival of something new. And something new arrived: a slim volume from an unknown small press in the Netherlands – Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. Based on lecture notes for a

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small undergraduate class at MIT, it looked like a technical monograph, replete with novel criticisms of the descriptive linguistics of the day. Its impact was magnified by a long, laudatory review in Language (the journal of the Linguistic Society of America) by Robert B. Lees, a mature scientist who had become a major promoter of Chomsky’s ideas. Lees had read a prepublication copy, enabling Language to publish the review in the same year as the book. The American descriptive linguistics establishment rapidly realized that this book, and its 28-year-old author, challenged their preeminence. They invited Chomsky to debate with a phalanx of senior linguists at the Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Description in English in 1958, perhaps thinking he could be exposed or defeated. The resulting intense discussion was published in Hill 1962. Meanwhile Chomsky was copublishing with the distinguished psychologist George Miller on finite state machines in a cybernetics journal (Chomsky and Miller 1958); preparing lectures on “linguistics, logic, psychology, and computers” for an artificial intelligence summer school in Michigan (Chomsky 1958); writing a major paper on the mathematics of grammars (Chomsky 1959a); and preparing his devastating review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, to appear the following year (Chomsky 1959b). Already his work touched linguistics, computer science, and psychology. PHILOSOPHERS WEIGH IN

Philosophers soon became interested. The key philosophically relevant claims about language that Chomsky began to enunciate between 1957 and 1965, familiar to almost all philosophers today, included these (I summarize them very briefly): 1 American descriptive linguistics was moribund, having pursued mere taxonomy when theoretical insights were needed. 2 Flirtation with behaviorism had only underlined its inadequacy by linking it to a bankrupt psychological research program. 3 Adequate grammars for human languages must be generative systems, in the mathematical sense of “generate,” predicting the properties of indefinitely many novel utterances, not just classifying the parts of attested ones. 4 Grammaticality consists in compliance with the definition provided by the grammar, and is not reducible to anything like meaningfulness, nor to anything behavioral such as speaker disposition or probability of being uttered. 5 Generative grammars can be formally related to automata, and thus are crucially relevant to computer science. 6 Adequate generative grammars for human languages will need structure-modification rules called transformations.

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7 The extreme complexity of human linguistic behavior suggests that grammars are psychologically real – physically inscribed in the brains of language users. 8 Ample evidence for such internalized grammars can be obtained by investigators simply reflecting on their own native competence (tacit linguistic knowledge). 9 Grammars defining the idealized speaker’s competence must form the starting point for any study of the mechanisms of linguistic performance. 10 Psychology has to take seriously the idea that human minds store and manipulate complex mental representations. 11 The problem of how infants can accomplish language acquisition so easily demands explanation in terms of innate unlearned mental structure. 12 Hence seventeenth-century rationalism offers linguists better guidance than most of the twentieth century’s supposedly rigorous behavioral science. 13 The necessary innate mental infrastructure constitutes a framework of universal grammar, shared by all humanly possible languages. 14 Since only humans, and no other species, can acquire languages, this universal grammar must correspond to some kind of species-specific human genetic endowment. 15 It is implausible that language could have evolved from simpler forms of animal communication – indeed, it probably didn’t.

These ideas did not, of course, emerge from nowhere; they had sources in earlier works. The idea in [3] that a linguistic description can be viewed as providing instructions for “generating” sentences had been advanced by both Hockett (“principles by which one can generate any number of utterances,” 1954: 390) and Harris (“a set of instructions which generates the sentences of a language,” 1954: 260). The “production systems” developed by Emil Post in his 1920 dissertation are in essence generative grammars. (Chomsky knew of Post’s work from Rosenbloom 1950, cited in Chomsky 1975a.) The distinction between formation rules and transformation rules (see [6]) seems to have been introduced into logic by Carnap. Transformations were first applied to human languages by Zellig Harris, for whom they simply defined mappings on the set of all sentence structures; Chomsky reconceived them as dynamic string-altering derivational procedures. The idea that sentences have deep structures, defined by formation rules, from which surface structures are derived by transformations, emerged with Chomsky, where the terms “deep” and “surface” are acknowledged (1965: 198–9 n. 12) to be echoing Wittgenstein’s “depth grammar” and “surface grammar” (Tiefengrammatik and Oberflächengrammatik: Wittgenstein 1953) and Hockett’s “deep and surface grammar” (1958: chapter 29). The most remarkable presaging of Chomsky’s major ideas concerns the claim that the grammar of a language must reflect actual structure realized in the brain of a native speaker. It is found in Hockett, a note responding to another linguist’s hocus-pocus remark that linguistic structure “does not exist until it is

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stated” (1948: 279). Hockett argues that such antirealism is at the very least misleading, for the linguist’s analysis must assign structure to utterances never so far attested. The analytical process “parallels what goes on in the nervous system of a language learner, particularly, perhaps, that of a child learning his first language,” corresponding to “a mass of varying synaptic potentials in the central nervous system” (279). This foreshadows several characteristic theses about language and the mind (e.g. [3] and [7] above), twenty years before Chomsky published Language and Mind (1968). It recognizes the “authority” that accrues to the speaker who has native competence in a language, realized in “the central nervous system,” and distinguishes that from performance, with its “lapses” (see [8]–[9]). Earlier descriptive linguists had assumed that the subject-matter was concretely attested utterance types as recorded in texts. So theses like [8]–[10] came as a shock: Chomsky advocated working not from texts, or records of the habitual practices of speakers, but from native speakers’ intuitive understanding of what is (or is not) in their native language. During the discussion at the Third Texas Conference he asserted: “Intuition is just what I think I am describing. The empirical data that I want to explain are the native speaker’s intuitions” (Hill 1962: 158). Archibald Hill, the convener of the conference, seemed completely unable to take this in, for after half an hour or more (nine pages of transcribed discussion) he returned to it (1962: 167): hill:

If I took some of your statements literally, I would say that you are not studying language at all, but some form of psychology, the intuitions of native speakers. chomsky: That is studying language.

MENTALISM AND INNATISM

Seven years after the Texas conference Chomsky revealed the full extent of his reconception of linguistics as a study of mental processes and brain states (1965), following up with a monograph arguing that seventeenth-century French rationalism was closer to the truth about language than twentieth-century empiricist science (Chomsky 1966; see Behme 2014a for a recent extended critique). This hit the older generation of American linguists harder than any critique of their analytical procedures had, and raised many philosophical eyebrows. Chomsky claimed that the subject-matter for linguistic theory was the mental state of an adult “ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speechcommunity, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such

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grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic)” (1965: 3). Sociolinguists, dialectologists, psycholinguists, and field linguists recording texts would battle for decades against the implied exclusion from the core of linguistic science that they saw in this sentence. Linguists and philosophers alike were shocked by the proposals in [11]–[14]: that language acquisition must be driven by biologically built-in universal grammatical principles, and that the “innate ideas” doctrine had been underrated. Ancient empiricism/rationalism battles were soon being reenacted in modern dress. At a 1965 Boston Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science (proceedings in Synthese, March 1967), Chomsky stated that “the conclusions regarding the nature of language-acquisition . . . are fully in accord with the doctrine of innate ideas . . . and can be regarded as providing a kind of substantiation and further development of this doctrine” (Chomsky 1967: 10), and was responded to by his old friend Putnam and his former philosophy professor Goodman. Putnam (1967a) concluded, in urgent italics: “Let a complete 17th-century Oxford education be innate if you like . . . Invoking ‘innateness’ only postpones the problem of learning; it does not solve it.” And Goodman was outright contemptuous. He wrote up his remarks as a dialogue with a supercilious interrogator calling the doctrine “intrinsically repugnant and incomprehensible . . . unsubstantiated conjectures that cry for explanation by implausible and untestable hypotheses that hypostasize ideas that are innate in the mind as non-ideas” (Goodman 1967: 27–8). Chomsky responded point for point in several publications (1968; 1969b, 1969c), answering objections from other philosophers such as Quine and Harman as well. His 1969 Russell lectures (Chomsky 1971) addressed Quine’s Word and Object (1960), a work combining philosophy of language with philosophy of descriptive linguistics. A summer conference at Stanford in 1969 spurred further philosophical discussion of linguistics and led Quine (1972) to comment directly on the methodology of generative linguistics, questioning whether a speaker could ever be said to be following one set of internalized rules rather than another extensionally equivalent one (as opposed to just being in compliance with both), if the speaker was not conscious of what the rules said. Lengthy counterargument appeared in Chomsky (1975b). Throughout the 1970s, in books and public lectures, Chomsky regularly responded to criticisms by prominent philosophers like Quine, Putnam, Goodman, Harman, and Searle. Lesser figures were ignored. Itkonen (1978), for example, argued that Chomsky’s theorizing could not possibly be empirical, but was never answered or cited. Philosophy of linguistics was dominated by

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exegesis of Chomsky’s writing and, for the privileged few whose work Chomsky addressed, answering his counterattacks. KATZIAN PLATONISM

Jerrold Katz was a key philosophical ally of Chomsky’s in the 1960s and 1970s, but he eventually came to the conclusion that Chomsky’s views on semantics were all wrong (Katz 1980), and the following year announced a complete break with the idea that linguistics dealt with the mind (Katz 1981). Linguists had twice misidentified the metaphysical status of their subject-matter, Katz now claimed. Repurposing terminology from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the medieval theories of “universals” (i.e. properties), Katz posited an exhaustive tripartite classification of ontologies for linguistics: nominalism, conceptualism, and Platonism. Nominalist linguists claimed to be studying physical facts about utterance tokens. Conceptualism was the Chomskyan mentalist view, which Katz had once warmly advocated (1964). What Katz now advocated was Platonism: the view that linguistics deals solely with abstract objects. Katz took “nominalism” to be discredited by Chomsky’s arguments (e.g. in Chomsky 1964) against pre-1950 phonemic analysis. These are actually thin grounds for dismissing the link between linguistics and actual speech. Chomsky’s arguments against Harris-style phonemic analysis procedures were ingenious, but hardly suffice to crush the whole idea of linguistics addressing concrete phenomena. For example, Ruth Millikan’s highly original subsequent work (e.g. Millikan 1984), on understanding linguistic behavior in terms of “reproductively established families” of utterance tokens, has a distinctly nominalistic flavor, but is hardly to be challenged by allegations of inelegant duplication in phonological rules. Chomsky’s “conceptualism” was little better than nominalism, Katz believed: tied to human brains, it was incompatible with the existence of grammatical sentences that were too long or complex for a brain to store or apprehend, and with explaining how brain representations could make a sentence true in all possible worlds (Higginbotham 1991 and Soames 1991 respond on the latter point). Platonism leaves no room for linguistics to be empirical. Katz simply bites the bullet on that, asserting (without reference to Itkonen 1978) that linguistics is a non-empirical a priori discipline like logic or mathematics. Issues like learnability and usability are for psychologists, not linguists, he claims. He posits just one key property distinguishing what he called “natural languages”: He claims they are effable, meaning that every natural language has the resources to permit exact expression of absolutely any proposition. This claim is sorely in need of

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support. Consider Pirahã. Spoken by a hunter-gatherer people who do no counting and build no permanent dwellings, this language has no terminology for numbers, money, colors, art, or architecture (Everett 2005). In what serious sense could one claim to be able to translate into Pirahã the statement that before renting out the house we should get an estimate for repainting the dining room walls in turquoise between the dado rail and the crown molding? The major challenge for Platonism is explaining how spatiotemporally located beings like us can come to know languages, or even be aware that they exist. Katz posits a special intuition permitting humans to discern the existence and properties of objects like triangles, numbers, and languages (Katz 1998). Katz’s classic a priori philosophy of science, laying down appropriate beliefs for linguists derived from first principles rather than drawing philosophical conclusions from examining how they actually work, insists on a unique metaphysics for linguistics. Ontological pluralism, as advocated by Stainton (2014), seems far more appropriate for the language sciences. KRIPKEAN SKEPTICISM

The year after Katz’s book came a very different challenge to Chomskyan linguistics. Kripke (1982) discusses a paradox drawn from Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein had remarked that “no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule” (1953: §201, 81). In an interpretation that does not satisfy some Wittgensteinians, Kripke expounds a paradox which he illustrates with the meaning rule for the word “plus.” Consider someone who has often in the past added together numbers neither of which exceed some finite bound k, but denies ever having followed the rule that “a plus b” is synonymous with a + b, claiming instead that it means a + b if a and b are less than k but denotes 5 in the case of all higher numbers. Kripke’s worry is that nothing about their prior use of “plus,” nor anything else about them, even full knowledge of the workings of their mind, can refute this absurd claim. And that worry holds for a simple explicitly formulated meaning rule; the difficulties “are compounded if, as in linguistics, the rules are thought of as tacit, to be inferred by the scientist and inferred as an explanation of behavior” (1982: 31 n. 22). Kripke adds: “The matter deserves an extended discussion elsewhere” (1982: 30–1 n. 22). The beginnings of such extended discussion emerged (in Chomsky 1986; Wright 1989; Scholz 1990; and Katz 1990b), but the rule-following literature is now vast, too large for even a brief review here. Regrettably, it seldom digs

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deep into matters of syntax, but instead sticks to very simple examples of “going on in the same way” with some sequence or practice like addition. One philosopher who did firmly connect the problem to Chomskyan linguistics is Crispin Wright. He called Chomsky’s response to the Kripke/ Wittgenstein argument “unsatisfying,” describing Chomsky as having “conspicuously declined to take up the invitation, preferring a frontal attack on the Sceptical Argument” (Wright 1989: 235, referring to Chomsky 1986: 223–43). Wright sees Chomsky’s attack as failing in the same way as the “dispositional” response – the idea that following a rule is a matter of being disposed to behave in accordance with it (see Kripke 1982: 24–32). First, it ignores the normativity of linguistic rules: Grammars define what’s correct, not events in brains or dispositions to behave. And second, Chomsky’s view threatens “to make a total mystery of the phenomenon of non-inferential, first-person knowledge of past and present meanings, rules and intentions” (Wright 1989: 236). THE POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS

Linguists themselves have shown little interest in Katz’s ontological challenge or Kripke’s rule-following paradox. The philosophical issues they find most compelling are those about how linguistic and psychological phenomena are related: the psychological reality of grammars, the status of universals of grammar, and the problem of language acquisition. On acquisition, Chomsky’s made a casual aside about “a variant of a classical argument in the theory of knowledge, what we might call ‘the argument from poverty of the stimulus’,” (1980: 34), thus introducing the phrase “poverty of the stimulus,” which became enormously popular among linguistic nativists, along with other slogans, including “the logical problem of language acquisition” (Baker and McCarthy 1981) and “Plato’s problem” (Chomsky 1986). The literature on arguments for linguistic nativism (see Scholz and Pullum 2006 for a survey) is rife with confusions. Some cite the underdetermination of theory by evidence as relevant, but Hume’s insight that a finite corpus of data never determines a unique non-trivial theory implies only that the child’s input data cannot logically force the assumption of a unique grammar, and nobody ever doubted that. The “poverty of the stimulus” – the claim that the infant’s linguistic environment is informationally too thin to support grammar learning that occurs – is an entirely different matter, raising potentially empirical and quantitative questions. The mathematical theorems of Gold (1967) are also sometimes thought to offer a pro-nativist argument (see e.g. Matthews 1984), but they have nothing to do with either underdetermination or stimulus poverty. Gold assumes no

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informational poverty at all: His “identification in the limit from text” paradigm assumes an input consisting of an infinite sequence of grammatical sentences in which every grammatical sentence eventually occurs. Since successful algorithms exist for some infinite classes of languages but not for others, Gold’s idealizations do not uniformly imply that utterance-presentation environments are always too meager to permit language identification. His results shed light on the preconditions for text-based algorithmic grammar-guessing, but have no serious relevance to practical language acquisition. Controversy about innate grammatical ideas has not ebbed. Fiona Cowie’s critique of linguistic nativism (1999) elicited a polemical assault by Jerry Fodor taking up nearly fifty pages of Mind (Fodor 2001) and over fifty pages of debate in the pages of Mind and Language (16 [2002]: 193–245) in which each side charged the other with acting like creationists. INTUITIONS AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE

Nor have other areas of the philosophy of linguistics mellowed. Devitt (2006) made an important and novel contribution to the debate about linguistics and psychology, proposing that linguists’ descriptions and theories of linguistic phenomena are not about the psychological abilities and mechanisms underlying the abilities of speakers, nor are the rules defining well-formedness of sentences to be equated with routines used by a language user in processing or constructing an utterance. Processing and constructing sentences can (and must) respect grammaticality-defining rules, but not subsume them. Devitt rejects the allegedly Cartesian view that we can discern our mental processes and content by peering into our own minds. Our ability to use a language does not give us information about its workings through the medium of intuitions, he believes; instead, utterances in our language trigger certain “immediate and fairly unreflective empirical central processor responses” in us. These are not opinions or judgments, and are not always easily reportable – and “not the main evidence for grammars” (2006: 276). Devitt’s book was criticized (often harshly) by more philosophers than can be discussed here (Louise Antony, John Collins, Gareth Fitzgerald, Guy Longworth, Peter Ludlow, Nenad Miščević, Paul Pietroski, Peter Slezak, Barry Smith, and others). Devitt responded energetically in various forums (one is the Croatian Journal of Philosophy, which has become an important publication outlet for philosophy of linguistics). Devitt believes what was once a truism from the dictionary: that linguistics is the scientific study of language. His critics do not. Antony (2008: 656) says that “Devitt has yet to show that a science of Language is viable – or desirable.” She

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takes linguistics to be, as Chomsky claims (pace the title of Chomsky 2012), a study of mental processes and brain states. The view that such studies belong in the psychology department is now controversial. But so is almost everything in philosophy of linguistics today. Intense debate continues about the reliability of intuitions, the mental reality of grammars, the innateness of human language acquisition abilities, and so on. Philosophical commentary on Chomsky’s thinking has filled numerous edited volumes (Harman 1974; George 1989; Otero 1994; Antony and Hornstein 2003; McGilvray 2005, etc.), and enthusiasm has not been diminished by recent developments like the strangely inexplicit “Minimalist Program” or Chomsky’s eccentric saltationist speculations on the phylogenetic emergence of language (see Chomsky 2012 on both topics, and Behme 2014b for a ruthlessly critical review). The issues Chomsky raises still almost entirely dominate the philosophy of linguistics. Regrettably, this keeps philosophical discussion focusing on linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches that are now a half-century old. For example, while attention continues to be lavished on questions about how creatures like us came to have brains perfectly adapted to learning languages, few philosophers (or linguists) consider the possibility that the right question is how natural languages adapt themselves so well to being learned by creatures like us (Kirby 2001).

4 VARIETIES OF EXTERNALISM, LINGUISTIC AND MENTAL san f o r d c. g o l d b e r g

OVERVIEW

In the philosophy of mind and language, “externalism” is a label for a class of doctrines regarding the conditions that determine the intentional, representational properties of words and/or mental states. Originating in the 1960s and 1970s in the “New Theory of Reference” for singular terms, by the late 1970s externalist views spread into the philosophy of mind as well. Accordingly, there are externalist doctrines regarding the factors that determine the reference of an expression (as used on an occasion), the linguistic meaning of an expression (in a given language), and the content of a mental state. This chapter presents a historical overview of the emergence and variety of externalist doctrines, the arguments that have been given for them, and the ways in which they have been resisted.

IN THE BEGINNING

In the 1960s and 1970s, philosophers of language began to reconsider the role of context in determining who or what a speaker referred to with a particular use of an expression. At issue was the viability of a traditional (broadly Fregean) account of the reference of a certain class of singular terms. Taking off from the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, the traditional account held that the referent of a singular term on a given occasion of use – what object was picked out by the speaker’s use of that term on that occasion – is determined by the sense that speaker associated with that term on that occasion. According to the account, the associated sense was provided by the criteria the speaker associated with that term on that occasion of use, where the criteria themselves were taken to be captured by a definite description; and the referent of the speaker’s use of the expression was that object, if any, which uniquely satisfied that description. Such a picture of reference-determination is both mentalistic – it holds that each speaker has in mind the criteria that 60

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determine who or what, if anything, she is referring to – and semantic – it holds that the criteria themselves are provided by the semantics of the relevant (sense-constituting) description. Accordingly, the only role for context to play in reference-determination is in providing the objects and properties that are the candidate referents of the speaker’s use of the term on a given occasion. By the mid-1960s, philosophers had come to think that context itself plays a much greater role in reference-determination than this theory allows, and this led them to question both the mentalistic and the semantic aspects of the traditional account. On this score, two (related) sorts of arguments were offered: counterexample-driven arguments and modal arguments. Counterexample-driven arguments aimed to highlight cases in which the traditional account makes the wrong predictions about who or what a speaker is referring to. The earliest (alleged) counterexamples were presented for cases involving definite descriptions (“the F”), demonstratives (“that F”), and proper names. Perhaps the most famous of these was Donnellan’s (1966) treatment of definite descriptions. In his example a speaker manifestly directs his gaze at a particular person in the corner of the room with a martini glass in his hand, and utters, “The man in the corner drinking a martini is quite happy.” Donnellan argued that this speaker successfully refers to the person gazed at – call him Wally – even if it turns out that Wally’s martini glass contained water instead of gin, and even if in another corner of the room there is a different man drinking a martini. Shortly thereafter, Kripke (1972) focused on reference-determination for names. He argued that satisfaction of the description which the speaker associates with a name is neither necessary nor sufficient for being the referent of a proper name (on an occasion of use). It is not necessary because speakers who use a common proper name can be mistaken about who or what is the common referent of that name, yet still succeed in referring to that common referent with their use of the name. And satisfaction of the associated description is not sufficient, since a speaker who is mistaken about the common referent of a familiar name might nevertheless succeed in referring to that referent, even under conditions in which the description she mistakenly associates with the name is satisfied by someone else. Chastain (1975) and Stampe (1977) went on to give other would-be counterexamples to the standard theory, focusing on other types of singular term. These arguments are of historical importance not only for the (would-be) counterexamples they provide against the traditional account of referencedetermination, but also for the positive theory they motivate: the “new” or “causal” theory of reference. Where the traditional account was committed to thinking of reference-determination in fully mentalistic and semantic terms, the emerging view repudiated both. It held that the object singled out by the use of

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an expression on a given occasion was at least in part a matter of certain causal relations between the speaker and the object in question. The idea was that the object o picked out by a speaker S’s use of a singular term t reflects such facts as e.g. that S was perceiving o on the occasion of using t, or that S perceptually demonstrated o on the occasion of using t, etc. To be sure, those who advanced such claims allowed that what the speaker had “in mind,” as well as semantically derived criteria, can be relevant to reference-determination; the core claim was rather that such things, by themselves, are insufficient to determine reference. The second set of arguments against the traditional account of referencedetermination aimed to show that this account has untoward modal or epistemic implications: Certain claims that (intuitively) are contingent are construed by the traditional account as necessary, and certain propositions which (intuitively) are knowable only a posteriori are construed by the traditional account as knowable a priori. Arguments of this sort were inspired by developments in modal logic owed to Marcus (1961) and Kripke (1972). Thus Kripke (1972) argued that if reference-determination for a common proper name is by way of some description which the speaker associates with the name, then it will be a necessary truth that the person named satisfies the description. So if the reference of “Plato” just is whoever satisfies “the teacher of Aristotle,” then we reach the unintuitive result that “Plato was the teacher of Aristotle” expresses a necessary truth. Kripke also argued that insofar as we assume that the description in question (not only determines the reference, but also) captures the sense of the proper name – so that the sense of the description “teacher of Aristotle” gives the sense of the name “Plato” – then it will be a priori knowable for the speaker that the person named satisfies the description – and this, too, is unintuitive. These modal arguments are of great importance in part for a new semantic category they introduced: the “rigid designator.” A rigid designator is an expression e that refers to one and the same object in every possible world in which e refers at all. Consider an ordinary description like “the President of the US.” This description can be used at different times to refer to different people: As used in 2011 it referred to Barack Obama, as used in 1972 it referred to Richard Nixon, and so forth. In short, the description “the President of the US” can be used to refer to different people, and so it is not a rigid designator. According to Marcus and Kripke, proper names are not like this. If “Richard Nixon” is a proper name for a particular man, then that name picks out that man in any possible world in which that man exists, and in worlds in which he doesn’t exist the name is empty. Of course, it is a contingent matter that the man was given the name “Richard Nixon” at birth; he might have been named something else. But once the name is introduced as his name, it rigidly refers to him, and to no other. (Insofar as there are others named “Richard Nixon,” a

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proper semantic theory would treat those as distinct names that happen to be spelled the same way.) Many defenders of the doctrine of rigid designation (including Kripke himself ) invoked something like the causal theory of reference to explain the mechanisms of reference for rigidly referring expressions. Indeed, this is at the core of Kripke’s picture regarding reference-determination for proper names. According to that picture, a proper name is introduced to the language in a procedure akin to an original baptism; then users of the language employ the name with the intention of continuing to be speaking of the same person; and in this way reference is preserved through a chain of communication within a given language community. (See Evans 1973 for some complications.) So influential was this combination – the causal theory of reference and the doctrine of rigid designation – that many people came to recognize that a new philosophical approach to the philosophy of language was in the offing. For reasons discussed below, the label “externalism” was used to designate this approach. ENTER HILARY PUTNAM

Shortly after the development of these arguments regarding singular terms, other philosophers made similar arguments regarding other types of expression. The most famous of these was Hilary Putnam’s (1975) “twin earth” thought experiment. He aimed to show that the traditional account of referencedetermination fails not only for expressions whose semantic job is to pick out individuals, but also for expressions whose semantic job is to pick out natural kinds. Putnam’s argument proceeded by thought experiment. Twin Earth was imagined to be a planet exactly like Earth, with one exception: Whereas the transparent, drinkable, thirst-quenching liquid that flowed in the rivers, came out of the taps, and fell from the sky on Earth was H2O, on Twin Earth the transparent, drinkable etc. liquid is of a different chemical kind altogether, albeit with precisely the same superficial properties. Now the people on Twin Earth were very much like people on Earth, and they spoke a language that in virtually every respect was like Earthian English. They even used “water” to pick out the relevant transparent liquid that filled their Twin Earth streams and oceans. Thus they might express thoughts with sentences such as “Water is thirst-quenching,” “When it rains water falls from the sky,” and so forth. Putnam’s core contention was that when they uttered such sentences, they were talking about the liquid kind found on Twin Earth – he called it “twater” – and not the superficially similar liquid kind on earth (water). His argument for this appealed to the truth conditions of the speakers’ statements: Speakers on Twin

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Earth who assert “Water flows in lakes and streams” are saying something that is true just in case twater is found in lakes and streams; this statement would be false if made on Earth (where water, not twater, flows in lakes and streams). As Putnam was aware, this argument gives rise to a radical conclusion, not just about reference-determination, but about meaning. To bring this out, he noted that there could be two subjects, one on Earth, the other on Twin Earth, who were doppelgängers (= internal duplicates of one another), both of whom uttered the sentence-form “Water is good to drink,” where they were speaking of different kinds of liquid. Since they are internal duplicates of one another, they both associate with “water” the same images, the same forms of words (“wet,” “thirst-quenching,” etc.), and so forth. An immediate conclusion is that the reference or extension of “water” is not determined by any description which the subjects associate with the word, and so is not determined by a senseconstituting description. Now, if we stipulate that the meaning of a natural kind term like “water” is whatever it is that determines its reference or extension – call this the Putnamian meaning of a term – we reach the result that the (Putnamian) meaning of an expression such as “water” is not equivalent to the (Putnamian) meaning of any description that the subject associates with the term. Putnam’s characteristically vivid way of putting this radical conclusion was this: “Cut the pie any way you like, meanings ain’t in the head!” (Putnam 1975: 227). Putnam’s argument regarding natural kind terms exploited the causal theory of reference and the doctrine of rigid designation. Thus, in arguing for the idea that those on Earth use “water” to refer to H2O while those on Twin Earth use “water” to refer to a different liquid, Putnam appealed to causal constraints on reference. (This was a theme to which he would return, famously, in subsequent work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. See especially Putnam 1980 and 1981.) In addition, in trying to model the semantics for natural kind terms such as “water,” Putnam appealed to the doctrine of rigid designation: He held that natural kind terms as a class are rigid designators, so that a term like “water” refers to the same kind in every world in which that kind exists, or else is without reference. In addition to this argument, Putnam (1975) presented a second influential argument against the traditional account of reference-determination (and the corresponding theory of meaning). In particular, he presented a case on behalf of the Division of Linguistic Labor (DOLL), according to which Every linguistic community . . . possesses at least some terms whose associated “criteria” are known only to a subset of the speakers who acquire the terms, and whose use by other speakers depends upon a structured cooperation between them and the speakers in the relevant subsets. (1975: 228)

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Putnam’s argument on this score was an inference to the best explanation: It is because of DOLL that individuals can use expressions whose references are precise and consistent across the population of members of a language community, even as the individual members themselves do not know the “criteria” that are used to determine the reference or extension of the expressions themselves. In one respect, this DOLL-based argument was less radical than Putnam’s first (environment-based) argument: This argument continues to speak of “criteria” for reference-determination, whereas the environmentbased argument took aim at just that aspect of the traditional theory. But in another respect, the DOLL-based argument is more radical: It makes way for a much more social (non-individualistic) approach to the theories of reference and meaning. Putnam himself brought out the nature of this social dimension with another Twin Earth case. He imaged cases in which two doppelgängers, occupying different planets, use the same word-form (such as “aluminum”) but where the Putnamian meanings of their word differ in virtue of differences in the criteria that the experts in their respective community use. He noted that if the relevant criteria themselves determine different extensions on the two planets, then their words differ not only in (Putnamian) meaning but also in extension. While the examples Putnam used to illustrate DOLL were mainly from the sciences – he used natural kind terms such as “elm” and “beech,” “aluminum” and “molybdenum” – subsequent philosophers went on to note that nothing in principle requires such a restriction. Putnam’s vivid description – “meanings ain’t in the head!” – was probably the thing most responsible for the use of the label “externalism” to characterize the emerging theses about reference-determination and meaning. The core claim was that the determination of the reference or extension of the expression involved factors that were in some hard-to-articulate sense “external” to the subject. Subsequent authors aimed to try to articulate the relevant sense of “external.” Interestingly, three distinct senses had appeared in Putnam’s own argument. Thus a factor or condition might be relevantly “external” when (i) it is external to the subject’s head (suggested by “meaning’s ain’t in the head!”), when (ii) it is external to the individual qua psychological subject (this is how Putnam introduced the thesis he developed in his 1975 work; but see Gertler 2012), or when (iii) it does not supervene on the intrinsic properties of the body of the subject (this is suggested by Putnam’s use of the doppelgänger set-up). In the course of time, explication (iii) came to dominate, so that “externalism” about reference-determining factors or Putnamian meaning was understood to be an anti-supervenience thesis (but see Farkas 2003 for some concerns about this formulation).

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We can distinguish several varieties of externalist theses about language. One taxonomic dimension focuses on the relevant range of expressions about which one advances an externalist (anti-supervenience) claim. Thus we can distinguish externalism regarding (some subclass of ) singular terms from externalism about kind terms (natural, social, and/or artifactual). While this way of categorizing things is somewhat helpful, it can obscure the fact that many of the earliest arguments for externalist conclusions in language target (not types of expression but rather) uses of expressions. Analyses of this sort, which take as their target (not expression-types but) uses of expression-types, received early support from Strawson’s (1950) response to Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions, as well as from the resources of speech-act theory (Austin 1975 [1962]; Grice 1989). So insofar as we want to distinguish the varieties of expressiontypes for which externalist theses regarding language have been advanced, we must bear in mind that some of the theses concern, not the types themselves, but uses of the types. A second dimension of taxonomic difference would have us distinguish between externalisms regarding reference-determination only, and externalisms about (Putnamian) meaning. While Putnam (1975) might encourage us to run these together (insofar as he simply stipulated that meaning, whatever it is, must determine reference), it serves clarity to distinguish what we might call Reference Externalism from Meaning Externalism. Reference Externalism is a thesis about the factors that determine the reference of (a particular use of ) an expression. It is natural to suppose that the earliest “causal theorists of reference” who defended views about reference-determination in connection with some subset of singular terms (Chastain 1975; Stampe 1977) held such views. It is also natural to suppose that Donnellan’s reflections (1966) on the referential use of definite descriptions is such a thesis. In both of these cases, it is patent that they were not advancing a thesis about the meaning of the expression-types themselves. Accordingly, these are views that are best characterized as Reference Externalist without being Meaning Externalist, where the latter is a thesis about the factors that individuate the meaning of an expression-type. Clearly, Putnam’s (1975) arguments regarding natural kind terms, as well as the arguments developed in connection with DOLL, were aimed to establish both Reference Externalism and Meaning Externalism. In this respect, externalism about proper names is an interesting case. While Kripke (1972) was clear that he rejected all forms of descriptivism regarding the meaning of a proper name, and so embraced both Reference Externalism and Meaning Externalism regarding names, others have gone on to accept his case for Reference Externalism

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regarding names, while simultaneously rejecting his case for Meaning Externalism regarding names. This sort of “hybrid” view has been attractive to those who think that the linguistic meaning of an expression for an individual speaker is a matter of the cognitive significance that speaker associates with the expression. Views in this vicinity have been developed by McKinsey (1991b; 1994) and Byrne and Thau (1996). The popularity of such “hybrid” views, however, appears to have been dampened by the development of so-called “two-dimensionalist” accounts of semantic content, which seek to accommodate the reference-related considerations that have led others to embrace externalism, albeit within a broadly anti-externalist semantic framework. (Two-dimensionalism is discussed further below.) Finally, a more far-reaching taxonomic dimension among the different varieties of externalism concerns the types of factor that are regarded as relevant to the determination of reference (and/or meaning). Certain arguments for externalism about language focus exclusively on elements of the subject’s natural and physical environment – the particulars that exist and the natural kinds that are instantiated in that environment. One thinks here of Putnam’s reflections on the (Putnamian) meaning of “water”: Among the things that determine the reference or extension of the term is the nature of the liquid kind itself. Nothing about these arguments requires other people to play any interesting or ineliminable role in reference-determination. Contrast this with the sort of argument for externalism that emerges out of Putnam’s appeal to DOLL. Here, the “external” factors that serve to fix reference make essential mention of the criteria that experts in one’s community regard as relevant to reference-fixation. Externalisms of this sort have been labeled “social” or sometimes “antiindividualistic” externalisms. (Although the term “anti-individualism” was introduced by Tyler Burge, as a label for a doctrine regarding the nature of the attitudes, it fits equally well here.) FROM LANGUAGE TO THOUGHT AND THE PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES

While the first arguments for externalism were in the philosophy of language, starting in the late 1970s several prominent philosophers began advocating for externalist theses in the philosophy of mind as well. The most prominent of the initial people to argue for externalism regarding the attitudes was Tyler Burge. Burge’s (1979) argument starts off with a point very much in the spirit of Putnam’s (1975) hypothesis of the Division of Linguistic Labor: We defer to experts to explicate the application conditions of some of our words. For Burge, the interest of this point lies in what it tells us

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about the intentional (representational) features, not only of our words, but also of the thoughts and attitudes we use those words to express (and to ascribe to others). To reach such a conclusion, Burge appeals to a Fregean doctrine according to which the point of the phrase “that p” in “S believes that p” is not only to pick out the content of S’s belief, but also to express that very content. If this is correct, then differences in the meanings of the expressions used to express those contents amount to differences in the contents – and so differences in the beliefs – being ascribed. Thus, the sentences “Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent can fly” and “Lois Lane believes that Superman can fly” attribute different beliefs to Lois, despite the co-referentiality of “Superman” and “Clark Kent.” Accordingly, we can imagine Twin-Earth-like cases in which experts from two different language communities provide different explications of a single word-form – with the result that when members of these two communities ascribe beliefs to one another using that word-form, the beliefs they ascribe differ in content between the two communities. Since all of this is consistent with two subjects who are exactly alike as to their “internal” properties, we have reached a version of externalism regarding the attitudes. Burge presented his conclusion under the label “anti-individualism” about the mental, since his argument appealed to considerations regarding deference to experts in the language community. Another argument appealing to language considerations as part of an argument for externalism about the mind came from Gareth Evans’s (1982) and John McDowell’s (1984; 1986) reflections on singular thought. Motivated in part by the doctrine of rigid designation in the theory of reference, Evans and McDowell held that there is a class of singular thoughts – roughly, those naturally expressed with genuinely referring expressions like demonstratives and proper names – whose very existence presupposes the object being thought about. For such thoughts, the object at which thought is directed, o, is picked out, not through any set of properties that o is taken by the thinker to satisfy uniquely, but rather through the mental analogue of singular reference. Evans and McDowell came to this conclusion through reflecting on truth conditions: Whether such thoughts are true turns on the states and doings of a particular object, and so it must be in the nature of these thoughts that they secure this feature of their (singular) truth conditions. One possibility is suggested by the doctrine of Russellian singular thought, according to which the particular object itself is part of the very content of the singular thought. But both McDowell and Evans were Fregeans who thought that the constituents of thought were never objects themselves but rather ways of thinking of objects. Accordingly, they were lead to the conclusion of “de re senses” (McDowell 1984): Fregean senses whose existence presupposed the object being thought about. (See Sachs, this

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volume, for more on McDowell’s wider project.) But both the Russellian and the Fregean views are versions of “singular thought externalism,” since both entail that two subjects who are internal duplicates of one another might nevertheless differ in the thoughts they have, owing to the fact that their thoughts are directed at numerically distinct objects. While the earliest versions of externalism in the philosophy of mind were motivated by considerations very much in keeping with externalism about linguistic reference or linguistic meaning, versions of mind externalism soon emerged from other sources. Perhaps the primary source was the desire for a naturalistic account of the mind. Providing such an account requires us to understand in naturalistic terms how mental states can be said to represent features and states of the world. In this respect, the early focus on causal relations as the basis for linguistic reference was an inspiration. Two different (though not incompatible) views began to emerge. One came from philosophers of mind whose fundamental approach to the mind was evolutionary. Under the influence of the significant work of Ruth Millikan (1984; 1995; 2004) and David Papineau (1993), philosophers of mind began to think of the representational properties of mental states as arising, under the pressure of natural selection, to serve the function of featuredetection in the ambient environment. Millikan’s influential analysis of what it is (from the perspective of evolutionary biology) for something to “have a function” made this seem naturalistically kosher. According to her analysis, an organ or system φ (such as the human heart) has some function F (pumping blood) when the following condition holds: The fact that organs or systems of this kind regularly performed this job explains why this type of organ or system persisted in members of the species. Millikan applied this analysis to mental states and to the role they play in representing features of the external environment: A mental state M has the function of representing feature f when the fact that mental states of this kind regularly play the f-detecting role explains why this kind of mental state persisted in members of the species. Such a view might be regarded as a teleological externalism about mental representation, insofar as it traces the contents of (at least some) kinds of mental representations to the evolutionary-historical role that instances of that kind played in enabling members of the species to detect a given feature of the local environment. The result is externalist since differences in the type of environmental feature with which a species regularly interacted imply differences in the content of the corresponding representations. Burge (1986) presents an argument of this sort in connection with visual representation; and Cowie (1999) considers how this might be made to square with psychological nativism.

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A second view, very much in the spirit of this first view but motivated more centrally by the theory of signaling and information, was Dretske’s (1981; 1995) information-theoretic conception of mental content. Very roughly, Dretske proposed a counterfactual analysis for signals, whereby a condition C is a signal with the content that p just in case C wouldn’t have obtained if it were not the case that p. He then employed this in the philosophy of mind by seeing how certain mental state types causally covary with features in the world, so that (after a sufficiently long learning period, and under a certain idealized and restricted set of circumstances) when those features are present, so too are tokens of the mental state types. We might in this way come to identify the content of a mental representation as that of (say) horses by noting that it is a kind of state that is regularly tokened in the presence of (say) horses, and not otherwise. Jerry Fodor (1987) questioned how such an account can make sense of the possibility of error: If a particular representational kind normally tokened in the presence of horses happens to be tokened occasionally by (horse-looking) cows, with what right do we say that this kind represents horses, rather than the disjunctive category horses or horse-looking cows? While Dretske had appealed to a learning period to try to handle this worry, Fodor appealed instead to the doctrine of asymmetric dependence: A mental state type or kind represents that feature on which its tokens asymmetrically depend. In the present case, if the representational type hadn’t been reliably tokened by horses, it would never have been tokened by horse-looking cows (whereas the reverse is not true). However the problem of error is handled, though, we have a version of mental externalism: What a mental state is said to represent depends on causal covariances with or asymmetric dependences on types of object in the environment. Two creatures that are internal duplicates of one another might nevertheless mentally represent distinct features or properties in virtue of causally interacting with what in fact are different features or properties. METAPHYSICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF EXTERNALIST DOCTRINE

Almost immediately, externalist theories of mental states were seen to have far-reaching implications in metaphysics and epistemology. These implications were identified and discussed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and some of the debates continue to this day. In epistemology, the implications concerned first-person authority and external-world skepticism. It is widely assumed that each subject enjoys an especially authoritative and secure route to judgments regarding her own current mental life, including not

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only the tickles, feels, and other sensations she currently experiences, but also her current episodes of thinking. But this “first-person authority” can seem mysterious if externalism about thought is correct. After all, we typically identify our attitudes (including our current thoughts) by their content. But according to externalism, there are thoughts whose contents depend on features of the subject’s “external” (non-mental) environment. And the subject’s access to that environment is neither particularly authoritative nor particularly secure. Tyler Burge (1988) took up this problem and argued that, given the self-verifying nature of first-person, present-tense self-ascriptions of thought, there is no difficulty: When one’s judgment is expressed in a sentence of the form “I am currently thinking that p,” the very same things that go into determining the content of the thought one is thinking also go into determining the thought one judges oneself to be thinking. Although this sort of account has been widely accepted, many have worried that if it is correct, it gives rise to an implausibly strong response to skepticism in what Jessica Brown (1995; 2004) has called the “consequence problem.” For we then appear to have a non-empirical route to knowledge of the existence of (features of ) the external world (McKinsey 1991a). To see this, consider that many philosophers think that, if it is true at all, externalism about the mental can be known a priori to be true: It is, after all, a philosophical thesis that is typically established using thought experiments. (This is not true of the sorts of externalism developed in Millikan, Papineau, and Dretske, but it is true of the sorts of externalism developed by Burge, Evans, and McDowell.) Suppose then that a subject S can know from the armchair what she is currently thinking merely by self-ascribing her thought in the way Burge described. It would seem that a subject who did so would then be in a position from the armchair to combine this self-knowledge with her a priori knowledge of the truth of externalism about the mind, to reach the conclusion that some external-world features are responsible for the thought she is thinking. She thus appears to have a nonempirical route to knowledge, both of the existence of the external world, and of the existence of those particular features of that world. While some philosophers have accepted this conclusion (including perhaps Putnam [1981], who anticipated this argument), most have sought ways to resist it. Some deny that the route is non-empirical, arguing that anyone who would use this sort of route to the knowledge in question must already have an empirical route to the same knowledge (Sawyer 1998; 2001); others deny that the a priori (or non-empirical) warrant transmits from premises to conclusion in this sort of argument (Wright 1985; 1992; 2000; Davies 2004); and a third group deny that one can tell from the armchair whether one’s thought does depend on external-world features, even when it does (McLaughlin and Tye 1998; Goldberg 2003).

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In the 1980s, Putnam himself initiated a line of inquiry concerning the metaphysical implications of externalism in the philosophy of mind and language. He argued (Putnam 1980) that the nature of reference-fixation ensures that certain strong forms of Metaphysical Realism are false. Put crudely, his thought was that, given how the world is implicated in the determination of reference and meaning, successfully referring to the world is inconsistent with being fundamentally and systematically wrong in what there is in the world. This led him to develop a position he called “Internal Realism,” and it led many other philosophers to take up the issue in turn. RESISTANCE TO EXTERNALISM

The earliest forms of resistance to externalism sought to show that the resources of a thoroughly descriptivist account (of the determination of reference, linguistic meaning, or mental content) could accommodate the intuitive judgments that drove the arguments for externalism. Here, two tools are worth highlighting. The first is what we might call the mechanism of self-reference, or de se reference. Thus Searle (1983) conceded that Putnam’s Twin Earth argument shows that no context-insensitive description can be equivalent in meaning to a natural kind term such as “water.” But he denied that this dooms the descriptivist approach to reference, meaning, and mental content. On the contrary, he argued, “water”can be seen as equivalent in meaning to a description such as “the watery liquid that is causally responsible for this experience,” where “this experience” refers to the very token experience of the subject in question. Other variations on this theme were subsequently developed, e.g. McKinsey 1986; 1991b. The second tool in the anti-externalist repertoire is the “actually” operator, which in effect rigidifies a previously non-rigid description. Suppose we want to refer to the person who invented the zipper, whoever he or she is, so we agree to call this person “Julius.” What is the meaning of this name? Assuming that names are rigid designators, we cannot say that the meaning of this name is equivalent to the meaning of “the inventor of the zipper” (since the latter is a non-rigid designator). But consider “the actual inventor the zipper”: Insofar as “actual” functions as an operator that restricts attention to the actual world, the result is that this description will refer to one and the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists – namely, that individual who in the actual world invented the zipper. A more sophisticated attempt to use these tools to resist externalism arose in the 1990s, in the form of two-dimensionalist (2D) semantics. (See Ebbs, this

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volume.) Although 2D semantics was originally developed in connection with the semantics and logic of indexicals and modal terms like “actually” (for which see Kamp 1971; Åqvist 1973; Segerberg 1973; Kaplan 1989), variations were soon developed (including by Chalmers [1996a; 2006] and Jackson [1998]) as a way to model the semantics of natural kind terms, artifact terms, and other classes of terms. The basic idea was to model the meaning of the relevant type of expression as a function of two distinct parameters: one pertaining to the world (and context) at which the term is used, the other pertaining to the world (and context) at which the use of the term is semantically evaluated. Thus a 2D semantics for “water” might hold the following: (1) as used in any given world, “water” refers rigidly to one type of liquid, and yet (2) for any given possible world, if we consider that world to be the actual world, a description (such as “the watery liquid”) fixes the reference of “water” in that world. The meaning of “water,” then, can be represented by the two-dimensional framework that makes this explicit.1

1

Thanks to Kelly Becker for comments on an earlier draft.

5 AN ANALYTIC-HERMENEUTIC HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS benj hellie

A great strength of the analytic tradition in philosophy (I count myself among it) is its affiliation with the mathematical logic of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and Tarski: All graduate students are forced to learn its basics, and soon come to discipline their thoughts to fit its structures. This makes for a lingua franca, an admirable prevailing level of clarity and rigor, and interdisciplinary permeability with cognate fields sharing this affiliation. These all contribute to the continuing growth and dynamism of the global analytic-philosophical research community, which shows no sign of losing steam. But mathematical logic is not theory-neutral. Its characteristic use of truth as the fundamental analysans for validity and entailment reflects its origins as a tool for representing the discourse of the natural sciences, which aim at the truth from “outside” their subject-matter. And – though this would conflict with the “unity of science” (Carnap 1934 [1931]; Neurath 1959 [1932]; Oppenheim and Putnam 1958) characteristically embraced by the analytic tradition – perhaps the discourse of the “human” sciences is fundamentally different. After all, a disjuncture between “naturalistic” and “humanistic” discourse – less poetically, physical and mental – is the mainstay of the Continental hermeneutic tradition (Schleiermacher 1998 [1834]; Dilthey 1989 [1883]; Gadamer 1976; Ricoeur 1981); and for the twentieth-century Anglophone non-analytic philosopher Collingwood (2005 [1933]; 1994 [1946]), the “relation between the sciences of the body, or natural sciences, and the sciences of the mind is the relation inquiry into which ought to be substituted for the make-believe inquiry into the make-believe problem of ‘the relation between body and mind’” (Collingwood 1992 [1942]: 2.49). More specifically, the social sciences typically require . . . understanding . . . what actions and experience mean to a person from the inside. We can understand physics or chemistry without knowing what it is like to be an electron, but understand[ing] people [requires] understanding . . . how things are for them. The required subjective empathetic understanding . . . cannot . . . be arrived at solely through the methods of the natural sciences. (Harman 1999 [1990a]: 262)

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Aimed at “subjective understanding” of “how things are,” “from the inside,” for its subject-matter – an “empathetic” or “simulative” pretense of being the subject-matter – mental discourse essentially adopts an “interior” viewpoint disjoint from the essential physical-discourse “exterior” viewpoint. The fundamental apparatus of mathematical logic does not represent viewpoint contrasts, and indeed is bound to the exterior viewpoint; bells and whistles will not change it (Hellie forthcoming). So if the hermeneuts are correct, mathematical logic is inadequate to represent discourse about the mental. But then the strength of analytic philosophy ramifies into a weakness of the analytic philosophy of mind: For if we have disciplined our thoughts to fit mathematical logic, we should avoid theorizing beyond its limits – and so, about the mind. If we neglect the warning, we will presumably find ourselves restructuring pretheoretic mental discourse to fit the limitations of mathematical logic, in a procrustean-slash-sisyphean cycle: proposing novel descriptive schemata; adding epicycles to handle mounting doubts until the complexity becomes unmanageable; standing aside out of exhaustion, awaiting the opportunity to discard the worn-out schema once a novelty is proposed . . . For observers of post-war analytic philosophy of mind, this may ring a bell. So perhaps there is historical and philosophical illumination in giving the hermeneuts their day in court: granting their viewpoint-shifting “disunity of science” in order to narrate our trajectory as they might see it (using our own idiom, however!). So: Disunity has to go somewhere, hermeneuts say. They immediately spot our perpetual readiness to ransom the unity of science by disintegrating the mind (Place 1956; Block and Fodor 1972; Shoemaker 1975a; Block 1978; 1995; Fodor 1991; Chalmers 1996): For its valuable causal difference-making, we credit a “functional” or “computational” or “structural” side; for the nuisance mind–body problem, we blame a “phenomenal” or “qualitative” or “experiential” or “what-it’s-likeish” side – Consciousness (the “big-C” is a convention from Wilson 2014 for marking a suspect philosophical transmutation of a perfectly fine “little-c” concept). And the rest is a tale of a rug with an outof-place bump. After an initial sketch of theoretical pressures behind, and resulting from, this disintegration, I outline a sequence of four difficulties for Consciousness. Each era in a roughly “quindecadal” sequence discovers the corresponding difficulty: While the reaction is constrained to protect the “unity of science,” variation within this constraint accounts for continuity and change across the eras. A running commentary draws philosophical morals; a pessimistic but brief conclusion points to the future.

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Explanatory Permeability, Semantic Isolation The basic challenge for the philosophy of mind, perhaps, is to accommodate two inescapable relations between mental and physical discourse. One is their explanatory permeability with respect to one another: Mental explanantes explain physical explananda, and physical explanantes explain mental explananda. Consider an example: A man enters the room, drawing Rance’s gaze: Rance then quickly leaps to his feet, turns in a circle five times (Harman 1990a: 262), and sits back down. Why? Well, the fact that the man has entered the room is evident to Rance; recognizing the man as the mayor, Rance believes that the mayor has entered the room; Rance identifies as a member of the Conservative Radical Alliance, which he ritualizes in part through salute when high CRA officials enter the room; Rance believes that the mayor is a high CRA official, and so believes that a high CRA official has entered the room, and so proceeds under an intention to perform the CRA salute; according to Rance’s knowhow, to perform the CRA salute ritual, one leaps to one’s feet, turns in a circle five times, and sits back down; so, instrumentally to the intention to salute, Rance proceeds under an intention to leap to his feet, turn in a circle five times, and sit back down.

Learning this goes a long way toward dispelling the mystery about Rance’s behavioral response to the sensory stimulus. Another inescapable relation between mental and physical discourse is their semantic isolation from one another: Between the manners in which we think about the physical and about the mental is a wide gap. Our knowledge of bat anatomy does not suffice for us to know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel 1974). Black-and-White Mary’s great physical knowledge does not suffice for her to know what it is like to see a red thing (Jackson 1982). And of course states of possessing evidence are not alone: Physical knowledge will not suffice for knowledge of what it is like to know how to persuade people to buy real estate, or to regret a missed opportunity, or to go forward under an intention to dive from a high platform, or to identify as Japanese, or to be uncertain whether Chicago is by a lake, or to have the complement of beliefs of a Koranic scholar – or, for that matter, to be in any of Rance’s evidential, recognitional, belief, identification, ritualization, intention, or knowhow states. Thinking about a certain mental state appears to require knowing what it is like to be in it; but the latter appears not to be “merely implicit” in physical knowledge, and to instead involve an entirely different manner of thinking. In particular, while a purely physical explanatory chain might be built tracing from Rance’s initial to final state, this

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would remove mystery in a different way, by subsuming Rance’s behavior under causal law rather than by making it rationally intelligible. A Metadualist Account A discourse is descriptive if it adopts an exterior viewpoint on its subject-matter, aiming for the truth about it (descriptive-discourse belief “distinguishes possible worlds,” in the well-known image: Stalnaker 1984; 1999 [1970]). Descriptivism is the “unity of science”-style doctrine that all discourse is descriptive. In “metapsychology” (the “psychology of psychology”, concerned with the meaning of psychological discourse), a “monistic” position maintains that psychological discourse is descriptive, while a “dualistic” position denies it – metamonism and metadualism, for short. Descriptivism requires metamonism. The contrasting broadly hermeneutic metadualism I will discuss treats mental discourse as akin to hypothesis, or pretense. More specifically, to believe that Rance intends to perform the CRA salute is to purport, qua Rance, to perform the CRA salute: to shift away from one’s “root” mental state and enter a hypothetical mental state, intended to serve as Rance’s point of view, which harbors the intention to perform the CRA salute. (If the believer is Rance himself, the purport is “non-strict”: Instead, his belief that he has the intention is just the having of it.) Not all hypothetical discourse is mental discourse (the fictional, the conditional, “free pretense”). What promotes a hypothesis to purport-qua-Rance? Assuming Rance to be “like me in being [a] thinker. . . [to] possess the same fundamental cognitive capacities and propensities that I do, I place myself in what I take to be his initial state by imagining the world as it would appear from his point of view and I then deliberate, reason and reflect” (Heal 1986: 13–14). Beginning with my own mental state, I mutate it minimally until it conforms with what I take to be “evident,” or “given” to Rance – so that it bears, as a set of basic perceptual beliefs, the salient truths about the evolving sensible qualities of, and relations between, Rance’s body, and its environment. The account of semantic isolation is straightforward: Belief in physical discourse is root-mental state description, involving no pretense; nothing beyond more root-mental state description – no pretense – is implicit. In the account of explanatory permeability, a central role goes to evidence, the “given.” Because evidence is both true and believed, it is available as a “pivot” or “fixed point” in shifting between physical and mental discourse. So if a chain of purely mental explanation, progressing within an environment of purportqua-Rance, devolves to the given, it may then jump from the hypothetical

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mental state to the root mental state, and continue as a root-level, physical explanatory chain (Hellie 2018). Pressures on Metamonism The Fundamental Tension The metamonist lacks the theoretical resource of shifts of view: All discourse is descriptive, picturing the world from within the root mental state. Explanatory permeability is therefore analyzed as causal interdependence: “Cause is the cement of the universe; the concept of cause is what holds together our picture of the universe, a picture that would otherwise disintegrate into a diptych of the mental and the physical” (Davidson 1980b: xv). Semantic isolation is analyzed in terms of heterogeneity in the logical form of descriptive discourse: of a descriptive independence between mental-describing and physical-describing discourse (Levine 1983). And (bracketing delicacies in metaphysics of causation) descriptive independence yields “epiphenomenalism” (compare Jackson 1982: 133; Lewis 1988: 282–5; Chalmers 1996: 156) – against causal interdependence. This fundamental tension for metamonism admits three responses. An isolationist abandonment of explanatory permeability has been at best marginal (perhaps Churchland 1981): I set it to the side. A permeabilist abandonment of semantic isolationism (behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism) typically appears early in a “wave of reductionist euphoria” (Nagel 1974: 435), losing its allure once the air clears. Dialectically most stable is disintegrationism, combining permeabilism and isolationism by postulating “two quite distinct concepts of mind”: The phenomenal concept of mind . . . as conscious experience, and of a mental state as a consciously experienced mental state[; and] the psychological concept of mind . . . as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior[, on which] it matters little whether a mental state has a conscious quality or not . . . On the phenomenal concept, mind is characterized by the way it feels. On the psychological concept, mind is characterized by what it does. There should be no question of competition between these two notions of mind. Neither of them is the correct analysis of mind. They cover different phenomena, both of which are quite real. It is only the fact that both are called “mind” that gives an appearance of competition. (Chalmers 1996: 11)

Our picture of the mental disintegrates into a diptych of the (explanatorily and semantically permeable) “psychological” and the (explanatorily and semantically isolated) “phenomenal” (“Consciousness”) – and so then does our picture of the world, if not in exactly the way that worried Davidson.

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The Unity Problem Unfortunately, this faces the following unity problem. Mental explanation – rationalization – removes mystery by making sense of what it is like for one, by making one rationally intelligible: Rationalization does not fall apart, revealing independent “explanatory” and “what it is like” components; instead, what it is to be a rationalization just is to be an explanation in terms of what it is like – “explanatory” permeability and semantic isolation are “unified” in rationalization (“it is very hard to see how to make sense of the analogue of spectrum inversion with respect to nonqualitative States” [Block 1978: 304]). Disintegrationists, however, think we picture the world as including distinct psychological and phenomenal copies of all mental features – for example, of knowledge how to persuade people to buy real estate. If so, we can describe circumstances in which, while Alex has both kinds of this knowhow and Fred has neither, Ruth has only the “psychological” kind, and Belkis only the “phenomenal” kind. We explain Alex’s and Ruth’s success in persuading real-estate buyers, in contrast with Fred’s and Belkis’s failures, by contrasts in their psychologicalknowhow: So, according to the disintegrationist, we have psychological explanations of this contrast. And yet we find cross-cutting contrasts in what it is like: What it is like for Alex and Belkis in respect of their possession of phenomenalknowhow is the same, and contrasts with what it is like for Ruth and Fred in this respect; so Ruth’s success and Belkis’s failure are rationally unintelligible. But then we have no psychological explanation after all: a contradiction.

The Received View This unity problem is largely unrecognized, for its full-strength disintegrationist target appeared on the scene only recently (to foreshadow: as the phenomenal intentionalism of Horgan and Tienson 2002). The agenda of much discussion even today remains set by the period from roughly 1970 to 1995, when the focus was on a milder disintegrationism, the “functionalism-plus-qualia” received view of mental discourse – an approach making a different set of tradeoffs. The received view synthesizes two components. First, a conception of qualia tracing to Schlick (1979 [1932]) and thence Russell (1910–11), as the “stuffing” for the “structures” built in our theories (compare Livingston 2004: chapters 2–3): Phenomenal discourse encodes our “direct” or “revelatory” grasp (by way of an “ineffable” relation of “acquaintance”: compare Kripke 1980 [1972]; Dennett 1988; Lewis 1995; Chalmers 2003; Hawthorne 2006; Stalnaker 2008: chapter 4) of these “intrinsic” and “qualitative” mental properties. Unfortunately for Schlick, we do not, in fact, picture the world as containing any mental qualities. Still, this is easy to lose track of, because of what I call the

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evidence conflation. Evidence, recall, is true, believed, and concerns salient sensible qualities (including relations). The subject-matter of evidence, sensible qualities, is “given,” and the subject-matter of descriptive discourse; but the possession of evidence – the harboring of “appearances” – is mental. Accustomed to using evidence as a pivot between viewpoints, we easily ascribe aspects of one side to the other, treating sensible qualities as mental and appearances as described: Boundaries between the sides thus eroded, they blur into one as the archetype of qualia – qualities serving as appearances, both mental and given. The second component of the received view is a functional conception of rationalizing discourse developed (following Carnap 1959 [1932] and Morris 1938) by Putnam (1960) and Davidson (1963), as pertaining to the abstract causal structures bridging sensory stimulation and behavioral response: All consideration of rationalizing matters is assigned to psychological discourse, which conveys an “indirect” or “occlusive” grasp of its subject-matter, by way of a “mode of presentation” specified in “causal-structural” or “functional” terms, our familiarity with which is implicit in our endorsement of “folk psychology.” Descriptive independence results from the logical gap between relations of acquaintance and functional modes of presentation. By segregating the concerns of phenomenal and psychological discourse, the received view is able to deflect the unity problem: Rather than picturing the world as including distinct psychological and phenomenal copies of all mental features, we do so for none. In particular, knowhow is exclusively psychological, never phenomenal. But then descriptive independence does not predict that Belkis’s and Ruth’s phenomenal-knowhow is misaligned with their explanatoryknowhow – avoiding the consequence that their actions are rationally unintelligible, and, in turn, the contradiction. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF “CONSCIOUSNESS”

The received view is not, ultimately, satisfactory. Arguably, the story of “folk psychology” is far less plausible than its simulationist competitor (Heal 1986) – but I set this aside in order to focus on the phenomenal (“Consciousness”) region. The literature here, as I will narrate, has been driven by four difficulties, coming to prominence in the following chronological order. First, the conflation problem: Schlickean mental qualities result from the evidence conflation. Warnings in Ryle 2002 [1949] are successively mutated beyond recognition in Place 1956, Smart 1959, and Lewis 1966, opening the door to qualia in Nagel 1970 and Kripke 1980 [1972]; rediscovered in a weakened form in Harman 1990b, its still further weakening in Tye 1992 is the origin of ontemporary “representationalism”.

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Second, the semantic problem: Semantic isolation results from metadualistic shifts of view, not acquaintance. Part of the conflation problem is a special case, accounting for the previous era’s mutations; the general problem is raised tentatively by Nagel 1974 and disarmed in Jackson 1982. Third, the ineffability problem: Losing any explanatory role, qualia are pushed out of ordinary discourse, becoming “ineffable” (Shoemaker 1982). With the occlusion of the conflation problem and disarming of the semantic problem came an increasingly freewheeling conceptualization of qualia (Shoemaker 1975a; 1975b; Block 1978; Levine 1983): Ineffability was thus neglected as a problem until Dennett 1988 and Lewis 1988, but soon then became foundational to the qualia-toppling conflation problem revival in Harman 1990b. Fourth, the separation problem: It is implausible, and ultimately unsustainable, to separate rationalizing discourse from the reach of semantic isolation. Once representationalism supplants the received view, this difficulty is quickly noticed (Siewert 1998; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Chalmers 2004). For the metadualist, the semantic problem is most fundamental: Its datum is that mental discourse is not descriptive, in direct conflict with metamonism. Bound to the semantic problem, metamonists avoid the unity problem by shouldering the separation problem; the received-view strategy here faces the conflation problem and then the ineffability problem. While dropping qualia for phenomenal intentionality resolves the conflation problem, and then the ineffability and separation problems, received view mildness is the disintegrationist way around the unity problem – to which, in opting instead for phenomenal intentionalist extremism, the metamonist then stands exposed. USHERING IN QUALIA (THE CONFLATION P R O B L E M : T O 19 7 0)

Ghostbusting Monumental, wild, subtle, and enigmatic, Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (2002 [1949]) is the foundational work of the literature. (See also Smith, this volume.) Though long thought an “analytic behaviorist” permeabilist, Ryle is no metamonist, elsewhere denying the universality of descriptive discourse (Ryle 1950: 250–2; compare Livingston 2004: 4.i–iii). Instead, Ryle presses the conflation problem against the Schlickean approach: Labeled the “official doctrine” (Ryle 2002 [1949]: 11), its image of “mental stuffing” in a physical “structure” is derided as the “dogma” of the “ghost in the machine” (15–16) – a “philosopher’s myth,” to be dissolved by “rectify[ing] the logic of mental-conduct concepts” (16). Ryle presses the conflation problem. On the subject-matter side comes nonmental: “there is nothing ‘mental’ about sensations” (204); sensation is unnecessary for

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mentality or even “consciousness” (“if by ‘stream of consciousness’ were meant ‘series of sensations’, then from a mere inventory of the contents of such a stream there would be no possibility of deciding whether the creature that had these sensations was an animal or a human being; an idiot, a lunatic or a sane man” [204-5]); and it is insufficient (“a person can be said to be unconscious of a sensation, when he pays no heed to it” (157); compare Rosenthal 1986; Block 2011). On the possession side comes expressive: “appearance”-discourse expresses possession of perceptual evidence (“Talking about looks, sounds and smells . . . is already talking about common objects, since it is applying learned perception recipes for the typical appearances of common objects to whatever one is trying to make out at the moment” (Ryle 2002 [1949]: 219; compare Hellie 2010: 107); yielding the special semantic problem: Such discourse does not descriptively encode acquaintance with “appearances” or “representational properties” (compare Hellie 2013: 314 n. 7). Heedlessness Rectification complete, Ryle exits the stage: This theoretical quietism soon proves a vulnerability, facilitating misinterpretation by Ryle’s metamonistically inclined students, Place and Smart (compare Livingston 2004: 4.iv–v). Place’s “The concept of heed” (Place 1954) frames Ryle as an analytic behaviorist: locally, for the alleged rationalizing subregion, the right view (“in the case of cognitive . . . and volitional concepts[,] an analysis in terms of dispositions to behave . . . is fundamentally sound” [1954: 44]): This local permeabilism sets a paradigm – “any theory is compatible with a dispositional analysis of mental states other than experiences” (Lewis 1966: 102 n. 8); “functional . . . or intentional states . . . could be ascribed to . . . automata . . . that experienced nothing” (Nagel 1974: 436); “beliefs seem to be supervenient on functional organization in ways that qualia are not” (Block 1978: 304); “Dividing and conquering – concentrating on intentionality and ignoring consciousness – has proved . . . remarkably successful . . . so far” (Fodor 1991: 12). But, rejecting an imputed “dispositional analysis of consciousness and heed concepts generally” (Place 1954: 254), “The concept of heed” goes on offense. (1) Asserting the negation of nonmental (insufficiency) (“to have a sensation itself entails paying at least some heed to the sensation”; “Sensations, as we have seen, do not exist independently of our consciousness of them” (250, 252), and apparently thinking of sensations as bundling in their own heedings, Place extracts a vicious regress from the dispositional analysis (“to be disposed to react to a sensation therefore would be to be disposed to react to one’s consciousness

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of that sensation” (252). (2) While on the dispositional analysis, “it should be logically impossible for us to describe what it is like to be conscious of something,” we instead do so “continuously” (252, my emphasis); a dispositionalist simulacrum of the expressive treatment is brushed aside (253). Behaviorism out, the “identity theory” secures explanatory permeability (255). The sequel, “Is consciousness a brain process?” (Place 1956) goes on defense, addressing semantic isolation (“I am not claiming that statements about sensations and mental images are reducible to or analyzable into statements about brain processes, in the way that ‘cognition statements’ are analyzable into statements about behavior” [Place 1956: 44–5]), with a broadly “verificationist” story of the modes of presentation (“it would be necessary to show that the introspective observations reported by the subject can be accounted for in terms of processes which . . . have occurred in his brain” [48]). Residual concern is attributed to a “phenomenological fallacy” (49), where a “green after-image” is literally green: Place sidesteps the special semantic problem by mutating expressive (“when we describe the after-image as green . . . we are saying that we are having the sort of experience which we normally have when . . . looking at a green patch of light” [49]). Soon afterward, Smart’s “Sensations and brain processes” seeks to present the doctrine of Place 1956 “in a more nearly unobjectionable form” (Smart 1959: 141 n. 1). Where Place attacks Ryle on nonmental, Smart just ignores the distinction between the sensation and the “heeding” or “consciousness” of it, offering as examples of “states of consciousness” “visual, auditory, and tactual sensations . . . aches and pains” (142). Treating semantic isolation moves Smart further from the special semantic problem, mutating Place-expressive into the famous “topic-neutral” analysis: “When a person says, ‘I see a yellowish-orange afterimage’, he is saying something like this: ‘There is something going on which is like what is going on when . . . I really see an orange’” (149). Ghostbusting Goes Bust The chain of transmission runs next through David Lewis’s still agenda-setting “An argument for the identity theory” (Lewis 1966), in which Smart 1959-like rhetoric and Putnam 1960-like apparatus are filtered through Lewis’s careerguiding, Carnap (1928; 1947)-tinged metamonism (Hellie 2017). Mutating Smart-expressive (via “elaboration and generalization,” Lewis 1966: 102) swaps Schlickean acquaintance for “analytic functionalist” modes of presentation (“the definitive characteristic of any experience as such is its causal role” [102]); the path back to nonmental is obliterated by replacing “consciousness” or “heed” or “sensation” with the Carnapian “experience.” On behalf of

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analytic functionalism comes explanatory permeability, put up to descriptive interdependence (“it inherits the behaviorist discovery that the (ostensibly) causal connections between an experience and its typical occasions and manifestations [have] analytic necessity” [103]); a concluding nod to “the dualism of the common man” (106) exhausts Lewis’s attention to semantic isolation – until Lewis 1983b. T H E A G E O F Q U A L I A ( T H E S E M A N T I C P R O B L E M : 19 7 0 –19 8 2 )

The Return of Schlick Analytic functionalism would be soon afterward taken up by Putnam (1967b) and Armstrong (1968) (compare Dennett 1969; Harman 1973) – a short-lived reign of permeabilism, inevitably renewing attention to semantic isolation. Resistance to the Schlickean strategy for interpreting semantic isolation as descriptive independence had come from Ryle’s conflation problem – by now off the stage: thanks, ironically, to Place, Smart, and Lewis. Readying that stage for a Schlickean revival, its foundational metamonistic semantical program (Carnap 1942; 1947) had seen a decade of great technical progress (Kripke 1959; Montague 1960; 1970; Lewis 1970a). Interpretation of semantic isolation again in need, Schlickeanism and descriptive independence come roaring back, now framed with great sophistication. Descriptive independence predicts the coherence of phenomenal permutation across functional constancy, whether by varying phenomenal characterization (“spectral inversion”) or withholding it entirely (“zombies”): Neo-Schlickeans, bound to the metamonist interpretation of semantic isolation as descriptive independence, widely purport to intuit this coherence (Nagel 1970: esp. 396–7, 397 n. 2, 401–2, 402 n. 4; Kripke 1980 [1972]: 148–53; and also Block and Fodor 1972; Kirk 1974; Shoemaker 1975a; 1975b). Palace Rebellion While Nagel (1970) was a pioneer neo-Schlickean, his protean “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974) works to strip away theory, elaborating semantic isolation “en plein air” (rather than interpreted as descriptive independence), via attitudes toward what it is like (precursors: Ryle 2002 [1949]: 56–7, 175; Farrell 1950: 181–8, esp. 183; Place 1954: 252; Smart 1959: 150–1). Implicit in the discussion is the (general) semantic problem. At the apparent crux, Nagel announces – surprisingly, perhaps – “my point . . . is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat” (1974: 442

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n. 8). Instead – more surprisingly still, perhaps – the central point is revealed as metadualism: “even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat . . . and a fortiori to know what it is like . . . one must take up the bat’s point of view” (442 n. 8). But Nagel’s early metamonism pushes back (“My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts” (441); lamenting being “unequipped to think about . . . experience . . . without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject,” Nagel issues “a challenge to . . . devise . . . an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination” [449]), yielding an unsettled, roiling trajectory. Order Restored Jackson’s “Epiphenomenal qualia” (Jackson 1982), worried at this instability, restores order (“despite my dissociations to come, I am much indebted to [Nagel 1974]”); “the emphasis changes through the article” (1982: 131 n. 10), collapsing the pretheoretic semantic isolation back into the neo-Schlickean descriptive independence in three moves. (1) The semantic problem is suppressed, using fresh work on self-location to misinterpret, and then marginalize, Nagel’s “point of view” talk (“No amount of knowledge about Fred, be it physical or not, amounts to knowledge ‘from the inside’ concerning Fred. We are not Fred. There is thus a whole set of items of knowledge expressed by forms of words like ‘that it is I myself who is . . .’ which Fred has and we simply cannot have because we are not him” . . . “Knowledge de se in the sense of [Lewis 1979a]” [1982: 132, 132 n. 11]); (2) ignorance of what it is like becomes unspecificity in descriptive belief (“there is something about his experience, a property of it, of which we were left ignorant” [132]); (3) the meaning of “qualia” is enriched: Alongside existing neo-Schlickean resonances, it now applies to the subjectmatter of the above unspecificity (a “qualia freak” thinks “there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of physical information includes” (127; prefigured by Block 1978: 281). Ignorance of what it is like despite physical belief – semantic isolation – becomes uncertainty about qualia despite physical belief – requiring descriptive independence. The palace rebellion suppressed, confidence in the theoretical architecture of the age plateaus in its manifesto: Levine’s “Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap” (1983) propounds descriptive independence laid bare of surrounding clutter (downstream metaphysics; details of thought experiments; nuance in the conception of the physical or functional; backstopping Schlickean doctrine; terminological or conceptual stability in “qualia”-discourse).

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Ineffability Embraced Attention to the conflation problem leads to careful discrimination of the subjectmatter and possession of evidence; that constraint lifted, the hybrid discourse of “qualia” constructed by the neo-Schlickeans rushes ahead with terminological wild abandon, folding in “what it’s like” thanks to Jackson’s redefinition. Levine 1983 is an opulently festooned museum of period terminology (subject-matter: “pain,” “sensations of warmth and cold,” “sensation of pain”; possession: “the feeling of pain,” “having the feeling of pain,” “how pain feels,” “the feel of pain,” “feeling like pain,” “how it feels to be in a state of pain”; point of view: “what it’s like to be in pain” or “be in certain mental states” or “have one’s Cfibers fire”; experience: “experience of pain,” “the particular way a qualitative state is experienced,” “essential features of qualitative sensory experiences,” “experiencing what it’s like to be in pain”; conscious: “being conscious,” “the phenomenon of consciousness,” “conscious experience”; qualia: “(visual/sensory) qualia,” “the qualitative side (character) of pain,” “having qualia,” “visual quality,” “the qualitative character of pain” or of “C-fiber firing”; “phenomenal properties of pain” or “associated with heat”). Compounding the obstacles to interpretation radiating from this indiscipline, Schlickean doctrine itself demands obscurity of its proponents. Pretheoretically, all mental discourse is explanatorily permeable, so if all explanation is causal and all causal discourse is semantically permeable, there is no residue of pretheoretic mental discourse fit to account for semantic isolation (“lessons couldn’t help,” Lewis 1988: 281). Neo-Schlickeans acknowledge this. Compare Shoemaker (1975b: 7) on subject-matter qualia: It is far from clear that we can make sense of the notion of someone having a sensation phenomenally just like pain which he does not find unpleasant or distressing, and which he responds to in the way other people respond to tickling sensations. Because this raises rather special problems, I shall say no more about pains and tickles and the like in this paper.

And also Shoemaker (1975a: 281) on possession qualia: someone’s being appeared-blue-to [requires] that he be in the qualitative state that is, in him at that time, associated with visual stimulation by blue things . . . But . . . then being appeared-blue-to will not itself be a qualitative state[,] if spectrum inversion is possible.

So qualia-discourse is essentially neologistic (compare Lewis 1995: 326). Acknowledging this, the neo-Schlickeans embrace disintegrationism about the

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apparent ordinary language expressions used in qualia-discourse: Despite appearance, they are used with an extraordinary “phenomenal sense” (Shoemaker 1975a: 300–1; 1975b, 28–30; compare Jackson 1977; Lewis 1980; Shoemaker 1982: 365; Block 1995).

Mustering Revanchists Jackson’s redefinition notwithstanding, semantic isolation does not require neoSchlickean qualia. Still, the redefinition was successful enough that, by the late 1980s, analytic functionalists would wage a revanchist campaign through attacks on qualia. Dennett (1988) presses the ineffability problem, worrying that the unfamiliarity of qualia leaves it underdetermined how to cross-identify them (233–4), a conflict with neo-Schlickean acquaintance (229); Lewis (1988) thinks the ineffability of qualia “peculiar” (280–1): Each pins qualia on pretheoretic opinion, and concludes celebrating the restoration of analytic functionalism through the transcendence of confusion (Dennett 1988: 227; Lewis 1995: 329). The paper achieving the revanchist aim, however, is Harman’s “The intrinsic quality of experience” (1990b) – by acknowledgment, a rehearsal of age-old wisdom (“I will say little that is original and will for the most part merely elaborate points made many years ago,” 245). The ineffability problem backstops Harman’s defense against descriptive independence: namely, refusal to comprehend which properties are addressed in the neo-Schlickean spectral inversion thought-experiment (1990b: 260). Regarding the theory-independent semantic isolation, however, little solace is available within the parameters of this chapter (“it is unclear to me whether any satisfactory response is possible on behalf of” those who understand descriptive discourse in terms of truth-conditions [257]; although a response I find obscure is sketched within a “functionalism that refers to the functions of concepts” [257]). Fortunately, this unpromising treatment of the compelling objection to analytic functionalism is overshadowed by Harman’s revival of the conflation problem, attacking subject-matter qualia with nonmental (“you do not experience any features as intrinsic features of your experience”; “the only features there to turn your attention to” are external qualities; and possession-qualia with yet another expressive-mutation “aware[ness] of an intentional feature of . . . experience: . . . that . . . experience has a certain content” [251]) – yet again overlooking the special semantic problem.

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Attention to Representation Pioneering neo-Schlickeans were, unsurprisingly, unimpressed, embracing the ineffability problem to deflect the conflation problem (“Harman’s appeal to introspection [nonmental] is an error in philosophical method” [Block 1990: 73]; from Shoemaker 1991: “the awareness we have of the intentional content of our experiences . . . involves an awareness of qualia”: “none of the expressions [of] ordinary language . . . ascrib[e] qualia” [521]; “concepts of . . . qualia . . . are theoretical concepts” [521]; and to rebut Harman on semantic isolation (from Block 1990: “Harman’s refutation of the inverted spectrum depends on rejecting the distinction . . . between qualitative and intentional content” [59]; “the qualia realist says [Black-and-white Mary] acquires knowledge involving qualitative contents in addition to the intentional contents. This is the crux of the matter, and on this, Harman . . . is silent” [75]). But many new theorists would flock to Harman’s re-exorcism of the evidence conflation. According to these representationalists, (1) some mental properties are targets for “turning attention on” or “introspection” (with the neo-Schlickeans; but fitting ill with nonmental and not Harman’s claim); (2) these targets are representational properties (against the neo-Schlickeans; with nonmental but mutating Harman-expressive: “I am introspectively aware that I am undergoing a visual experience with a certain content . . . This . . . is . . . felt . . . it is given in introspection” (Tye 1992: 166); compare: Carruthers 2000; Byrne 2001; Kriegel 2002; Tye 2002; Chalmers 2004; Jackson 2004; Zahavi 2005; Siewert 2004; Levine 2006; Speaks 2009). The metadualist demurs, raising the general semantic problem against (1) and the special semantic problem against (2).

The Significance of Representationalism Bringing along the Place 1954-style paradigm of the rational-as-permeable, the first wave “reductive” representationalists (Tye 1992; 1995; Dretske 1995; Lycan 1996; Byrne 2001) would trumpet the demise of descriptive independence. Of course, these “reductive representationalists” had no more hope than their precursor analytic functionalists. Jackson’s redefinition was soon undone, as the pretheoretic explanandum, semantic isolation, was cut loose from its fallen theoretical explanans, qualia (Chalmers 1996: 377 n. 38; Warfield 1999; Vinueza 2000). Representationalism would outlast its reductive origin: Where the theoretical power of qualia collapses to a singularity (the ineffability problem), representation

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is the stuff of philosophical theory. Facing up to the separation problem in the years around 2000, a phenomenal intentionalism emerged (Siewert 1998; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Chalmers 2004), absorbing and centralizing strands of research that long stood aside from the received view to address first-order, pretheoretic explananda concerning representation and rationality (Evans 1982; Peacocke 1983; Snowdon 1980/81; Searle 1983). The received-view austerity regime lifted, philosophy of mind would rebuild links with neighbors (epistemology: Pryor 2000; metasemantics: Chalmers 2004; 2006b), and germinate novel endogenous subliteratures (Martin 2002; Siegel 2004; Hellie 2005; Morrison 2016; Phillips 2010; Lee 2014; Siegel 2006; Logue 2013). (Space prohibits exploring challenges here from the outstanding semantic and unity problems: compare Hellie 2014; 2018). The Future for Metamonism A laconic remark by pioneers of phenomenal intentionalism is striking: “separatism” – received-view separation of the phenomenal and the intentional – “has been very popular in philosophy of mind in recent decades, and is still widely held” (Horgan and Tienson 2002: 520). Well yes. For although separatism creates the ineffability and separation problems, it is also the crucial bulwark from the unity problem, rooted in the descriptive independence analysis of semantic isolation: Still facing the semantic problem and thus committed to that analysis, phenomenal intentionalism confronts the unity problem. Preliminary gestures have been made. Spectral inversion thought-experiments have been recast on behalf of “narrow content” for phenomenal-intentional states of evidence about color (Chalmers 2004: §§5–8), and extended to certain further sensible qualities (Thompson 2009); a few widely discussed cases of “reference” in belief-content (natural kind terms, proper names, deictic nominals) have received comparable treatment (Horgan and Tienson 2002: 528–9). It remains to be seen, however, whether these treatments can be extended to cover the totality of mental discourse. Having now for some time enjoyed the benefits of liberation from the received view, proponents of phenomenal intentionalism should pursue this program with vigor. The stakes are high: phenomenal intentionalism is the last refuge of disintegrationism; in turn, the most stable form of metamonism; in turn, a consequence of descriptivism; in turn, an apparent commitment of the marriage of mathematical logic and unified science – in turn, the twin pillars of the analytic tradition. If the program fails, philosophers inheriting the analytic tradition will need to rebuild around hermeneutic themes; those with a due appreciation of what success would require may think it wiser to get a head start on the rebuilding.

6 COMPUTATIONAL PHILOSOPHIES OF MIND mar gar e t a . b o d e n

INTRODUCTION

Computational philosophies of mind (CPMs) all hold that computational concepts of some sort are needed to understand the mind. Beyond that, they vary significantly. CPMs differ, for instance, over just what concepts these are. Initially inspired by computer science, their development has reflected changes in artificial intelligence (AI), theoretical psychology, and neuroscience. At first, the focus was on symbolic AI – dubbed GOFAI, or “Good Old-Fashioned AI,” by John Haugeland (1985: 112). Later, some CPMs replaced, or complemented, GOFAI concepts with ideas drawn from connectionism and dynamical systems. CPMs differ also over conscious sensations and feelings, or qualia: Some deny their existence, while others do not. (See Hellie, this volume, for discussion of consciousness.) There’s disagreement, too, over what counts as “computation”: whether Turing’s definition covers all cases (Boden 2006: 16.ix). So there are many squabbles within this philosophical family. Moreover, there is a major feud between this family and phenomenologists. In short, CPMs cover a richly controversial area.

THE EARLY ATTEMPTS

It’s widely believed that the first CPM was presented by Turing (1950), in the paper that defined the “Imitation Game,” or Turing Test. However, that’s mistaken. It’s true that “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” attracted huge philosophical interest, and still does (Boden 2006: 16.ii). The commonest objection is that a system might conceivably “pass,” yet be a zombie: a creature behaving like a human being but utterly lacking consciousness. Wolfe Mays said this in 1949 (in an invited reply for Mind, rejected as “too polemical” for mentioning consciousness too often: Mays p.c.). Mays also objected (Anon. 1949; Mays 90

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1952) that a Turing machine or computer program merely shuffles formal symbols, with no meaning being involved (see above). Moreover, the test ignores bodily behavior. But Turing’s 1950 paper did not offer a systematic philosophy of mind. The Imitation Game was merely jokey “propaganda” (Gandy 1996: 125). The paper was intended as a manifesto for a future AI. As such, it focused on (broad) technicalities, not philosophical argument. This was a CPM only in embryo. Nor was it the first. It had been preceded by Kenneth Craik (1943) and Warren McCulloch (McCulloch and Pitts 1943; Pitts and McCulloch 1965 [1947]). Craik’s notion of “cerebral models” was inspired by analog computers, but McCulloch initially focused on Turing machines. In a paper of 1943 that inspired early work in both symbolic and connectionist AI, he posited an isomorphism between Turing machines and the propositional calculus – and neurons, too. Every statement expressible in propositional logic was Turingcomputable by some strictly definable neural network. In 1947, McCulloch turned from logic to probability theory in describing brain-function. FUNCTIONALISM

The first CPM from a professional philosopher was Hilary Putnam’s functionalism (Putnam 1960; 1967c). The mind and mental processes (identified by the categories of “folk psychology”) were conceptualized as the program running on the brain – where a program was a sequence of instructions for a Turing machine. As Putnam put it: “The functional organization (problem solving, thinking) of the human being or machine can be described in terms of the sequences of mental or logical states respectively . . . without reference to the ‘physical realization’ of these states” (1960: §3). The final clause expressed the doctrine of “multiple realizability” (analogously, a program could be implemented in physically different computers). This implied that philosophers, and psychologists, could ignore the brain. Psychology was an autonomous science, focusing on abstract information processing as opposed to neurophysiological mechanisms. Philosophers with “scientistic” leanings saw functionalism as a welcome liberation. It licensed talk about mind, while avoiding metaphysically mysterious events, processes, or substance. It underwrote the explanatory links between (and within) mind and body that we normally take for granted. Through multiple realizability, it saved the main claim of the previously popular identity theory (Place 1956; Armstrong 1968) – that each mental state is identical with some brain state – without claiming, falsely, that all mental states of type x are identical with brain states of type y. It was consistent with materialism but left

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space for an autonomous, non-reductionist, psychology – grounded in causalcomputational mechanisms. And it promised a research program that could offer both precision and testability. Putnam’s functionalism was “computational” in relying on the concept of Turing machines, and on the then-novel software/hardware distinction. But Putnam did not ask just what computational processes might be involved. Nor did he mention his own work on automatic theorem-proving (Davis and Putnam 1960 [1959]), which later helped lead to resolution theorem-proving in AI. Nor did he cite any of the early AI programs that were arguably relevant. These included a checkers/draughts player that had beaten its programmer (Samuel 1959), and Oliver Selfridge’s Pandemonium, a pattern-recognizer that could learn to classify input images (alphanumeric characters) despite conflicting evidence, or noise (Selfridge 1955; 1956; 1959). Pandemonium was a GOFAI program that was, in effect, a parallel-processing, multilevel, system – later, hugely influential in the development of connectionism. A system based on probability rather than Boolean logic, and modeling a neuropsychological theory, would be even more important in that regard: Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron (Rosenblatt 1958). This self-organizing system could learn to classify new images starting from random weights and features, not (as in Pandemonium) from what the programmer regarded as “reasonable” ones. Two further late-1950s programs, due to Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, dealt with logical reasoning. The Logic Theory Machine had proved thirtyeight of the theorems in the Russell-Whitehead Principia Mathematica – even finding a more elegant proof of one of them (Newell and Simon 1956). And the General Problem Solver (GPS) could solve problems represented as goal/ subgoal hierarchies (Newell, Shaw, and Simon 1959; Newell and Simon 1961). Soon, philosophers developed various CPMs which did address questions about specific computational processes, and which used work in AI (including the early programs mentioned above) to suggest answers. AI-INFLUENCED CPMS

The first professional philosophers to ground a CPM in specific research in AI and cybernetics were Kenneth Sayre (Bobik and Sayre 1963; Sayre 1965; 1969; 1976) and Margaret Boden (1965; 1970; 1972). Sayre, who founded Notre-Dame’s Philosophical Institute for AI in 1965, had been a colleague of Selfridge and Marvin Minsky at MIT. He drew on their ideas to argue that the best way to understand any type of thinking or behavior is to try to simulate it. (His research group’s system for recognizing handwriting was the field-leader in the early-1970s: Sayre 1973.) But he relinquished the

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materialism that underpinned Putnam’s functionalism, saying that both mind and matter are metaphysically dependent on a more basic principle, namely information. Boden’s CPM used ideas from early AI to illuminate the nature of purpose. She offered a fundamentally physicalist, but non-reductionist, philosophy of this and other intentional concepts. And she sketched a computational account of human personality and character that integrated cognition with motivation and emotion, and which addressed various types of psychopathology (including hysterical paralysis: Boden 1970). Soon afterwards, Aaron Sloman initiated an ambitious – and still ongoing – study applying computational insights to epistemology and the philosophy of mind (Sloman 1971; 1978 et seq.; 1979; 1987; 2000; Boden 2014). He focused on the overall architecture of human and animal minds, integrating cognition, motivation, and emotion (and offering a computational analysis of consciousness: See “Dynamical Systems,” below). Sloman’s approach was broadly comparable to Putnam’s. But whereas Putnam saw the mind as the program that runs on the brain, Sloman saw it as the virtual machine – or rather, the integrated set of many different virtual machines – that is implemented in the brain. The concept of virtual machine comes from computer science, where it is understood as the information-processing system that the programmer has in mind when writing a program, and that people have in mind when using it. For instance, we think of neural networks as functioning in parallel, although most are implemented in a (sequential) von Neumann computer. Sloman’s experience of AI enabled him to conceptualize mental phenomena in much richer detail than is normal for philosophers. For instance, his early work on vision posited numerous cooperating and competing functions (Sloman 1978: chapter 9). These involved both temporary and long-lasting visual representations (some of them “noisy” or incomplete), feeding information backward and/or forward within the visual system, and potentially connecting to various kinds of bodily movement. Most philosophers in the 1970s/1980s lacked the knowledge of AI that’s needed to appreciate Sloman’s work (or Minsky’s either, which was broadly similar but less philosophically informed [Minsky 1965; 1979; 1985]). The bestknown CPMs during that period were due rather to Jerry Fodor, Daniel Dennett, Newell and Simon, and John Searle. Fodor, a pupil of Putnam, was a cognitive psychologist as well as a philosopher. He was strongly influenced by early AI, and by theories of concept learning (Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin 1956), linguistics (Chomsky 1957; 1965; 1967; 1968), and – later – low-level vision (Marr 1976; 1982).

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Fodor raised formalism to new heights (1968; 1975; 1978; 1980; 1983; 1987). He said that a computational psychology is the only “even remotely plausible” candidate for a scientific psychology (1975: 27), and the only scientifically respectable philosophy of mind. (He eventually denied that there can be a science of the higher mental processes, because there are no laws limiting relevance between concepts or beliefs: Fodor 1983.) Moreover, it had to be a CPM of a particular kind, i.e. one which described intentional processes as syntactic operations defined on mental representations. Internal (compositional) representations, he said, are real entities. And the mind is “literally” a computational system, so functionalist talk shouldn’t be regarded as metaphorical. Any propositional attitude (fearing, believing, intending, perceiving . . . that P) involves a computational relation between the organism and some compositional “formula(e)” of the organism’s internal code, or innate “language of thought” (LOT). (This theory was self-confessedly “scandalous,” because it implied that the innate LOT is as powerful as any language that one can ever learn: Newborns possess the semantic potential for representing aeroplanes.) The late-1980s rise of connectionist AI (see “Connectionist CPMs,” below) was a major challenge, given Fodor’s classical/symbolic conception of computation. He argued that connectionism couldn’t implement compositionality or identifiable representations, so couldn’t account for natural language or formal reasoning (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988). Dennett wasn’t similarly challenged by connectionism, because he had never prioritized formalism. Nevertheless, he was deeply influenced by early AI – and his first publications (Dennett 1969; 1971) set much of the agenda in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science for years ahead. He posited a “subpersonal” level of explanation of mental phenomena, and saw meaning as rooted not in public language but in mechanisms evolved in human and animal brains. He refused to identify thoughts with either functional states or brain states. To identify x with y is to say that both terms refer to the same thing – but Dennett argued that mentalistic terms don’t refer to anything at all. Thought, belief, intention, fear, even pain: All these words, he said, are nonreferential. Meaning, or intentional content, isn’t an extra item over and above bodily behavior or brain states. In saying this, Dennett was strongly influenced by Willard Quine (1953c; 1960), who saw the language of belief and desire as an “essentially dramatic idiom” (1960: 219). But Dennett rejected Quine’s view that intentional language is in principle reducible to physics. Ordinary language terms like belief and goal are imprecise but, he insisted, they are useful. Even in describing (predicting, explaining) the behavior of computers, they are in practice unavoidable.

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To use mentalistic language, he said, is not to identify and report on mental states as such, but to take “the intentional stance” in describing the organism/ machine concerned (Dennett 1971; 1978; 1984; 1988). This assumes rationality – defined as having beliefs and goals that are mutually appropriate. Alternatively, one might take the “physical” or the “design” stance. The decision about which stance to take is a pragmatic one: Which is the most useful, in the circumstances? (This involved some equivocation about the reality of mental states: Dennett 1981.) Systematic attempts to gloss the mind in computational terms were made not only by professional philosophers, but also by AI scientists. (Sloman qualified as both.) Several AI pioneers briefly addressed longstanding philosophical problems (Minsky 1965; McCarthy and Hayes 1969). One would develop a wide-reaching CPM many years later (Minsky 1985; 2006). But the first all-encompassing CPM from AI was due to Newell and Simon (Newell and Simon 1976; Newell 1980). They saw the mind as a Physical Symbol System (PSS). (They should have said a Physically Implemented Symbol System, because symbols are aspects of virtual, not physical, machines.) They claimed that any PSS carrying out the right computations has “the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action” (Newell and Simon 1976: 116). What the “right” computations might be was suggested by their psychological experiments (Newell and Simon 1972). A symbol, they said, is a physical pattern with causal effects. The meaning of a symbol is the set of changes it enables the information-processing system to effect, either to or in response to some object or process (outside or inside the system). Analogously, intentional concepts such as representation, interpretation, designation, reference, naming, standing for, and aboutness were causally defined. For example: “Designation. An expression designates an object if, given the expression, the system can either affect the object itself or behave in ways depending on the object” (Newell and Simon 1976: 116). RESISTANCE FROM THE CHINESE ROOM

Searle (1980; 1982) praised Newell and Simon for being admirably clear. Nonetheless, he disagreed with them. He claimed that GOFAI (and Fodor’s CPM) could not account for intentionality, a.k.a. meaning. Searle expressed his argument as a thought-experiment now notorious as “the Chinese Room.” He imagined himself locked in a room, with a slit in the door through which slips of paper could be passed in or out. The papers passed in bore apparently meaningless doodles: squiggles and squoggles. Inside the room was a large box containing slips with similar doodles on them, and a rule-book

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saying that if a squiggle like this were passed in then he should pass out a squoggle like that. Unbeknownst to Searle, the doodles were words in Chinese writing, and the Chinese people outside were using him as a question-answerer. And the denouement? Searle didn’t understand a word of Chinese when he entered the room, and he still wouldn’t understand it when he left. Searle argued that Searle-in-the-room had been carrying out the (purely formal) steps of a “natural language understanding” program (Lehnert 1978). Therefore, even if – which he doubted – such steps are somehow involved in genuine understanding, they cannot be sufficient for intentionality. GOFAI programs are intrinsically meaningless: “all syntax and no semantics.” We can project meaning onto them, but that meaning originates in human minds/ brains, not formal computations. Mays had said this thirty years before (see “The Early Attempts,” above). But Mays hadn’t provided a highly memorable, and highly seductive, example. The Chinese Room argument is still hotly disputed (Preston and Bishop 2002; Cole 2014). Some think it obviously correct, others obviously fallacious. But Searle himself still stands by it (and now appeals also to consciousness: Searle 1992). Searle wasn’t – and isn’t – unsympathetic to AI. He welcomed its use in clarifying some of his own previous work on speech-acts. He has even described it as “one of the most exciting developments in the entire two-thousand-year history of materialism” (1992: 43). Nevertheless, no form of AI, on his view, can generate/explain intentionality. To the question “Just what can do that?” Searle’s answer was (and still is) “the brain.” He claimed that computers, whether running GOFAI programs or not (his “Chinese Gym” covered connectionism: Searle 1990), cannot support intentionality because they are made of the wrong kind of stuff. Neuroprotein, he said, causes intentionality much as chlorophyll causes photosynthesis. Perhaps other substances, on other planets/galaxies, can do so too. But metal and silicon “obviously” cannot: Multiple realizability applies to computation, but not to intentionality. Critics pointed out that this is not obvious at all: How neuroprotein, qua neuroprotein, supports intentionality is a mystery (Boden 1988: 241). Insofar as we understand how neurons implement mental functions, it is in terms of the information-processing that they carry out: how neurotransmitters affect messagepassing at the synapse, for instance. The biochemistry as such isn’t the point. CONNECTIONIST CPMS

At AI’s inception, GOFAI was not the only game in town. Neural-network models were being investigated too. For instance, Pandemonium was a

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parallel-processing virtual machine, and Perceptrons had a connectionist implementation (see above). But those models fell out of favor in the 1970s, following a savage critique by two high priests of GOFAI (Minsky and Papert 1969; Boden 2006 12.iii). Connectionist AI eventually enjoyed a renaissance as parallel distributed processing, or PDP (Rumelhart, McClelland, and PDP Research Group 1986). A PDP system comprises many very simple, interconnected, computational units. It does not follow a sequence of instructions. Rather, the individual units aim for local coherence by adjusting their neighbors’ strengths (weights), and gradually achieve a global equilibrium in which overall coherence is maximised – but, usually, not perfectly. PDP systems could not only tolerate noise, or contradiction. They could also learn patterns/concepts by being shown examples. They could use somewhat different collections of units to represent “the same” pattern. They had contentaddressable memory, wherein a fragment would arouse the whole pattern. And their (basically probabilistic) learning was surprisingly powerful. One early example learnt to use past-tense verbs correctly while apparently making – and recovering from – the same sorts of mistakes (temporary overregularizations such as go/goed) as children do (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986). These strengths were philosophically interesting. They recalled Wittgenstein’s notion of concepts as family-resemblances. They challenged nativist CPMs, such as Fodor’s, that followed Chomsky (1967) in asserting the impossibility of learning grammatical rules. They offered a type of computation intriguingly different from GOFAI. And, broadly inspired by the brain, they threw doubt on multiple realizability. Accordingly, many philosophers turned for inspiration to PDP instead of GOFAI. Some contrasted “False Starts” with “Real Foundations” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988). However, they usually ignored GOFAI’s strengths, not recognizing that the mind must be a hybrid system. The leading connectionist philosopher was, and remains, Andy Clark. Others included Paul and Patricia Churchland (Churchland 1981; 1986a; 1986b; 1989; 1995; 2012; Churchland and Churchland 1981). Clark initially focused on the philosophical problems mentioned above, and on linguistic compositionality (1989; 1991; 1993). Over the years, he drew increasingly on the relevant sciences. His account of representational change, for instance, rested on developmental psychology (Clark and Karmiloff-Smith 1993; Clark and Thornton 1997). He later added insights from phenomenology (see “AI-influenced CPMs,” above). Today, he highlights “predictive coding,” wherein behavior is continuously controlled by feedback between prior expectations (based on Bayesian

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probability) and error-messages passed down from higher levels of the brain (Clark 2013; 2016). This is a twenty-first-century version of Craik’s theory of anticipatory cerebral models (see “The Early Attempts,” above). The key proponents of GOFAI-based CPMs were not persuaded. They saw PDP as dealing with implementation, not computational function, and argued that it couldn’t account for linguistic systematicity or compositionality (Pinker and Prince 1988; Fodor and McLaughlin 1990). Years later, Fodor still insisted that a formal-symbolic CPM/psychology is “the only [theory of cognition] we’ve got that’s worth the bother of serious discussion” (Fodor 2000: 1). D Y N A MI C A L S Y S T E M S

McCulloch and Sayre (see “The Early Attempts” and “AI-influenced CPMs,” above) were both strongly influenced by cybernetics. Half a century later, cybernetic ideas would surface again as CPMs based on dynamical systems (Port and van Gelder 1995). The key philosopher here was Timothy van Gelder (1995; 1998). Unlike most dynamical theorists, he allowed for internal representations. But he saw them as emerging from state transitions in continuously varying dynamical systems, where each state is a point in a high-dimensional, numerically defined, vector space. Such continuous systems, he said, can compute things – such as temporality – which Turing machines cannot. This didn’t become mainstream. Critics such as Sloman (1993: §§7–8) and Clark (1997: 118–28) complained that the highly abstract vocabulary of dynamical theory can’t represent interestingly complex mental states, nor distinguish specific propositional content. If one construes a mind-brain (or a computer) as passing from one global state to another, one loses all the important structure in the system. But if one tries to identify the detail (the number of dimensions, the numerical parameters, and/or the attractors on various levels), the distinction between a dynamical systems view and more conventional AI begins to disappear. Others objected that the notion of a dynamical system includes whirlpools and windmills – and digital computers, too (Giunti 1997). One should say just which types of dynamical system are specifically cognitive (Chrisley 1998). Moreover, van Gelder’s assumption that computation can be defined only in terms of Turing machines is mistaken (Sloman 1993; Chrisley 2000). CPMS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness has long been a challenge for CPMs. Putnam’s functionalism was charged with failing to encompass qualia (Block 1978). But computational

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approaches have helped to clarify the important distinction between functional and phenomenal consciousness. The word “conscious” is used to make many distinctions: awake/asleep, deliberate/unthinking, in/out of attention, accessible/inaccessible, reportable/ non-reportable, self-reflective/unexamined, and so on. These are functional distinctions. Many philosophers – and all CPMs – allow that they could be understood in information-processing and/or neuroscientific terms. But phenomenal consciousness (qualia) seems to be different. Its very existence, in a basically material universe, is a metaphysical puzzle. (See Hellie, this volume.) Fodor (1992) despairs of solving it: “Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious” (1992: 7). But CPM-accounts have been offered by Paul Churchland, Dennett, and Sloman. Churchland’s “eliminative materialism” identifies qualia with brain-states, but offers a novel theory – part computational (connectionist), part neurological – about what those brain-states are (Churchland 1986a; 1986b). He defines a fourdimensional “taste-space” (reflecting the tongue’s four types of taste receptor) that systematically maps subjective discriminations of taste onto specific neural structures. The implication is that all phenomenal consciousness simply is the brain’s being at a particular location in some empirically discoverable hyperspace. Dennett (1988; 1991), too, denies the existence of ontologically distinct experiences, over and above bodily events. To experience is to discriminate. But in discriminating something that exists in the material world, one doesn’t bring something else into existence in some other, immaterial, world. His imaginary conversation with the dualist Otto, concerning the “pinkish glowing ring” (a visual illusion) that seems to hover over the dust jacket of his book, ties Otto in knots. Otto wants to know “Where is it?” while Dennett answers that “There is no such thing” – but Otto has already had to admit that “There isn’t any pinkish ring. Not really.” In general, says Dennett: “There is no such phenomenon as really seeming – over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case” (Dennett 1991: 363–4). In short, no metaphysically mysterious qualia are involved. It follows that the concept of zombie is incoherent, so zombies are logically impossible (Dennett 1995a). This undermines the commonest objection to the Turing Test (see “The Early Attempts,” above). Sloman’s CPM – namely virtual-machine functionalism, or VMF – is “revisionist but not eliminativist” (Sloman 2000; 2010; Sloman and Chrisley 2003). It allows the existence of qualia (despite “an agnostic option”: Chrisley and Sloman 2016: 2.3.3), while denying that they have the properties they are commonly believed to have.

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For Sloman, qualia are aspects of certain sorts of virtual machine. They are intermediate structures and processes generated by an information-processing system with a complex, reflexive, architecture. Some qualia (but not all) can be noticed and thought about using selfreports – which might require the system to generate ways of classifying them, using internal categories that can’t be matched/compared with comparable categories in other virtual machines (other minds). But the self-reports are something extra. They are directly accessible to the highest level of the system, and are sometimes communicated verbally, or expressed behaviorally, to others. The directness of first-person experiential statements is due to the particular kind of (reflexive) computation involved. The high-level management system has access to some intermediate perceptual data-base (blue, itch . . .), which may represent something in the third-person-observable outside world or may be the content of a dream or hallucination. On this view, qualia could exist in simpler organisms that have sophisticated perceptual mechanisms without also having human-like selfmonitoring mechanisms for introspection. So a house-fly might have visual qualia of which it cannot be aware. T H E Y A W N I N G P H I L O S O P H I C A L DI V I D E

Advocates of CPMs assume that some naturalistic (science-based) philosophy of mind/psychology is possible, and that science is a realist enterprise. Phenomenologists disagree. They hold that all our concepts arise from our consciousness – what Martin Heidegger (1962a [1927]) called Dasein, or being-in-the-world – so deny that there is any independently existing real world for science to study. Using science to explain conscious experience is, literally, nonsensical. CPMs faced objections from phenomenologists (Mays, for instance) right from the start. Soon afterwards, a radical attack came from Hubert Dreyfus (1965; 1967; 1972). Drawing on Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1945]), and late Wittgenstein, Dreyfus argued that AI’s project is in principle impossible. The “higher” forms of intelligence, he said, are necessarily derived from “lower” forms concerned with bodily action. Moreover, much of our knowledge is tacit, and inexpressible in formal language. He also claimed that early AI had grave weaknesses, which no future research would overcome. It lacked: reliance on the fringe of consciousness; discrimination between essential and accidental; tolerance of ambiguity; and perspicuous grouping – each of which is essential to human intelligence.

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Many philosophers agreed. Haugeland, for instance, added that formalist CPMs couldn’t encompass emotion (Haugeland 1978; 1985; 1995; 1996). Opposition from Mays and Dreyfus was only to be expected: Both were already committed phenomenologists. Colleagues of Wittgenstein, denying subpersonal mental processes or representations, predictably objected too (Malcolm 1971; Anscombe 1974). Another Wittgensteinian dismissed Dennett’s first book as “not a happy piece of work,” complaining about the “many references to scientific findings and, it must be confessed, scientific speculations” ([Hamlyn] 1970). And Richard Rorty hoped for “the disappearance of psychology as a discipline distinct from neurology” (Rorty 1979: 121). But worse was to come: Putnam himself denied the possibility of any naturalistic philosophy of mind (Putnam 1982). He now argued that there are no mind-independent facts, or “ready-made world.” Later, he eschewed out-and-out idealism, allowing that minds are in the world, not creators of it (Putnam 1988a). But his “internal realism” still held that mind and language are philosophically prior to science and can’t be explained by it. Putnam’s move to idealism had been preceded by his new work on meaning, according to which “Meanings just ain’t in the head” (Putnam 1975a). Meanings, he said, depend on our interpretative practices and context of use, so can’t be analyzed in naturalistic, non-normative, terms. It followed that cognitive science (if based on a functionalist-Fodorian, CPM) was more “science fiction” than science (Putnam 1997: 36). Another leading analytic philosopher followed suit. John McDowell (1994) argued that there can be no such thing as non-conceptual content, no subjective experiences in animals, and no mind-independent data to found our knowledge of the world. Conscious experience, he said, is an irreducibly rational category. (See Sachs, this volume.) Although causal mechanisms are necessary for our having perceptions and beliefs, no scientific psychology can explain how these mental phenomena emerge. Cognitive science – studies of low-level vision, for example – is “a recipe for trouble,” because it implicitly encourages “the Myth of the Given” (1994: 55). Perceptual mechanisms as such can provide no meaning, no semantic content, whatever. Dreyfus had got much of his science wrong (Papert 1968; Wilks 1976). Whether he had also got his philosophy wrong is less easily decided. The divide between a realist, science-respecting philosophy and an idealist/ constructivist one affects every fundamental problem – including the nature of reason and truth. So there is no shared ground from which to mount this debate. There are persuasive arguments on both sides, but no killer blow. Even Fodor cannot find a knock-down argument. Saying that McDowell’s book is “as good a representative of this [anti-naturalistic] philosophical sensibility as

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you could hope to find,” he adds: “Which, however, is not to say that I believe a word of it” – and concludes: “It’s all wrong-headed. Science isn’t an enemy, it’s just us” (Fodor 1995: 3, 8). Despite this philosophical impasse, a few CPM advocates have tried to combine insights from both sides of the realist–constructivist fence. Most do so by endorsing the phenomenologists’ view that attention to the body, and to its constantly changing situation in the world, is essential for understanding the mind. Accordingly, they draw on work in cognitive psychology and robotics that studies the “embodied” and “situated” mind. One such example is Clark, first in his book tellingly titled Being There, and subtitled Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (1997). He makes a powerful case for a body-respecting CPM (later widened into his theory of “the extended mind” [Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2003]). But he side-steps the fundamental problem here. Despite occasional references to Heidegger, and the salute to Dasein in the book’s title, he ignores the realist–idealist controversy: “a somewhat metaphysical issue on which I take no stand” (1997: 171). (His recent CPM based on predictive coding also draws on phenomenological insights: See “Connectionist CPMs,” above.) Another example is Michael Wheeler (2005), who details the debt to, and the conflicts with, Heidegger’s work more fully. Besides accepting that scientific findings are philosophically relevant, he argues – against Heidegger – that nonhuman animals have Dasein too. One ambitious thinker has tried to bridge the realist–constructivist divide within his concept of computation and/or intentionality: For Brian Cantwell Smith (1986), there is no fundamental distinction between these two notions. He takes the universe’s basic metaphysical principle to be the “dynamic flux” studied by field-theoretic physics. Everything emerges or is constructed from the “participatory engagement” of the flux, which has hugely varying degrees of connectivity. And he develops an entire ontology accordingly: Physical objects, minds, subjectivity, truth, and values (“how to live right”) are all derived from this base. Smith’s position is highly provocative. But he has some admirers. Haugeland declared (on the dust jacket): “Smith recreates our understanding of objects essentially from scratch – and changes, I think, everything.” If Smith, or anyone else, were to succeed in bridging the analytical/phenomenological gap, that would indeed change everything. Meanwhile, we must live with the fact that many philosophers reject CPMs at the most fundamental level.

7 PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION mar i a a lvar e z an d j o h n h yman

INTRODUCTION

The philosophical study of human action begins with Plato and Aristotle. Their influence in late antiquity and the Middle Ages yielded sophisticated theories of action and motivation, notably in the works of Augustine and Aquinas.1 But the ideas that were dominant in 1945 have their roots in the early modern period, when advances in physics and mathematics reshaped philosophy. In particular, the theories of matter and causation that developed in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made action by conscious agents seem like a curious and isolated phenomenon in the natural world, because they encouraged philosophers to conceive of matter as “a substance altogether inert, and merely passive” (Reid 2010 [1788]: i.6). One of the main achievements in philosophy since 1945 has been to challenge positivist orthodoxies about causation, and to rehabilitate causation by substances and causal powers. But applying these ideas to the philosophy of action was still a work in progress in 2015. Two large questions dominated the philosophy of action in the midtwentieth century. First, what is the causal structure of voluntary action? How do desire, volition, imagination, and motion fit together when we act? Second, what are the circumstances in which an agent is morally responsible for an act? However, these questions received increasingly independent treatment during the period covered in this chapter, and we shall mainly confine our attention to the first. The orthodox answer to the first question at that time was that a voluntary act is a movement of the body or a muscular contraction with a specific kind of mental cause. This was either thought to be a “volition” or “act of will” – i.e. a

1

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Leverhulme Trust and the European Research Council respectively, the latter under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (project ID: 789270). Augustine 2010; 1998, 5.10; Aquinas 1964–73, 1a2ae, 6–21; 1964. See also Dante 2008 (1308–20), cantos 17 and 18.

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conscious act of choosing or willing – or a memory-image of the sensation associated with a movement. Volitions or memory-images were in turn held to be caused by desires, and desires were either held to be uncomfortable sensations, such as hunger and thirst, which was how empiricists since Locke had conceived of them, or else dispositions to engage in patterns of behavior that cease when their object is achieved, as Russell proposed in the Analysis of Mind. This picture of the causal structure of voluntary action was combined with the doctrine that causal explanation consists in the subsumption of events under generalizations or laws, as it had been by empiricist philosophers since Hume. Together, these ideas yielded a positivist conception of the social sciences, whose most influential defense in twentieth-century philosophy is by C. G. Hempel, but whose classic statement is by John Stuart Mill: The Science of Human Nature may be said to exist, in proportion as the approximate truths, which compose a practical knowledge of mankind, can be exhibited as corollaries from the universal laws of human nature on which they rest. (Mill 1846: 6.3.2)2

In the history of philosophy, as in the history of architecture, periods of structural change alternate with periods of decorative embellishment. In the philosophy of action, the first half of the period under consideration in this volume was a period of structural change. Accordingly, the arguments of R. G. Collingwood, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Ryle in the 1940s, and of Elizabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s, have continued to be the most important up to the present, so far as philosophy in the analytic tradition is concerned. The most influential philosophical writings on human agency outside the analytic tradition in this period were by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is discussed in chapters 26 and 27 of this volume. Sartre follows Heidegger in claiming that the human form of existence and engagement with the world is basically active and practical, rather than cognitive and theoretical. But what is distinctive in Sartre’s philosophy, and accounts for its lasting appeal, is his celebration of spontaneity and freedom – freedom from Weber’s “iron cage” of bureaucracy and rationality, and from tradition, religion, and bourgeois social norms. The individual conceived in L’être et le néant, which Sartre wrote in Paris during the German occupation, was absolutely free, and he defined himself by the free choices that he made. “L’être humain est un projet qui se fait peu à peu. En conséquence, il se définit par l’ensemble des ses actes [A human being is a project that is formed step by step. Hence, he defines himself by the sum of his acts]” (Sartre 1946: 21).

2

See also Hempel and Oppenheim 1948; Hempel 1965.

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Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Anscombe, and Davidson were responsible for four main developments in philosophical thought about human agency, each of which is described in more detail below. • First, Collingwood and Wittgenstein claimed independently that explanations of voluntary actions do not subsume them under laws, and Collingwood argued that the eighteenthcentury ambition to construct a science of human nature failed for this reason. “Its method,” he wrote, “was distorted by the analogy of the natural sciences” (Collingwood 1946: 208). • Second, Ryle and Wittgenstein both attacked the idea that voluntary acts are caused by volitions or acts of will, not merely on the grounds that postulating volitions is unnecessary, as James and Russell had already claimed when they defended theories that postulate memory-images instead, but on the more radical grounds that the very idea that a voluntary act is a bodily movement with a specific kind of mental cause is misconceived. • Third, Anscombe accepted both of the positions attributed to Wittgenstein above, and argued (i) that the kind of action in which human agency is principally expressed is intentional rather than voluntary, (ii) that voluntary action can be defined in terms of intentional action and knowledge, and (iii) that intentional action can be defined by means of the concept of a reason for acting (and the related concept of goodness). • Finally, Davidson accepted (i)–(iii) above, although his concept of a reason differed substantially from Anscombe’s, but he argued that explaining action in terms of the agent’s motive or reason for acting does identify its cause, and does imply that it falls under a law. Wittgenstein and the others who denied these things, he argued, did so because they failed to understand the subtle relationship between causes and laws.

As a result of these developments, philosophers working in the subject-area we are focusing on in this chapter have engaged with two large and interconnected sets of questions since the 1960s: first, metaphysical questions about the individuation and location of acts, and their relationship with movements of the body; second, logical and metaphysical questions about reasons and reasoning, and about the relationship between reasons and the acts they motivate and explain. The same developments also transformed philosophical thought about responsibility and free will, principally by encouraging philosophers to regard the capacity to respond to and endorse reasons as the factor that makes human action susceptible to moral assessment, instead of causation by volitions. The intense debates that ensued, and still continue, echo earlier ones about the relationship between freedom and necessity, but they have accorded greater importance to an individual’s autonomy, sense of self, psychological integration, and self-control (as Sartre did), as well as her responsiveness to reasons (as he did not), and they have examined various factors that undermine these, such as addiction and mental illness.3 3

These debates were initiated especially by Strawson (1962) and Frankfurt (1969). Representative collections and review essays include Watson 1982; Fischer 1999; Widerker and McKenna 2003; Levy and McKenna 2009; and Kane 2002 and 2011.

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Collingwood claimed that the eighteenth-century ambition to construct a science of human nature modeled on the natural sciences had failed. Both historians and natural scientists investigate the causes of events, he argued, but in historical studies the term “cause” is used in “a special sense” (Collingwood 1946: 208). In science, discovering the cause of an event means “bring[ing] it under a general formula or law of nature” (214), whereas in history, it means discovering “the thought in the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about” (214–15). It is a mistake to imagine that history is “the study of successive events lying in the dead past, events to be understood as the scientist understands natural events, by classifying them and establishing relations between the classes thus defined” (228). Unlike the natural scientist, the historian is not interested in events as such, “he is only concerned with those events which are the outward expression of thoughts, and is only concerned with these in so far as they express thoughts” (217). Hence, “all history is the history of thought” (215).4 Wittgenstein’s position was more radical than Collingwood’s. He too believed that identifying the reason or motive for a voluntary act is quite unlike the task of classifying events and establishing relations between the classes thus defined. But instead of postulating a special sense of the word “cause,” he inferred that it is not a matter of identifying a cause at all. The main influence on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of action was Schopenhauer’s theory of the will, which he seems to have fully accepted in 1916, and which still influenced his thinking in 1947. Schopenhauer had argued, against the empiricists, that an act of will cannot be an impression or thought, because impressions and thoughts are mere phenomena, and therefore quite passive and inert. Schopenhauer’s own view was that the act of will and the act willed – the action of the body, as he called it – are one and the same thing, “perceived and apprehended in a twofold manner,” from the “interior” perspective of the agent and from the “exterior” perspective of an observer (Schopenhauer 1966 [1818–19]: 36). (Brian O’Shaughnessy [1980] defends a theory inspired by Schopenhauer.) In Wittgenstein’s Notebooks, these ideas are repeated (Wittgenstein 1979: 87–9). But in the 1930s he abandoned the thought that willing is an event that presents two different faces to “interior” and “exterior” perception, and argued instead that if willing is acting, then it is so “in the ordinary sense of the word”: “so it is speaking, writing, walking, lifting a thing, imagining something. But it is also striving, trying, making an effort – to speak, to write, to lift a thing, to 4

See also Dray 1995: chapters 2–3.

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imagine something, and so on” (Wittgenstein 1953: §615). These are all things we normally do voluntarily, and as such they are all that willing can possibly consist in. There is no additional internal psychic push – no “will force,” as James called it. It is true that there is willing without acting: Trying to lift a heavy weight is an exercise of the will, whether or not the attempt succeeds. But we should not imagine that every act is preceded by an effort or attempt: “When I raise my arm,” he writes, “I don’t usually try to raise it” (1953: §622). So “trying” is not the vernacular name for a volition or act of will. Wittgenstein also rejects the idea that voluntary movements are caused by memory-images of kinaesthetic sensations. James and Russell had argued that we possess a repertoire of ideas of possible movements, laid down in infancy, and composed of the memory-images of the kinesthetic sensations that make us aware of the movements we perform. These images, they claimed, are the immediate mental antecedents of our voluntary acts. But in a searching criticism of James and Russell, which is of a piece with the anti-sensationalism of the Investigations as a whole, Wittgenstein rejects the very idea that kinesthetic feelings make us aware of the movements of our limbs (1953: 194). Finally, Wittgenstein considers the idea that voluntary acts are movements caused by decisions: Consider the following description of a voluntary action: “I form the decision to pull the bell at 5 o’clock; and when it strikes 5, my arm makes this movement.” – Is that the correct description, and not this one: “. . . and when it strikes 5, I raise my arm”? – One would like to supplement the first description: “And lo and behold! my arm goes up when it strikes 5.” And this “lo and behold!” is precisely what doesn’t belong here. I do not say “Look, my arm is going up!” when I raise it. (§627)

Wittgenstein’s remarkable conclusion is that the movement does not qualify as voluntary because it is caused by a decision, but because “voluntary movement is marked by the absence of surprise” (§628). This is not intended as a definition of voluntary action. Rather, Wittgenstein thinks of the absence of surprise as part of a “family of phenomena” that are characteristic of voluntary action (Wittgenstein 1958: 152). It is, he claims, the context of action that makes it voluntary, “its character and its surroundings” (Wittgenstein 1967: §587), including, in most cases, the absence of surprise: “Voluntary movements are certain movements with their normal surroundings of intention, learning, trying, acting” (Wittgenstein 1980: §776). Wittgenstein’s conclusion signals his determination to reject the doctrine that a voluntary act is a movement with a particular kind of cause, but it is not widely accepted by philosophers today. A voluntary act is more commonly

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defined as an act the agent could have avoided doing, or alternatively, as an act that is not due to ignorance or compulsion.5 Ryle’s attack on the “doctrine of volitions” is one of the most influential passages in The Concept of Mind. It forms part of the author’s attack on a dualist conception of human life, which, he says, is due mainly to Descartes. The theory that voluntary acts are caused by volitions is indeed an important feature of Descartes’s psychology, although it is separable from the doctrine that the mind is an immaterial substance. However, Ryle regards the theory as a myth. It is, he says, “a causal hypothesis, adopted because it was wrongly supposed that the question, ‘What makes a bodily movement voluntary?’ was a causal question” (Ryle 2002 [1949]: 54). Ryle presents several arguments against the doctrine of volitions, of which two have generally been accorded the greatest weight. The first is that we do not know how to answer a variety of questions about volitions, which we would be able to ask if the theory were true: “Can they be sudden or gradual, strong or weak, difficult or easy, enjoyable or disagreeable? . . . Can we take lessons in executing them? Are they fatiguing or distracting?” And so on. According to the theory, volitions should be encountered “vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom,” but “if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds” (1949: 64ff ). In reply, it can be pointed out that while few of Ryle’s questions about volitions have straightforward answers, and it is hard to say anything sensible about their frequency, duration or strength, the same can be said about other mental operations, whose reality is not in doubt. How often do I acquire a belief in the course of a day? How many beliefs do I acquire when I walk into an unfamiliar room? Is acquiring beliefs a fatiguing or distracting business? And so on. But although Ryle’s argument is not decisive, it effectively put the volitionist on the back foot. Ryle’s second influential argument is that the theory that voluntary acts are caused by volitions leads to an insoluble dilemma: Some mental processes . . . can, according to the theory, issue from volitions. So what of the volitions themselves? Are they voluntary or involuntary acts of mind? Clearly either answer leads to absurdities. If I cannot help willing to pull the trigger, it would be absurd to describe my pulling it as “voluntary”. But if my volition to pull the trigger is voluntary, in the sense assumed by the theory, then it must issue from a prior volition and that from another ad infinitum. (1949: 54) 5

Ryle 2002 [1949]: 56ff; Hyman 2015: 77. Both definitions stem originally from Aristotle: NE 1110a, Met. Θ, 1046a–1048a.

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This argument, which was sometimes described as a dilemma and sometimes as a regress, was widely regarded as conclusive for at least twenty years. For example, Anthony Kenny describes it as “decisive” (Kenny 1975: 14). But the consensus weakened in the 1970s. For example, Jennifer Hornsby claimed that the argument is only effective against a theory that treats volitions both as causes of actions and as actions themselves: “For the fundamental step is: whenever there is one action, there are two actions; and the conclusion is: there are infinitely many actions” (Hornsby 1980: 48–9). Arguably, both of these views about Ryle’s argument are partly right and partly wrong. For it is one thing to explain what makes a bodily movement voluntary, and another to explain what makes it active rather than passive, i.e. attributable to the agency of the individual whose body moves. Philosophers have tended to amalgamate these questions, but volitions can be postulated either to explain voluntariness or to explain agency. Arguably Ryle’s argument is effective against a volitionist theory of voluntariness, which is how Kenny interprets it, but not against a volitionist theory of agency, as Hornsby points out (Hyman 2015: chapter 1). Collingwood, Wittgenstein, and Ryle initiated a radical change of direction in the philosophy of action, because between them they shattered the empiricist consensus that a voluntary act is a movement of the body or a muscular contraction caused by a specific kind of conscious mental event, and challenged both the natural assumption that explanations of human behavior refer to causes, and the positivist claim that they must therefore refer to regularities or natural laws. In the next generation, some philosophers, notably G. H. von Wright, William Dray, and Peter Winch, pursued Collingwood’s idea that explanations in the social sciences are quite different from ones in the natural sciences, because the former aim to understand and interpret human action, whereas the latter seek to facilitate the prediction and control of natural events (von Wright 1963; 1971; Dray 1995; Winch 1958). Others focused on the explanation of individual human action.6 Among these, Anscombe and Davidson were the most influential, mainly because they persuaded philosophers – except for those who worked in philosophy of law – to stop thinking about voluntary action, and to think about intentional action, and action done for reasons, instead. It was as if the very concept of voluntary action had been discredited or rendered relatively unimportant by the destructive arguments of Wittgenstein and Ryle.

6

See Hampshire 1959; Melden 1961; von Wright 1963; 1971; Kenny 1963; Taylor 1966.

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Anscombe’s book Intention (1957), which was mainly influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, set the agenda for subsequent work in the philosophy of action, both directly and through its influence on Davidson. In Intention, Anscombe sets out to elucidate a concept of intention that is common to three presumably related phenomena: (i) an intention to act, (ii) an intentional act, and (iii) an intention with which a person acts. Anscombe’s approach was to focus on (ii) and (iii), and then to argue that (i) can be explained in terms of them (Anscombe 1957: §50f, p. 90). Davidson initially agreed that an intention to act can be understood in this way, but he subsequently came to regard “pure intending” as “the basic notion on which the others depend” (Davidson 1980a: xvii). Various debates ensued, centered on whether Anscombe’s or Davidson’s view is right and, if Davidson is right, whether an intention to act is a sui generis mental state or attitude, possibly with the character of a plan or program, or whether it can be reduced to some kind of combination of judgments, beliefs, and desires.7 The most important ideas defended in Intention are, first, that the main kind of action that is characteristic of human beings is intentional rather than voluntary action; and, second, that an intentional act is one of which we can sensibly seek a particular kind of explanation. This is not a causal explanation. Instead, it gives the agent’s reason or justification for doing the act. In other words, it explains what made the act seem worth doing from her point of view. Anscombe accepts that human action can have mental causes. For example, if you march up and down because you are excited by some martial music, hearing the music causes you to march up and down. But this does not mean that hearing the music is your reason or justification for marching up and down – in the case imagined you are not supposed to have a reason or justification – and Anscombe denies that a reason (in the sense of a justification) is a mental cause. Anscombe’s proposal that intentional action can be defined by means of the concept of a reason for acting has been highly influential. But it is not obvious that it is true. For even if we can sensibly ask for an agent’s reason whenever she acts intentionally, it appears that we can ask the same question about some acts that are not intentional, notably ones that express emotions. For example, someone who reacts to a piece of news with a laugh or a curse may not do so intentionally, but it would not be plausible to insist that in that case she cannot be laughing or cursing for a reason. Of course, it may be a poor or insufficient

7

See Anscombe 1957; Davidson 1978; Searle 1983; Bratman 1987; 1999; Velleman 1989; Setiya 2007; Thompson 2008.

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reason. But equally, it may be a perfectly good reason, which fully justifies reacting in that way. We can certainly ask for an agent’s intention or goal when she acts intentionally. But arguably “reasons for acting” inform a broader range of human behavior than intentions or goals. Anscombe’s suggestion that the concept of a “reason for acting” can be explained in terms of the good has also been disputed (Velleman 1992; Tenenbaum 2010). Another idea Anscombe defends in Intention, which also stimulated extensive debate, is that we need to be aware of the different descriptions that can be applied to a single act. Anscombe draws attention to the fact that we often do one thing by doing another thing. For example, suppose a man kills some people in a house by poisoning its water supply, which he does by working a pump, which he does by moving his arm up and down. How are these acts related? Is moving his arm part of killing the people? Or is one cause and the other effect? Or are they one and the same act described in different ways? Anscombe’s own view is the last (Anscombe 1957; 1979; Davidson 1970). But although it has the attraction of parsimony, if parsimony is considered desirable in this case, this solution faces difficulties, e.g. when it comes to determining when and where the act occurred. For if the killing is the movement of the man’s arm, it follows that the killing and the movement happened in the same place and at the same time, and hence that the killing happened in the pumphouse, some time before the victims died. Many philosophers have found these implications of the identity claim hard to accept, and have proposed alternative views about the nature, individuation, and location of acts.8 In his influential article “Actions, reasons, and causes,” which developed out of a commission to write a review of Anthony Kenny’s book Action, Emotion and Will, Davidson accepts that an explanation that identifies the agent’s reason for doing an intentional act “rationalises” or justifies the act. But he argues that it is also a causal explanation. An agent’s reason, Davidson maintains, is a combination of a belief and a desire (or “pro-attitude”), and when an agent acts for a reason, the reason – or an event closely associated with it, such as the onset of the desire – causes the act. It follows that when we explain an intentional act by identifying the agent’s reason for doing it, this is a causal explanation. Does it follow that the explanation subsumes the act and the reason – or associated event – under a generalization or a law? For example, if a defendant 8

Prichard (1949), O’Shaughnessy (1980), Hornsby (1980), and (1998), and Cleveland (1997) argue that acts are not movements of the body but their causes, which are instances of trying, endeavor or “setting oneself to do something.” The problems about locating acts are, if anything, acute for accounts of this kind. Others claim that acts are sui generis “agential” events (Ginet 1990; O’Connor 1995), or challenge the assumption that acts are events of any kind at all (von Wright 1963; Dretske 1988; Bennett 1995; Alvarez and Hyman 1998; Hyman 2015).

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charged with a criminal offense claims that he acted under duress, does he imply that he would respond to a threat in the same way again, or that he or others always respond to threats in that way? Davidson’s ingenious reply to these questions is that the statement that an act was done for a certain reason does imply that a law covering the events concerned exists, but it does not imply that the same reason would always lead to the same act. For the relevant law need not be stated in the language of beliefs and desires. If beliefs and desires are physical states, the law can be stated in the language of physics instead (Davidson 1970). Thus, Davidson accepts that if one event (becoming thirsty) causes another (reaching for a glass of water), the two events can be subsumed under a generalization or law. But laws relate events under specific descriptions, and as Anscombe pointed out, different descriptions can be applied to a single event. Hence, it is a mistake to infer from the fact that identifying an agent’s reason for doing an act is unlike the task of “classifying [events] and establishing relations between the classes thus defined” (Collingwood 1946: 228), that it is not a matter of identifying a cause. After the publication of “Actions, reasons, and causes,” Davidson’s influence in the philosophy of action gradually overtook Wittgenstein’s, and by the mid1980s, the prevailing doctrine was as follows: • An act is a movement of the agent’s body, caused by a combination of mental states, which “rationalises” or justifies it. This combination of mental states is the agent’s “reason” for doing the act. • An agent’s “reason” causes an act via an intention. • An act in its turn causes further events – such as when operating a pump causes the water in a tank to become poisoned – on account of which new descriptions can be applied to it (e.g. “poisoning the water”). • An act is not intentional or unintentional absolutely, nor is it “rationalized” absolutely, but only “under” a particular description, or qua act of a particular kind. (The murder Oedipus committed was intentional qua killing but not qua parricide.) • A particular bodily movement qualifies as an act, i.e. it is attributable to the agency of the individual whose body moves, because it is intentional “under” some description.

Davidson’s philosophy of action was widely accepted in outline, although many details were disputed,9 and some philosophers challenged it in fundamental ways.10

9 10

Lepore and McLaughlin 1985; Vermazen and Hintikka 1985; Stoecker 1993. Kenny 1975; Frankfurt 1978; Wilson 1989; Ginet 1990; Schueler 1995; 2003; Rundle 1997; Stoutland 1998; Sehon 2000; 2016; Schroeder 2001; Tanney 2009; Mayr 2011; Hyman 2015.

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It was generally agreed that Davidson’s account was incomplete. For example, he had little to say about omissions (Vermazen 1985; Williams 1995; Bach 2010). But the most widely discussed difficulty Davidson’s theory faces is the so-called problem of deviant causal chains, which Davidson himself drew attention to: A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally. (Davidson 1980a: 79)

This example shows that a reason can both cause and “rationalize” an act without the agent doing the act intentionally, or for that reason. Davidson therefore maintains that when an agent acts intentionally her reason does not merely cause her act, it causes it in the right way. But what is the right way? Davidson and Anscombe agree that it is not possible to define the kind of causal route that is characteristic of intentional action, but they interpret this result in very different ways. In Anscombe’s view, it confirms that intentional acts are not caused by beliefs and desires, whereas Davidson regards it as a consequence of the fact that beliefs and desires cannot be related to physical states by strict laws (Anscombe 1989; Davidson 1987). Others claim that it is possible to define the kind of causal route that is characteristic of intentional action; or alternatively that the problem of deviant causal chains shows that the nomothetic theory of causation Davidson took for granted cannot explain the exercise of causal powers.11 Davidson’s ideas dominated the philosophy of action in the 1970s and 1980s, but his influence began to wane in the 1990s, partly because of a revival of interest in some of the ideas in Anscombe’s Intention that had been overshadowed by his work.12 As a result, first, the concepts of reason and reasoning, and the distinctions and relationships between different kinds of reasons, have been more widely debated, and Davidson’s claim that reasons are mental states has consequently been more widely and effectively challenged.13 Second, the role of knowledge in intentional action – especially (but not exclusively) an agent’s knowledge of her own action – has been studied closely.14 Finally, the 11 12 13 14

See Goldman 1970; Peacocke 1979; Bishop 1989; Mele 1992; Hyman 2015. For a detailed discussion, see Mayr 2011: chapter 5. Intention was reissued in 2000, having been out of print for many years. Raz 1975; 1999; Parfit 1997; 2011; Quinn 1993; Hyman 1999; Smith 1994; Scanlon 1998; Dancy 2000; Bittner 2001; Alvarez 2010; Sandis 2012. See various essays in Ford, Hornsby and Stoutland 2011.

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temporal dimension of action has been accorded more importance than before, and it has been argued that we need to add the category of process to those of continuant, state, and event, in order to account for the ontology of action.15 CONCLUSION

The philosophy of action continues to develop. Many topics we have not been able to touch upon are being studied intensively, such as unconscious motivation and “implicit bias,” virtue, character, emotion, strength, weakness of will (akrasia), and mental acts. The topic of acts by institutions, collectives, and groups, and the question whether these are reducible to acts by individuals, have been the subject of some especially interesting work.16 Some philosophers have embraced a methodological shift toward empirical work, either by engaging in so-called “experimental philosophy,” or by drawing extensively on cognitive science, psychiatry, and neuroscience, especially in connection with free will and moral responsibility.17 At the same time, the central questions that connect the philosophical study of human action with metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics have not received definitive answers, and the arguments and problems introduced by Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Anscombe, and Davidson are far from being played out.

15 16 17

Stout 1996; 1997; Thompson 2008; Hornsby 2012; Steward 2012; Lavin 2015. See for example Tuomela 2007; List and Pettit 2011. Knobe and Nichols 2008 and 2013, Mele 2009, Murphy, Ellis, and O’Connor 2009, and Levy 2014 are representative of some of these developments.

8 CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO RADICAL SKEPTICISM d u n can p r i t c har d

I N T R O DU C T O R Y R E M A R K S

Although there are some obvious exceptions, for a good part of the first half of the twentieth century the general philosophical attitude toward the problem of radical skepticism was largely dismissive. Whether for broadly antirealist/logical positivist reasons, or for broadly Wittgensteinian reasons, this puzzle was widely thought to be a pseudo-problem, trading on dubious metaphysical claims.1 The second half of the twentieth century, and up to the present day, however, has seen this problem taken seriously once more. Indeed, we have witnessed this philosophical difficulty again not only seriously generating academic discussion, but also being a driver for new proposals within epistemology.

COMMON SENSE AND RELEVANT ALTERNATIVES

One thread running through the contemporary (i.e. post-war onwards) treatment of radical skepticism has been a concern to be true to our commonsense epistemological commitments. In order to properly characterize this broad church of thought, we need to first briefly revisit a philosopher who predates the timeframe that we are concerned with, G. E. Moore. This is because Moore made particular contributions to the debate concerning radical skepticism that have reverberated throughout the post-war literature on this topic. One of the guiding elements of Moore’s thought was the idea that common sense occupies an epistemically privileged role with regard to conclusions derived from philosophical reasoning. In particular, Moore emphasized that where philosophy and common sense come into direct conflict, common sense is always to be preferred. Common sense thus occupies a kind of default role in our philosophical theorizing. This claim manifests itself with a concern to 1

For a good example of the former, see Carnap 1928. For a useful discussion of both ways of treating radical skepticism as a pseudo-problem, see Gascoigne 2002: chapter 4.

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articulate the kind of everyday certainties – or Moorean certainties, as they are these days known – that we hold, and which are immune (according to Moore) to philosophical challenge. Moore (1925) lists such claims in this regard as that he has hands, or that the earth has existed for many years before he was born. These are claims that Moore is optimally certain of, where this is a certainty that cannot be dislodged by any philosophical train of reasoning (which we would inevitably be less certain of ). In a later paper, Moore (1939) draws an intriguing consequence of this account of our commonsense certainties, which is a “proof” of an external world, something which had hitherto been widely held to be unavailable. Exactly what Moore is trying to demonstrate with this proof has been the subject of debate, but one point that is important to note for our purposes is that his target is not so much radical skepticism about the external world (which as we will see below can be understood as a paradox rather than a general position) as the specific philosophical position of idealism. Very roughly, Moore argues that he can legitimately appeal to commonsense certainties, such as that he has two hands, and on this basis extract the logical conclusion, contra the idealist, that there is an external world. Setting aside the distinction just drawn between idealism and radical skepticism for a moment, one thus gets the so-called Moorean response to radical skepticism, whereby one extracts an anti-skeptical conclusion by appeal to a commonsense premise.2 We will return to consider Moorean approaches to the skeptical problem later on, when we will consider more recent neo-Moorean accounts, and also when we look at a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology that is developed in opposition to the Moorean proposal. First, though, we need to consider later post-war appeals to common sense that were very different from that advocated by Moore. A good representative of this is J. L. Austin’s ordinary language approach to philosophy, which he applied to the problem of radical skepticism.3 Austin (1961) also in a sense privileges common sense – or, at any rate, our folk epistemic practices – but unlike Moore he does not regard our everyday practices as having any special epistemic standing in virtue of our certainty in the core claims that make up those practices. Rather, Austin argues that philosophical analysis has a tendency to distort our concepts and in doing so generate 2

3

Note, however, that Moore never claims to have knowledge of the conclusion that he derives, even though he does claim to have proved it, so it is far from clear how “Moorean” Moore was. See Baldwin (2004: §6) for more on this point, and on Moore’s treatment of common sense and certainty more generally. For a closely related proposal, which has also been very influential in contemporary epistemology, see Clarke (1972).

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philosophical puzzles. The challenge is thus to properly attend to the details of our everyday practices in order to prevent this distortion from occurring, and hence prevent the skeptical paradox from arising in the first place. In particular, Austin argues that when we examine our everyday epistemic practices carefully we discover that our practice of making claims to know, and of challenging claims to know, always presupposes a particular set of supporting grounds (either grounds in support of a knowledge claim, or grounds to challenge a claim to knowledge). This is in contrast to skeptical challenges to our claims to know, of course, which are perfectly general in scope. Indeed, Austin observes that an everyday challenge to a claim to know always brings with it a specific way of meeting that challenge, where this is in marked contrast to skeptical challenges. To take a famous example that Austin considers, if someone claims to know that the creature before her is a goldfinch, and one challenges this claim, then one must have a specific kind of epistemic lacuna in mind. How does one know that this creature is not a woodfinch rather than a goldfinch, say, given that there are lots of woodfinches in the vicinity, and they can look a lot like goldfinches to the untrained eye? We now have a specific challenge, and specific criteria for meeting that challenge, in that the subject needs to cite something concrete that would enable her to make the relevant discrimination (e.g. that this creature before her has a distinctive feature that is missing from woodfinches). Radical skeptical challenges are not of this kind, however. Instead they proceed by raising radical skeptical hypotheses which by their nature cannot be resolved via any specific means, such as asking how one knows that one’s entire perceptual experience is not an illusion. Relatedly, whereas everyday challenges to claims to know are themselves grounded in specific reasons – e.g. one asks how one knows that it is goldfinch rather than a woodfinch because one knows that the latter are found in the vicinity, and can be easily confused with the former – the radical skeptic doesn’t offer any specific reasons for thinking that the radical skeptical hypotheses hold, but rather merely presents this hypothesis as something not to be discounted. In emphasizing these points, Austin is often held to be endorsing a way of thinking about knowledge that has subsequently been called a relevant alternatives proposal (though as we will see, several different accounts of knowledge can potentially fall under this general heading). In particular, the idea is that Austin is arguing that in being legitimately accorded knowledge of a proposition one must be able to rule out a set of relevant alternatives (i.e. alternative scenarios) to what is known, where relevance is in turn determined by contextual factors (e.g. what is in fact taking place in one’s environment, what error-possibilities have been legitimately motivated as relevant in that context, and so on).

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Crucially, however, in being legitimately accorded knowledge it does not follow that one is able to rule out all possibilities of error – i.e. all the alternatives. But that is in effect what the skeptic is demanding – viz., that one has ruled out not just the relevant alternatives, but also all the other alternatives too, including the radical skeptical hypotheses. Consider this famous passage: Enough is enough: it doesn’t mean everything. Enough means enough to show that (within reason, and for present intents and purposes) it “can’t” be anything else, there is no room for an alternative, competing description of it. It does not mean, for example, enough to show it isn’t a stuffed goldfinch. (Austin 1961: 84)

Notice that Austin doesn’t even mention radical skeptical hypotheses here, since if a relevant alternatives approach to knowledge is legitimate then the drawbridge of relevance will usually fall well before we get to the point of considering error-possibilities of this kind. Instead, unusual contexts aside, it will make itself felt once we get to more mundane kinds of error-possibility, such as whether the creature before one is a stuffed goldfinch. There are a number of problems facing relevant alternative accounts of knowledge and their putative application to the skeptical problem (assuming that Austin is correctly read as endorsing such a view, which is far from obvious).4 We will be considering one such problem in a moment, which concerns whether such a proposal is committed to denying the highly intuitive closure principle for knowledge. (Becker, this volume, also discusses relevant alternatives and closure.) A very different difficulty for proposals of this general kind was famously raised by Barry Stroud (1984). Stroud pointed out that it was not enough to simply demonstrate that our ordinary epistemic practices function very differently from the epistemic practices employed by the radical skeptic, since it was consistent with that observation that the latter is a purified version of the former. That is, the skeptic could contend that if only we consistently applied the epistemic standards in operation in our ordinary lives – i.e. such that we were not limited by thoroughness, time, imagination, and so on – then we would be naturally led to adopt the skeptical practices. As Stroud pointed out, not only is this a theoretically live possibility, but it is also on the face of it rather compelling. For example, we do naturally tend to demand that agents be able to rule out error-possibilities that are inconsistent with what one claims to know in ordinary circumstances. It’s just that in ordinary circumstances we don’t tend to raise radical skeptical hypotheses but rather more mundane error-possibilities that we often can rule out. But once radical skeptical 4

For an illuminating survey of some of the exegetical issues when it comes to Austin’s epistemology, see Longworth (2012: §3).

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hypotheses are on the scene, then who is to say that we can dismiss them out of hand as being alien to our everyday practices?5 NON-CLOSURE

This is a good juncture to formulate the radical skeptical problem as it is usually understood in the contemporary literature, not least because it enables us to rehearse the other problem facing relevant alternative approaches to skepticism that was just noted. Here is how the argument goes: Closure-Based Radical Skepticism (S1) (S2) (SC)

One cannot know that one is not the victim of a radical skeptical hypothesis. If one cannot know that one is not the victim of a radical skeptical hypothesis, then one has little, if any, knowledge of an external world. One has little, if any, knowledge of an external world.6,7

(S1) is motivated by the general thought that since, ex hypothesi, one cannot distinguish between one’s ordinary experiences and the corresponding experiences that one would have if one were the victim of a radical skeptical hypothesis, so one can never knowledgeably exclude the latter possibility. Consider, for example, the notorious brain-in-a-vat (BIV) hypothesis. If one were a BIV, one would continue to have essentially the same beliefs that one does now, and hence one could never determine that one was a BIV. Accordingly, how is one to know that one is not a BIV?8 The combination of (S1) and (S2) obviously entails the skeptical conclusion, (SC). But what motivates the second claim, (S2)? Consider the following principle: 5 6

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For further discussion of this point, see Pritchard 2014. Note that this formulation of radical skepticism is in fact much stronger than we need to generate the skeptical paradox. In particular, in terms of (S1), it would suffice, for example, that one does not – as opposed to the stronger cannot – have knowledge that one is not the victim of a radical skeptical hypothesis. Relatedly, it would suffice for (S2) that it follows from one’s lack of knowledge that one is not the victim of a radical skeptical hypothesis that one lacks knowledge of an external world. Another way of formulating the radical skeptical problem that has been popular in the contemporary literature has been via an epistemic principle known as underdetermination. For some key presentations of this argument, and further discussion of how it relates to the closure-based formulation, see Yalçin 1992; Brueckner 1994; Cohen 1998, Byrne 2004; Vogel 2004; Pritchard 2005a: part one; 2005b; 2015: part one. Note that in order to keep matters simple I am setting to one side those responses to radical skepticism – e.g. Vogel 1990 – which claim that we can have an abductive rational basis for preferring our everyday beliefs over skeptical alternatives. I critically discuss such proposals in Pritchard 2015: chapter 1.

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The Closure Principle If S knows that p, and S competently deduces from p that q, thereby forming a belief that q on this basis while retaining her knowledge that p, then S knows that q.9

With the closure principle in play, imagine that one does have the kind of knowledge of the external world that is being denied in (SC). Suppose, for example, that one knows that one is sitting at one’s desk in one’s office. This proposition is inconsistent with a range of radical skeptical hypotheses, including the skeptical hypothesis that one is a BIV (BIVs, after all, don’t sit anywhere, but rather float). If one is aware of this fact, one could thus employ the closure principle and in this way acquire knowledge that one is not a BIV. Conversely, if we grant to the skeptic that it is simply impossible to have knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, then it follows that one must lack knowledge of such everyday propositions as that one is sitting at one’s office desk. We thus get the bridging premise in the skeptical argument, (S2). The guiding thought behind the closure principle is that competent deduction is a paradigm instance of a rational process. Accordingly, any belief which is grounded on a competent deduction from prior knowledge – and where the original knowledge is preserved throughout the deduction – cannot be itself any less epistemically grounded. It is therefore hard to see how this principle could fail. How could one have knowledge, competently deduce a belief on this basis (while retaining one’s original knowledge), and yet lack knowledge of the proposition deduced? At the very least, any antiskeptical strategy which proceeds by rejecting this principle will face a steep up-hill task. So we have a radical skeptical argument which proceeds toward a radical conclusion, in the form of (SC). But we can get a better grip on the problem that confronts us by representing radical skepticism not as an argument to a skeptical conclusion, but rather as a putative paradox that presents us with a trilemma. That is, the radical skeptic seems to be exposing the fact that we have the following three fundamental epistemological commitments, which turn out to be jointly inconsistent:

9

I argue (Pritchard 2015: part one, and elsewhere) that this principle, and thus the closure-based skeptical argument as a whole, is best formulated in terms of rationally grounded knowledge (and also that, if anything, the skeptical argument is strengthened as a result). In order to keep matters as straightforward as possible, however, in what follows we will confine our attentions to radical skepticism aimed at knowledge simpliciter.

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Closure-Based Radical Skepticism Qua Paradox (i) One cannot have knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses. (ii) The closure principle. (iii) One has a large body of knowledge of the external world.

Rejecting (iii) would thus be one route out of this paradox, a route that would involve embracing radical skepticism qua position. This would mean resigning ourselves to the thought that the epistemic currency we standardly trade in is essentially counterfeit. So long as one finds this option unpalatable, the alternative is to find a way of rejecting either (i) or (ii) (or both). Crucially, however, if it is granted that (i) and (ii) constitute highly intuitive claims, then it follows that rejecting one of these claims will not be without its costs.10 Once we formulate the skeptical problem in terms of the closure principle, it becomes apparent that there is, as yet, a crucial lacuna in the idea of responding to this problem by appeal to relevant alternatives. In particular, which of these three claims is the relevant alternative theorist denying? This is not a question that someone like Austin ever engages with, since the closure principle was not a staple of the skeptical debate when he was writing. On the face of it, however, it seems as if a relevant alternative theorist ought to be denying the closure principle. After all, if skeptical hypotheses are always irrelevant, then it seems one ought to be able to know everyday things about the external world even while being unable to know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses. But that seems to be in conflict with closure, in that it appears one can know one proposition, know the entailment to a second proposition (and so be in a position to make a competent deduction on this basis), and yet be unable to know, in line with (i), that entailed proposition. Given the plausibility of closure, that might make us think again about the viability of a relevant alternatives approach to knowledge. That said, some contemporary theorists have attempted to motivate rejections of closure, most notably Fred Dretske (1970; 2005a; 2005b) and Robert Nozick (1981).11 Dretske, for example, argues that closure fails for what he calls the “heavyweight” propositions, like the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, which must be presupposed in order for everyday knowledge to get off the 10

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As Schiffer (1996: 330) has rather nicely put the point, if radical skepticism poses a genuine paradox then there is no “happy face” solution to this problem, only a “sad face” solution, because it would mean that there is indeed a “deep-seated incoherence” within our pre-theoretical epistemological commitments. Though note that both Dretske (1970) and Nozick (1981) are primarily concerned with rejecting a weaker synchronic formulation of the closure principle (as opposed to the diachronic formulation offered here, which is now more commonly employed in the contemporary literature on radical skepticism).

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ground, and that this is why we cannot come to know these heavyweight propositions by deducing them from our everyday knowledge. But given the plausibility of closure, is there a way of retaining the core idea behind relevant alternatives without having to deny this principle? CONTEXTUALISM

There are two ways of developing the relevant alternatives anti-skeptical line that don’t involve denying the closure principle. The first is attributer contextualism, as prominently defended in various forms by such figures as Stewart Cohen (e.g. 1999; 2000), Keith DeRose (e.g. 1995) and David Lewis (1996). The basic idea behind the view is that what error-possibilities count as relevant is a highly context-sensitive matter, where the salient context is that of the attributer. So, for example, consider two attributers (A and B), occupying different contexts (and therefore applying different contextual standards for “knows”), and both evaluating whether a third person (S), in an entirely distinct context, has knowledge. If the epistemic standards for attributer A are very high, and the epistemic standards for attributer B are very low, then we could imagine A quite properly asserting that “S doesn’t know that p” and B quite properly asserting “S does know that p.” According to attributer contextualism, both of these statements could express truths, in that on this view “knows” is itself a context-sensitive term (in that it picks out high standards in A’s assertion, and low standards in B’s assertion). The putative advantage of this proposal is that it seems that there is now no need to deny the closure principle. In ordinary epistemic contexts, of the kind that Austin was concerned with, the epistemic standards are low and hence our ascriptions of knowledge to each other (and to ourselves) generally express truths. But once the problem of radical skepticism enters the stage, however, and in particular once we start considering radical skeptical hypotheses, then the epistemic standards get raised and now such ascriptions would no longer express truths. But this doesn’t generate any tension with the closure principle, since in any context in which the claim “S lacks knowledge of the denial of a skeptical hypothesis” is truthfully expressed will inevitably be a high-standards skeptical context, and thus a context where knowledge ascriptions involving everyday propositions will also express falsehoods. Attributer contextualism is an ingenious proposal, and for a while it was highly influential. It does face some fairly serious problems on closer inspection, however. For example, in order for this proposal to work, we need to be able to make sense of how one’s everyday beliefs, in quotidian epistemic contexts, can at least satisfy low epistemic standards. The problem, however, is that this is far

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from obvious. After all, if the radical skeptic is right, then it seems that our everyday beliefs have absolutely no epistemic status whatsoever. That is, if I really cannot exclude radical skeptical scenarios such as that I am a BIV, then how do I have any evidence in favor of an everyday belief, such as that I have two hands? If that’s right, then appealing to a contextual shift in epistemic standards will not help us resolve the problem, since as things stand our everyday beliefs do not satisfy any epistemic standard.12 NEO-MOOREANISM AND HINGE EPISTEMOLOGY

There is another way to think about relevant alternatives theory. The core of the idea is that one can know everyday claims without having to exclude radical skeptical hypotheses. That’s only in tension with the closure principle if we accept (i) above, and thus concede that we are unable to know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses. But arguing that we can know everyday claims without having to exclude radical skeptical hypotheses only entails that we don’t need to first know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses in order to know everyday claims. Perhaps we could use our knowledge of everyday claims in order to subsequently acquire knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical claims. This is a line of thought known as neo-Mooreanism, due to its parallels to the Moorean anti-skeptical proposal that we looked at above. The challenge facing neo-Mooreanism is to explain how we might be able to know such anti-skeptical claims, given that such knowledge is so anti-intuitive. Various proposals have been offered on this score. Gail Stine (1976), for example, argued that the reason why we think we do not know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses is because of the conversational impropriety of making such claims, and not because they are false. Relatedly, one might try to defend such knowledge on epistemic externalist grounds. On this view, such anti-skeptical knowledge is not rationally grounded, and hence is in a certain sense “brute,” but it is bona fide knowledge nonetheless.13 Others have opted to more directly claim that there is nothing essentially question-begging about acquiring one’s knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses by deducing it from one’s everyday knowledge, in some cases by appealing to a radical new way of thinking about what rationally grounded knowledge is.14 12 13 14

For more on this point, and for a review of other problems facing attributer contextualism, see Pritchard 2015: passim. See Pritchard 2005a for a development of this kind of anti-skeptical line. For an influential defense of the legitimacy of such anti-skeptical inferences, see Pryor 2000. For an example of the more radical line, one which appeals to a conception of perceptual knowledge known as epistemological disjunctivism, see McDowell 1995a, which has in turn been spelt out in detail in Pritchard 2008; 2012a.

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But how plausible is it that we can know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, much less on the basis of inference from our everyday beliefs (which seem, as we saw Dretske noting above, to essentially presuppose a legitimate commitment to these anti-skeptical beliefs)? A striking opposing thought here comes from Wittgenstein (1969), who in his very final notebooks, published as On Certainty, proposed a radical new conception of the structure of rational evaluation, one that had basic arational “hinge” commitments, including commitments to the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses (and also our general Moorean certainties), at its heart. Unlike Moore, who regarded the optimal certainty that attached to such commitments as ensuring that they had a special epistemic status, Wittgenstein instead argues that our hinge commitments have no epistemic standing at all. Instead, they constitute the necessary structural background which enables knowledge to take place. On this view, issues about context or the relevance of alternatives do not get to the heart of the matter, which is the way in which traditional skeptical, and for that matter anti-skeptical, theorizing trades on the thought that we can make sense of the idea of fully general epistemic evaluations (whether positive or negative). This is just what Wittgenstein aims to deny with his appeal to the necessity of hinge commitments.15 The cogency of Wittgenstein’s own approach to these issues has also been disputed, of course. In particular, one large question for a hinge epistemology is whether it results in the denial of the closure principle, since if it does it may be no less problematic than the other anti-skeptical approaches that we have looked at.16 But what does set it apart from standard forms of anti-skepticism is how it tries to unearth the philosophical presuppositions of the skeptical problem, as opposed to conceding the formulation of the problem to radical skeptic and then attempting to respond to that difficulty while remaining within those confines.17

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For some key contemporary interpretations of a Wittgenstein hinge epistemology, see Williams 1991; Moyal-Sharrock 2004; Wright 2004; Pritchard 2012b; 2015; forthcoming; Coliva 2015; Schönbaumsfeld 2016. For two surveys of contemporary work on hinge epistemology, see Pritchard 2011; 2017. For what it is worth, my own view is that a hinge epistemology, properly understood, can accept all three of the claims that make up the formulation of the radical skeptical paradox above, including the closure principle. In short, I take the Wittgensteinian line as regards closure-based radical skepticism to be that what looks like a paradox is in fact nothing of the sort, since the three claims in play, when understood correctly, are consistent. See Pritchard (2015) for the details. For a more comprehensive survey of contemporary work on radical skepticism, see Pritchard 2002.

9 POST-GETTIER EPISTEMOLOGY ke l ly b e c ke r

What value is there in the counterexample method in philosophy? For sure, a well-constructed counterexample is an effective means of revealing the deficiency in a proposed analysis of a concept. But where do we go from there? If, for example, as is clearly the case in the recent history of analyses of “S knows that p” (hereafter just “knows”), there is no consensus on an adequate definition, does the churning out of ever more clever counterexamples simply devolve into a competition to knock contenders out of the ring? It can certainly seem that way, which leads many philosophers to despair of the very idea of analysis. In my view, however, drawing that inference misses the point and beauty of the proposed-analysis-and-counterexample method. We learn a lot from the failures of analysis, which drives us to original thinking about the concept at issue. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of epistemology after Gettier’s (1963) refutation of the Justified True Belief analysis (JTB) of “knows.” In this chapter, I aim to show how the ground beneath Gettier’s demolition has proved to be remarkably fertile. To that end, we first need a workable grasp of Gettier’s refutation of JTB. I will then recount the subsequent history of approaches to knowledge that are directly influenced, at least in part, by the Gettier problem. This is the problem of analyzing “knows” while adequately responding both to Gettier’s counterexamples and to other adequacy conditions on knowing – an unforgiving task given that, once the counterexample method is entrenched, it is difficult to anticipate what the next problem case or adequacy condition is going to look like. Nevertheless, at each bend in the road we learn something – sometimes something quite significant – that we didn’t know before. I then turn to approaches to knowledge that are arguably indirectly inspired by Gettier. Typically, these take into account and aim to improve upon deficiencies perceived in the strategies that take up the Gettier problem directly. Finally, I describe reactions against the Gettier problem (which, again, is that of adequately analyzing “knows”), which have become more prominent very recently. 125

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Discussion of Gettier’s paper “Is justified true belief knowledge?” (1963) often begins with the claim that Gettier refuted the consensus analysis of knowledge as JTB. Some see this as misleading insofar as the analysis of knowledge was not at the time a widely shared ongoing research project. Still, Gettier himself cites several philosophers who explicitly held a version of the JTB analysis. In addition, an account very like JTB was articulated in Plato’s Theaetetus and, while (of course) Plato did not actually endorse (his version of ) JTB, it was as far as he got in defining knowledge. Others have noted that Bertrand Russell’s (1948) stopped clock example (where one forms a true belief by looking at a clock that just happens to be stopped at the correct time) is a Gettier case, hence that Gettier’s paper is not original. However, Russell himself only aimed to show the insufficiency of true belief for knowledge, and nobody seemed to have noticed that his example could also undermine JTB. In constructing his cases, Gettier asked the reader to buy in to two apparently uncontroversial assumptions: (1) that one can have a justified false belief; and (2) that belief in a proposition is justified if based on a correct deduction from justified premises. (1) appears to be uncontroversial unless the standard for justified belief is infallibility; (2) appears to be uncontroversial because valid deduction, given its truth-preserving nature, would seem to make one’s conclusions at least as justified as one’s premises. Let’s focus on just the first of Gettier’s cases. (The second has a very similar “logic.”) Smith is told by his boss that Jones is getting the job for which Smith and Jones both applied. Thus Smith is justified in believing this. (If that seems too quick, you may add further evidence, short of implying infallible grounds: Smith knows his boss to be reliably truthful; Smith read a memo indicating Jones would get the job, etc.) Smith also justifiably believes that Jones has ten coins in his pocket, having just counted them. Smith then deduces that p: The person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. As it happens, however, Smith is going to get the job, and Smith happens to have ten coins in his pocket. Thus Smith’s belief that p is true and justified, but intuitively Smith does not know that p, for the belief is justified by deduction from Smith’s false belief that Jones is getting the job. Et voilà, justified true belief is insufficient for knowing. Hardly an earth-shattering conclusion, no?

G E T T I E R ’ S C H I L DR E N

The question sounds rhetorical because the solution to the Gettier problem seems obvious. The problem is that Smith’s belief is based on a false premise,

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inviting the response that knowledge is JTB with no false grounds (or premises or lemmas). This was Michael Clark’s (1963) early reaction, which itself inspired counterexamples to the claim that having no false grounds is necessary for knowledge, since it seemed that one could have false grounds so long as one had independent adequate justification consisting in only true propositions. This led to the idea that knowledge cannot be based essentially on false grounds (Harman 1973). (Klein [2008] fairly convincingly shows that not to be the case.) Perhaps more interestingly, not long after Clark’s paper many others argued that JTB with no false grounds is insufficient for knowing. We kill two birds with one stone if we introduce another response to Gettier first. Recognizing that in Gettier cases one’s justification for believing that p (e.g. that the boss told Smith that Jones is getting the job) seems somehow disconnected from the fact that makes p true (Smith’s getting the job), Goldman (1967) proposed that one’s grounds for belief must be appropriately causally connected to whatever fact makes the belief true. Here we witness one of the first explicitly externalist accounts of knowledge – accounts that hold that knowledge need not require that the agent has cognitive access to her grounds. (Precursors are sometimes recognized as externalists, perhaps even Aristotle, but few so self-consciously so.) So long as the causal connection is of the appropriate kind, S can know that p, regardless of whether she has epistemic or cognitive access to the nature of the connection. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this first step toward externalism. It dovetails neatly with Quinean naturalized epistemology: to understand knowledge, seek causes of belief. And it sets the agenda for much imaginative thinking about knowledge, now no longer assumed to require cognitively accessible reasons. Much that follows here illustrates this second point. Here’s the birds-killing stone, attributed to Carl Ginet (in Goldman 1976). Henry is driving along a country highway and his son, pointing to a barn, asks, “What’s that?” Henry sees the barn clearly and replies, truly, that it is a barn. However, on this stretch of road, all of the many other barn-looking objects are papier mâché barn facades – not barns at all – that Henry cannot distinguish from genuine barns. Does Henry know that what he sees is a barn? Most philosophers think that it is clear that Henry lacks knowledge (but see Lycan 2006 and Hetherington 2001 for dissenting voices). He appears to have gotten lucky in that his son pointed to the one and only real barn; had his son pointed to a fake barn, Henry would have said it is a barn, too. If Henry does not know, this has nothing to do with any false grounds for his belief, nor does it have to do with a faulty causal connection between the belief and the fact that makes it true, as the real barn is causally responsible for Henry’s perception of it, hence for his believing that it’s a barn. The fake barns case does not share its

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structure with an original Gettier case, but what they have in common seems to be some element of luck. Smith’s grounds were false but he somehow ended up with a true belief anyway. Henry’s belief is true but only because his son happened to point out the only real barn around. Goldman’s reaction was to suggest a discrimination requirement on perceptual knowledge: “S has perceptual knowledge if and only if not only does his perceptual mechanism produce true belief, but there are no relevant counterfactual situations in which the same belief would be produced via an equivalent percept and in which the belief would be false” (Goldman 1976: 786). Independently, Dretske (1971) and Nozick (1981) hit upon a similar requirement for knowledge in general. Nozick’s version has it that S knows that p only if, were p false, S would not believe that p. This condition, now known as sensitivity (whereas Nozick used the term “sensitivity” to apply to the combination of two necessary conditions, this one and one that says “if p were true, S would believe that p”), handles the original Gettier cases and the fake barns example, that is, accounts for why they are not cases of knowledge. If it were false that the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket, Smith would believe it anyway, based on his evidence that Jones is getting the job. And if it were false that Henry sees a barn, he would believe it anyway, as he would be looking at a fake barn. In both cases, one fails to know because one’s way of believing, in violating a necessary condition on knowing, fails to track the truth. This discrimination or sensitivity condition replaces the justification condition in the traditional JTB analysis, and it further entrenches externalism in mainstream epistemology, for nowhere is it required that the agent knows that or how the discrimination requirement is met. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Nozick’s sensitivity theory triggered a new avalanche of objections and counterexamples. (See, for example, Becker 2007: chapter 3 and the papers in Luper-Foy 1987.) Perhaps the most lasting complaint is that it implies violations of the principle of closure: If S knows that p, and S knows that p entails q, then S is in position to know q (and S would know that q if S competently deduced q from her knowledge that p and that p entails q and based her belief that q on the deduction). For example, S (at least possibly) knows that she has hands, for if it were false, she would be well aware of it. S knows that if she has hands, she’s not merely a brain-in-a-vat (BIV). But S is in no position to know that she is not a BIV, for if she were, she would be fed exactly the experiences she has in the actual world and thus would believe that she’s not a BIV. Dretske (1970) offers an argument for non-closure – interestingly, a decade in advance of Nozick’s work that caused such a stir – but for most philosophers there is and can be no such cogent argument, for the closure principle is non-negotiable. Otherwise, how can we make sense of the

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purported fact that logical deduction from known premises is a sure-fire way to extend one’s knowledge? We have now seen three early, distinct responses to Gettier: no false grounds; a causal requirement; and a discrimination requirement. And we have seen how the first two are felled by the fake barns case, paving the way for the third. We have also seen how externalism begins to blossom, arguably, in response to Gettier, inarguably at least partly in response to Gettier. During roughly this period, another new idea emerged, namely, that the reason Smith does not know in the Gettier case is that there exists a defeater – a true proposition such that, had Smith believed it, he would not have been justified in believing (hence would not know) that the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket. Here the defeater is that Smith himself is getting the job. The new suggested analysis is that knowledge is undefeated JTB (Lehrer and Paxson 1969). The notion of a defeater is now a staple of epistemological theorizing, but the extent to which it is the key to a correct analysis of knowledge is controversial. Some defeaters seem compatible with knowledge; some not (Harman 1973). Some partly undermine justification, but perhaps not enough to say that S is not justified in believing that p. How shall we develop the no defeater proposal then? S knows that p if and only if S has a JTB with no defeaters sufficient to undermine S’s knowing that p? (Compare: x is a tiger if and only if x is a feline animal that is not a non-tiger.) Let the preceding serve to illustrate some of the original thinking emergent from reflection on Gettier cases. In the next section, we’ll see still more original thinking spawned indirectly from Gettier cases, mediated by consideration of some of the ideas just described. G E T T I E R ’ S G R A N DC H I L D R E N

Goldman quickly moved on from his causal and discrimination accounts of knowledge to develop a much deeper and broader position: reliabilism about justification (Goldman 1979). Emboldened by the naturalist, externalist insights of his early work, Goldman argued that the ostensibly normative notion justification can be explicated in terms of reliability: Roughly, a belief is justified just in case it is the product of a reliable belief-forming process. A principle virtue of this idea is that the notion of reliability appears to tell us something substantive about justification. That is, Goldman offers not merely some evaluative term by which to explicate “justification,” such as “having good reasons” or “excellent grounds.” He proposes a purely descriptive basis for justification, since reliability is a factual notion grounded in whether, as a matter of fact, a process produces (or tends to produce) true beliefs.

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Of course, the history of philosophy is rife with failed attempts to explicate normative or evaluative notions in descriptive terms. To give just one example of how philosophers reacted negatively to Goldman’s proposal, consider the New Evil Demon problem (Cohen 1984). Suppose one is always deceived by an evil demon. Surely she doesn’t know; all her beliefs are false. But surely, too, she is sometimes justified in her beliefs, especially if she is quite careful to form beliefs only on the basis, say, of clear and distinct ideas (to draw the parallel to Descartes even closer). Her way of believing seems to earn some positive epistemic status, but her processes are entirely unreliable. The usual options to a naturalist take on a normative notion seem to be on the table: (1) argue for a change of meaning of the original term “justification” on the grounds of overall theoretical power and simplicity; (2) “split” justification into two notions, a normative one and a descriptive one, and perhaps with them go two distinct kinds of knowing; or (3) simply deny that knowledge in fact requires justification. Some Quineans might go for the first, but see Kim’s (1988) complaint that this just changes the subject. Traditionalists might go for the second and focus their attention solely on knowledge that requires adequate reasons. Those impressed with the possibility of foundational knowledge, warranted (to use a neutral term so as not to invoke New Evil Demon-like criticisms) but not justified by reference to other beliefs or reasons and typically based on perception, might favor the third (Kornblith 2008). (Some Quineans would prefer this approach.) There is nothing in the basic idea of reliabilism that counteracts Gettier cases, but a development related to reliabilism might offer some useful resources. Sosa (1980) introduces the idea that knowledge is true belief produced from a cognitive virtue. From there, virtue epistemology begins to flourish. (See Baril and Hazlett, this volume.) Sosa presents it as an alternative to both coherentism and foundationalism. In later work (1991), Sosa distinguishes animal knowledge from reflective knowledge, rather along the lines of the second option (“split”) in the previous paragraph. Greco (2003) develops a similar line of thought (agent reliabilism) and uses it in response to the Gettier problem, saying that knowledge requires true belief acquired due to or through the exercise of an agent’s character traits. In Gettier cases, one acquires true belief, not due to exercise of her own character traits, but effectively just by accident. Shifting gears a bit, partly due to dissatisfaction with the sensitivity response to Gettier and its concomitant closure violations, a safety requirement on knowing has become increasingly popular in its stead (Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000; Pritchard 2005a). A belief is safe just in case, in (all or mostly all) close worlds in which one holds the belief, the relevant proposition is true. In Gettier cases, there are close worlds in which Smith believes that the person who is getting the

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job has ten coins in his pocket, but this is false because Smith himself doesn’t have ten coins in his pocket. And because the requirement holds that the key to Gettier cases and knowledge more generally is that one knows only if one’s belief is safely held, that is, there are no close worlds where it is false, safety is thought of as the basis of a neo-Moorean epistemology. S knows that she has hands. S knows that if she has hands, then she’s not a BIV. And S knows that she’s not a BIV, because the worlds where that belief is false are very distant. In this way, safety appears not to imply closure violations. Though as mentioned, safety is increasingly popular, some worry that it generates “cheap” knowledge, for example that one is not a BIV, just as many complained about Moore’s proof. (See also Pritchard, this volume, on neo-Mooreansim.) Reading between the lines a bit, one begins to see that there are essentially three basic positions with regard to our possible knowledge statuses. (Notice that we are moving away from the Gettier problematic now.) If one takes closure to be a true principle, then one might either side with the skeptic and say that, because one cannot know that one is not a BIV, one cannot know anything about the external world (because if one could, one could also deduce that one is not a BIV), or side with Moore and say that, because one can know ordinary empirical facts, on that basis one can deduce and come to know that one is not a BIV. The third option is to deny closure, but few find this avenue worth exploring seriously. Contextualists (Cohen 1986; DeRose 1995; Lewis 1996) advocate semantic ascent, asking into the truth conditions of attributions of knowledge (that is, of instances of utterances of the form “S knows that p”) rather than directly into the nature of knowledge itself. Their basic insight is that the truth conditions depend on the context of attribution. If the context is skeptical, say if skepticism is a conversational topic, then it will be false to say that “S knows she is not a BIV,” and given the standards for satisfying the truth conditions of such attributions operative in that context, it is also false to say, “S knows that she has hands.” In an everyday context, both of these attributions may be true. In either case, there is no closure violation. It’s worth mentioning, in this context, that contextualism is inspired at least in part by misgivings about closure violations, which in turn are implied by theoretical approaches directly inspired by Gettier. In fact, it is arguable that the source document for contextualism is Stine’s (1976) response to Dretske’s argument for non-closure. She argues that Dretske misapplies the relevant alternatives idea – the notion burgeoning in the postGettier, anti-skeptical literature that says knowing that p requires grounds that enable one to rule out only relevant alternatives to p. (The concept of a relevant alternative is well-nigh explicit in Goldman’s early discrimination account,

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adumbrated above, in his appeal to relevant counterfactual situations. Nozick thinks of his subjunctive conditionals as clarifying the relevant alternatives approach, where an alternative is relevant if it is what would be the case if p were false [1981: 175].) For Dretske, closure fails because one can rule out the alternatives relevant to knowing, for example, that one has hands but not those relevant to knowing whether one is not a BIV. A relevant alternative (on the basic view common to Dretske and Nozick) is a possibility that would or might be the case if p were false. To know one has hands, one must rule out the alternatives, say, that one’s hands were just chopped off or one was born without hands (but not that one is merely a BIV, because that is not what would be the case if one did not have hands), but to know one is not a BIV, one must rule out the possibility that one is a BIV. Stine argues that Dretske’s conception of relevant alternatives leads to equivocation on “knows” within any one context, because it appears that the standard for correct use of “knows” in “S knows that she has hands” is far easier to meet than the standard for “S knows she is not a BIV.” Such standards, she argues, do shift from context to context (of attribution), but must be held constant within any one context. A non-contextualist relative of contextualism holds that truth conditions of knowledge attributions do not vary by context, but depend on practical interests of the agent whose knowledge status is in question (Hawthorne 2004; Stanley 2005). This view, sometimes called “subject-sensitive invariantism,” shares with contextualism the idea that standards for true knowledge attributions can depend on facts that are independent of one’s grounds or evidence. In the present case, sometimes merely pragmatic concerns of the agent encroach on questions of epistemic standing (Fantl and McGrath 2007). GETTIER’S STEPCHILDREN

In the past two decades, there have been influential reactions against the Gettier problem. Each takes a form quite distinct from the others. Famously, Williamson (2000) argues for what has come to be known as knowledge-first epistemology. The idea is that knowledge is not analyzable into necessary and sufficient conditions, and the Gettier-inspired thought that it is has led to a “degenerating research programme” (Williamson 2000: 31). Williamson does believe that an informative characterization of knowledge is possible and desirable – indeed he accepts a safety condition – but denies “knows” is analyzable. His knowledge-first program proceeds on at least two fronts that have picked up quite a bit of steam – one conceptual, the other metaphysical. First, whereas traditionalists aim to analyze “knows” partly in terms of reasons, evidence, or justification, Williamson argues both that knowledge is identical to

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evidence, and that knowledge is the basis of justified belief rather than vice versa. That is, one’s belief is justified by evidence, and, because knowledge is evidence, belief is justified by knowledge. Second, Williamson challenges traditionalists to explain how knowledge is composite (not prime; not first), with separate contributions from mind (belief ) and world (truth). Based partly on a commitment to a form of externalism about mental states (such as beliefs) inspired by Evans (1982) and McDowell (1986) – a form, notably, that is stronger than the “orthodox” externalisms of Putnam (1975a) and Burge (1979) – he argues that there are no neatly separable internal, purely mental components and external, purely worldly components to knowledge. Williamson then argues that knowledge is a metaphysically basic type of mental state.1 Hetherington (2001) argues that in Gettier cases, the agent does know that p, but not in the best way. Knowledge is not only fallible, but failable. Gettier subjects know but easily might have failed to know. In his recent book (2016), while assuming arguendo that one lacks knowledge in Gettier cases, Hetherington argues that the Gettier problem has typically been incorrectly formulated. Roughly, the standard uptake of Gettier cases is that one has a belief that is true but could easily have been false. Hetherington argues that being Gettiered is a property of a belief in a Gettier case, and that property consists, among other things, of truth. So to say that that very belief could easily have been false is to conflate a Gettiered belief with some other kind of belief, for a belief could not be Gettiered and false. To the response that he is committing some sort of modal error (taking “necessarily, if a belief is Gettiered then it is true” to mean “if a belief is Gettiered then necessarily it is true” – the former simply saying that any Gettier case involves a true belief, the latter saying that any belief in a Gettier case necessarily is true), Hetherington is undeterred, arguing at length that a proper diagnosis of Gettier cases requires thinking of “being Gettiered,” which implies being true, as an essential property of beliefs in Gettier cases. Hetherington’s biggest concern is to show that we can compatibly hold that one lacks knowledge in Gettier cases, and yet knowledge may still be construed as justified true belief. Finally, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001) argue, as part of a growing but diverse experimental philosophy movement, that the “intuition” that the agents in Gettier cases lack knowledge is not universal. Experimental survey data suggests that the Gettier intuition is not shared by everyone and varies by culture or ethnicity. East Asians, for example, often report that agents in Gettier cases do know. One problem that leaps to mind is that their surveys included the

1

See McGlynn 2014 for a comprehensive discussion of knowledge-first epistemology.

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following response options: In a Gettier case, the agent REALLY KNOWS or ONLY BELIEVES. Why did they not offer the possible response BELIEVES TRULY or even BELIEVES TRULY WITH JUSTIFICATION? Nagel (2012) argues that intuitions about Gettier cases are not in fact generally affected by culture, ethnicity, and gender, and indeed are widely shared and reliable. She claims that the intuitions are generated from the same “mindreading” capacity that allows us to reliably attribute commonsense psychological states to each other. Given the high-profile nature and fecundity of the Gettier problem, as described above, Gettier intuitions provide an important test case for the burgeoning experimental philosophy approach, which, among other things, seeks to challenge armchair philosophy and its appeal to intuitions as a means of discovering philosophical truths. FECUNDITY

The most important takeaway from the preceding is that, though philosophers might rightly despair of attempts to analyze important philosophical concepts on the grounds that no such analyses – at least none that go beyond mere synonymies, if such exist – ever seem to succeed, it is short-sighted to infer that the exercise is pointless. This is important because, in the post-Gettier philosophical world, it has become fashionable to look down one’s nose at the analysis-andcounterexample method. To those who are so inclined, let me pose the following questions. Without Gettier, whence the causal theory of knowing? Whence the important concept of a defeater? Whence sensitivity? Whence safety? Whence reliabilism? Whence contextualism? Whence knowledge-first epistemology? Surely it goes too far to say that these important ideas could not have surfaced and developed without Gettier, so I won’t make that reckless claim, but surely it’s also true that Gettier’s paper inspired much that we now call epistemology.

section two LOGIC, METAPHYSICS, SCIENCE

10 LOGIC IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY j o h n p. b u r g e s s

Modern logic emerged in the period from 1879 to the Second World War. In the post-war period what we know as classical first-order logic largely replaced traditional syllogistic logic in introductory textbooks, but the main development has been simply enormous growth: The publications of the Association for Symbolic Logic, the main professional organization for logicians, became ever thicker. While 1950 saw volume 15 of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, about 300 pages of articles and reviews and a six‑page member list, 2000 saw volume 65 of that journal, over 1,900 pages of articles, plus volume 6 of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 570 pages of reviews and a sixty‑page member list. Of so large a field, the present survey will have to be ruthlessly selective, with no coverage of the history of informal or inductive logic, or of philosophy or historiography of logic, and slight coverage of applications. Remaining are five branches of pure, formal, deductive logic, four being the branches of mathematical logic recognized in Barwise 1977, first of many handbooks put out by academic publishers: set theory, model theory, recursion theory, proof theory. The fifth is philosophical logic, in one sense of that label, otherwise called non-classical logic, including extensions of and alternatives to textbook logic. For each branch, a brief review of pre‑war background will be followed by a few highlights of subsequent history. The references will be a mix of primary and secondary sources, landmark papers and survey articles. SET THEORY

Set theory began in the 1870s when Georg Cantor applied to infinite sets the criterion for having the same cardinal number that we apply to finite sets: The cardinals of two sets are the same when their elements can be put into one-toone correspondence. He showed there was a non-trivial subject here by showing to begin with that there are at least two infinite cardinals, countable and continuum, represented by the sets of natural and of real numbers, respectively. He formulated the conjecture, known as the continuum hypothesis (CH), 137

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that there are no intermediates. For the rest, set theory divides into three areas: (i) descriptive set theory, the theory of definable sets of real numbers; (ii) the theory of arbitrary sets of real numbers, with CH as the central conjecture; (iii) infinitary combinatorics, the theory of arbitrary sets of arbitrary elements, and the arithmetic of infinite cardinals. After 1900, Cantor’s theory was put on an axiomatic basis by Ernst Zermelo, who made explicit an assumption, the axiom of choice, earlier left implicit. Zermelo’s work was amended by Abraham Fraenkel to produce the system known as ZFC. By the middle 1930s a group writing under the collective pseudonym Bourbaki was advocating something like ZFC as a framework for rigorous development of all modern abstract mathematics. By mid-century their point of view had prevailed. Now Kurt Gödel had famously established in 1931 that any system of axioms sufficient to develop basic number theory will be incomplete, leaving some statement formulable in its language undecided: neither refutable nor provable from the axioms; or equivalently, both consistent with but independent of those axioms. (There are systems, such as the axioms of the algebra of the real numbers, that are complete, but these are not sufficient to develop basic number theory, and Gödelian examples cannot be formulated in their languages.) ZFC certainly suffices for basic number theory, and so Gödel’s incompleteness theorem guarantees there are statements formulable in its language that are undecidable by it. Thus with ZFC accepted as a framework, there are mathematical statements left undecided by the whole of mathematics as we know it. The examples produced by Gödel’s proof are rather contrived, raising the question whether more natural examples can be found. Gödel himself suspected that CH was one. (Gödel [1948] expresses the view that if it is, that does not show that CH is meaningless, but rather that mathematics as we know it needs further axioms beyond ZFC.) Using what are called constructible sets, Gödel (1940) established the positive half of the conjecture: CH is consistent with ZFC. For more pre-war background, see Kanamori 2012a, in addition to the general source van Heijenoort 1967 for developments down through the Gödel incompleteness theorems. The 1940s and 1950s were comparatively dull for set theory. Then Paul Cohen announced in 1963 and published in 1966 a proof, by a method called forcing, of the negative result Gödel had anticipated: CH is independent of ZFC. This work inaugurated a golden age, as Cohen’s methods, alongside Gödel’s, were taken up and adapted and elaborated. The names of Robert Solovay and Ronald Jensen appear as leading figures in the section headings in the survey of this period in Kanamori 2012b; the names of other contributors too numerous to list here can be found in the text of those sections. Through the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, such logicians attacked problems in all areas (i), (ii), and (iii)

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above, showing many of them undecidable in ZFC, explaining why they had theretofore remained unsolved. Gödel had shown that neither ZFC nor any consistent extension thereof can prove its own consistency, but in some cases ZFC can prove that if ZFC is consistent, then ZFC + B is consistent; this is a more precise statement of what Gödel and Cohen proved for B = CH and B = not-CH, respectively. When ZFC can prove that if ZFC + A is consistent, then ZFC + B is consistent, usually it turns out that a much weaker system can prove the same, and we say that the consistency strength of ZFC + B (or of B, for short) is less than or equal that of ZFC + A (or of A, for short). By this standard, ZFC and ZFC + CH and ZFC + not-CH are of the same strength. But there are many hypotheses that are known to be of higher and higher strength – or, since consistency strength might equally well have been called inconsistency risk, known to be riskier and riskier. These are the large cardinal axioms. Such a hypothesis asserts the existence of a cardinal that is in some sense – a different sense for each axiom – very much larger than any smaller cardinal. The weakest asserts the existence of an inaccessible, unreachable by any of the processes Cantor used to obtain larger cardinals from smaller ones. (Inaccessibles have occasionally been used outside pure set theory, in category theory.) The consistency strengths of the many large cardinal axioms that have been proposed all form a linearly ordered scale; moreover, when other hypotheses are proved undecidable, their consistency strengths generally turn out to fit somewhere in this scale. This fact is noteworthy since it is easy enough to contrive artificial examples of incomparable consistency strength. By the end of the 1980s, the work of a group of set theorists called the “cabal” (Alexander Kechris, D. A. Martin, Yannis Moschovakis, John Steel, Hugh Woodin) had shown, using game-theoretic methods, that large cardinals high enough up the scale give satisfying solutions to virtually all problems of area (i). Moreover, the conjunction of the theorems stating these solutions is of about the same consistency strength as the axioms used to prove them. There has been no subsequent breakthrough of comparable magnitude, though Harvey Friedman (see Harrington et al. 1985) has found results more concrete-looking than those of area (i) that are also of about the same consistency strength as certain large cardinal axioms. Gödel had hoped large cardinal axioms might be of help also in area (ii); but it transpired that they leave undecided even the most basic problem there, CH. There is an alternative to CH, of no greater consistency strength, that does settle in an interesting way a number of problems in area (ii). But though it is called Martin’s axiom, it does not have much support among set theorists as a

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candidate new axiom, in the way some of the large cardinal axioms do. And there are limits to what even powerful extensions of Martin’s axiom (as in Shelah 1982) tell us about area (iii). We are left with a picture of a sequence of extensions of ZFC of greater and greater consistency strength, and a varied range of statements more and more of which become provable as we move higher and higher on the scale, but also with a range of problems unaffected by these developments, including the oldest problem of all, CH. For more on what was going on as this picture was emerging, see the introduction to Foreman and Kanamori (2010). MODEL THEORY

The rudiments of model theory are covered in the courses on logic commonly taken by philosophers, so will be only briefly recalled here. First, “syntactic” notions: A first-order language has the logical predicate of identity = and various other predicates P, Q, R, each with a fixed number of places, giving rise to atomic formulas such as x = y and Px, Qxy, Rxyz. From these, compound formulas can be produced using logical operations of negation ¬, conjunction ^, disjunction ∨, the indicative conditional !, and quantification, universal and existential, 8 and 9. Sentences are formulas in which every occurrence of a variable is “bound” by a quantifier, like 8x9yQxy and unlike Qxy. A theory is a set of sentences. Next, “semantic” notions: An interpretation provides a universe of objects for variables x, y, z to range over, and for each predicate an associated relation on that universe, of the right number of places. The notion of truth of a sentence under an interpretation is then defined by recursion on the complexity of the sentences: For instance, a conjunction is true if the conjuncts both are. (Quantification is a longer story, told in textbooks.) A model of a theory is an interpretation in which all sentences of the theory are true. The cardinal of a model is that of its universe; the theory of models of finite cardinality has a special flavor, and pure model theory largely concentrates on infinite models. The foregoing notions have roots in the work of Alfred Tarski in the 1930s, and were further developed with students, such as Robert Vaught in the 1950s, when a wide range of model-building techniques was introduced (see Vaught 1974). A number of model‑theoretic results had been established as far back as the 1920s, before the Tarskian definitions were formulated, and hence before those results could be fully rigorously stated. Examples include the celebrated Löwenheim-Skolem theorems, saying that if a theory has a model of one infinite cardinal, it has models of all infinite cardinals. A crucial notion throughout mathematics is that of isomorphism. Consider two interpretations of the same language, having universes U1 and U2 and

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associating relations Q1 and Q2 with each predicate Q. A one-to-one correspondence between U1 and U2 is an isomorphism if for all Q, any given elements of U1 stand in relation Q1 if and only if the corresponding elements of U2 stand in relation Q2. If there is an isomorphism, the interpretations are said to be of the same isomorphism type. It can be shown that the same sentences are true in models of the same isomorphism type. Since isomorphism requires one-to-one correspondence and hence identity of cardinality, the Löwenheim‑Skolem theorems imply that if a theory has any infinite model at all, it has infinite models of different isomorphism types: A first-order theory can never be categorical in the sense of characterizing a model “uniquely up to isomorphism.” At most it may happen for a given infinite cardinal that all models of a theory of that cardinal are isomorphic, in which case we say the theory is categorical in that cardinal. There are several logics allowing more operators than first-order logic, but working with the same kind of models, that escape this limitation. Second-order logic allows quantification over subsets X as well as over elements x of the universe of a model. It goes all the way back to Gottlob Frege (see the first selection in van Heijenoort 1967). Infinitary logic allows conjunctions and disjunctions of infinite lists of formulas. Generalized quantifier logic allows, in addition to “for some x” and “for all x” also “for infinitely many x” and “for all but finitely many x.” Both infinitary and generalized quantifier logics, which go back to Tarski (1958) and Mostowski (1957), were intensively investigated through the 1970s and beyond, and generalized quantifiers remain of interest in linguistics. All three logics mentioned allow the natural number system and some other structures to be characterized uniquely up to isomorphism. The price is the failure of various theorems that hold for first-order logic, beginning with Löwenheim-Skolem. Returning to first-order logic, the spectrum of a theory is the function assigning each infinite cardinal the number of isomorphism types of models of the theory with that cardinal. The spectrum problem is to characterize the possible spectra for complete theories, of which abstract algebra provides many specific examples. As a first step, Morley (1965) showed that a complete theory categorical in one uncountable cardinal is categorical in all uncountable cardinals. An almost total solution to the spectrum problem was worked out by the end of the last century, mainly by Saharon Shelah, who discovered a “main gap” between theories where the number of isomorphism types of models increases rapidly with cardinality, and theories where it increases only rather slowly (see Shelah 1986). Left unsolved is the status of Vaught’s conjecture, to the effect that even if CH is false, the number of isomorphism types of countable models cannot be intermediate between countable and continuum.

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Model theory has many applications to abstract algebra and other areas of core mathematics, but apart perhaps from the work of Robinson (1966) reconstructing something like Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus, such applications seem to hold little interest for philosophers. So though the center of gravity of model theory post-Shelah has lain in algebraic applications, they will be left aside here. RECURSION THEORY

The proposal has been gaining ground to replace the long-established label at the head of this section with computability theory. Soare (1996) argues the case on historical grounds, and is a convenient source for background on the work of Alonzo Church, S. C. Kleene, and Alan Turing in the 1930s that gave rise to this subject, whatever one calls it. From this background only a few points need be recalled. (1) Workers such as those mentioned were seeking to give rigorous analyses of what it is for a function on the natural numbers to be effectively calculable. (2) All approaches had to allow partial functions, which may be undefined for some numbers as inputs, giving no outputs. (3) All approaches ultimately led to the same class of functions. (4) The thesis that this class is indeed the classes of effectively calculable functions is now the consensus. If we reserve effectively calculable for the intuitive pre-theoretic notion, what term shall we use for the rigorous technical notion so many writers have characterized in so many equivalent ways? Fairly early recursive won out, though computable is now a challenger. A set A of natural numbers is recursively decidable if its characteristic function – a(n) = 0 or 1 according as n isn’t or is in A – is recursive, and recursively enumerable if it is the range of some recursive partial function – the set of all outputs b(n) for some such b. Any recursively decidable set is recursively enumerable – let b(n) = n/a(n) – but there is a stock example of a recursively enumerable but recursively undecidable set, the halting set H, obtained as follows. There is a way to assign natural number indices to one-place recursive partial functions so that the following is itself a two-place recursive partial function: t (m, n) = the output of the partial function with index m for input n. Then H is the set of m such that t(m,m) is defined. For a positive calculability result one need only describe the calculation procedure and show that it works; it is for a negative incalculability result that one needs some kind of analysis of what calculability amounts to, and the most famous results from the 1930s are indeed negative ones, the recursive undecidability of H being perhaps the most basic. The first half and more of the 1950s was dominated by a single problem. An effective procedure for deciding membership in a set involves no use of external

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sources of information. But suppose we do have an external source of information that for any n we ask about will tell us whether or not it is in a certain set A. If there is a procedure for deciding membership in the set B that uses such an external source but is otherwise effective, then we say B is reducible to A, or of degree of recursive undecidability less than or equal to that of A. All recursive sets have the same degree, the least degree, called 0. The degree of H, called 00 , is greater, and the degree of any other recursively enumerable set is less than or equal to 00 . The dominant problem was this: Does there exist a recursively enumerable set of degree strictly between 0 and 00 ? The question was independently answered, in the affirmative, by Albert Muchnik and Richard Friedberg (in Russian and English, respectively) in 1956–57, using what is called the priority method. As with forcing, so with priority, the introduction of a new technique was followed by a flurry of activity lasting through the 1960s and 1970s at least. The structure of the system of degrees (especially recursively enumerable ones) and the reducibility order on them was intensively investigated, almost as if it were as natural an object of study as the natural number system. The kind of relative decidability involved in degree theory is only one direction of generalization of the original notion. Others led to the developments of so-called higher-type and ordinal recursion theories. For workers in other areas of logic, however, recursion theory was of interest more for its applications to their specialties. For instance, the notion of recursiveness is needed to state Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in its most general form, besides being a tool in the proof of even its simplest form. But indeed each of set theory, model theory, and recursion theory has uses in the other two. In retrospect, however, arguably the most important development in recursion theory during our period of interest lay on the borders with computer science. Turing’s well-known approach to characterizing effective calculability, in terms of the operations of his idealized machines, though it dates from before there were any real electronic digital computers, remains relevant to the theory of such technology. For unlike the rival approaches of Church, Kleene, and others, it provides not only a formal notion of calculability, but also a way of counting how many steps are needed in a given calculation, which is important since a procedure that makes it possible in principle to calculate a function may still leave it infeasible in practice, if the time demands are too great. Such issues are pursued in complexity theory, which makes distinctions among recursive functions based on how rapidly time requirements for producing an output rise as a function of the size of the input. Though foreshadowed in a long-neglected 1956 letter of Gödel to John von Neumann, complexity theory began in a serious way with work of Stephen Cook and others in the early 1970s, from which emerged the famous P versus NP problem. Of this problem there exist

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many semi-popular accounts, but a special interest attaches to Cook (2006), officially announcing a million-dollar prize for its solution, something not on offer for any other problem in or near logic. PROOF THEORY

A first-order sentence is valid if it is true in all interpretations. A proof-procedure is a method intended to be usable to demonstrate that a sentence is valid, generally by producing a derivation of the sentence from sentences known to be valid by rules known to preserve validity. The procedure is sound if every derivable sentence is indeed valid, and complete if every valid sentence has a derivation. There are many sound and complete proof procedures for first-order logic – but none for second-order, infinitary, generalized-quantifier, or other such logics. Proof theory in a narrow sense has been concerned with two special types of proof procedures, and centers around two theorems, Gerhard Gentzen’s cut‑elimination for sequent calculus and Dag Prawitz’s normalization for natural deduction, dating from the 1930s and 1960s, respectively. For the pre‑war philosophical history and background in the 1920s debates between David Hilbert and L. E. J. Brouwer, see van Plato 2014. Both central theorems show how, in general at the cost of great lengthening, “indirect” derivations can be replaced by more “direct” ones. Such technical results, with bells and whistles, have endless consequences, and can be used to establish how the scale of consistency strength, showing how power to derive more results is balanced against risk of collapsing in contradiction, which is marked in set theory by large cardinal axioms as benchmarks, can be developed for much weaker theories. These extend right down to so-called Robinson arithmetic Q, which cannot even prove that the function exp(n) = 2n is defined for all n (see Hajek and Pudlak 1993). The positions as to the scope and limits of legitimate mathematics that were advocated by dissidents opposing the rise of the now-established set-theoretic mathematics – the small critical schools called finitist, constructivist, intuitionist, predicativist, and so on – show up as points on this scale. As Simpson (1982) illustrates, when a mathematical theorem cannot be proved at one level on the scale but can be proved one level up, often adding it to the lower level lets one deduce the characteristic axiom that distinguishes the higher level. Friedman calls such proving axioms from theorems “reverse mathematics,” and it arguably has been the most active area of proof theory in a broad sense in recent decades. The view that the meaning of the logical particles should be conceived proof-theoretically rather than model-theoretically – that we should explain conjunction by saying that a conjunction is derivable from its two conjuncts and

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each conjunct is derivable from the conjunction, rather than by saying that a conjunction is true if and only if both its conjuncts are true – has a substantial following among philosophers. Dummett (1977) draws on such ideas to defend intuitionism. Feferman (1998) draws on other proof-theoretic notions and results to defend predicativism. But it is more common for proof theorists today to abstain from advocacy and merely lay out available trade-offs between power and risk – for instance, pinning down the exact strength of theories of truth in the spirit of Kripke (1975), or of consistent repairs of the system of Frege shown inconsistent by Russell’s paradox, as surveyed by Burgess (2005). N O N - C LA S S I C A L L O G I C

There are too many non-classical logics even to list the names of all of them here, but a handful stand out as objects of wide and deep study. Two date from the pre‑war years: (1) the modal logic of C. I. Lewis, which has ancient and medieval antecedents, but in its modern revival originated in the first decade of the twentieth century and assumed definite form in Lewis and Langford (1932); (2) the intuitionistic logic extracted for separate study from the intuitionistic mathematics of Brouwer by his disciple Arend Heyting in 1930. Lewis confined himself to sentential logic, where we consider compound sentences built up by ¬, ^, ∨, !, and operators of necessity and possibility from simple sentences p, q, r. Quantified modal logic was taken up only postwar and it remains a scene of controversy to this day, though indeed even in sentential form there is a proliferation of systems and no consensus as to which is the right one. Today modal logic is considered a paradigmatic extra‑classical logic, adding to classical logic the modal operators, to represent notions of interest in philosophy but not mathematics (where all facts are necessary). Lewis, however, seemed to see himself as opposing the logical mainstream since Bertrand Russell. Brouwer and Heyting were unequivocally dissidents, and they considered quantification from the outset: Theirs is the paradigmatic anti‑classical logic, and the laws of classical logic they reject included not only excluded middle p ∨ ¬p and double negation ¬¬p ! p, but also ¬8xFx ! 9x¬Fx. The post-war period saw the development of new non-classical logics, notably: (3) the extra-classical tense logic of Arthur Prior (in Prior 1967 and elsewhere), which adds, in place of necessity and possibility modalities, past and future tense operators; (4) counterfactual logic, an extension of modal logic to handle subjunctive conditionals (as in Lewis 1973); (5) the anti-classical relevance logic of Anderson and Belnap (1975), the eldest and best-known of the family of paraconsistent logics, which reject the classical law (p ^ ¬p) ! q. (There are rival paraconsistent logics, as in Restall 2000 and Priest 1979, that have garnered

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attention, but this is mainly a development of the present century.) There is a sharp difference between intuitionistic logic and other anti-classical logics: Intuitionists proving “metatheorems” about their logic use intuitionistic logic in their proofs; paraconsistent logicians use classical logic. This is inevitable since, in the words of Feferman, “nothing like sustained ordinary reasoning can be carried on” (1984: 95) in anti-classical logics other than the intuitionistic; but it raises an obvious issue about justification, discussed in the literature under the rubric “classical recapture.” Though it cannot be given much space here, mention must be made also of (6) quantum logic, going back to Birkhoff and von Neumann (1936), but standing rather apart. Some deep results on modal logics were obtained during the war years using algebraic methods (as in McKinsey 1941), but a revolution occurred with the introduction of relational models. Goldblatt (2006) examines the relevant history minutely, and identifies as the crucial contribution work of Saul Kripke dating from the late 1950s and published in the early 1960s. Kripke models variously adapted can handle not only modal but tense, counterfactual, relevance, and other logics. For instance, early in the history of modal and intuitionistic logic Gödel had announced a deep connection between them; Kripke model theory can be used to provide a proof, which Gödel did not. (Kripkean methods largely fail for quantum logic, one reason it stands apart.) Because (1)–(5) were introduced by philosophers, sympathetic coverage of them is conveniently available online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. At least as far back as Pnueli (1977), however, computer scientists began to take a major interest in such logics, and the center of gravity of non-classical logic today arguably lies in applications, and so outside the scope of this survey.

11 (RE)DISCOVERING GROUND m i c ha e l j. rav e n

Many venerable philosophical questions can be posed as questions of determination. Examples include: i ii iii iv v vi vii viii ix

Is art’s value determined by the context of creation or appreciation? Is power and authority determined by consent or coercion? Is one’s personhood determined by one’s psychology? Is gender or race determined by biology or social forces? Are arithmetical facts determined by set-theoretic facts? Are a thing’s dispositions determined by its categorical features? Does an action’s outcome determine whether it is right to do it? Are laws determined by the social context in which they prevail? Is a term’s meaning determined by its non-semantic features?

As different as these questions might be, they appear to have a similar form: They ask, in one way or another, whether some phenomenon determines another. Although this determination needn’t be causal in any usual sense, it is nevertheless usually taken to be or to back a kind of explanation: The determined phenomena hold in virtue of or because of the determining phenomena. Recently, there has been a rapid growth of literature on questions of determination. It has become increasingly clear that subtly different notions of determination are involved. Nevertheless, much of this literature operates under the working hypothesis that there is a distinctive kind of determination that is at issue in these questions and is itself a topic worthy of study on its own. “Ground” has emerged as the popular, quasi-technical term for this kind of determination. A question of ground asks in virtue of what some phenomenon obtains and is answered either by stating its grounds or that it has none. Much has recently been written about ground.1 Here the focus is on its history in the Western analytic philosophical tradition since 1945.2 Although 1 2

Surveys of the recent literature include: Bliss and Trogdon 2014; Clark and Liggins 2012; Correia and Schnieder 2012; Raven 2015; Trogdon 2013b. Although ground does not only appear in the Western analytic philosophical tradition, space requires omitting its appearances elsewhere.

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interest in ground has surged in the new millennium, it is unobvious how this came to be. For there are two apparently conflicting stories of ground’s rise to prominence. There is a tale of discovery. It begins in 2001 with the publication of Fine (2001), followed by Schaffer (2009) and Rosen (2010). This Trinity of papers inspired recent interest in ground, as witnessed by their rapid accumulation of citations. On this tale of discovery, we are newly recognizing ground as a topic worthy of study, not just for its involvement in the questions of determination but also for its own intrinsic interest. There is also a tale of rediscovery. It begins in media res in 1945. Questions of determination have been around since philosophy’s inception. Interest in them thrived with Plato and Aristotle. Much later, Bolzano’s (1837) sophisticated work on ground anticipated current interest in many ways.3 Although ground-like notions also appear in the work of Husserl (2001 [1900/1]), Russell (1918–19), and Wittgenstein (1922), interest in them waned under the logical positivists’ influence in the early twentieth century. Back then, a question of determination was often either dismissed as nonsense or else distorted into a “sanitized” question of logical, linguistic, or conceptual analysis. Questions of determination still suffered from these anti-metaphysical sentiments in 1945. But not long after, resistance to these anti-metaphysical sentiments grew with the pioneering work of David Armstrong, Kit Fine, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others. Increasing interest in modality, supervenience, and truthmaking helped provide a climate in which the venerable questions of determination could be considered again openly. On this tale of rediscovery, we are reacquainting ourselves with ground after past trends led us to ignore its involvement in the questions of determination that so interested us. The tales conflict: For how could ground be both discovered and rediscovered? Nevertheless, I will try to merge what each gets right into a coherent story of the (re)discovery of ground since 1945. This is aided by comparing the story of ground to the story of modality. Two key plot points of the modal story are disentangling various modal notions and separating questions of modality from questions about modality. Both plot points have direct analogues in the story of ground, as will emerge by considering the Trinity and its influence. I conclude by looking forward to what might lie in store for ground, given how it got to be where it is.

3

See Tatzel 2002 and the papers in Roski and Schnieder forthcoming.

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T H E MO D A L A N A L O GY

The story of ground is in certain ways analogous to the recent modal renaissance.4 Although I will rely on the analogy with modality as a framing device for the recent history of ground, many complicating factors prevent the analogy from being perfect. One complication is that both the past development of modality and the ongoing development of ground have messy histories. Telling their stories precisely would outrun the available space. Another complication is that whatever benefits hindsight provides for the modal story are not yet available for the developing story of ground. Complications like these make it hard to avoid telling a “just so” story entirely free from distortions.5 Nevertheless, the modal analogy helps highlight certain key “plot points” in the history of ground. Consider a potted history of the modal renaissance.6 Although modality has been with philosophy since the beginning, it enjoyed a recent growth spurt. In the first half of the twentieth century, philosophers became increasingly sensitive to their reliance on modal notions. This both inspired and was inspired by various logical explorations of modality by Lewis and Langford (1932), Barcan (1946), Carnap (1947), Prior (1957), Hintikka (1961), and others, ultimately culminating in Kripke’s (1963b) pioneering semantics for modal logic. But doubts about the coherence of modality (e.g. Quine 1980 [1953]) together with insensitivity to the differences between epistemic, semantic, and metaphysical modalities stunted fruitful applications to traditional philosophical problems. The growth spurt took off with Kripke’s (1972) influential disentanglement of various modalities and support of the coherence of a distinctively metaphysical (as opposed to epistemic or semantic) kind of modality. In sum, the twentieth century increased our modal sophistication (e.g. modal logic, Kripke semantics) while focusing interest in a distinctive topic (viz. metaphysical necessity as opposed to apriority or analyticity) with wide-ranging applications (e.g. reference, meaning, supervenience, counterfactuals, causation, the mind– body problem). The result was a climate interested not only in applications of modality to various philosophical problems, but also in modality itself as a topic worthy of study. The present state of ground increasingly resembles the past state of modality. Although determination has been with philosophy since the beginning, it is 4 5

6

Rosen (2010) also discusses this analogy. Wilson (2014) charges many with being in the grip of such a “just so” story. I suspect her charge partly relies on the apparent incoherence between the tales of discovery and rediscovery. If my attempt to merge them succeeds, it may serve as a reply to her charge. This potted history draws from Soames (2003b) and Burgess (2012), among others.

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beginning to enjoy a growth spurt. In the second half of the twentieth century, philosophers became increasingly sensitive to their reliance on determinative notions. But doubts about their coherence together with widespread insensitivity to the differences between them stunted fruitful applications to traditional philosophical problems. Fine (2001), Schaffer (2009), Rosen (2010), and others helped popularize the disentanglement of various determinative notions and supported the coherence of a distinctive kind of determination, ground (as opposed to supervenience or truthmaking).7 In sum, the twenty-first century is increasing our sophistication with determination – e.g. Fine’s (forthcoming) state space semantics for ground, Schaffer’s (2016) application of Pearl’s (2000) and Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines’s (2000) structural equation modeling to ground – while focusing interest in a distinctive topic (viz. ground as opposed to supervenience or truthmaking) with potential applications (e.g. questions i–ix, fundamentality, essence). The emerging result is a climate increasingly interested not only in applications of ground to various philosophical problems, but also in ground itself as a topic worthy of study. These potted histories share similar plot points. One is that just as the climate for modality transitioned from hostility to acceptance, so too the climate for ground is transitioning from hostility to acceptance. Another is that sophistication about modality inspired and was inspired by progress in modal logic and semantics, just as sophistication about ground is inspiring and is inspired by progress made in state space semantics and structural equation modeling. Two more plot points common to both potted histories are: first, the disentanglement of various notions and, second, the status/topic distinction. I will discuss each in turn, focusing on how they concern ground.

D I S E N T A N G L E M E NT

Just as the logical positivists were hostile toward any sort of apriority or necessity unreduced to analyticity, so too many metaphysicians were hostile toward any sort of determination unreduced to more respectable notions, such as supervenience or truthmaking.8 Much like how the pre-Kripkean entanglement of 7

8

Fine (2012a) later distinguished three kinds of ground (metaphysical, normative, natural) corresponding to his earlier distinction between three kinds of modality (2005). Few have followed Fine in his pluralism about ground (cf. Berker forthcoming). Oliver (1996: 48) writes: “We know we are in the realm of murky metaphysics by the presence of the weasel words ‘in virtue of’.” Curiously, this sentiment was common among metaphysicians but uncommon among normative theorists for much of the twentieth century (Berker forthcoming). (Perhaps this is explained by metaphysicians being more prone than normative theorists to reacting to anti-metaphysical misgivings than normative theorists.)

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apriority, analyticity, and necessity led to confusion, so too with the more recent entanglement of supervenience, truthmaking, and ground. Supervenience, roughly put, is necessary covariation.9 One of the many kinds of supervenience is this: A property supervenes on another property just in case there can be no difference in which things have the former without a difference in which things have the latter. Many hoped that supervenience would help express certain metaphysical theses (e.g. physicalism) while being “unencumbered by dubious denials of existence, claims of ontological priority, or claims of translatability” (Lewis 1999b: 29). But these metaphysical theses were thought to have an explanatory aspect too (e.g. the physical somehow explains the mental). Doubts emerged in the 1980s and 1990s about whether supervenience captured this explanatory aspect (Dancy 1981; DePaul 1987; Kim 1993). To illustrate, if each one of the mass, volume, and density of a body supervenes on the other two, that would not (non-circularly) explain the one in terms of the other two (Fine 2001: 11). These doubts culminated in Kim’s (1993: 167) now oft-quoted remark: Supervenience itself is not an explanatory relation. It is not a “deep” metaphysical relation; rather, it is a “surface” relation that reports a pattern of property covariation, suggesting the presence of an interesting dependency relation that might explain it.

This view is present in the Trinity, and has become a familiar presupposition of much of the literature on ground.10 Truthmaking, roughly put, is the relation between a true representation and those things the existence of which makes that representation true. Mulligan, Simons, and Smith (1984) and Armstrong (1997) were among the earliest and most influential proponents of truthmaking. The subsequent literature reveals truthmaking’s affinities with ground, especially its explanatory focus: to give an ontological account of a representation’s truth by citing those entities the existence of which necessitate the representation’s truth. Truthmaking thus involves a modal link (necessitation) between two relata, one semantic (a true representation) and the other ontic (existents of some sort, often facts or states of affairs). But it has been argued that the general explanatory considerations ground is meant to serve needn’t primarily concern the truth of representations or a merely modal link between them and their truthmakers (Fine 2001; Schnieder 2006a; Horwich 2008). From this perspective, conformity to the truthmaking model distorts the otherwise salutary focus on explanation.11 9 10 11

McLaughlin and Bennett (2011) give a detailed discussion of supervenience. Berker (forthcoming: §2) discusses the entangled history of supervenience and ground. Fine (2012a: §1.3) vigorously argues against taking truthmaking to be ground.

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Nowadays, philosophers are increasingly appreciating the differences between supervenience, truthmaking, and ground. It is increasingly taken to be an important lesson that ground resists assimilation to supervenience or truthmaking. This in turn has opened the door to treating ground itself as a topic worthy of study.

STATUS AND TOPIC

Generally, there are at least two ways in which a notion might be involved in a question: The question might be of that notion or it might be about it. Here’s an illustration. The question “Does smoking cause cancer?” is a question of causation because it directly asks for a cause; but it is not a question about causation because it does not directly ask anything about causation itself. The question “Is causation transitive?” is a question about causation because it directly asks about causation itself, but it is not a question of causation because it does not directly ask for any causes. The first question concerns causation as to status (it is a question of causation) but not as to topic (it is not about causation), whereas the second question concerns causation as to topic (it is about causation) but not as to status (it is not a question of causation).12 We may recognize the status/topic distinction for determination as well. The questions of determination listed in i–ix concern a wide range of topics: aesthetic value, power, personhood, gender, race, mathematics, dispositions, moral rightness, law, and meaning. But none of these questions is directly about determination itself. Thus, while these questions may have the status of being questions of determination, none have determination as their topic. In contrast, questions about whether determination is explanatory or transitive or necessary don’t have the status of being questions of determination, but rather have determination as their topic. It is not always neat in practice to distinguish between status and topic. Some questions appear to be both (e.g. questions of iterated modalities, such as “Are necessities necessary?” concern modality as to topic and as to status). What’s more, reading the distinction into many philosophical works risks anachronism or distortion. But attending to connections between them can also be illuminating. For example, logical positivists wished to assimilate apriority and necessity to analyticity. Their insensitivity to modalities resisting assimilation hindered their recognition of metaphysical modality as an intelligible topic of interest. This then transferred to a skepticism of questions concerning metaphysical modality 12

This terminology is repurposed from Fine (2007: 43).

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as to status. Similarly, insensitivity to determinative notions resisting assimilation to supervenience or truthmaking hampers recognition of ground as an intelligible topic of interest. This then transfers to a skepticism of questions concerning ground as to status. The status/topic distinction helps alleviate the tension between tales of discovery and rediscovery: Although questions of ground as to status have been around as long as philosophy itself, questions of ground are more prominent now than before. This will emerge by considering how the Trinity helped generate recent interest in questions of ground as to status. THE TRINITY

The modal analogy reveals two plot points: disentanglement and the status/ topic distinction. These emerge most clearly in the Trinity of papers: Fine 2001, Schaffer 2009, and Rosen 2010. In focusing on the Trinity, I do not wish to give the impression that others were not also working on ground (or ground-like) notions. Indeed, there are both precursors and parallel notions. Consider the following examples of precursors. First, as Berker (forthcoming) argues, many central questions of normativity (e.g. vii) are plausibly questions of ground as to status. According to Berker, ground-like notions are detectable in Sidgwick (1907), Moore (1993a [1903]), Ross (1930) and, ironically, maybe even in Hare’s (1952) introduction of the term “supervenience.” And Dancy’s (1981) and DePaul’s (1987) criticisms of supervenience formulations of various normative theses are plausibly taken as objecting that these formulations do not adequately express connections of ground. Second, while interest in supervenience peaked in the 1980s, many pointed out that supervenience theses cried out for explanation (cf. Schiffer 1987, Horgan 1993, Wilson 1999, and McLaughlin and Bennett’s [2011] survey of these and related issues). Especially in retrospect, this demand for explanation may, in the spirit of Kim’s (1993: 167), quote above, be understood as a demand for a ground-like connection which accounts for why supervenience holds when it does. Third, Lowe (1998) proposed an explanatory notion of dependence similar to ground but soon abandoned it for being inadequately perspicuous. Lowe’s proposal generated further development by others, including Correia (2005) and Schnieder (2006b). Fourth, there is an extensive literature on the notion of truthmaking recently popularized by Mulligan, Simons, and Smith (1984), Armstrong (1997), and

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others. Truthmaking’s affinity with ground is suggested by the prevalence of glosses like Rodriguez-Pereyra’s (2002: 33): “Truth depends on being in that it is grounded on being – being is the ground of truth.” Nevertheless, Schnieder (2006a), Horwich (2008), Fine (2012a), and others have argued that truthmaking and ground are importantly distinct. In addition to these precursors, notions like ground have evolved in parallel. An especially influential parallel is Sider’s (2011) notion of structure, which extends Lewis’s (1999b) notion of naturalness from predicates to any linguistic category. On Sider’s approach, reality has an objective structure that we strive to discern by identifying the structural linguistic categories. In a striking parallel to ground, whereas Sider’s early interests focused on questions of structure as to status (e.g. Sider’s [2001] focus on reality’s temporal structure), they have since increasingly focused on questions of structure as to topic (e.g. Sider 2011). Sider and the Trinity are alike in their conviction that metaphysics requires tools like ground or structure. But it is becoming increasingly clear that these tools differ enough to deserve separate treatment (Fine 2013; Sider 2011; 2013). Despite these precursors and parallels, my focus remains on the Trinity. This might risk distorting ground’s history by excluding the precursors and parallels. But their significance needn’t be diminished by focusing on the Trinity. Most of the current interest in ground can be fairly directly traced back to the influence of the Trinity. Precursors and the Trinity alike shared an interest in questions of ground as to status and, to a lesser degree, as to topic. But one of the Trinity’s distinctive contributions was their emphasis on questions of ground as to topic, especially as they bore upon questions of ground as to status. KIT FINE

Fine’s (2001) project was to clarify what it is to be a realist about some domain. This question of realism is notoriously obscure and, as Fine argued, resists characterization in terms of supervenience, truthmaking, reduction, logical analysis, and other notions. Fine helped himself to ground (a bold move back then), and proposed using it to provide a recipe for settling questions of whether some domain is factual or nonfactual. Fine went on to argue that the question of realism connects to the question of factuality: For a proposition is factual just in case it is real or is grounded in what is real. In this way, considerations of ground play a critical role in the question of realism. Fine’s paper introduced the current quasi-technical use of the term “ground” to the literature. By connecting considerations of ground to questions of realism, these questions were revealed to turn on questions of ground as to status. And because responsibly engaging with considerations of ground requires

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better appreciating its distinctive features, these questions also motivated interest in questions of ground as to topic. Thus, in retrospect, Fine’s paper contained the seeds of what have grown into active areas of research, including:13 The expression of ground claims. Fine (2001: 16) proposes expressing statements of ground by means of a sentential operator “because” to avoid engaging with whether ground is a relation. This was an early difference between Fine and the rest of the Trinity: Both Schaffer (2009) and Rosen (2010) alike conceive of ground as a relation, with Rosen requiring that it relates facts whereas Schaffer imposes no restriction whatsoever on what the relata might be. Nowadays it is debated whether ground is a relation and whether it is best expressed by means of a relational predicate. The distinction between factive versus nonfactive ground. Fine (2001: 15) distinguishes between a factive notion of ground which requires that grounds and grounded alike obtain and a nonfactive notion which does not. There has been some debate over whether the nonfactive notion makes sense and, if so, whether it or the factive notion is primary. The distinction between full vs. partial ground. Just as determination can be partial or full, so too Fine (2001: 15) distinguishes between grounds which fully ground some fact and those which only partially (or help) ground some fact. For example, P together with Q fully ground their conjunction P ^ Q, while P alone only partially grounds it. Ground and explanation. Fine (2001: 15–16) conceives of ground as an explanatory connection. This has become controversial. Some follow Fine in unifying ground and explanation: Ground is (a kind of ) explanation. Others separate them: Ground backs explanation.14 Ground and necessity. Fine (2001: 22) characterizes ground as accounting for the presence of a necessary connection between the grounds and what they ground. This has also become controversial, with most following Fine in taking ground to be necessary (Trogdon 2013a) while others take ground to be contingent (Leuenberger 2014; Skiles 2015). Ground and logic. Fine (2001: 15, 19) hints at how ground and logic interact: True disjunctions are grounded in their true disjuncts taken singly or jointly, whereas true conjunctions are grounded in their true conjuncts taken jointly. Rosen (2010) expands on these hints, and Correia (2010; 2014) and Schnieder (2011) develop them further. Fine (2010) and Krämer (2013) raise puzzles for the

13 14

See Raven 2015 for brief surveys of each of these issues as well as further references. Raven (2015) surveys this dispute between “unionists” (Rosen 2010; Raven 2012; Litland 2013; Dasgupta 2014a) and “separatists” (Audi 2012b; Correia and Schnieder 2012; Koslicki 2012; Trogdon 2013b; Schaffer 2016).

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interaction of ground and logic. This interaction is now regarded as part of the impure logic of ground: impure for its concern with the features (e.g. logical form) of what grounds or is grounded. This contrasts with the pure logic of ground: pure for its concern with the structural principles governing ground regardless of the features of what grounds or is grounded. The pure logic has been developed by Fine (2012b) and others. JONATHAN SCHAFFER

Metametaphysical questions about metaphysics were especially prominent during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Perhaps because of Quine’s, Lewis’s, and others’ influential preoccupation with ontology, these metametaphysical questions focused on the nature, status, and legitimacy of ontological questions, as if metaphysics concerned little else. Indeed, Raven (2010) and Wilson (2010) pointed out that nearly all of the essays in Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman’s (2009) influential anthology on metametaphysics (revealingly subtitled New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology) were concerned with metaontology in one way or another. At least at the time, “Metaontology [was] the new black,” as Cameron (2008: 1) memorably declared. Schaffer’s (2009) aim was to argue against the Quinean view that metaphysics is primarily about what there is and to replace it with the neo-Aristotelian view that metaphysics is primarily about what grounds what. Schaffer argued that many ontological questions (“Are there numbers?”) are trivially answered (“Yes of course; for instance, there is a number between 3 and 5!”). Carnap (1956) and his followers regarded these answers as trivial, and took them to reveal the triviality of metaphysics (when it wasn’t nonsense). But Schaffer claimed that the trivialization of metaphysics follows only if ontology exhausts metaphysics. He argued that it did not. Non-ontological questions about what grounds what are not merely part of metaphysics but rather are at its core. Part of Schaffer’s project was to argue that many central metaphysical questions are best understood not as ontological questions, but rather as questions of ground. These questions are of ground as to status, and clarifying them thus involves answering questions of ground as to topic. Schaffer explored how ground could be used to define various important metaphysical notions, such as fundamentality, existent, integrated whole, and interdependence. Additionally, Schaffer argued for various features of ground itself. In particular, Schaffer conceived of ground as a relation with no restriction on what kinds of entities it may hold between. An especially influential part of Schaffer’s conception of ground is how it is supposed to induce the great chain of being: an irreflexive, transitive, and

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asymmetric ordering of entities terminating “with foundations (the substances, the foundation post for the great chain of being)” (Schaffer 2009: 376). Both the features of the ordering as well as its termination have emerged as controversial, with some challenging ground’s being a partial order, including Schaffer (2012a) himself, and others challenging whether ground terminates with foundations.15

GIDEON ROSEN

Rosen’s (2010) paper is a “plea for ideological toleration.” Questions of metaphysical determination or dependence – ground – occur throughout philosophy (Rosen explicitly cites examples v–ix above). But Rosen recognized that, at least at the time, many philosophers worried that ground was unintelligibly confused or incoherent (cf. Hofweber 2009).16 Their squeamishness about ground led them to the “skeptical” choice of recasting questions apparently of ground into questions of some other sort, or else to disregard them entirely. Rosen (2010: 114) describes his own strategy for responding to this kind of skepticism: The plan is to begin to lay out the principles that govern this relation and its interaction with other important philosophical notions. If the notion is confused or incoherent, we should get some inkling of this as we proceed. On the other hand, if all goes smoothly, we will have neutralized the main grounds for resistance, in which case there can be no principled objection to admitting the notion as intelligible, to be used in raising and answering philosophical questions insofar as this proves fruitful.

Thus, skepticism about questions of ground as to status are to be addressed by refocusing on questions of ground as to topic. Unlike Fine (2001) but like Schaffer (2009), Rosen conceives of ground as a relation. But whereas Schaffer imposes no restriction whatsoever on what the relata might be, Rosen (2010: 114) requires that the relata be facts: “structured entities built up from worldly items – objects, relations, connectives, quantifiers, etc. – in roughly the sense in which sentences are built up from words.” This has emerged as controversial. There is a general controversy over how fine or coarse grained statements of ground are: Some, such as Fine (2012a) and Rosen, take a 15

16

Additionally, Jenkins (2011) and Correia (2014) challenge irreflexivity; Tahko (2013) challenges transitivity; Bliss (2014) and Barnes (forthcoming) challenge asymmetry; and Rodriguez-Pereyra (2015) challenges all three. Litland (2013) and Javier-Castellanos (2014) defend transitivity; and Raven (2013) defends all three. Although well-foundedness seems widely assumed, it is left open by Rosen (2010) and Raven (2016) and challenged by Bliss (2013) and Tahko (2014). Audi (2012a), Fine (2012a), and Raven (2012) respond to these skeptical challenges.

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fine-grained view whereas others, such as Correia (2010) and Audi (2012a; 2012b), take a coarse-grained view.17 Taking ground to be a relation between facts converts this general controversy into a controversy over how fine or coarse grained the facts of ground are. An especially influential part of Rosen’s paper is its exploration of ground’s relation to essence.18 In particular, Rosen (2010: §13) conjectures that when a connection of ground obtains, the fact that it does will itself be grounded in a certain fact about the essences of the constituents of the grounded fact. Here Rosen is suggesting an answer to the metaquestion of what (if anything) grounds the facts about what grounds what. The metaquestion has emerged as an important and thorny question in the recent literature.19 LOOKING FORWARD

Ground is currently enjoying a surge of popularity. Many questions of determination are now regarded as questions of ground as to status. And questions of ground as to topic are being vigorously explored. One might wonder whether this interest should be sustained. Even those who do not doubt the legitimacy of questions of determination might nevertheless doubt whether they are really questions of ground as to status.20 These doubts might then extend to doubts over whether questions of ground as to topic deserve the hype they’ve received. But let us recall the modal analogy. Dramatic progress clarifying modality and its applications helped secure it a prominent place within contemporary philosophy. Similar progress on questions of ground as to status and as to topic will likely be needed to move beyond the hype and secure ground a similar place of prominence. I conclude with a brief, incomplete list of some open questions concerning ground that I expect to guide future research: 1 How does ground relate to other core metaphysical notions, such as essence and cause? 2 Is ground a kind of explanation, or does ground merely back explanation? 3 What are the pure and impure logics of ground? 17 18 19 20

The issue of granularity is (somewhat misleadingly) characterized as about “worldly” vs. “conceptualist” approaches (Correia and Schnieder 2012: §3.3). Correia (2013), Dasgupta (2014b), Fine (2015), Rosen (2015), and Trogdon (2013a) discuss how ground and essence relate. Bennett (2011), Dasgupta (2014b), deRosset (2013), Litland (2017), Raven (2009), and Sider (2011) discuss the metaquestion. Wilson (2014) and Koslicki (2015) express these doubts. Raven (forthcoming) replies.

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4 What, if anything, grounds the facts about what grounds what? 5 How might answers to questions of ground as to topic affect answers to ground as to status?21

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Thanks to Selim Berker, Dana Goswick, Paul Hovda, David Mark Kovacs, Colin Marshall, Kristie Miller, Patrick Rysiew, Jonathan Schaffer, Jonathan Simon, and Alex Skiles for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.

12 LEWIS’S THEORIES OF CAUSATION AND THEIR INFLUENCE sara b e r n s t e i n

David Lewis’s metaphysics of causation set the stage for many contemporary approaches to the topic and laid the groundwork for debates on related dependent philosophical concepts, including interventionist theories of causation, causal modeling, grounding, and the role of laws in metaphysics. This chapter will give an overview of Lewis’s work on causation, and trace the influence of his approach through recent developments in the metaphysics of causation. First I will give a summary of Lewis’s views on causation, as well as various well-known challenges they faced. Next I will summarize the attempts to respond to these problems that dominated the causation literature for many years after his early work. Then I will give an overview of the myriad and widespread topics that share an ancestor in Lewis’s theories of causation. Finally, I will examine the influence of his approach on present-day “hot topics” in metaphysics. LEWIS ON CAUSATION

The linchpin of Lewis’s views on causation is the counterfactual. Counterfactuals (roughly, statements of the form “If c hadn’t occurred, e wouldn’t have occurred”) are intrinsically interesting for Lewis, but also unite several strands of his system: his possible worlds semantics (which postulates a similarity metric across possible worlds), his modal realism (which postulates infinite, real world-sized possibilities), and his views on causation, which will be the focus of our discussion. His unified system and his view of counterfactuals specifically set the stage for the next half-century of metaphysics. “Causation” (1973) is the seminal statement of Lewis’s views on causation. In that piece, he argues that causation is the ancestral of the relationship of counterfactual dependence: c is a cause of e if it is the case that for two actual events c and e, had c not occurred, e would not have occurred. For example, suppose that Billy throws a rock at a window, causing it to shatter. The counterfactual “If Billy had not thrown the rock through the window, the 160

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window would not have shattered” is true. (We are not to admit backtracking readings of counterfactuals, such as “If Billy had not thrown the rock, it would have been because his friend threw one first . . . in which case the window would still have shattered.”) For Lewis, evaluating counterfactuals requires appealing to possible worlds, as distilled in the following rule: “If A were the case, C would be the case” is true in the actual world if and only if (i) there are no possible A-worlds; or (ii) some A-world where C holds is closer to the actual world than is any A-world where C does not hold.1

Closeness of worlds is to be judged in terms of comparative overall similarity to the actual world based on similarities between those worlds and the actual one. Additionally, so that causation is transitive, causation is the ancestral of counterfactual dependence: There is a string of counterfactual dependencies between c and e. Lewis’s (1973) view, however, faced obvious counterexamples in different kinds of redundant causation, or cases in which there are multiple sufficient causes to bring about an outcome. Suppose that, along with Billy, Suzy threw her rock at the window at almost the same time. Then the counterfactual “If Billy had not thrown his rock, the window would not have shattered” is false, as well as the counterfactual “If Suzy had not thrown her rock, the window would not have shattered.” For either is false in virtue of the fact that the other person’s rock would have shattered the window. On the simple counterfactual account, the shattering of the window is left entirely without causes: an unacceptable result. There are multiple sorts of redundant causation, and each impacts the simple counterfactual theory in a slightly different way. There is a case of early preemption when there are multiple would-be causes for an outcome, but one cause preempts the other would-be causal process from running to completion. To use a canonical example: Billy and Suzy are each poised to throw their rocks at a window. Suzy throws her rock at the window artfully. Billy, who was poised to throw his, becomes demoralized and puts his rock down. In this sort of case, had one cause not brought about the effect, the other cause would have, even though the actual process of the would-be cause never ran to completion. Taking causation as the ancestral of counterfactual dependence, as Lewis does, solves the problem with early preemption, for there is a chain of counterfactual dependencies running from Suzy’s rock to the window’s shattering, but not from Billy’s rock to the window’s shattering. The simple counterfactual account can handle this and similar cases of early preemption. 1

This formulation of the rule is drawn from Menzies (2014).

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It does not fare so well, however, in cases of late preemption and overdetermination. There is a case of late preemption where, roughly, there are multiple causes sufficient to bring about an outcome, and both causal processes run to completion. In many cases of late preemption, the preemption cause preempts the would-be cause by bringing about the effect first. For example, suppose that Billy and Suzy each threw rocks at the window. Suzy’s rock strikes the window and breaks it, and Billy’s rock flies through the space where the window used to be. Here, there are separate chains of counterfactual dependencies running both from Suzy’s rock and from Billy’s rock. Similarly with cases of overdetermination, in which there are multiple causes sufficient to bring about an outcome in the way it occurs. Suppose, for example, that Billy and Suzy each throw their rocks at the window and both rocks hit the window at the same time. Either rock alone could have shattered the window in roughly the way it occurred. Each causal process is a counterfactual dependence-breaking backup for the other, and on the simple counterfactual account they are not to be causally distinguished. RESPONSES TO THE COUNTEREXAMPLES

The period after these well-known counterexamples was concerned with emending the counterfactual account of causation in order to best shore up the theory. Yablo’s (2002) attempt came in the form of the de facto dependence theory of causation, which holds that e de facto depends on c if had c not occurred, and had other factors been held fixed, then e would not have occurred. De facto dependence is a theory built to handle preemption cases, since holding fixed facts like whether or not Billy threw his rock in addition to Suzy yields the right result about counterfactual causation. The “holding certain things fixed” strategy laid the groundwork for the causal modeling approach, which sought to formalize such relationships. I discuss this approach further below. Lewis’s own (2000) attempt at shoring up the counterfactual theory proposed a promising set of bells and whistles on the original theory. As opposed to the “whether–whether” dependence of the simple counterfactual approach (that is, whether e occurs depends on whether c occurs), Lewis proposes “whether– when–how” dependence of e on c: Whether, when, and how e occurs depends on whether, when, and how c occurs. More formally, causation is a matter of counterfactual covariation between modally fragile alterations on an actual event e and an actual event c. For example: Suppose that Billy throws his rock in a particular way. Call that actual event c. Now suppose that the window shatters in a particular way because of the rock throw. Call that actual event e. A modally fragile alteration on c is just a slight variation of the way c occurs: for

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example, Billy throwing the rock slightly earlier. A modally fragile alteration on e is just a slight variation of the way e occurs, for example, the window shattering slightly earlier. To check for causation, we check to see if there is a pattern of counterfactual covariation between these modally fragile alterations. For example, is it the case that if Billy had thrown his rock slightly differently, the window would have shattered slightly differently? Lewis intended this more complicated account to handle cases of redundant causation in the following way: An event that influences an effect (in his technical sense of “influence”) is considered more of a cause of an outcome than events with less influence. Consider the bugaboo of the 1973 counterfactual account, a case of late preemption: Suzy throws her rock at the window, shattering it, and Billy’s rock, thrown only slightly later, flies through the space where the window used to be. Altering Suzy’s rock-throw – changing when and how it occurs – will change when and how the window shatters more than altering Billy’s rock. Suzy’s rock, the preempting cause, thus exhibits more influence than Billy’s rock, the preempted cause. These results had several interesting outcroppings. First, Lewisian influence causation is arguably a matter of degree rather than “on or off”: One event can cause something to a greater degree than another. Second, even “trace” causes (for example, a dog wagging his tail near the shattering of the window) exhibit slight influence over outcomes, since altering how trace events occur slightly alters the way outcomes occur. Finally, the influence account is arguably better able to handle cases of trumping preemption, cases in which there are multiple sufficient causes for an outcome, and one “trumps” the other according to a preexisting rule or law with no discernible difference in causal process. In Schaffer’s famous (2000a: 165) example: Imagine that it is a law of magic that the first spell cast on a given day match the enchantment at midnight. Suppose that at noon Merlin casts a spell (the first that day) to turn the prince into a frog, that at 6:00 PM Morgana casts a spell (the only other that day) to turn the prince into a frog, and that at midnight the prince becomes a frog. Clearly, Merlin’s spell (the first that day) is a cause of the prince’s becoming a frog and Morgana’s is not, because the laws say that the first spells are the consequential ones.

According to Schaffer, this is not a case of late preemption because both causal processes “run to completion,” and it is not a case of overdetermination because only one process, Merlin’s spell, is the cause of the enchantment.2 Lewis holds

2

There is some controversy over whether trumping should be viewed as a kind of preemption or a kind of overdetermination: see e.g. Bernstein 2015 and Hitchcock 2011.

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that the influence account can handle Schaffer’s canonical case of trumping preemption: The transmogrification is more sensitive to variations in Merlin’s spell than in Morgana’s. However, it has been pointed out (Strevens 2003; Collins 2007) that similar cases of trumping preemption can be constructed which include effects that are insensitive to variations on the putative cause. It remains a matter of some controversy how well Lewis’s later account handles such cases. 20 0 0 - P R E S E N T : T H E C A U S A L M O D E L I N G E R A

In the early 2000s, attention began to shift from the Lewisian armchair methodology to approaches that sought to precisify counterfactual relationships within formal structural equations models. Central figures of the causal modeling movement include Pearl (2000), Hitchcock (2001), and later Schaffer (2016). Generally, causal models have the following key ingredients: variables which represent the occurrence, non-occurrence, or nature of token events, values assigned to those variables, and structural equations which represent the causal relations among those elements. A causal model is often represented in an ordered triple , where U represents values of the variables not in the causal model (exogenous variables), V represents the variables within the causal model (endogenous variables), and E represents one or more structural equations modeling the causal relationships. Causal models are best understood by example. Consider the late preemption case in which Suzy’s rock preempts Billy’s rock. That scenario can be represented in the following model (modified from Menzies 2004a): Suzy Throws (ST) = 1 if Suzy throws a rock, 0 if not. Billy Throws (BT) = 1 if Billy throws a rock, 0 if not. Suzy Hits (SH) = 1 if Suzy’s rock hits the intact bottle, 0 if not. Billy Hits (BH) = 1 if Billy’s rock hits the intact bottle, 0 if not. Bottle Shatters (BS) = 1 if the bottle shatters, 0 if not.

Here, the exogenous variables are ST and BT: They are not “within the control” of the causal modeler or within the causal model itself. The endogenous variables are determined by the causal modeler. There is a structural equation for each endogenous variable. The structural equation often models counterfactual dependence or independence. Drawing again on Menzies’s setup, the causal relationships in the above model can be represented in the following way: Suzy Hits = Suzy Throws Billy Hits = Billy Throws & ~Suzy Hits Bottle Shatters = Suzy Hits ∨ Billy Hits

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Causal models thus encode and formalize specific token counterfactual relationships between elements in these models. Lewisian counterfactuals are clear forerunners of causal models. The function of the latter is primarily to model subtleties of counterfactual relationships between causes and effects without Lewis’s modal realism or semantic framework. One specific respect in which Lewis set the stage for contemporary projects was his focus on demarcating actual causation rather than, for example, merely possible causes or mere probabilities. Roughly, actual causation is the causal relationship between two actual events c and e. The goal of focusing on actual causation is, in Weslake’s words, to “[eliminate] all of the non-causes of an effect that can be discerned at the level of counterfactual structure” (forthcoming: 1). The project of determining actual causation seeks to separate mere would-be causes, like preempted rock-throws, from actual causes. As Lewis showed, this project is harder than it looks when appealing to counterfactual structure alone. Despite the considerable recent enthusiasm about the modeling method, some (most notably Briggs 2012) remain skeptical of the usefulness of causal models. If causal models are just Lewisian counterfactuals formalized, their extra value must stem simply from their formalization and specificity. It remains an open question whether this methodology will yield results more impressive than careful applications of the Lewisian approach. There is an independent methodological question about whether the Lewisian approach and the causal modeling approach are attempting the same philosophical project, and whether they aspire to the same desiderata. One line takes the causal modeling approach to be more akin to causal explanation than causation itself. Others such as Hitchcock (2007) propose several distinct concepts of causation, with causal models tracking one concept and Lewisian counterfactuals tracking another concept more in line with folk intuitions. Some causal modelers, however, purposely collapse this line so that the two projects are viewed to be one and the same. TOPICS WITH ANCESTORS IN THE LEWISIAN APPROACH

Besides giving rise to the research program of responding to and shoring up the counterfactual theory, Lewis’s approach to causation gave rise to many other important related topics. The past decades have generated a profusion of philosophical and empirical work alike on the supposed context sensitivity of counterfactuals. Lewis’s own work generally doesn’t address this feature. In On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), he notes that each event has an objective group of causes. Even his later

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influence account, within which there is room for context-sensitivity, largely focuses on objectively discernible relationships of counterfactual covariation. In contrast to Lewis’s extreme realist approach, much work since homes in on contextual and pragmatic features that affect and even determine the truth conditions for counterfactuals. Schaffer (2005) argues for the contrastivity of causal claims: c rather than c* causes e rather than e*, where c and e are actual events and c* and e* are unactualized, contextually specified contrasts. To use Schaffer’s own example to illustrate: Jane’s moderate smoking rather than abstaining causes her lung cancer, but Jane’s moderate smoking rather than heavy smoking does not. For Schaffer, causation is a quaternary rather than a binary relation, holding between actual events and their contrasts. Not including the contrastive events results in a failure to see the full causal picture. Menzies (2004b) similarly argued that difference-making required contextsensitivity in order to be fully true and informative. There is now an associated body of work concerned with empirical tests of the context-sensitivity of counterfactuals. A volume from Hoerl, McCormick, and Beck (2012) includes numerous empirical studies of everyday reactions to counterfactuals. Livengood and Rose (2016) suggest that the folk do not see counterfactual dependence as necessary for causation. Such studies are important when intertwining actual linguistic practice with contextual truth conditions for counterfactuals. The recent explosion of research on the pragmatics of counterfactuals is an outcropping of Lewis’s semantic system that undergirds his analysis of causal counterfactuals. Von Fintel (1997) and Gillies (2007) use special sequences of counterfactuals, reverse Sobel sequences, to argue against the standard Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals. The canonical example of a reverse Sobel sequence is the following: (1a) If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance. (1b) But of course, if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she wouldn’t have seen Pedro dance.

This series seems true. But read in the reverse order – (1b) to (1a) – the sequence seems false. Order seems to make a difference to the consistency of certain groups of counterfactuals. Moss (2012) defends Lewisian semantics against reverse Sobel sequences by appealing to pragmatics. More recently, Karen Lewis (2016) has recently argued that both approaches are untenable. While Lewis famously denied backtracking readings of counterfactuals such as “If Joanna hadn’t woken up, it would have been because her alarm hadn’t sounded” – there has been some recent interest in defenses of such readings. Khoo (2017) argues that “counterfactuals quantify over a suitably restricted

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set of historical possibilities from some contextually relevant past time,” licensing backtracking readings of counterfactuals. Joyce (2010) endorses backtracking in causal reasoning. Penelope Mackie (2014) suggests that backtracking readings of counterfactuals are sometimes as natural as nonbacktracking readings. A closely associated literature questions Lewis’s commitment to temporal asymmetry, the fixity of the passed coupled with openness of the future. In “Counterfactual dependence and time’s arrow,” Lewis (1979b) suggests that the direction of causal dependence matches the direction of temporal flow: Effects depend on their causes because the present and future depend on the past. (He does accept the conceptual possibility of time-reversed causation, but does not focus on it.) This thesis of the asymmetry of overdetermination, which holds that earlier events are massively overdetermined by later events but not vice versa, is partly responsible for the huge literature on whether time is symmetric or asymmetric, and whether the arrow of causation must match the arrow of time. Albert (2000) picks up the gauntlet and argues for the time-asymmetry of counterfactual dependence, while Price (1992) famously argues against temporal asymmetry more generally. A current surge of interest in the metaphysics and causal profile of omissions – events that don’t occur – has roots in Lewis’s (2004) “Void and object.” There he argues that causation isn’t actually a relation, since a relation requires relata, and omissions are nothing at all. There is a cluster of currently live issues surrounding causation by omission, including what omissions are, whether and how omissions cause, and which omissions cause things if any of them do. Lewis’s claim that omissions are nothing at all has been challenged by philosophers thinking variously that omissions reduce to positive events described negatively (Schaffer 2000b; 2004; 2012a), negative properties, and even possibilities (Bernstein 2014). Questions about whether or not omissions count as real causes have been batted around vigorously. Dowe (2001) defends causation by omission as “quasi-causation”: something very much like causation, but not exactly worthy of the full causal honorific. Dowe proposes what he calls the “intuition of difference,” the idea that omissions and negative events seem fundamentally causally different from their positive event counterparts. Schaffer (2000b; 2004) argues forcefully against this intuition of difference, suggesting that omissive causes are ubiquitous and non-mysterious, and can be normal causes, effects, and intermediaries. Finally, a debate traceable to the Lewisian approach but begun in earnest by Menzies (2004b) calls attention to the problem of profligate omissions: Given the counterfactual theory of causation, if any omissions count as causes, then all of them do. For example, the counterfactual “If I hadn’t failed to water my plant, the plant wouldn’t have died” is true, but

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the counterfactual “If the Queen of England hadn’t failed to water my plant, the plant wouldn’t have died” is also true. Options for handling this problem include giving up the counterfactual account, using contextual or pragmatic elements to distinguish between salient omissions and non-salient ones, or including norms in the causal relation. This latter surprising outcropping of the omissions literature – the idea that causation is normative, or at least has normative dimensions – has gained force in recent years on both philosophical and empirical grounds. Thompson (2003) and McGrath (2005) argue that causation is irreducibly normative: Whether c is a cause of e depends partly on norms and expectations governing whether c should have happened. Causal modelers have gotten in on the act, holding that norms can help us distinguish between default and deviant variables in formal models of causal relations. And recent empirical work by Henne, Pinillos, and De Brigard (2017) and Alicke, Rose, and Bloom (2011) suggests that the folk concept of causation is heavily intertwined with normative concepts. Finally, a current strain of counterfactual skepticism presses worries about the very possibility of truth conditions for counterfactuals. “If I hadn’t dropped the fragile vase, it would not have shattered” seems straightforwardly true. But there is an extremely small probability that the vase could have naturally reconstituted itself post-dropping. Such examples motivate DeRose’s (1999) and Hajek’s (MS) worry that counterfactuals can never be true. Karen Lewis (2016) argues that contextual semantics can avoid counterfactual skepticism. But metaphysicians and epistemologists alike remain concerned about the problem. TOPICAL DESCENDANTS OF LEWIS’S PROJECT

I now turn to Lewis’s influence on present-day hot topics in metaphysics more generally. The advent and popularity of work on grounding, roughly the dependence relationship between things that are made up and the thing or things that make those things up (see Raven, this volume), has clear ancestry in the Lewisian approach to causation, causal modeling, and counterfactual dependence. Schaffer (himself a Lewis acolyte) calls grounding “something like metaphysical causation. Just as causation links the world across time, grounding links the world across levels” (2016: 122). Some, like Bennett (2017), take grounding to be akin to causation, or even causation itself. At first, grounding and Lewisian causation might seem to be unlikely bedfellows. But putative similarities between them have been set out as a way to flesh out the concept of grounding and make it less mysterious. Like counterfactual dependence, grounding is irreflexive, asymmetric, and intransitive. Some have postulated that the temporal symmetry of one event causing another is a kind of

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metaphysical priority. Others have taken up the project of giving formal models of the grounding relation akin to formal models of causal relationships. Schaffer holds that comparing metaphysical dependence to causal dependence is the best way to make sense of the otherwise mysterious notion of grounding. Karen Bennett also argues that causation might be construed as a kind of “making up” relation like the other so-called “building relations” of constitution, composition, realization, and so on. Alastair Wilson (2018) holds that many unusual causal structures such as preemption and overdetermination have obvious parallels in grounding. A recent spate of literature has challenged this parallel. Bernstein (2016b) argues that grounding is not causation and not even like causation, despite their apparent similarities. Koslicki (2016) considers that the apparent similarities of formal models of both gloss over their deep differences. Another topic locus where Lewis’s system was especially prescient was in predicting the role that laws would play in metaphysical theories of causation in explanation. Currently, there is debate over whether there are metaphysical laws akin to those that are seen to bind causal relationships: for example, whether and how rules govern what sorts of things can compose what other sorts of things, and in what circumstances. As laws are seen to undergird causal explanations, so too are laws seen to undergird metaphysical explanations. Wilsch (2015) lays out a notion of metaphysical explanation in terms of metaphysical laws. Kment (2014) suggests that metaphysical laws undergird metaphysical explanations. Finally, impossible worlds have become a hot topic of late, and are being utilized in several philosophical contexts. Though the modal realism central to Lewis’s causal system extends only to metaphysically possible worlds, impossible worlds have recently been invoked to account for a variety of metaphysical concepts. Nolan (2014) suggests that many metaphysical concepts are hyperintensional, or requiring distinctions finer grained than mere possible worlds. For example, a poor mathematician might believe that 4 = 4 but disbelieve that 2 + 2 = 4. Every possible world where 2 + 2 = 4 is a world where 4 = 4. It is only in bringing in impossible worlds that we can account for the differences in mental content. A currently popular strand of hyperintensional metaphysics is concerned with counterpossibles, counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents, such as “If Hobbes had squared the circle, small children in rural India would not have cared.” There is a lively debate over whether such counterfactuals can be true or false non-vacuously. One school of thought, vacuism, holds that all counterpossibles are vacuous due to their impossible antecedents. If the antecedent is impossible, vacuists hold, “anything goes.” Non-vacuists, in contrast, argue that counterpossibles can be made sense of

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non-vacuously. The most compelling arguments for this conclusion invoke intuitive differences between counterpossibles: “If Hobbes had squared the circle in private, children in rural India would not have cared” seems true, while “If Hobbes had squared the circle in private, then the roses would have turned blue” seems false. Bernstein (2016a) takes non-vacuism one step farther, arguing that impossible events generate counterfactual dependencies, and thus can be causes. Finally, a related debate questions whether a similarity metric can be applied to impossible worlds, like the one Lewis applies to possible worlds. Nolan (1997) proposes a Strangeness of Impossibility condition: Any possible world, no matter how bizarre, should be considered closer to actuality than any impossible world. Berto (2013) holds that it is intuitive that some impossible worlds are closer to actuality than others, while Brogaard and Salerno (2013) propose a closeness relation based on feature-sharing propositions. FINAL REMARKS

Lewis’s theories of causation set the stage not only for philosophical progress on the topic for the next half-century, but for fruitful outcroppings of the system across philosophical subfields and subtopics. The influence of his theory of causation, including his foundational modal realism and semantic programs, cannot be overstated. Even contemporary metaphysical topics such as grounding, laws, impossibility, and temporal asymmetry have their roots in Lewis’s seminal 1973 paper, and the various debates that followed. His influence is sure to maintain its strength for years to come.

13 NATURALISM FROM THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT Quine’s “Hegelianism,” Armstrong’s Empiricism, and the Rise of Liberal Naturalism

dav i d macart h u r Naturalism as a philosophy of nature, what it consists in, and our ways of knowing nature (so conceived) has a long history in philosophy. In the twentieth century the question of naturalism has been, for the most part, centrally concerned with the question of philosophy’s relation to science, especially the natural (or “hard”) sciences. Its moral is that philosophy can no longer continue to think of itself as an autonomous discipline or stance distinct from science. I will proceed by examining in some detail the naturalisms of W. V. O. Quine and David Armstrong, which seem to align as a result of a commitment to what, at first, seem the same doctrines of Physicalism, Empiricism, and Metaphysical Realism. Against this perception of near-alignment I want to argue that they do not neatly line up on the naturalist side of the longstanding opposition between idealism and naturalism. In fact, in some key respects, Quine’s naturalism contains traces of idealism. The real opposition is between normativism and naturalism. I conclude by briefly contrasting two normativist positions – idealism and liberal naturalism – and come down in favor of the latter. INTRODUCTION

Naturalism arises in the wake of the scientific revolution, which we trace back to the sixteenth century and associate with such figures as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, and Darwin. The great success of early modern science in explaining and predicting natural phenomena in terms of natural laws or patterns and quantitative properties of matter stood in sharp contrast to the interminable disputes of metaphysicians over their rival systems. Just as natural science had humbled the old conception of humans having a central place in the universe – replacing a broadly Aristotelean geocentric conception of the universe with a heliocentric conception according to which the Earth is just one 171

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of many planets that revolve around one of many suns – so, too, science embarrassed the metaphysical pretensions of philosophy to arrive at the essence of things by purely a priori means. As Goethe puts it: Of all discoveries and opinions, none have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world has scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind – for by this admission so many things disappeared in mist and smoke! (Quoted in Hawking 2002: 6)

This scientific reconception of the universe and the loss of our “privileged” place in it forced philosophy to reconceive itself in light of the significant loss natural science had wrought upon our self-esteem; not to mention the evident failure of any traditional philosophical system to win the kind of rational consensus that typified mature natural science. Let us, henceforth, use the name “naturalism” for what is more perspicuously termed scientific naturalism. I shall contrast naturalism with what I call liberal naturalism later in the chapter.1 Naturalism is the result of a major rethinking of philosophy in the new age of science that reaches its most powerful early articulation in the seventeenth century in Hume’s new “science of man.” Hume’s “experimental philosophy” aims “to [causally] explain the principles of human nature” by appeal to “experience and observation” (1975 [1738]: xvi). Gone is the attempt to offer a priori justifications of philosophical conclusions from first principles. From that time to the present, the major opposition in philosophy has been between naturalism and (transcendental) idealism – although it is worth noting that skepticism haunts both positions. Hume famously woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers insofar as Kant became aware of the need to defend his transcendental approach to philosophy against Hume’s naturalist skepticism; and, in particular, to argue for a category of knowledge that Hume would not have recognized, namely, the synthetic a priori. In the aftermath of Kant’s critical philosophy there was a naturalist reaction against idealism in the form of the problems of skepticism and nihilism elaborated, respectively, by Maimon and Jacobi.2 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the opposition of idealism and naturalism played out in various movements and counter-movements, especially within German philosophy, many in the context of neo-Kantianism involving such thinkers as Fries, Helmholtz, Lotze, Cohen, Windelband, and Rickert.3 1 2 3

For discussion of liberal naturalism, see De Caro and Macarthur 2004; 2010. See Franks 2005; 2007; 2008. See Franks 2008 for details. Sebastian Gardiner notes that in 1919 Norman Kemp Smith writes that “it is the great antagonism between idealism and naturalism that lies at the heart of all philosophy” (2007: 21). And Richard Rorty (1997b: 96) takes the nineteenth-century opposition as that between idealism and materialism, which is no real disagreement. Materialism is a highly restrictive version of naturalism according to which one supposes all the legitimate sciences reduce to physics.

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Naturalism may include any or all of these themes: 1 In contrast to traditional philosophy, a secular or non-theistic conception of the world – at least insofar as theism involves a commitment to supernatural agencies or powers. 2 An attempt to model the method of philosophy on scientific method in the successful sciences, typically the natural sciences. For many, though not for all, this is equivalent to the denial of any appeal to a substantial a priori in philosophy. 3 A conception of genuine knowledge and/or understanding as nothing over and above the theoretical results of the successful sciences. 4 A conception of the world (or nature) as nothing over and above the scientific image of the world, i.e. the world as pictured by the successful (for many, only the natural) sciences. This is the theme that leads to the placement problem, the attempt to “place” morality, modality, and mathematics (etc.) within a restrictive scientific conception of nature.

Each of these themes can be developed in different ways leading to different conceptions of “naturalism.” Furthermore, how we interpret naturalism is affected by whether the scope of the term “science” is taken to range more broadly or narrowly than the natural sciences. There is, for example, the question whether to include or exclude the social sciences. In the present chapter I want to focus on naturalism from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Some further qualifications are in order. Firstly, I shall not discuss the first anti-theistic theme but simply note that naturalism involves the rejection of supernaturalist ontotheology. That leaves the question of the viability of a naturalized or non-supernatural (or “radical immanentist”) theology open.4 Secondly, although I will be discussing naturalism mostly from within the tradition of analytic philosophy, I will draw connections to Continental philosophy, in particular the post-Kantian tradition of German Idealism (henceforth, simply, “idealism”).5 Thirdly, given the vast literature on contemporary naturalism, I have chosen to discuss what I take to be two important and influential representatives of naturalism, without wanting to claim that these cover all or even most of the alternative forms of naturalism that are, or have been, held. The focus will be on how differently the relation between philosophy and science has been conceived even amongst philosophers who, prima facie, appear to endorse the very same positions. The wider historical dialectic of idealism versus naturalism will also be considered, as well as the motivation for adopting a liberal naturalism as an alternative to both positions.

4 5

I borrow the term “radical immanentist” from John Cottingham, who used it in an unpublished talk on June 23, 2018 at Heythrop College, London. For a lucid and insightful discussion of naturalism in the context of German Idealism, see Paul Franks 2008.

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In the early twentieth century, analytic philosophy was defined in terms of the method of logical analysis, an a priori inquiry into the underlying logical form of propositions as opposed to their surface grammatical form. Frege set the tone by distinguishing sharply between the psychological and the logical. On this vision, philosophy involves the a priori investigation of logical relations between propositions, which are seen, contra Kant, as capable of yielding substantive unobvious analytic truths. Logical and mathematical truth – which were thought to be reducible to logical truths – are necessary truths (e.g. “If p then q, p, therefore q,” “2 + 3 = 5”) wholly distinct from synthetic and contingent matters of psychological compulsion (e.g. that one has a tendency to associate p with q or that every collection of 2s and 3s one has so far come across has totalled to 5). Although early analytic philosophy was a form of anti-naturalism originally committed to denying (3) and (4) – since it accepted a priori knowledge of logical form as well as the existence of non-empirical logical and mathematical “objects” – it could, nonetheless, accept a version of (2), as Russell explains: The study of logic becomes the central study in philosophy: it gives the method of research in philosophy, just as mathematics gives the method of research in physics. And as physics . . . became a science through Galileo’s fresh observation of facts and subsequent mathematical manipulation, so philosophy, in our own day, is becoming scientific through the simultaneous acquisition of new facts and logical methods. (2009 [1914]: 194)

It is interesting to note that, despite accepting a strict separation of the discipline of philosophy from that of science, Russell still looks to science as the paradigm of knowledge and so, for that reason, a model for philosophy in a revolutionary period in which the past achievements of traditional philosophy are rejected as spurious and a new beginning is called for. In this context the newly discovered method of logical analysis was understood to make available a “scientific” philosophy insofar as philosophy could finally become a collaborative research program with cumulative results – so, in that quite specific way, akin to a successful science (cf. Hylton 1990: 390). Nonetheless, as a consequence of its commitment to the a priori method and results of logical analysis, early analytic philosophy remained firmly anti-naturalist. In striking contrast, a key feature of analytic (or Anglo-American) philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century is that the distinction between philosophy and science is either explicitly denied, or becomes clouded in obfuscation or confusion. Let us consider and compare two influential and representative naturalists, W. V. O. Quine and David Armstrong. To

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understand their samenesses and differences is to understand naturalism anew and sets the stage for the introduction of liberal naturalism in the early twenty-first century. Q U I N E ’ S N A T U R A LI S M: T H E R E J E C T I O N O F F I R S T PHILOSOPHY

Quine’s “Two dogmas of empiricism” – widely misunderstood as an attack upon any form of the analytic/synthetic distinction6 – arrives at the farreaching conclusion that there is no distinctive philosophical stance or method (of, say, a priori thinking) over and above that of science. His commitment to naturalism is understood as “abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy prior to natural science” or “the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described” (1981: 21). More fully: [Naturalism] is rational reconstruction of the individual’s and/or the race’s actual acquisition of a theory of the external world. It would address the question, of how we physical denizens of a physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meagre contacts with it: from the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill. (1998: 16)

Quine takes naturalism to imply physicalism, the view that the discourse of current physics is our best bet as to the ultimate make-up of the world. To be is to be the value of a variable where the variables range over entities in our best scientific theory of the world, at least when suitably logically regimented. Furthermore, the best scientific theory is the one that is empirically best supported by way of the corroboration of empirical predictions. Despite rejecting the empiricist dogmas of an epistemologically substantial analytic/ synthetic distinction and the semantic thesis of phenomenalist reductionism, empiricism “as a theory of evidence” remains in full force (1981: 39). Famously, Quine argues that there is no principled way to distinguish the semantic rules of a linguistic framework (i.e. analytic truths in Carnap’s sense) from empirically well-confirmed propositions (i.e. synthetic truths). (See Ebbs, this volume.) For example, such supposedly a priori “definitional” truths as “Mammals do not lay eggs” and “Mammals bear live young” came to be 6

In fact, Quine only undermines the logical positivist’s epistemologically weighty version of the analytic/synthetic distinction. It is important to note that Quine is prepared to endorse Frege’s notion of analyticity as logical truths and truths derived by replacing explicit definitions for the terms in such truths. (See Quine 1990: 54–5).

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regarded as false once the platypus was discovered by Europeans in the new colony of Australia in 1797. The platypus was a warm-blooded vertebrate that laid eggs. Although it did not conform to the then-current definition of mammal its discovery led to a revision in the definition rather than its exclusion from the category defined by the definition. In light of the empirical defeasibility of “a priori truth,” of which this is an example, Quine abandons the category of the a priori altogether and with it the idea of a distinctive stance peculiar to philosophy. Given that “no statement is immune to revision” (1961: 43), philosophy (on this conception) is absorbed into what Quine calls “total science” which “is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience” (42). ARMSTRONG’S NATURALISM: ONTOLOGY AS A P O S T E R I O R I R E A LI S M

Armstrong is in a similar quandary regarding the idea of a distinctively philosophical stance. He sees himself as contributing to ontology or “first philosophy,” the metaphysical inquiry into the foundations of Being, which he calls “the most abstract or general theory of reality” (1978: 261). Naturalism is not fundamental enough to count as ontology. It is, rather, a doctrine within Armstrong’s ontology, which is a form of realism committed to the existence of mind-independent causally significant things (particulars) which instantiate universals (properties and relations). Armstrong is also committed to factualism, the thesis “that the world, all there is, is states of affairs” (1997: 1) which are composed of particulars and universals. Regarding naturalism, Armstrong writes: “Naturalism I define as the doctrine that reality consists of nothing but a single all-embracing spatiotemporal system” (1978: 261). I take “all-embracing” to refer to a single causal order whose spatiotemporally located entities are causally related to one another: something Armstrong calls “a causally self-enclosed system” (265). This understanding fits well with Armstrong’s method for deciding existence questions. For example, when he considers whether there exist “God . . . transcendent universals, the realm of numbers, transcendent standards of value, timeless propositions, nonexistent objects such as the golden mountain, possibilities over and above actualities (‘possible worlds’) and ‘abstract classes’,” the test he appeals to is whether “they are capable of [causal] action in the spatio-temporal system” (261). Armstrong thus endorses the eleatic principle according to which to be is to be a cause, or to be caused. His first philosophy includes a posteriori realism, the claim that “the best guide we have to the nature of reality is provided by natural science” (274). Since the

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epistemology of science is based on the method of observation and experiment, this is a form of empiricism. Knowledge of nature can only be gained a posteriori, not a priori as traditional philosophy had supposed. Naturalism is a specification of reality within a metaphysical realism that is seen as internal to natural science. Empiricism, typically associated with phenomenalism in the history of philosophy, is in this instance combined with direct realism in the philosophy of perception and the most robust metaphysical realism understood as a commitment to a mind-independent world. Armstrong’s materialism (or physicalism) – “the view that the world contains nothing but the entities recognized by physics” (268) – is a subspecies of naturalism. R A T I O N A L I S T I C A N D E MP I R I C I S T F O R M S OF NATURALISM

At a glance one might be forgiven for thinking that Quine’s and Armstrong’s versions of naturalism closely align given that they both endorse physicalism, empiricism (as method of natural science and, more generally, of epistemology) and metaphysical realism – Quine declaring himself, in terms that Armstrong might use, a “robust realist” about “external things – people, nerve endings, sticks, stones . . . atoms and electrons and . . . classes” (1981: 21). But, in this matter, appearances are more than usually deceiving. Regarding all three doctrines, Quine and Armstrong are really quite far apart, which suggests that, for all their denials about the possibility of a distinctive philosophical standpoint, there are very real differences in their off-stage philosophical reasoning – especially as it concerns how we are to understand “science” and its relation to philosophy – a style of reasoning that cannot be described as “scientific” since, in making it explicit, we must employ a distinctive philosophical vocabulary. Let us first compare the two philosophers on the question of physicalism. Quine’s physicalism is a matter of the prioritization of physical theory in his conception of what there is. He concurs with Smart “that the physicalist’s language provides a truer picture of the world than ordinary common sense” (1981: 92). Although Quine’s physicalism is reductive in principle – looking forward to reductions of, say, psychology or biology or chemistry to physical vocabulary – it respects the fact that at present we have no such wholesale reductions. Consequently, Quine settles for a “nonreductive nontranslational” global supervenience thesis which states that “nothing happens in the world . . . without some redistribution of microphysical states” (98). Notice that Quine explains his deference to physical theory by appeal to what happens, not in terms of (apparent) truths. So physicalism in this sense is compatible with his

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well-known skeptical theses of the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference.7 Quine’s commitment to physicalism is primarily a commitment to scientific theory understood as a system (built according to certain theoretical virtues, e.g. economy, coherence, simplicity, empirical adequacy) rather than to the doctrine that all that exists are the theoretical posits of physics understood as causally efficacious spatiotemporal entities. The scientific enterprise, as Quine understands it, is not necessarily or exclusively committed to the physical. For example, if experience suggested it, science might lead us to believe in a world organized around the predictions of soothsayers or dreams: We might begin to be somewhat successful in basing predictions upon dreams or reveries. At that point we might reasonably doubt our theory of nature in even fairly broad outlines. But our doubts will still be immanent, and of a piece with the scientific endeavour. (1981: 22)

All that scientific theory demands is “that [the world] be so structured as to assure the sequences of stimulation that our theory gives us to expect” (22). A specific ontology is not important; through theoretical reductions (e.g. reducing physical objects to space–time regions or these, in turn, to classes of quadruples of numbers) we may treat our theory as yielding nothing more than the ontology of pure set theory so long as we preserve the structure of true sentences from observation sentences to theoretical predictions. Armstrong’s physicalism, alternatively, is a commitment to precisely the contrary view that the “objects” of physics provide a complete inventory of reality: “the only particulars that the spacetime system contains are physical entities governed by nothing more than the laws of physics” (Armstrong 1997: 6). The difference between Quine’s commitment to the system of physical science and Armstrong’s to the causally efficacious objects of physics shows up particularly in their differing attitudes to mathematics. For Quine, since to be is to be the value of a variable and regimented theory contains numbers (or proxies of these, e.g. sets of sets), Quine’s “physicalism” is straightforwardly committed to the existence of abstract (non-spatiotemporal) entities. As we have seen, Quine would be happy to settle for a system of ontology composed entirely of abstract sets. However, since for Armstrong what exists is tied to 7

That is, the same naturalistic facts are compatible with alternative equally successful translation manuals, and any given translation is compatible with different assignments of reference to individual terms and other referring expressions. Hence the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts and other propositional attitudes do not supervene on the physical facts. From here it is a short step to Quine’s anti-realist view that there is no fact of the matter about meanings or the contents of propositional attitudes.

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what is ultimately causally responsible for our observations and experimental data, then mathematics poses a very significant problem. Taking it seriously seems to require a commitment to non-causal, non-spatiotemporal (“abstract”) objects, as in Quine. Thus, for Armstrong, work must be done to show that mathematical truths can be naturalized, reduced to truths about causally efficacious spatiotemporal entities,8 whereas for Quine, the fact that mathematics plays a central role in scientific thinking is all it takes to be natural. This suggests another important difference between the two philosophers regarding what they take their respective commitments to empiricism to come to. Armstrong’s empiricism commits him to regard the reality of the commonsense perceptible world as more or less unassailable. He accepts what he calls the “bedrock common sense” of Moorean truths such as that we have hands or that we live in a world which includes trees, rivers, and mountains. Such things are “the primitive verities of ordinary experience” (1997: 5) which are not to be denied or eliminated on the grounds of scientific theory. They are givens of an empiricism that favors an objectivist or direct realist account of the objects of perception over any form of sense-data theory. While not theoretically deep such truths are “epistemically fundamental” (2004: 27), that is, secure foundations in our system of knowing which, even if not logically indubitable (since their denial involves no contradiction) are rationally indubitable insofar as “no sane enquirer in fact doubts [them]” (28). Again in sharp contrast, for Quine there are no givens of experience. Observation is understood in physicalized terms as sensory stimulation of nerve endings and energy transfer. Nothing is given; rather, everything that exists is a posit of our best scientific theory of the world. Experience gives rise, in the first instance, to observation sentences. For Quine it is not objects that matter but the theoretical role that they play. For that reason Quine is indifferent whether we have rabbits or cosmic complements of rabbits (the universe minus rabbits) or undetached rabbit parts, etc. Commonsense entities like tables, chairs, and trees are given no weight in Quine’s naturalistic philosophy since they lack sufficiently determinate and clear identity conditions to meet Quine’s stringent scientific standards: That is, they are no part of the scientific account of what really exists. Indeed much of the realm of common sense is treated as insubstantial and unreal from the point of view of physical theory within Quine’s philosophical stance (e.g. his requirement of strict standards of identification and reidentification for any entity worthy of inclusion in logically regimented theory). 8

Armstrong holds that “numbers are internal relations between structural universals and unitproperties” (Mumford 2007: 77).

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From a properly naturalistic perspective, there are no meanings, no propositional attitudes, no artifacts, no persons, and so on. It is consonant with this view that Quine does not put any philosophical weight on the idea that we observe, point to, and name commonsense objects like trees, cats, and spoons. We and the artifacts we make are physical objects, but the language of persons or of chairs, cars, phones, etc. plays no part in “limning the true and ultimate structure of reality” (Quine 1960: 221). Empiricism, then, is not a claim about the ultimate data for science; it is simply the view that the only evidence for science is empirical – but with the important caveat that our understanding of this “evidence” is itself a product of theory. This is what it means to philosophize in medias res. Let us turn finally to consider the third issue, metaphysical realism. When Quine says he is a “realist” about such things as persons, artifacts, and other “external things” or when he employs intentional idioms, it is important to realize that he is operating with what he calls a “double standard” which, in the case of propositional attitudes, he explains thus: Not that I would forswear daily use of intentional idioms, or maintain that they are practically dispensable . . . [But] if we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme [of physical theory] that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and behavior of organisms. (220)

That is, Quine recognizes a distinction between what he calls the “first-grade system” of physical theory on the basis of which we discern “the true and ultimate structure of reality” and the “second-grade system” of common sense – including talk of people, chairs, beliefs, etc. – which is practically indispensable but, not being “science-worthy” (since, as we have noted, these items have no clear and determinate identity conditions), is not to be taken seriously for theoretical (i.e. ontological, epistemological, logical) purposes in science and philosophy (1969: 24). Consequently, we must conclude that Quine, in stark contrast to Armstrong, is not a realist in any substantial sense about the commonsense world.

NATURALISM AS A FORM OF A PRIORI METAPHYSICS (FIRST PHILOSOPHY)

The possibility of philosophy is bound up with the fate of the a priori. This was always a questionable category precisely because in order to talk about justification or knowledge independently of experience one had to set aside whatever experiences were required in order to learn the language in which

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they are framed in the first place. What Quine’s arguments show is that the way that the empirical bears on reflective theoretical thinking is much more complex and far-reaching than previously imagined. Thus one solid result of naturalism is that we have good reason to reject the traditional notion of an unrevisable a priori that is wholly insensitive to empirical discoveries. Of course, it would be premature to conclude from the failure of the traditional notion of the a priori that the only remaining option for philosophy is to reason a posteriori on purely empirical grounds, as Armstrong and Quine seem to suggest. A distinctive philosophical form of reasoning still remains available, one which employs a specific philosophical vocabulary distinct from that of the sciences. Such a form of reasoning may well take science and empirical matters into account but, in its reflections, employs philosophical criteria of interpretation and evaluation. Unlike the traditional a priori, such philosophical reasoning can admit to being empirically defeasible, but the way that the empirical bears on such reasoning is indirect and leaves room for alternative interpretations. At this point one may invoke the notion of a pragmatic or relative a priori, truths that are held fixed (or are taken as necessary) for the purposes of a particular inquiry but which are not completely unrevisable; or, if talk of unrevisability makes no sense since we cannot currently imagine what a revision could be then we can at least say that there is no guarantee that the truth in such cases is fixed come what may (Lewis 1929; Putnam 1994). As we have seen, the discovery and investigation into the lifecycle of the platypus led scientists to revise what were formerly regarded as fixed definitional truths about the concept mammal.9 Both Quine and Armstrong officially reject the category of the a priori. Quine writes that “no statement is immune to revision” (1961: 43), including the laws of logic, and that naturalism is “the abandonment of the goal of first philosophy prior to natural science” (1981: 21). The philosophical task of identifying and describing reality is to take place wholly “within science,” a form of empirical inquiry. Armstrong seconds Quine by remarking, “as an Empiricist I reject the whole conception of establishing [ontological or metaphysical] results by a priori argumentation” (Armstrong 1978: 262). But in this matter both seem muddled, for naturalism is itself a form of a priori metaphysics or first philosophy. Although science is indeed an empirical form of inquiry, rather than a metaphysical theory, it can be metaphysicalized by claiming that

9

Putnam (1975d) makes the point that statements of Euclidean geometry such as “Two parallel lines will never meet” were once thought to be a priori true and it was unimaginable that they could be false, but with the discovery of Riemannian geometry we came to see that they were, in fact, false!

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scientific knowledge or understanding is all the knowledge or understanding there is, or by claiming that the scientific image is all there is to reality. It is these unqualified claims to exhaustiveness or completeness that reveal naturalism as a form of first philosophy that goes beyond anything established by the sciences. This point is obscured by Armstrong when he writes, in words that Quine could have written, “we should look to total science to tell us what properties and what relations there are” (1987: 273). It is quite correct that successful science in most cases gives us good reason to believe in the existence of the properties and relations that it posits. But that falls short of a claim to completeness, the idea that total science tells us what properties and relations there are and that these are all the properties and relations that there are. That is not something that total science (which, presumably, means all the successful sciences) tells us, since science provides answers to specific scientific questions concerning gravity, quarks, protein structure, tribal rituals, etc. Claims to completeness, then, are distinctively philosophical claims established through rational argument from a distinctively philosophical stance –one that reflectively fits the findings of science into a wider philosophical structure or framework. Naturalism provides the ontological framework within which Armstrong establishes his more particular philosophical results. To say, with Armstrong, that naturalism (so understood) is established empirically is in tension with the idea that naturalism is the background assumption of a single spatiotemporal system within which we understand any particular empirical result, and in terms of which empirical results uberhaupt are established and interpreted.10 Indeed, Armstrong’s ontology is doubly incompatible with his denial of a priori argumentation, since his endorsement of an eleatic view of existence – according to which there is a tight conceptual connection between causation and Being – is not something that could be established on empirical grounds. It, too, is a kind of first philosophy that is taken for granted in his understanding of what the world is fundamentally like and what constitutes evidence for any particular claim about it. Quine’s implicit commitment to first philosophy, despite his official denials, is not, as it is for Armstrong, a commitment to ontology understood as an a priori theory of Being. It is important to see that Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment – to be is to be the value of a variable – is not a contribution to the substantial explanatory program of ontology but simply a way of reading off from our theory of the world what we are existentially committed to. As Frank Jackson remarks, “serious metaphysics” (i.e. ontology) 10

In this I concur with Paolo Valore, who remarks, “The metaphysical a priori assumption of a single space–time system cannot be discarded, not even on the basis of a physical result” (2016: 256).

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“is not concerned with any old shopping list of what there is”; rather, it is interested in explaining phenomena “in terms of a limited number of more or less basic notions” (Jackson 1998: 4). But a shopping list, or something like it, is indeed what Quine gives us. If the vocabulary in which Quine characterizes reality is a restricted one, that is not because he employs ideas of what is metaphysically basic or fundamental or absolute; it simply reflects the attempt to satisfy the desiderata of scientific theorizing: simplicity, clarity, economy, etc. The element of first philosophy in Quine’s system is his scientism, his commitment to the idea that it is the system of science in particular – that is, “total science” – that limns the true nature of reality; or, as he also puts it, “all traits of reality worthy of the name can be set down in an idiom of this austere form [i.e. a properly scientific vocabulary] if in any idiom” (Quine 1960: 228). Q U I N E ’ S H E GE LI A NI S M V E R S U S A R M S T R O NG ’ S TRADITIONAL EMPIRICISM

We are now in a position to see that for all the apparent similarity of their philosophical commitments, and notwithstanding their joint rejection of the a priori, Quine and Armstrong are actually very far apart in philosophical orientation, and this has an important bearing on their respective understandings of naturalism. We might put it this way: Quine is at the rationalistic (or idealistic) end of the spectrum of naturalistic allegiance; whereas Armstrong is at the empiricist end in the traditional sense according to which empiricism involves a commitment to an empirical given – in this case, not sense-data but observable states of affairs involving commonsense objects. As we have seen, Armstrong calls these “the primitive verities of ordinary experience” (1997: 5). It is instructive to compare this with Quine’s empiricism. Quine’s philosophy has a highly systematic character which is governed to a large extent by theoretical principles, e.g. no entity without clear identity conditions, regimentation in extensional first-order logic, adherence to the cognitive virtues of simplicity, economy, clarity, and predictive power. In this context Quine’s empiricism – the claim that the only evidence for science is empirical evidence – is thoroughly mediated by theoretical considerations so that it no longer concerns articulating the deliverances and philosophical import of sensory consciousness from the first-person perspective, as traditional empiricists would have it. Experience is experience physicalized, a mere matter of patterns of neural stimulation, which is a theoretical issue, and the implication of observation sentences for theory is also a theoretical question which turns on how one parses their referential import. Whatever Quine accepts as real is a posit of theory. Consequently, on Quine’s view there is no empirical given, nor

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any basic or privileged form of empirical knowledge, say, of sense data or commonsense objects.

I D E A L I S M V E R S U S N A T U R A LI S M ( R E DU X)

In general terms let me try to indicate how these differences bear on the larger philosophical opposition of naturalism and idealism that we touched on previously. In this context it is worth considering Burton Dreben’s enigmatic remark that Quine is the Hegel of contemporary philosophy.11 Plausibly, this is a reflection of the systematicity of Quine’s outlook, its emphasis on intratheoretical constraints – logical, pragmatic, and scientific. The suggestion is that the systematicity that characterizes German Idealism reappears, in detranscendentalized form, in Quine’s naturalist philosophy. Consider Quine’s insouciant attitude to ontology in contrast to his devotion to the logic of his system in this remark: “[W]hat matters for any objects, concrete or abstract, is not what they are but what they contribute to our overall theory of the world as neutral nodes in its logical structure” (Quine 1998: 74–5). Systematicity for Quine does not require, as it does for the idealist tradition, derivation from a single principle (i.e. a form of monism). But there is a striking analogy between the idealists’ commitment to holism – which is the view “that every particular (object, fact, or judgment) be determined through its role within the whole and not through any intrinsic properties” (Franks 2005: 9–10) – and Quine’s commitment to strong forms of semantic and justificatory holism. In Quine, additionally, there are the theoretical desiderata of science: simplicity, economy, logical clarity, and predictive power (Hylton 2007: 299). Naturalism – understood as a commitment to (1)–(4) above – has come to contain within itself a version of the traditional debate between idealism and naturalism as represented by the contrasting outlooks of Quine and Armstrong.12 Indeed, from Armstrong’s point of view, Quine’s is an anti-naturalist position because it is committed to the existence of abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, e.g. numbers (see Armstrong 1997: 8). And, for the same reason, Armstrong 11

12

This is one of the many striking comments Dreben made whilst teaching his famous “Drebenar” at Boston University in the 1990s: a never-ending course of instruction in which Dreben would trawl slowly through a personal canon of well-thumbed philosophical texts to find nuggets of philosophical gold, or, just as often, fool’s gold, to comment on in the manner of Midrash, which was his own analogy. It is worth noting that Quine’s philosophical inheritance includes a line tracing back from C. I. Lewis through the classical pragmatists to Hegel and Kant, whereas Armstrong’s includes a line from John Anderson back to the empiricism of the Scottish tradition which includes Hume. We could say, then, that there is a sense in which Quine is post-Kantian whereas Armstrong is pre-Kantian.

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would deny that Quine is a physicalist.13 Moreover, given that Quine does not commit to the epistemic priority of immediate objects of sense, Armstrong would question Quine’s empiricist credentials, too. Of course, as we have seen, Quine has his own account of what it takes to be considered natural, real, and empirically testable. This internal dispute about the content of naturalism is really a dispute about the methodological and metaphysical import of science for philosophy, and of what properly counts as “science” for philosophical purposes – as well as what standards are internal to science. As we have seen each of the main terms “physicalism,” “empiricism,” and “realism” undergoes conceptual stresses and strains as it shifts from one of these two camps to the other. What matters for present purposes is to acknowledge that these are highly controversial matters that cannot be solved by scientific means. Which is, once again, to conclude that Quine and Armstrong have their own forms of first philosophy – even if we grant, with both thinkers, that no truth is guaranteed true come what may.

NORMATIVISM VERSUS NATURALISM

We are now in a position to refine and recast the old opposition between idealism and naturalism. An aspect of the idealist tradition that remains steadfastly resistant to naturalism is its commitment to the explanatory priority of sui generis rational normativity.14 This is what naturalism of any kind cannot accept and must oppose – whether it takes Quine’s or Armstrong’s form.15 Inferential ought-involving transitions between propositions, which fund notions of correctness and incorrectness in judgment, cannot be assimilated to, or explained in terms of, what merely happens as a matter of causal happenstance – and explaining phenomena in terms of causal patterns or laws is largely what science aims to do. To give one important consideration, there is no accounting for normative error in causal terms, the way in which, say, a false belief still aims at truth and is judged according to that standard even though it falls short of it as a matter of fact. 13

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It is striking the number of commentators who treat Quine as a physicalist but then add a qualification that makes no sense from that perspective. Robert Fogelin is representative in writing, “Quine’s commitment to physicalism [is] wholehearted except for the grudging admission of a few, unavoidable, abstract entities” (1997: 545; italics added). Note the word “except”! Gardner writes, “[O]ne of the essential defining insights and metaphilosophical principles of German Idealism consists in the idea that normativity is irreducible and occupies a position of ultimate explanatory priority” (2007: 20). Robert Brandom (2009) adopts this normativist conception of the core of German Idealism; see, especially, chapter 5.

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What naturalism fundamentally opposes is normativism, by which I shall mean any philosophy committed to irreducible rational normativity.16 This might seem to give an easy victory to idealism, given both that it is, historically, the preeminent normativist outlook, and that “there is no eliminating the normative” (Putnam 1983: 246), seeing that the naturalist program of naturalizing reason has been notoriously unsuccessful. But there is at least one further option which is of particular relevance in the present discussion: to propose a normativist liberal naturalism that accepts (1) above but denies (2)–(4). On this program, nature extends beyond the scientific image of the world, and knowledge extends beyond scientific knowledge; but it does not follow those who argue that naturalism becomes insubstantial as the term “nature” loses all distinction (e.g. Stroud 2004). Liberal naturalism earns its title by rejecting the supernatural, e.g. supernatural agencies such as the Judeo-Christian God.17 So long as we find a way to acknowledge the naturalness of rational normativity it need not be condemned as supernatural (“spooky,” “queer”). Easing anxieties about whether reason is supernatural is precisely what the liberal naturalist John McDowell (1994) attempts to do by appeal to a naturalized Platonist conception of reason. According to this conception, although rational intelligibility is indispensable and sui generis, “that our lives are shaped by reason is natural” – natural to us as the language-using enculturated creatures we are. Here the emphasis falls on our second nature, the fact that we are cognitively shaped by our Bildung, that we are inculcated into a responsiveness to reasons that are always already there by way of a certain upbringing. Achieving the naturalness of normativity is not a theoretical matter of finding a “place” for it in the more or less austere scientific image of the world but simply a reminder of the naturalness of our responsiveness to reasons within the human form of life. Although the opposition between idealism and orthodox (“scientific”) naturalism remains in force, we must ask whether there is any significant difference between idealism and liberal naturalism. We cannot properly explore this issue in the present context, but let me briefly (and polemically) comment on Sebastian Gardner’s affirmative answer to this question. Gardner argues that philosophy should provide “systematic unity and completeness of explanation” (Gardner 2007: 31). Given these metaphysical desiderata, only two contenders present themselves: (1) orthodox naturalism; and (2) “metaphysically construed 16

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I argue (in Macarthur 2008) that naturalism is itself best understood in terms of what is rationally normative for philosophy, from which it follows that, since there is no reductive naturalistic account of normativity, naturalism is self-undermining. A liberal naturalist will thus be motivated to challenge the attempt of theologically minded philosophers to supernaturalize nature by seeing God as immanent in the empirical world. See, e.g., Fiona Ellis 2014.

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idealism” (45). He favors the latter on the basis that only idealism can provide normativity and value with an ontological grounding that is “absolute . . . beyond all natural contingency” (22). Gardner is astute in observing that (“scientific” or, as he puts it, “hard”) naturalism is a metaphysical position, but his own metaphysical predilections load the scales against a fair assessment of its non-metaphysical counterpart, liberal naturalism (or, as he calls it, “soft naturalism”) – which he sees as unstable, either collapsing back into hard naturalism or else converting itself into idealism. Liberal naturalism is situated in contrast to both of Gardner’s metaphysically inflationary options as a metaphysically deflationary – or, as I prefer to think of it a metaphysically quietist – program (see Macarthur 2017). It is inspired by Wittgenstein’s methodological remark, “All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems” (2009 [1953]: §109). Like Wittgenstein, a liberal naturalist is a philosopher who describes – from the relatively a priori perspective one has when reflecting on one’s own native tongue – the function and interrelation of our concepts in light of an appreciation of how hard it is to describe the actual use of concepts for one’s own purposes (not to mention the shifting immensely complicated uses of concepts when considering society as a whole). To a large extent this is because of our inveterate tendency to metaphysicalize concepts by imagining grand systems of extra-empirical explanation in which they play a leading role.18 We imagine we see “a super-order between . . . super-concepts” (§97), offering explanations from the armchair that are imagined to be final, absolute, leaving nothing to chance or fortune. It is the burden of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a whole to show the emptiness of such metaphysically heavy-weight explanations, or attempts at such, and the fantasies that motivate them. At one point he muses: “[I]f the words ‘language’, ‘experience’, ‘world’ have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words ‘table’, ‘lamp’, ‘door’” (§96). The same, of course, goes for “explanation.” Curiously, as a defender of robust metaphysics, Gardner finds himself on the same side as Armstrong; whereas, in contrast, the liberal naturalist shares a deep distrust of metaphysics with Quine, who writes: “What evaporates is the transcendental question of the reality of the external world – the question whether or in how far our science measures up to the Ding an sich” (Quine 1980: 22). Not only is this congenial to liberal naturalism, but, to bring this remark closer to Gardner’s concerns, one could replace “values” for “the

18

The metaphysicalization of “explanation” in Wittgenstein’s remark is indicated by the italics.

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external world” and “evaluative judgments” for “science.” The contrast between idealism and liberal naturalism ultimately turns on whether the idealist is committed to the metaphysical project of “grounding” normativity on something allegedly more basic – a program that non-metaphysical readings of idealism contest but that both Gardner and Franks argue is internal to idealism.19 The liberal naturalist is, in contrast, content to remove confusions or conceptual blinkers from our normative commitments without attempting to provide any deeper explanation of them. For what could that be? In words borrowed from Stanley Cavell, no explanation is needed since nothing is deeper than the fact, or the extent, of our mutual responsiveness to (conceptual) normativity.20 In closing, it might be worth adding that the idea of our responsiveness to normativity is best developed in the context of Peirce’s theory of inquiry. Indeed it is Quine’s own allegiance to this pragmatist theory of inquiry which effectively rescues him from feeling any philosophical pressure in the direction of the idealist search for absolute grounds.21 Franks (2005) has traced a key motivation for idealism in the German post-Kantian tradition to the need to respond to the ancient Agrippan trilemma that appears to undermine any justification whatsoever through a vicious regress of reasons for reasons, which can only be avoided by arbitrary assumption and vicious circularity, neither of which provides any genuine justification. Hence the trilemma: vicious regress; vicious circularity; and ad hoc assumption. Peirce’s theory of inquiry blocks the force of Agrippa’s trilemma by denying that justification must be earned by providing independent reasons. In other words, Peirce denies the rationalistic model of justification by inference presupposed by the trilemma. On the pragmatist account one starts in medias res, and is considered default entitled (or justified) without reasons unless or until some positive reason to doubt arises (Peirce 1955). Since one can be non-inferentially justified, the demand for reasons may be resisted as inappropriate, and even where it is appropriate it does not automatically generate an infinite justificatory regress.

19 20 21

Perhaps the most influential non-metaphysical reader of idealism, particularly of Hegel, is Robert Pippin. See, e.g., Pippin 1989. The Cavell quote is this: “For nothing is deeper than the fact, or the extent, of agreement itself” (1979: 32), where the agreement in question concerns the normative matter of language use. Quine does not refer to Peirce in this context but, rather, to Neurath (Quine 1960: epigraph). But in all likelihood he learnt about Peirce’s theory by way of C. I. Lewis.

14 THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE jam e s ladyman

INTRODUCTION

The philosophy of science in its broadest sense includes all philosophical questions asked about or within the sciences. It overlaps with epistemology because science is taken to be among the best available means of acquiring knowledge, if not the best. It overlaps with metaphysics, and philosophy of mind and language, because scientific theories tell us about the nature and functioning of matter and ourselves. Issues that are now considered core to the philosophy of science, such as the problem of induction and the nature of space and time, played a pivotal role in the development of philosophy from Descartes to Kant through Newton, Leibniz, and Hume, and thence to Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Philosophy of science continues to study such old and new questions of knowledge and reality. Furthermore, philosophy of science has also always overlapped with ethics and political philosophy. At the turn of the scientific revolution Francis Bacon envisioned New Atlantis, a society based on communal inquiry and collective action bringing the benefits of technology to its populace. No philosopher of science after 1945 could doubt the social nature of science and the benefits of science and technology, but nor could they doubt its potential for destruction. By the 1990s climate change was reckoned by many scientists to be a threat to much, if not all, human life on Earth. The ideas of the underdetermination of theory by evidence and paradigms were weaponized in political debates that ensued and are charged with a significance that goes way beyond the academic study of the philosophy of science (Oreskes and Conway 2010). Some significant changes in science since 1945 of philosophical relevance are as follows: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

increased technicality and specialization; increased interdisciplinarity and complexity; widespread use of computational and statistical methods; growth of the biological, behavioral, cognitive, medical, and social sciences; and, accelerating engineering and technological progress.

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Each of these has been of profound importance for the way philosophy of science has developed. It has mirrored all of them to some extent. For example, philosophers of science now often specialize in a highly specific and technical area of science, from aesthetic cognition to general relativistic cosmology, and attend conferences with scientists in the relevant field. Many have at least a doctoral level of education in their science, and like scientists, philosophers of science often work collaboratively, and often with scientists. Probability and statistics, and computation, are fundamental in philosophy of science as both objects of study and tools. Many philosophers of science study biology as well as behavioral, cognitive, medical, and social sciences. The philosophy of engineering and technology relates to the philosophy of computation and information, and to complexity science, control theory, and systems theory, all of which have been much studied in philosophy of science. This chapter explains some important developments and key ideas in Anglophone philosophy of science, but leaves out much of great importance, including ethical and political reflection on the application of scientific theories in technology, the study of the social organization of science, the link between scientific ethics and epistemic success, and the intense debate about the relationship between science and religion. The philosophy of social science is not entirely omitted but is mentioned only in passing. The text is organized into a series of narratives of varying detail. Referencing is necessarily representative rather than comprehensive. Many important works in the subject are not cited, but can be found in the bibliographies of those that are.1

FROM POSITIVISM TO POSTMODERNISM

The post-war boom in science and technology in the USA was accompanied by a similar explosion of work in philosophy of science due to the relocation of many European intellectuals there. The movement known as “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism” continued discussions begun in Berlin and Vienna. Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap in Chicago, Herbert Feigl in Minnesota, and Philip Frank in Boston brought with them their use of logical 1

Classic introductions to the philosophy of science include Chalmers 1976, Hacking 1983, and Brown 1993. Anthologies of seminal papers include Nidditch 1968, Hacking 1981,and Papineau 1996. The key specialist journals for general philosophy of science are The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, together with the newer European Journal for the Philosophy of Science and International Studies in Philosophy of Science. Much philosophy of science also appears in Erkenntnis, Synthese, and general philosophy journals. There are excellent entries on many topics in the philosophy of science in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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and other formal methods in philosophy of science, and their concern with epistemology and the demarcation of science from metaphysics.2 At the London School of Economics from 1946 Karl Popper formed a very influential school that included Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend (and later the Bayesian school led by Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, and founder of the Centre for the Natural and Social Sciences, Nancy Cartwright). Various other academic units of history and philosophy of science were established, for example, in Melbourne in 1949 by Gerd Buchdahl and in Leeds in 1956 by Stephen Toulmin, both of whom adopted an integrated approach to the subjects. Others followed, for example, in Cambridge, Sydney, and Pittsburgh, with Mary Hesse playing a prominent role in the former (along with Buchdahl who was in Cambridge from 1957). All these have prospered, and many other centers for philosophy of science have developed. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, philosophy of science grew greatly throughout Europe and Scandanavia.3 The influence of philosophy of science on the post-war development of “analytic philosophy,” as it became known, is hard to overestimate. Philosophy of science was even said by Quine to be philosophy enough. Many of the most influential philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century were philosophers of science in large measure, including Quine, Putnam, Dennett, Fodor, and van Fraassen, and others such as Davidson, Lewis, and Rorty were hugely influenced by their engagement with themes from the subject. This centrality and influence declined in the eighties and nineties with the dominance of a priori and conceptual analysis approaches to epistemology and metaphysics. This has led to something of a divide between those who study philosophy through science, and those who do so without it. The intellectual influence of post-war philosophy of science goes much further than philosophy. Karl Popper’s and Friederich Hayek’s ideas about scientific methodology and the social sciences influenced the economists and politicians known as monetarists, including Thatcher and Reagan (Jones 2012). (Popper is also an enduring influence on scientists.) As neo-liberalism flourished in the polis, in the academy a very different philosophy of science came to influence attitudes to science. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, is one of the most cited academic books of all time, and had a profound influence on the philosophy, history, and sociology of science in particular, and the arts and humanities in general.4 It played a central role in the

2 3 4

The papers in Feigl and Brodbeck (1953) represent the interests of this generation in biology, psychology, and social science as well as general philosophy of science. The European Society for Philosophy of Science was founded in 2007. For Kuhn’s ideas see below, and Larry Laudan 1977 and Bird 2000.

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intense arguments about the objectivity, progress, and rationality of science, and continues to be invoked in debates about pluralism, rationality, and relativism. The putative separation of philosophy into “analytic” and “Continental” varieties is in part due to recognition of the different attitudes to science among different communities of scholars, as manifested in the “Science Wars” in North America. Rightly or wrongly, the idea of Continental philosophy became associated with the rejection of science as epistemically privileged, while many analytic philosophers of science aimed to learn the lessons of the history of science without abandoning their positivist roots completely (despite having dropped almost all the positivist theories about the topics detailed below).5

The Demarcation Problem and the Scientific Method The core issue that defined the philosophy of science for many people in the post-war era, as now, is the demarcation problem. Proven reliability in establishing facts gives science a special place in law, medicine, and public policy as well as directly and/or indirectly in individual practical reasoning. The prestige of science means that pretending at it can be profitable. Claims of scientific status for theories involving human beings have political consequences and often motivations (see below). Debate about the rationality of science and the demarcation between science and pseudo-science and non-science is of great social and political importance. Discussions about astrology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and extraterrestrials defined the post-war discussions of the demarcation problem. By the turn of the twenty-first century the subject-matter is more likely to involve climate change, immunization, and homeopathy. It is most commonly thought that if anything singles out science it is its method rather than its theories or subject-matter. Since its inception, modern science has been regarded as constituted not by its product, but by its techniques and procedures, and its rules of inference and testing. The accounts of the scientific method due to the logical positivists and empiricists tended to be in the form of theories of evidence that sought in some way or other, usually with probability theory, to describe relations of verification or confirmation between evidence and theory (see below). These can be called Inductivist in the sense that they suppose deductive logic is not sufficient for an account of the scientific method, and that induction is rational reasoning that is not deductively valid but nonetheless confers knowledge or at least some kind of positive reason to believe (epistemic warrant, not mere permission). 5

See Sokal and Bricmont 1998.

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Popper criticized all forms of Inductivism and argued that theory choice in science is solely about falsification (1959; 1963). Popper thought that induction of all kinds is fallacious and argued that science proceeds by conjecture and refutation, and that theories are only ever so far unfalsified, never confirmed.6 Popper’s “critical rationalism” emphasizes the fallible and provisional nature of scientific knowledge. Classical physics describes phenomena in diverse domains to very high accuracy, and made predictions of qualitatively new phenomena. It had a vast amount of positive evidence in its favor. The rationalists and Kant had in various ways attempted to derive its principles a priori. However, it turned out to be completely wrong for very fast relative velocities and for very small particles, as was shown by relativistic and quantum physics respectively. Popper decided that scientists should actively try to show their most cherished theories to be false as this is how science progresses. According to him, the best theories are those that make precise quantitative predictions, because they are more falsifiable, rather than less precise and qualitative theories, since the latter are compatible with a much broader range of possible evidence and sometimes with any evidence at all. Very vague and general theories can always be modified to accommodate recalcitrant experience and are not scientific according to his demarcation criterion. Popper accepted that sometimes theories are modified rather than rejected in the face of contrary evidence, and argued that modifications must lead to new predictions, not just accommodate data in an ad hoc way. (Lakatos identified different ideas of ad hocness in Popper’s thinking, and developed his own influential account of “The methodology of scientific research programmes” [1978].) Popper’s idea of the “corroboration” of theories that survive many attempts to falsify them seems like equivocation about whether there is really confirmation or not. Many of his ideas, such as the emphasis on precise falsifiable predictions and the avoiding of ad hoc modifications to theories to save them from refutation, had an enduring influence on scientists’ ideas about the philosophy of science. However, despite Popper’s arguments, philosophers of science never gave up on the idea that the inductive or probabilistic logic of positive support bestowed on theories by evidence, or confirmation, is central to scientific reasoning (see below). The Inductivists and Popper had in common a general commitment to the rationality of scientific theory change and the idea that there is some kind of scientific method. They thought the origins of a theory in the thought processes of individuals and groups are a subject for psychology and/or

6

The first chapter (Popper 1963) is a clear introduction to his Falsificationism.

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sociology, not logic or philosophy of science. On the view of many philosophers of science of the post-war period, all that matters is that once a hypothesis is arrived at, deductions of specific and precise empirical consequences are made allowing it to be rigorously tested.7 Philosophers here follow scientists in separating questions concerning the evidence for a theory and its rational acceptability from the contingencies surrounding who first proposed a theory. For example, several people independently thought of the basic idea of quarks, and the Higgs boson owes its name to Peter Higgs, but others had similar models. As noted above, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (and also Polanyi 1946; 1958 and Feyerabend 1975) inspired many to reject the idea of the scientific method altogether. He established his case on the basis of empirical analysis, largely of the Copernican Revolution about which he had written his first book (1957). His theory of science in terms of paradigms was radical. Despite Kuhn later denying the charge that he had reduced science to mob psychology (1977), many have taken his work to show that scientific theory choice owes at least as much to individual, social, and political values and idiosyncrasies as it does to the evidence. Kuhn’s work challenges the view that science is cumulative and progressive, and that it epitomizes rationality in virtue of theory choice having an underlying logic that is free of social and political values. Much work by celebrated philosophers of science of the sixties and seventies was in direct reaction to the challenge Kuhn and others posed to the progress and rationality of science. Imre Lakatos and Karl Popper modified Kuhn’s philosophy to account for anomalous cases in the history of science. Testing views in the philosophy of science with case studies from the history of particular disciplines became and remains part of standard methodology in philosophy of science. Philosophers of science responded to Kuhn with careful scrutiny of his ideas and the case he made for them from the standpoint of history of science. Kuhn’s original presentation of incommensurability and paradigms, and his arguments and evidence for them, did not survive either empirical or theoretical test, as many later studies showed. (For example, the Chemical Revolution, which is his second main example after the Copernican Revolution, does not exhibit the hallmarks of a scientific revolution in Kuhn’s sense: Pyle 2000.) His later work was more nuanced but much less influential. Others who wrote about scientific progress in light of detailed studies of history, 7

Popper proposed his hypothetico-deductivism in the context of a distinction between the contexts of discovery and the contexts of justification in science. A related distinction is made by Hans Reichenbach, the logical empiricist.

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such as Kitcher (1993) and Laudan (1977), never attained the influence of the early Kuhn outside of philosophy of science. Kuhn’s book led to a parting of the ways (see Friedman 2000 for an earlier related divergence). Many took it to show that many of the traditional concerns of the philosophy of science were irrelevant, because they presupposed a single scientific method that was rational and that produced privileged kinds of belief and explanation based on foundations of observation that Kuhn shows do not exist. Kuhn’s principal claim is that existing accounts of the history of science failed adequately to portray the strengths of rejected theories and the rationality of their adherents. Some sociologists and historians of science established the field of Science and Technology Studies that subscribes, implicitly or explicitly, to a view of science inspired by Kuhn’s book (Barnes 1982; Latour and Woolgar 1986). Theory development and change in science is studied as if it were any other belief system and social activity, and the methodology is sometimes radically at odds with the rational reconstructions of theory and evidence that are the currency of analytic philosophy of science (Bloor 1976; Barnes and Bloor 1982). Seeking to explain why a theory was chosen in light of the way the world is an approach to the history of science decried as Whiggish and fanciful in many quarters, but others continue to study the scientific method as if it delivered. CORE TOPICS

The Theory of Confirmation Theories of confirmation are about the relationship between evidence and theory. A great deal of work studies and attempts to formalize the confirmation relation, and to provide quantitative measures of the degree of support between evidence and theory using the mathematical theory of probability (Carnap 1950). For almost everyone except the most ardent falsificationist, at least sometimes evidence can confirm a theory to some degree. In epistemological terms, the evidence justifies or provides warrant for belief in the theory. A theory is verified when it is shown to be true as opposed to there merely being some grounds for belief in it. Verification is, of course, a very high standard. Indeed, many post-war philosophers of science are fallibilists in the sense that they think that a theory can be confirmed without being verified. The Problem of Induction, for example, begins with the observation that no finite amount of evidence for a particular universal generalization, say that all ravens are black, is logically inconsistent with the next observed raven being some other color. Confirmation theory accommodates this by allowing that even a well-confirmed theory may turn out to be wrong.

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The most basic principle in the theory of confirmation is that evidence that conforms to what a theory predicts gives some grounds for belief in the truth of the theory, and is said to confirm the theory. If the theory takes the form of a generalization then this amounts to the principle that a generalization is confirmed by observations of its instances (Nicod’s criterion). Any theory of confirmation must avoid various paradoxes that can arise given seemingly obvious principles about confirmation combined with Nicod’s criterion. Such paradoxes have been subjects of much discussion (Hempel 1945; Swinburne 1971; Glymour 1980; Earman and Salmon 1992; Fitelson 2006). For example, the equivalence condition states that the degree of confirmation is invariant under logical equivalence. For example, “all ravens are black” is logically equivalent to “all non-black things are not ravens,” and so observation of a red shoe, which is a non-black non-raven, confirms “all non-black things are not ravens,” and therefore, by the equivalence condition, confirms “all ravens are black” which seems absurd (the Ravens Paradox). Such problems (including also the Grue problem, Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction) led some philosophers of science to conclude that the confirmation relation cannot be purely logical (Goodman 1955). The alternative is to adopt a historical theory of confirmation that makes which theory is most supported by the evidence depend on historical facts about the development of the theories and the discovery of the evidence (Musgrave 1974). Much is made of the distinction between accommodation, the theoretical recovery of a known fact, and prediction, the derivation in advance of something subsequently observed, with many arguing that there is more confirmation, or perhaps only confirmation, of a theory by evidence that was predicted not accommodated (Snyder 1994; Achinstein 2005; Brush 2007; Barnes 2008; Harker 2008). The historical sciences such as cosmology and palaeontology raise special issues, since there is no possibility of conducting experiments to rerun history. One of the most popular theories of confirmation is Bayesianism. It was championed by many post-war philosophers of science while it was unknown to most scientists. Probabilism and Bayesianism The probabilistic turn in philosophy of science in the twentieth century accompanied the statistical turn in science. Population genetics, epidemiology, and economics are among the sciences that drove this development, and the discovery that radioactivity appeared to be fundamentally random led many philosophers of science to think that there could be irreducible chances in the

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world.8 Meanwhile probability was being applied to understand science itself and especially confirmation (as in Carnap 1950, cited above). Probabilism is the view that beliefs are not all or nothing but come in degrees (credences). It is often argued that degrees of belief are rational only if they satisfy the axioms of the probability calculus by appeal to the Synchronic Dutch Book argument which shows that a gambler with inconsistent bets will always lose on average. Bayesianism goes further by describing how degrees of belief should change in the light of evidence in terms of Bayesian Conditionalization. This is based on Bayes’ Theorem which states that the conditional probabilities relating two propositions are related as follows: P(c/e) = (P(c).P(e/c))/P(e), where P(a/b) = P (a&b)/P(b). In conditionalization P(c) is called the prior probability of c and P(c/e) is interpreted as the (posterior) probability which c should be assigned after e has been learned. This means that, all other things being equal, evidence that was thought to be unlikely without the theory makes for more confirmation. The Diachronic Dutch Book argument concludes that beliefs must be updated in light of new evidence using conditionalization. Subjective Bayesians such as Savage (1972) and Jeffrey (1983) think there are no true probabilities, only subjective degrees of belief. On the other hand, Objective Bayesians, such as Jaynes (1968; 2003), argue that probabilities may still be objective even though they are epistemic. The fundamental idea is that probability should be shared equally among possible outcomes for finite sample spaces. This is known as the Principle of Indifference, and Jaynes’s (1968) mathematical version is based on information theory and called “the maximum entropy principle.” The classic works advocating a Bayesian approach to philosophy of science are by Horwich (1982), Howson and Urbach (1989), and Earman (1992). Influential critiques of Baysianism include Glymour’s “Why I am not a Bayesian” (in his 1980), and Mayo (1996). Influential work in Bayesianism epistemology relates to causal inference via so-called “Bayes’ nets,”9 to measures of the coherence of hypotheses based on the relationship among probabilities,10 and to approaches that take conditional probabilities as primitive. There is also a sizable literature on classical statistical inference with its standard scientific statistical methods of significance testing and the calculation of confidence intervals (see, for example, Mayo 1996). Traditional debates about confirmation and the philosophy of probability and statistics remain entangled with decision theory and formal epistemology (Joyce 1999). 8 9

Hacking describes the history of probability in early modern science (1975), and subsequent developments in statistical science (1990). 10 See Bovens and Hartmann 2003. See Douven and Meijs 2007.

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In the 1990s computation began to be routinely used for modeling and simulation, and data mining and pattern recognition became so sophisticated that it became routine for machines to learn to find projectible regularities in data for themselves. Philosophers of science applied formal learning theory to the logic of discovery and were at the forefront of thinking about AI applied to science itself (Glymour et al. 1987). Explanation One of the most discussed topics in philosophy of science is explanation (Braithwaite 1953; Nagel 1961). The canonical account of explanation, still discussed decades later, is Hempel’s (1965) “covering law” account which comes in two forms, namely, the deductive-nomological and the inductive-statistical, which involve deterministic or probabilistic laws respectively. According to this view, explanation of some event or phenomenon in science involves subsuming it under a general law.11 Critics, including perhaps most influentially, Cartwright (1983), rejected the prominence given to laws and instead argued that scientific explanation should be understood as causal explanation. More generally, she argued that general laws have much less epistemological significance than the particular, often messy and piecemeal approximations and idealizations that are used to describe particular situations. Her work on explanation is closely connected with models and unity as discussed below. On the other hand, Kitcher (1981; 1989) and Friedman (1981) elaborated influential accounts of explanation in terms of unification. Other influential accounts of explanation are by Achinstein (1983), Salmon (1984; 1999), and Woodward (2003).12 While many scientific explanations directly appeal only to the causal powers of concrete objects, some seem to make reference to more or less abstract facts expressed in the language of mathematics. In the advanced sciences mathematics is indispensable, and this is the basis of a much-discussed argument by Quine and Putnam for realism about mathematics.13 The rise of functional explanations in biology renewed interest in teleological forms of explanation, once thought banished from science along with Aristotelianism (see Hempel, “The logic of functional analysis” in Hempel 1965; Millikan 1989). Meanwhile the idea that explanation is crucial to scientific inference, and that it forms the basis of much if not all inductive reasoning (Harman 1965), became the basis of much work in the epistemology of science (Lipton 1991). (Whether explanation is the same thing as understanding is yet to be explained or understood.) 11 12

Critical discussion of it can be found in the essays in Ruben 1993; also Ruben 1990. 13 See also Knowles 1990 and Sklar 2000. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathphil-indis/.

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Underdetermination Duhem (1914) pointed out that an individual hypothesis in a scientific theory does not imply anything of an observational nature on its own, and so cannot be subjected to empirical testing without being combined with a whole host of other hypotheses, background assumptions, and auxiliary hypotheses about initial conditions, the operation of the apparatus, and so on. This means that whenever a theoretical prediction conflicts with the evidence it is never a matter of straightforward deduction where to localize the confirmation or falsification among the host of hypotheses and assumptions from which the prediction was derived. This latitude means that scientists faced with an apparent problem for fundamental theory have to choose whether to revise the latter, or whether to tinker instead with something else. This is a major problem for both falsificationism and confirmation theory. It led Quine in his famous “Two dogmas of empiricism” (1951) to advocate Confirmational Holism, according to which any theoretical hypothesis may be retained in the face of any refuting evidence whatsoever, provided enough changes are made in the rest of the theoretical system. While Quine argues that theory choice is ultimately a pragmatic matter, Kuhn (1977) argues that there is an “essential tension” between conservative and revolutionary tendencies in science and that how to balance them cannot be prescribed by any logic of the scientific method. Both argue that the evidence underdetermines the theory, and this is often known as the “Duhem-Quine thesis” or the “underdetermination” problem. Examples of “empirically equivalent” theories in various sciences, such as wave versus particle theories of light (Achinstein 1991), were analyzed in light of the historical and scientific details. Underdetermination was intensively studied by philosophers of science, especially in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.14 Quine argued that this problem generalizes to the extent that ultimately logic and mathematics and the most basic assumptions about material bodies could be revised in the face of recalcitrant experience, so that confirmation is holistic, applying to a conceptual scheme, where this is understood to be the combination of logic, mathematics, scientific theories, and propositions about physical events and agents’ perceptual experiences and measurement results. The relativist worry that follows is that there are many conceptual schemes compatible with empirical evidence and that they are all as good as each other. The idea of relativity to conceptual schemes is a major current that passes through both the 14

See for instance Harding 1976. Underdetermination and empirical equivalence was studied in relation to spacetime theories by Grünbaum (1963), Glymour (1970), Sklar (1974), and Michael Friedman (1983). Highly technical work across the philosophy of physics continues in this tradition.

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late work of Carnap and Kuhnian philosophy of science. (For an influential critique see Davidson 1974.) Quine’s solution is pragmatism, following Carnap. As explained above many in science studies seem to accept some form of relativism. Laudan and Leplin (1991; 1993) argued against the underdetermination problem as discussed by Kukla (1993). (Another influential discussion is Hoefer and Rosenberg 1994.) For van Fraassen (1980) the underdetermination argument became a central consideration in the rejection of scientific realism (see below). (Bayesian and other theories of confirmation have to offer a solution to the underdetermination problem, and all the texts on Bayesianism mentioned above have sections on it.) It has long been thought that simplicity is a theoretical virtue that may help solve the problem of theory choice. Ockham’s razor famously prescribes against hypothesizing more entities than are needed to account for the phenomena. This is not as simple as it sounds, and there are qualitative and quantitative notions of simplicity. Much work has concerned formalizing the notion of simplicity in the context of the special case of the underdetermination problem of fitting a curve to a set a data points.15 The ideas of underdetermination and relativism about conceptual schemes are often supported by the invocation of the theory-ladenness of observation. Theory and Observation Empiricists take scientific knowledge to be founded on observation. The logical empiricists, notably Carnap, often divided the language of science into observational terms and theoretical terms, in the cause of explicating the meaning of the latter in terms of the former, as well as in analyzing confirmation. Popper pointed out that observations are guided by and described in terms of theories. Hanson (1958) argued that observation is theory-laden in the sense that theory influences both what is observed and how it is observed. Both Feyerabend and Kuhn undermined the positivist idea that there is an objective confirmation relation between scientific theories and the evidence, by arguing that evidence is somehow in the eye of the beholder. However, what exactly is meant by theory-ladenness of observation, and whether it is true, is still much discussed following more recently a prominent debate between Churchland (1989) and Fodor (1990).16 It is now usually assumed that not all observation terms have fixed and precise meanings, and that observation involves the use of sophisticated measuring devices and the recording of magnitudes that are unobservable, 15 16

See Forster and Sober 1994; Kelly 1996; Kieseppä 1997. See also Shapere 1982; Hacking 1983: chapters 10 and 11.

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often only arrived at by machine-assisted computation. Accordingly, the theory–observation distinction is highly problematic, though arguably necessary for the analysis of science. Lewis (1970b) equated observational terms with antecedently specified terms rather than with a primitive notion of observation. In part to understand the relationship between theory and observation, philosophers of science came to pay very close attention to the details of experiments and how they are described (Galison 1987). Reductionism and the (Dis)unity of Science Science is now vast and covers many domains and levels of description. Kuhn’s work was published in an encyclopedia of the unified sciences. The logical empiricists explicitly advocated the unity of science, but this turns out to mean many things. Primarily, for the positivists and Popper, there is the unity of the scientific method. For reductionists there is the unity provided by inter-theory relations such as between chemistry and physics, or statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. The discussions of reduction by Oppenheim and Putnam (1958), Nagel (1961), and Hempel (1966) form the foundation of this subject, along with earlier debates about emergentism in the twentieth century and related discussions in the previous century by Mill. These issues have important implications in the philosophy of mind, where the question of whether or not the mental is reducible to the physical is of great importance. Kuhn suggests that science is not unified in the sense of being based on a single set of fundamental methods and aims for all the sciences at a time, and that conceptions of the right methods and aims change when paradigms change. The unity of science is now much disputed, and many argue that there are many scientific methods – quite distinct ones, for example, in fundamental physics on the one hand, and the social sciences on the other. Cartwright (1994) argued that science is an overlapping patchwork of models without the kind of hierarchy supposed by reductionists and physicalists, and without even consistency between different parts of the whole. Cartwright argues that the relationship between theories, models, and reality undermines what she calls “fundamentalism” about laws. Dupre (1993) argues for what he calls “promiscuous realism.” Such a view is frequently defended in philosophy of biology, where it often seems as if a single scientific term such as “species” or “gene” is understood differently in different parts of the science, and for which pluralism about meaning and reference is proposed. Fodor (1974) argued for the autonomy of the special sciences. Reductionism was revived by Churchland (1981; 1986b) and Bickle (1992). More nuanced conceptions of the relationships among the sciences were articulated by Bechtel

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(1994) and Wimsatt (1994). Emergence and reduction remain much discussed (Beckermann, Flohr, and Kim 1992). T H E P H I L O S O P H I E S O F T H E S C I E NC E S

Philosophy of physics played an important role in twentieth-century philosophy of science. It is fair to say that Popper’s ideas about the nature of science are largely based on his reading of the history of physics. Likewise Kuhn studied the Copernican Revolution (1957) and the wider context of ideas in cosmology and mechanics, though he also discussed the Chemical Revolution (1962). Philosophers of science played a very significant role in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Key articles by physicists were published in philosophy of science journals (for example, Schrödinger 1952), and philosophers of physics studied foundational problems in spacetime and quantum physics intensively (Reichenbach 1958; Grunbaum 1963; van Fraassen 1970; Earman 1971; Fine 1970; Jammer 1974; Putnam 1981b; Redhead 1987; Brown and Harre 1988). Indeed, until the flowering of quantum information theory in physics in the 1990s, Bell’s theorem and the measurement problem, and different approaches to its solution, were largely known better to philosophers than to physicists. Much work in philosophy of physics also concerned thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, with frequent discussion of reduction in the case of the latter (Nagel 1961; Reichenbach 1956; Sklar 1967; Price 1996). Philosophy of chemistry emerged as a subdiscipline in the 1990s with fascinating connections to the philosophy of physics and to central philosophical issues about causation, emergence, ontology, and reduction that are usually discussed in the philosophy of mind. There are debates about the existence of atomic orbitals, the extent of successful reduction in quantum chemistry, and how to characterize chemical kinds. Furthermore, the historiography of chemistry is of crucial importance since the chemical revolution was a central example for Kuhn, and questions about theory choice, realism, and pluralism are much discussed (Scerri and McIntyre 1997; van Brakel 2000). While philosophy of science is often taught and discussed in terms of examples from the physical sciences, philosophers of science engaged with biology from the 1950s and 1960s (for example, Grene 1968), and the journal Biology and Philosophy was founded in 1986. Many of the most interesting issues in the philosophy of science arise at the interface between different sciences, and within philosophy of biology there is much discussion of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary and molecular biology (Kitcher 1984). In addition, the levels of selection problem concerning whether evolution acts directly on genes, organisms, and/or groups is the subject of discussion among biologists (Dawkins

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1976; Sober and Wilson 1998). There are prominent debates about the nature of causation in evolutionary biology and about the definitions of “fitness” and “function,” as well as traditional philosophical questions about individuals and natural kinds applied to species and organisms (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999). Decision theory, game theory, and economics overlap with philosophy of biology and cognitive science (Skyrms 1990). Inference in the clinical, biomedical, and forensic sciences became a major concern for philosophers of science. Important debates concern evidence-based medicine and the status of randomized controlled trials (Cartwright 1987; Papineau 1994; Worrall 2007; see also Godman, this volume, on philosophy of biology). In the study of human beings and animals, prejudice often masquerades as science, and there is a long history of gender and race being the subjects of entirely bogus theories that have nonetheless been taken as authoritative. Feminist and other critiques of science drew attention to cases in the history of science, and in contemporary science, in which erroneous theories have been orthodox among scientists despite lacking evidential support because they fit with social and political values concerning gender, race, or certain groups of people (Keller 1985; Hrdy 1986; Lloyd 1993).17 There was more general discussion of feminism in science and philosophy of science (Harding 1986), and of the role of values in science (Longino 1990). Classification of gender, race, and personality within medical science raises the general problem of the social construction of human kinds (Hacking 1999). Psychiatric classification is particularly problematic in this regard (Cooper 2005). Issues such as the nature of disease and the taxonomy of human psychopathology are thoroughly entwined with philosophical dispute about the human condition and the meaning and purpose of life. Cognitive science is the combination of artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science. As such it came into existence in the post-war era and was championed by philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s. The problem of the relationship between folk psychology and an envisaged reductive science of the mind raises issues about the nature of theories, and, in particular, whether folk psychology should be thought of as a proto-scientific theory. Intense debate ensued about whether folk psychology would be eliminated, with the Churchlands arguing for and Fodor against. The status of explanations and theories in evolutionary psychology is hotly disputed (Dupre 2001), as is the degree to which the mind should be thought of as modular rather than general purpose (Fodor 1983). There are close connections

17

See Harding and Hintikka 2003.

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between debates in philosophy of mind and psychology about computational theories of mind and the naturalization of representation and issues in the philosophy of computation (Putnam 1988b; Chalmers 1996; see also Boden, this volume). The so-called complexity sciences are in fact diverse parts of the natural and social sciences that have in common that they treat of systems with a very large number of components interacting many times in such a way as to give rise to emergent phenomena. Complex systems are studied using approximate and statistical computational models. They raise issues about reduction and emergence and the epistemology of models and simulations. The use of information theoretic techniques is widespread in complexity science, and the latter casts new light on issues of emergence and reduction (Simon 1962; Wimsatt 1972). One of the most prominent developments in philosophy of science has been the study of mechanisms in the life sciences, and how nested processes at different levels of organization are found in living and cognitive systems (Bechtel and Richardson 2010 [1993]; Machamer, Darden, and Craver 2000). FROM ANTI-REALISM TO REALISM AND AROUND AGAIN

Scientific realists think that we ought to believe in the existence of the unobservable entities postulated by our best scientific theories, and that those theories are approximately true. Traditionally, scientific realism is associated with belief in robust notions of causation and explanation. Anti-realists such as Duhem, Mach, and Poincaré rejected atomism as a research program in physics. Having lost that battle after Perrin experiments on Brownian motion (see Chalmers 2011), their successors sought to treat atoms and all other unobservable entities as mere tools for the prediction of observable phenomena. However, dividing scientific theories into observational and theoretical terms proved to be highly problematic, as explained above. Post-war physics was long past any thought of dispensing with unobservable entities, and scientific realism became dominant in post-war philosophy of science as the new science of quantum physics led to the development of solid state electronics and new ways to manipulate and measure the micro- and nanoworld. The standard form of scientific realism came to prominence in the aftermath of logical empiricism through the work of Feigl and Sellars, and the early work of Putnam, among many others. New forms of anti-realism were developed that accepted the semantic presupposition of realists, namely that theoretical discourse about unobservable entities, properties, and processes is meaningful and to be taken literally, is irreducible and truth-apt, and describes an unobservable world of novel objects and properties. Those dissenting from scientific realism attacked either its

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metaphysical or its epistemic components. The former is the standard metaphysical doctrine of an external world whose nature and state are (largely) independent of our beliefs and desires about it and the structure of our cognition. The latter is the claim that our best scientific theories really do refer to unobservable entities and processes and are approximately true and known to be so. The scientific realism debate is largely though not entirely about the epistemological question as to whether we can know that our theories are true, given that they are taken at face value as talking about, for example, quarks and electrons. Reasons for skepticism include the development of quantum mechanics, which has been taken by many philosophers of science to pose particular problems for realism for reasons that cannot be explained here (Fine 1986), the underdetermination problem discussed above, and the past record of empirically successful theories that are now believed to be false. In respect of underdetermination, many have argued that the problem of induction is effectively a form of underdetermination and that theoretical virtues such as explanatory power must be deployed to overcome it, hence can also be used to overcome the underdetermination of theoretical hypotheses, given a class of empirically equivalent ones. Many philosophers have regarded it as akin to the problem of the external world and hence as a kind of skepticism that while irrefutable is also uninteresting. It is commonly argued that there is no special problem with inference to unobservable entities, and hence with scientific realism, because inference to the best explanation is an essential part of ordinary induction. This is often called the “explanationist” defense of scientific realism, and it holds that scientific realism is a naturalistic theory of science, and that the best explanation of the success of science is that it correctly describes the unobservable causes of what we observe. The most compelling arguments against scientific realism are those from theory-change in the history of science, and the most discussed is the pessimistic metainduction. It was once believed that science could deliver the complete and exact truth, but the history of science has taught us that approximate truth is all for which we ought reasonably to hope. Newtonian mechanics and gravitation are accurate to one part in a million in the description of planetary orbits in our solar system. Nonetheless, the Newtonian account of the nature of space and time, and radiation, matter, and forces is quite wrong about fundamentals. Formalizing what it means to say a theory is approximately true turns out to be very difficult (Niiniluoto 1998). There have been many empirically successful theories in the history of science that have subsequently been rejected and whose theoretical terms do not refer according to our best current theories.

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Our best current theories are no different in kind from those discarded theories, and so we have no reason to think they will not ultimately be replaced as well. So, by induction, we have positive reason to expect that our best current theories will be replaced by new theories according to which some of the central theoretical terms of our best current theories do not refer, and hence we should not believe in the approximate truth or the successful reference of the theoretical terms of our best current theories. By contrast, Hardin and Rosenberg (1982) argue that the causal theory of reference may be used to defend the claim that terms like “ether” referred to whatever causes the phenomena responsible for the terms’ introduction. (This is criticized by Laudan [1984]; see also Kitcher 1993 and Psillos 1999.) Van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricism” became the most discussed form of anti-realism (1980; 1989). He argues that the aim of science is to produce true beliefs, but only about the phenomena, not about the unobservable world. He articulates this view in expression of the broader empiricism that led earlier generations of philosophers of science to eliminativism or instrumentalism about theories of the unobservable world. His arguments against scientific realism are focused on explanation and inference and the metaphysics he thinks goes with them, which involves objectionable ideas of cause, essence, law, and modality.18 The debate about standard scientific realism continues, but other forms of realism have also been the subject of much discussion in recent years. Entity realism is defended by Ian Hacking (1983) and Nancy Cartwright (1983). They argue in line with a more general pragmatism that realism should be based on our causal interaction with unobservable objects, not on high theory and fundamental laws. On the other hand, structural realism was revived by John Worrall (1989) as a form of realism that denies that we have knowledge of unobservable entities and celebrates instead the structural knowledge expressed in mathematical relationships that are retained even when the ontology of theories changes significantly.

F R O M T H E O R I E S T O M O DE LI NG

Logical positivism and logical empiricism took mathematical logic to be the tool for the representation of scientific theories and the settling of epistemological questions about them. The framework they used was first-order logic, and the non-logical vocabulary was usually partitioned into observational and theoretical 18

For criticism from realists and a response from van Fraassen, see Churchland and Hooker 1985.

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terms. For some time, it was hoped that the meaning of the latter would be entirely characterized in terms of the former plus logical structure. According to the so-called “syntactic view,” which is the logical empiricist model of science (most developed by Carnap), theories are essentially linguistic entities consisting of a syntax of theoretical and observational terms, and containing correspondence rules linking theoretical terms with the results of observations. For various reasons, not least the failure to partition the language of science into the observational and non-observational, the syntactic view failed. Meanwhile philosophers of science were giving increasing attention to models. Philosophers have sometimes imagined scientific theories to make contact with the world, by sets of initial conditions being conjoined with the fundamental laws, and then specific details being deduced. It is now universally recognized that the application of fundamental theories involves a creative process of model construction that is often multi-stage and involves different forms of abstraction, approximation, and idealization. Modeling is the generic term for this activity. It often now involves computational models and simulations, and it requires computations for calculations. Hesse’s (1963) seminal work on models and analogies in science was followed by much work on models in the context of the so-called “semantic view of theories.” (The classic work on the syntactic versus the semantic views is by Suppe [1977]; see also Suppe 1989; Giere 1988; van Fraassen 1989; 2008.) Cartwright (1983) did much to focus attention on idealization and approximation and modeling (see also Morgan and Morrison 1999). There is a wealth of literature on models in science and specific discussion of causal modeling and simulations. (On simulation, see Winsberg 2009, and on causal modeling see Irzik and Meyer 1987.) FROM POSITIVISM TO THE METAPHYSICS OF SCIENCE

Some positivists rejected entirely such metaphysical ideas as cause, essence, universal, and natural kind. On the other hand, Popper and his school always acknowledged the importance of metaphysics in the history of science. According to Lakatos, metaphysical hypotheses could form part of the “hard core” of research programs. As such he thought with Popper that metaphysical hypotheses were not falsifiable, but nonetheless perfectly meaningful and often inspired theory development. Eventually, a research program may stop bearing fruit, and when it does its metaphysical framework will be abandoned; so in this sense metaphysics on their view is hostage to empirical fortune. Hesse (1961) presented a classic study in the metaphysics of physics. Clearly the idea of a law of nature is central to science. For the logical empiricists, laws of nature are just general statements that figured as axioms in

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theories construed as sets of sentences generated by inference from those laws. If boundary conditions are included, predictions of particular events become possible. For Carnap, the statement of precise laws is an essential characteristic of science. The classic discussion of laws in Hempel (and Nagel) concerns their role in explanation, as shown above. Empiricists, following Hume, usually deny the existence of natural necessity and hence deny any inherent difference between lawlike and accidental regularities. A. J. Ayer (1956) (and Richard Braithwaite 1953) both argued that it is our cognitive attitudes that determine which regularities we raise to the status of laws.19 Quine (1969: chapter 5) argued that physical science dispensed with all modal notions in favor of empirical and extensional statements. An important alternative Humean view of laws, defended by David Lewis (1973) and originating in Mill and Ramsey, is that laws are the “consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organised it as simply as possible in a deductive system” (Ramsey 1990b: 150). Lewis’s take on this is that laws are the result of a trade-off between simplicity and strength. Laws are the theorems and axioms of deductive systems that achieve the best combination of simplicity and strength. On the other hand necessitarians, such as David Armstrong (1985), Fred Dretske (1977), and Michael Tooley (1977), rejected Humeanism and nominalism and argued that laws of nature are relations between universals. More recent work on laws of nature includes Sklar (2000), Roberts (2008), and Lange (2009). Philosophers of science skeptical about the traditional views of the importance of fundamental laws in the analysis of scientific theories include van Fraassen (1989) and Cartwright (1983), who argues for an ontology of causal powers and against Humean accounts of causation in science. Causation was much discussed from a Humean point of view following Mackie (1965; 1980). (See also Sosa 1975.) Salmon (1984) focused attention on causal processes and the problem of how causation relates to correlations. Many scientific theories give causal explanations based on statistical relations, and some philosophers now believe that physics tells us that the world is fundamentally indeterministic. Hence, the traditional view of a cause as being sufficient for its effect may have to be abandoned and replaced by the idea that causes merely alter the probabilities of their effects (Salmon 1984; Cartwright 1989; Eells 1991). Contemporary philosophy of science intersects with the analytic metaphysics of causation, dispositions, laws, and modality in the form of “metaphysics of science.” Under this heading there is much recent discussion of scientific

19

See also Hesse 1980.

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examples of dispositions, essences, individuals, kinds, and powers, such as conductivity, atomic number, species, and force. (On natural kinds see Putnam 1969; Mellor 1977; Dupré 1981; Armstrong 1989; Ellis 2001; Bird 2007.) It is no accident that the rise of the metaphysics of science accompanied the rise of scientific realism after the demise of logical empiricist forms of antirealism, because it is only if science is taken as telling us about more than the phenomena that metaphysics and science overlap. Early work on the metaphysics of science arose out of the debates about theories of confirmation and reference and the seminal discussion of natural kinds by Quine (1969) and Putnam (1975a). CONCLUSION

As it has moved from the general to the particular, philosophy of science has moved from the center of philosophy to its periphery. Philosophy of science is often co-written with scientists and published in science journals and can seem very far removed from the arts and humanities faculties in which philosophy departments are often housed. Philosophers of science are usually trained in formal logic and have a reasonable grasp of mathematical logic, and many have a deep knowledge of it, probability theory, and other parts of mathematics, and increasingly of computer science and computational methods. Familiar questions from the history of philosophy about the a priori, causation, knowledge, and realism find new expression in new sciences and are studied accordingly. The philosophy of science from 1945 to 2015 greatly enhanced our understanding of philosophy and science.

15 A MODERN SYNTHESIS OF PHILOSOPHY AND BIOLOGY mar i o n g o d man

Biology was not of much concern to the logical empiricists, who settled for physics as their model of science and scientific explanation. In the course of the period of this volume, the situation has changed drastically. Philosophy of biology is now a large and respected academic specialization in its own right. There is much to be said for the birth of philosophy of biology coming out of the Modern (Evolutionary) Synthesis (MS) during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. While biologists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, George Gaylord Simpson, and Ernst Mayr launched the MS, philosophers as interpreters and critics played a significant part in determining its faith, as we shall see. Moreover, as noted by Marjorie Grene and David Depew, “The work of defending, expanding, challenging, and, perhaps, replacing the Modern Synthesis has tended to bring out the philosopher in many evolutionary biologists” (2004: 248). So wherein lay the intellectual potency of the MS? One of the central points of the MS was to unify disciplines such as Mendelian genetics, palaeontology, systematics, biometrics, and ecology.1 In particular, the MS aimed to improve on the theoretical framework of Darwin’s evolution by fusing natural selection with Mendelian population genetics. Population genetics allows for studies of evolutionary change and changes in fitness, by studying changes in gene frequencies within populations. This change is thought to occur according to the degree of genetic variation within a population coupled with the degree of heritability of different genes (where heritability is a measure of resemblance between parents and offspring). The idea is then that natural selection is demonstrated by the relative speed and accuracy by which genes replicate. Success in reproduction is supposed to indicate the

1

The MS preceded molecular genetics and the discovery of the molecular mechanism of inheritance empirically that was borne out by the uncovering of the double-stranded DNA molecule using x-ray crystallography. Most now think molecular genetics enhances rather than replaces an evolutionary perspective.

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adaptive superiority of organisms with those genes leaving more offspring than others (see, e.g., Brandon 1978). I will focus on three themes in the philosophy of biology where from the MS and onward there have been particularly high levels of cross-fertilization amongst philosophers and biologists. It is however worth mentioning some of what this focus omits. The domains of ecology and embryology, although envisioned as part of the MS by at least Huxley and Dobzhansky, have always had a bit of a strained relationship with evolutionary theorizing, and the philosophy of ecology has also been rather autonomous in philosophy of biology (Levins 1968). Nowadays topics in immunology and synthetic biology, which would have been seen as peripheral earlier, are also receiving a great deal of philosophical scrutiny. Moreover, many philosophers of biology, rather than turning to the theoretical framework of biology, are more concerned with the (distinctive) scientific practice and methods of biology. First, I’ll look at two debates at the core of the MS, about the nature of species and the dominance of genetic selection, where philosophical engagement has been particularly noticeable and relevant to the development of the MS. Then I will highlight a particular synthesis of philosophy and biology in the study of culture that also casts a new light on the traditional questions of the MS. S O R T I NG O U T S P E C I E S

The quest for the origin and justification for classification of organisms into species lay at the heart of the MS just as it did for Darwin. What explains the diversity of different life forms that is clustered in different kinds of species? Or one can turn the question around as Daniel Dennett (1995b) does and ask why there is not continuous variation, but “gaps in the design space”? One of Dobzhansky’s central themes was to connect the origin of species with the question of the origin of genetic variation. He showed how species are formed as a result of both geographical and genetic mechanisms for isolating populations. He used population genetics to model the variations and changes in chromosomes he had noted in the microscope when studying different species and subspecies of fruit flies (Drosophila) (Grene and Depew 2004: 253ff ). Thus, although there are many salient characters, which are similar amongst members of a species, if the right mechanisms for isolation are in place, natural selection will exploit the phenotypic consequences of genetic diversity within a natural population. Debates soon ensued about what this meant for the nature of species. Ernst Mayr, building on the work of Dobzhansky, claimed that the upshot of the MS

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is that species are constituted by their members’ capacity to generate gene flow. What has become known as Mayr’s Biological Species Concept (BSC) thus states that species are interbreeding natural groups which are reproductively isolated from other such groups (1969). George Gaylord Simpson on the other hand considered selection and maintenance of adaptations within phyletic lineages to be the central moral of the MS (1961). It is unclear whether he explicitly disagreed with Mayr, but he at least seemed to have found Mayr’s “nondimensional” view of species insufficient. For him, individuals with long stretches of historical time between them and which may lack the propensity to interbreed with one another should still be able to qualify as members of the same species if they belong to the same lineage. Simpson’s Evolutionary Lineage Concept hence explicitly proposed that species are historical and not just populations at a particular time-slice.2 Simpson’s view arguably also gained in currency against Mayr when it was translated into the notable research programs of phylogenetics and cladistics, where species were classified in terms of their historical branching relationships (Mishler and Brandon 1987).3 Several other debates have arisen in response to these disagreements – or, perhaps, different points of emphasis. One central issue for philosophers has been to determine how much of a departure from traditional typological or natural kind thinking this post-Darwinian view of species really is. One way to read the success of the population-thinking in the MS is to take it as a vindication of Darwin’s “natural system of classification” (1859: 485). In particular, it can be seen as a vindication of species as classes. If we are concerned with the direction of gene flow and of natural selection in natural populations, it won’t do to study random assortments of individuals. Indeed all the to-do about species in the MS suggests there is something special about species as natural populations. But does this suffice to render species natural kinds? Of course everyone agrees that for species to evolve they cannot be eternal, unchangeable entities. Indeed, evolutionary biology has helped demonstrate that this is a rather unattractive view of natural kinds in science in general! However, further pushback has been offered against the claim that species are types or natural kinds. Since variation between individuals is the central condition for natural selection, the MS seemed committed to thinking that any average within a species would be a mere statistical abstraction – not anything real belonging to

2 3

The other main concern raised against the BSC is how it deals with organisms that reproduce asexually. At the same time it is unclear if this view is compatible with punctuated equilibriums – Eldredge and Gould’s (1972) view that the gaps in the fossil record reflect the fact that long states of equilibrium for species are punctuated by periods of rapid change.

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the population or kind. Thus, it seems an Aristotelean natural state model must fall by the wayside in modern biology (Sober 1980). As Phillip Honenberger (2015) has highlighted, the real starting point for this discussion was Marjorie Grene’s “Two evolutionary theories” (1958) and David Hull’s “The effect of essentialism on taxonomy – two thousand years of stasis” (1965) – two of the first philosophy of biology articles published in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science.4 In her article, Grene focuses on a possible inconsistency she detects amongst the authors of the MS (focusing on Simpson): Insofar as the legitimacy of type or kind concepts is denied, one cannot make reference to notions like “adaptive types” in the accounts of species. Grene elaborates: When evolutionists talk about slight variations, we may ask, variations of what? Of bristle number, or length of limb, or skin pattern or pigmentation, or what you will, but of some trait or other. Variants must differ from their neighbors, however minutely, in some character or characters. But characters are not and cannot be particulars. They are sortals, predicates that sort out different kinds. (1990: 239)

While Grene therefore thinks kind and sortal concepts are both justified and indispensable to biology, Hull is of the opposite view. He believes that any noninstrumental endorsement of natural kinds is doomed to fail. The problem as he sees it is the connection between kinds, classes, and essentialism, and affirming natural kinds would force us to postulate some necessary intrinsic properties which all and only all members of a kind share in common. In his view, the MS just shows that there are no such properties (Hull 1965). His negative thesis also develops into a positive thesis in the case of species. He suggests species are particular individuals rather than classes supporting lawlike generalizations (1976). Species on this view do not have parts or members, but are spatialtemporal slices of the genealogical nexus. The view that species are individuals also seems to fit well with Simpson’s view that species are lineages enabled by Mayr’s interbreeding and reproductive isolation. In the 1980s and onward, we see philosophers of biology give roughly three different responses to this debate about whether species are kinds: The first follows Sober and Hull in their rejection of species as natural kinds, but also embraces the diversity of views on species as indicative of an ontological pluralism, where different epistemic perspectives are allowed to carve up species and the tree of life differently dependent on their interests (e.g. Dupré 1993; 4

Honenberger also nominates Hull and Grene as “two of the most influential philosophers of biology” and notes that two out of the three biennial prizes offered by one of the most important organizations in the field, the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) are named after Grene and Hull respectively (2015: 13).

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Kitcher 1984). The second strategy follows Grene in maintaining the usefulness of natural kind thinking for species and biological kinds in general. Despite variation on the genetic and phenotypic levels, these authors suggest the cluster of traits belonging to each species is something which permits inductive generalizations, although they are not exceptionless. The second strategy also suggests that one can maintain this view without essentialist commitments; species and higher taxa are rather groups of individuals that share a cluster of properties maintained by causal homeostasis (e.g. Boyd 1999). Finally, the third strategy can be traced back to a further reply which Grene herself gave to Hull, which is that there is no inconsistency in taking species both as kinds with individual members and as individuals with temporal parts (Grene 1989). This thought has later been developed by philosophers who suggest species are in fact kinds with historical essences (Griffiths 1999; Okasha 2002). Interestingly, all these options have recently been challenged by Michael Devitt (2008), who has garnered much attention by arguing that biological intrinsic essentialism should be resurrected! H O W DO M I NA N T I S G E N E T I C S E L E C T I O N AND INHERITANCE?

Stephen Jay Gould has compellingly shown how Dobzhansky and Simpson gradually “hardened” their views about the synthesis (1983). The role of natural selection and hence of adaptations at the expense of genetic drift became all the more dominant in their writing. Moreover, selection at the level of molecular genetics also came to dominate over all other possible levels of selection. Toward the end of the 1970s a clear divide between hard adaptationism and its critics emerged in evolutionary biology as well as within philosophy of biology. We can situate the divide in two key publications at the time. First, ethologist Richard Dawkins’s publication of The Selfish Gene gave a forceful expression of the hard adaptationist program by offering an unreservedly genecentered approach to evolution (1976). Dawkins argued that there is good reason to privilege genetic selection over other levels due to the faithfulness by which genes can be copied. In virtue of this, genes are genuine replicators. Such faithfulness in replication, Dawkins argued, matters if there are to be adaptations and cumulative selection where small improvements can be retained over time. Of course genes can only replicate by forming collectives or interactors – what are usually called organisms. However, organisms and phenotypes are ephemeral as they themselves are not capable of genuine replication. The simple and clear logic of the gene’s-eye view of evolution also attracted more

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philosophers to use this framework for explaining, for example, sexual selection (Cronin 1991), human morality (Dennett 1995b), and even the scientific process itself (Hull 1988). The second crucial publication was instead one of the most forceful and influential rejoinders to adaptationism: “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm” by Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979). Some of the points raised were mainly ontological (how likely are adaptations?) and others, mainly epistemological (how can we be sure that a putative trait is an adaptation?). We cannot assume, they argued, that a trait’s current functional role is a guide to the past, nor that it is the reason for the trait’s existence; things that are currently adaptive (e.g. human literacy) may not be adaptations, and, conversely, adaptations may not be currently adaptive (e.g. human taste for sugar). Moreover one should be wary of adaptationism since for an organism in a given environment there are often competing demands, and “optimal” solutions (or “optimal” genes) might not be retained. Finally, many traits may be precisely like the “spandrels” – by-products of adaptations proper. Hence, they concluded, adaptationist explanations should not be a matter of so-called Panglossian faith;5 alternative hypotheses such as drift and by-products also need to be entertained. As a compelling application, philosopher Elisabeth Lloyd has argued that adaptationist bias pervades thinking of the female orgasm when evidence rather indicates that it is a by-product of shared developmental pathways among males and females (2005). Not only were many philosophers heavily influenced by the adaptationist critique of Gould and Lewontin, both biologists taught and actively collaborated with several individuals who became leading philosophers of biology, such as Robert Brandon, Richard Levins, Elisabeth Lloyd, Elliott Sober, and Will Wimsatt. A common theme amongst these writers was to soften rather than harden the MS by postulating different traits and different levels of selection than those that a gene’s-eye view would predict. Lloyd and Gould (1993) built on the core element of population thinking that we saw was stressed already by Dobzhansky, namely, that greater variation of a trait within a natural population – rather than between populations – is typically a condition for natural selection. Based on the palaeontological record, they observed that this may also lead to a kind of species selection. They argued that those species that are divided into subpopulations, where members can explore many more options in different environments, will also have the best

5

A reference to Voltaire’s Candide where the character Dr. Pangloss consistently asserts his confidence in the world we live in being the best of all possible worlds.

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chance to respond to environmental change. In that sense they predict that evolution would select for phylogenetic plasticity: a trait that is selected amongst different species – where each species is a population – and which is not necessarily adaptive at the genetic or individual level. This latter example would be a special case of group selection that more generally was making a return to philosophy of biology especially during the 1990s. Previously many had been persuaded by William Hamilton’s explanations of altruistic behavior in terms of inclusive fitness. Hamilton (1964) had argued that seemingly altruistic behavior should not be explained by group selection, i.e. by the “group of altruists” benefiting. Like many others, he thought that ultimately such selection would be undermined by the possibility of individual defection. Instead he argued for a version of the gene’s-eye view in explaining altruistic behavior toward kin and those prone to reciprocation via the benefits of the chance of reciprocation or the chance of genes shared amongst kin propagating. The tide turned somewhat when biologist David Sloan Wilson and philosopher Elliott Sober developed a framework for multilevel selection, culminating in their influential defense of group selection (1998). In brief, say we have different groups of bonobos (Pan paniscus) that vary according to their trait of food sharing. In their mathematical models, Wilson and Sober showed how those groups with more pronounced food sharing traits will “reproduce” at a greater rate than those who share food less or not at all. Crucially this remains true in their model even if it is more beneficial to the individual bonobo to keep the food to herself. The upshot of their model is hence to offer a more general explanation of altruistic behavior than the gene-centered view can offer. Slightly simplified, their appeal is to count groups according to traits in virtue of which they share a common fate.6 You may have noticed that neither of these models of group selection departs from adaptationism per se, in the sense that they still seek legitimate adaptations, albeit at different levels. However, during the 1990s philosophers, psychologists, and developmental biologists teamed up to develop a more thoroughgoing alternative to the MS. Its first guise was developmental systems theory (DST) (Griffiths and Gray 1994). Central to DST was to extend the notion of inheritance in a similar way as group selection had extended the notion of genetic selection. Both the MS and the gene’s-eye view can rightly be said to ignore what happens between genotype and phenotype. DST in contrast embraced a wide range of heritable developmental resources that contain 6

Admittedly, this is a rather less intuitive way of counting populations than counting organisms or species.

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information allowing the organism to reconstruct a lifecycle (Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray 2001: 3–4). Two key assumptions of DST are made here. One is that a developmental system has the capacity to carry information about what it has been selected to represent – much like many think genes do (Maynard Smith 2000). The other assumption confronts adaptationism itself. According to DST the organisms do not merely passively respond to problems posed in their environment; for example, many organisms build nests and provide a “nursery” for their offspring, thereby directing or at least biasing the selection pressures in important ways. The phrase, niche construction was coined to describe this phenomenon, but whether it is a genuine evolutionary force in its own right remains controversial (for a discussion see Laland and Sterelny 2006). Have the collaborations of DST been successful in overturning the hardening of the Modern Synthesis or the popularity of Dawkins’s gene’s-eye view of evolution? I would say it depends on whom you ask. First, much of the work of DST is now subsumed by the broader paradigm of the Extended (evolutionary) Synthesis that like DST embraces niche construction, epigenetic inheritance, and group and multilevel selection – or simply non-genetic inheritance and nongenetic selection (Mameli 2004). But while I think it is fair to say that this extended MS and partly reformed perspective on Darwinian evolution is rather mainstream amongst philosophers these days, it has yet to become biological orthodoxy. Indeed this is probably what continues to fuel philosophical engagement with the issues. CULTURE ANNEXED?

The last section naturally leads us to the question of how far the MS can be extended. Can human culture also be Darwinized and synthesized along with the rest? Interestingly, although advocates of the MS hardened their stance about genetic selection, they were not averse to including culture in the framework of evolutionary thinking. Culture, after all, is the natural continuation of the central questions of the MS that I’ve described here. If the questions about the nature of species are directed to our own species and its nature, our capacity for creativity and culture is, if not unique, at least one of our most conspicuous capacities. Surely our systems of inheritance and evolutionary forces must have something to say about this. At the same time, evolutionary thinking about culture and the diversity of human life has had to confront the most significant and often harmful aberrations of genetic explanations, first among which is eugenics. This was evident in the resounding response from biologists to the eugenic program that came both during and after the 1959 centennial celebration of the publication of Darwin’s

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Origin of Species at the University of Chicago, where the diversity of cultures was heralded as an important achievement in human evolution (Grene and Depew 2004: 331ff ). Conrad H. Waddington, a developmental biologist who also was an inspiration to the DST, suggested that there might also be a separate system of cultural transmission, and Dobzhansky, who disagreed with Waddington on much, published a book arguing that our genes and culture evolve “hand in hand” (1973). This mid-century consensus amongst biologists was nevertheless broken by E. O. Wilson’s publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and the followup On Human Nature. In the latter publication, Wilson appears to flirt with eugenic notions like using knowledge of human genetics and molecular engineering to possibly change our nature to one of higher intelligence and creativity (1978: 208). In fact, it was Wilson who was the chief antagonist of anti-adaptationist critiques in the 1980s and onward. In the background there were also strong ideological disagreements. Wilson was an avid anti-Marxist who viewed culture with suspicion, as a space where fanaticism could run unleashed. On the other side, there were people like Waddington, Lewontin, and Levine who were committed Marxists. However, the ideas of Wilson were far from uniformly rejected, especially amongst some rebellious anthropologists and psychologists who set out a program of evolutionary psychology. As the name suggests, they focused on adaptationist explanations of universal psychological traits or “cognitive programmes” that in their view tell us, say, what to be fearful of and how to react to a partner’s infidelity. In fact, as part of their methodology, they suggested we should look for indications of how traits may not fit with our current modern environment as indicators that the trait would have evolved in the Pleistocene (Tooby and Cosmides 1990). Evolutionary psychologists on the other hand paid little attention to the creation of that modern environment itself, and we might think that this was the main crux with this program. If we are so unfit for our modern culture, how can it possibly have evolved? In parallel with evolutionary psychology, other Darwinian research programs have tried to address precisely this issue by picking up the proposals of Dobzhansky and Waddington: What if culture can constitute a separate system of inheritance from genetics? Dawkins (1976) and Dennett (1995b), for example, proposed to do this by treating cultural entities such as melodies, and religious and moral ideas, as analogous to genes – that is, replicator memes – which have effective strategies for spreading amongst the minds of humans. Many however felt that memetics would leave too much of human agency and action out of the picture. Accordingly, more recently it has been argued that

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the notion of replication should be replaced by the broader notion of reproduction. Because reproduction need not be high fidelity it can encompass a broader spectrum of social learning where cultural traits are transmitted by observing or imitating habits (Godfrey-Smith 2009; Heyes 2012). The proposal dovetails with one of the ideas we reviewed about species, namely, that cultural kinds (e.g. religions, ideologies, and folk wisdom), because their instances are united by cultural reproduction, could be kinds with historical essences (Millikan 1999; Godman 2015). If cultural traits are also to be able to undergo (cultural) selection, however, several additional conditions to reproducibility arguably have to be met. One is to show that reproduction can suffice for the gradual improvements necessary for cumulative evolution (Sterelny 2006). Another is to demonstrate how genetic selection interacts with, rather than counteracts, the effects of culture. So far mathematical models and simulations for gene-culture co-evolution have been important parts of making this argument (e.g. Richerson and Boyd 2007). Tim Lewens suggests that using these population models to study cultural change can be understood as a kinetic view of culture (2015). Just as the MS relied on changes in gene frequencies within populations as a means of detecting processes of natural selection, the kinetic view of culture relies on changes in learning rules within a population as a guide to when a cultural trait will evolve. Brian Skyrms has for instance investigated how a rule like “imitate your best neighbour” would allow for a population to change quite rapidly (2004). However, as is frequently complained about model-based science, it is still an open question how often, if ever, these conditions are met in the real world. But it is easy to see how research on cultural evolution is engaging – somehow or another, human culture must have evolved. A RETURN TO A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE?

The fascinating ideas involved in the Modern Synthesis have permeated not only philosophy of biology but also many other areas in philosophy, like philosophy of language, metaethics, and epistemology, which I have not been able to cover in this short chapter. In fact, although I have spoken of the exchange, inspiration, and collaborations between philosophers and biologists, I am struck that this may slightly have mis-characterized the enterprise. Instead of philosophy of biology becoming a new specialization uniting philosophers and biologists, what we may have witnessed is instead a modern reinvention of the Aristotelean tradition of a natural philosophy or a philosophy of nature, where an essential part of any study of the living world is its philosophical

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interpretation (see also Godfrey-Smith 2009: 3). And perhaps, to put things pointedly, it may be that for progress on understanding evolution, its key concepts, and their legitimate extension, the increasing institutional demands on specialization, found within both biology and philosophy, is often an obstacle.7

7

Many thanks to Paolo Mantovani who from the outset was able to patiently explain philosophy of biology to me, and for also continuing to help me with this piece.

section three ANALYTIC MORAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

16 THE REVIVAL OF VIRTUE ETHICS an n e bar i l an d a l lan haz l e t t

In the second half of the twentieth century, an influential strain of ethical thinking conceptualized itself as a revival of an ancient ethical tradition, as against modern moral philosophy, and in particular as a recovery of two central ethical concepts: virtue and eudaimonia. This revival paved the way for virtue ethics to be regarded as one of the “big three” approaches in ethics, alongside deontological and consequentialist approaches. Early developments of virtue ethics were eudaimonist, harking back to ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle. Now, virtue ethics is understood as a genus, eudaimonist virtue ethics being only one species (Swanton 2003: 1), and virtue has become an important concept for other approaches in ethics, and in other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology. In this chapter, we provide a sketch of this revival, beginning with the features of modern moral philosophy, discontent with which provided the impetus for the revival, and concluding with some speculations about future developments of virtue ethics and the concept of virtue. T H E C R I T I Q U E O F M O D E R N M O R A L P H I LO S O P H Y

The revival of virtue ethics arose from discontent with the way moral theory was being practiced in the mid-twentieth century – with “modern moral philosophy,” as we may call it, following G. E. M. Anscombe in her essay of that title (1958). By and large, moral theories of the time fell into two categories: deontological moral theories, exemplified by Kant’s ethics, and consequentialist moral theories, exemplified by utilitarianism and by the ethics of G. E. Moore.1 Although deontological and consequentialist theories have many differences, as they were developed and practiced at the time, they shared a number of features, discontent with which led many philosophers 1

See Baxley, this volume, on Kantian ethics since the Second World War, and Arneson, this volume, on consequentialism.

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to explore the possibility of doing ethics in a different way. In this section we will review three such features. The Employment of the Notion of “Obligation” One feature of modern moral philosophy that provoked criticism was its employment of the notion of obligation. One well-known critique, developed by Anscombe (1958), identifies, in modern moral philosophy, “a special socalled ‘moral’ sense” (1958: 5) of terms such as “should,” “needs,” “ought,” and “must.” Such terms, according to Anscombe, have an “ordinary and indispensable” sense, but – she claims – as they are used by moral philosophers, have a “special sense” (5), a “peculiar force” (6), an “atmosphere” (17), which they acquired “by being equated in the relevant contexts with ‘is obliged’, or ‘is bound’ or ‘is required to’, in the sense in which one can be obliged or bound by law, or something can be required by law” (5). Modern moral philosophers, she claims, continued to use the word “ought” with the “special emphasis and a special feeling” (6) with which it was imbued by those who believed in divine law, and God as a lawgiver. That special sense of “ought” made sense against the background of belief in God as a lawgiver. But modern moral philosophers attempt to proceed without God – to keep the authoritative, weighty sense of obligation, of moral law, without the metaphysical baggage of the lawgiver. And without such a lawgiver, Anscombe argues, such philosophers’ importation of the concept of moral obligation – as that concept was employed by theists – is illegitimate, and their claims about moral obligation lack a proper foundation. As Anscombe puts it, “[i]t is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten” (31; see also 33–4; cf. MacIntyre 2007 [1981]: 60, 110–13) – the concept (as Anscombe alternatively puts it) is not “intelligible” (6) or has “no content” (8) or “no reasonable sense” (ibid.) – it “seems to have no discernible content except a certain compelling force, which I should call purely psychological” (18). For those who (unlike Anscombe herself ) reject the theistic worldview that is, according to her, the only one in which this sense of obligation makes sense, the most promising strategy, she suggests, is a return to the ancient ethical tradition exemplified by Aristotle, which does not depend on this sense of obligation. (See further Teichmann 2008: 103–12; Annas 2014: 18–30.) A second objection to the way “obligation” is employed by modern moral philosophers stems not from the “special sense” or “atmosphere” with which it is allegedly imbued, but from the way it is treated as basic or fundamental. This critique is made e.g. by Bernard Williams (1985: 179). Modern moral philosophy, it is argued, reduces ethics to the theory of obligation (17–18). But this runs

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roughshod over important features of the ethical landscape. Williams cites the idea that there is a duty “to do good to those who have done services for you” as an attempt “to force into the mold of obligation” the idea that “it is a sign of a good character to want to return benefits” (179). A related objection stems from the demand, implicitly accepted by modern moral philosophers, that a moral theory be fully codifiable, paradigmatically in a comprehensive set of rules, or even a decision procedure that agents may use to decide how to act in each particular circumstance in which they may find themselves (McDowell 1979; Louden 1984: 228–9; Berker 2007: 109–10; Shiu-Hwa Tsu 2010). By reducing ethics to the theory of obligation, and by assuming that morality may in principle be fully captured in a set of rules, modern moral philosophy fails to recognize the important role for important concepts – notably virtue, character, and wisdom. Impartiality as a Moral Ideal A second supposedly objectionable feature of modern moral philosophy (and much contemporary moral philosophy as well) is a commitment to the ideal of impartiality. A central theme of Williams’s ethical writings – including his contribution to Utilitarianism: For and Against (Smart and Williams 1973), “Persons, character, and morality” (1981b: chapter 1), and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) – is the rejection of impartiality as a moral ideal. Williams argues that both deontological and consequentialist approaches are committed to impartiality. Kantian ethicists, for example, maintain that: “[T]he moral point of view is specifically characterized by its impartiality and its indifference to any particular relations to particular persons, and that moral thought requires abstraction from particular circumstances and particular characteristics of the parties, including the agent” (Williams 1981b: 2). Utilitarianism, Williams argues, is also committed to the ideal of impartiality, making the rightness or wrongness of actions depend only on how much happiness is promoted, without regard to whose happiness it is.2 Indeed, as Williams stresses (1973a: 95; 1981b: 3–4; 1985: 76–89), in a utilitarian framework, individual agents drop out of the ethical picture: States of affairs of happiness being instantiated are the basic units of value for the utilitarian, and these are agglomerated in the calculus of utility, regardless of whose happiness is instantiated. Two related forms of argument are deployed by Williams against the ideal of impartiality. First, Williams suggests that the ideal of impartiality is overly 2

Consistent with this, when utilitarians argue that it is permissible to give the happiness of those near and dear to one more weight in one’s calculations, they justify this on impartialist grounds.

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demanding, requiring, for example, that a committed opponent of chemical weapons take a job at a chemical weapons laboratory, in violation of his commitment, because it will have the best overall consequences (1973a: 97–8). Second, Williams suggests that the ideal of impartiality implies a vicious psychological profile. Forced to choose between saving your spouse and saving a stranger, proceeding impartially – for example, reasoning that it is generally best for people in such situation to give preference to their spouses, and thus that you ought to give preference in this case to yours – hardly seems like what a good person would do (1981b: 17–18). To think impartially about what to do, in this case, involves “one thought too many” (18) – what we expect from a good person is a simpler motivation: mere and unqualified concern for their spouse. (See further Stocker 1976.) The problem with the ideal of impartiality, according to Williams, is that it ignores the fact that we each have what he calls a “character,” constituted by a special set of “desires, concerns, or . . . projects” (1981b: 5). What makes this set of desires, concerns, or projects special is the role it plays vis-à-vis the meaning of our lives, i.e. that which gives us reasons to go on living; such “ground projects” are what make our lives worth living (10–14). And it would be “absurd” and “unreasonable” to ask someone to go against such a project, i.e. to violate their character, even if doing so would be best from an impartial perspective (14) The ideal of impartiality “does not give our convictions enough weight in our own calculations” (Williams 1985: 86) and “makes integrity as a value more or less unintelligible” (Williams 1973a: 99). This critique of the ideal of impartiality is related to modern moral philosophy’s focus on actions as opposed to persons, which is manifested by modern moral philosophy’s focus on obligation (see above). Consequentialist moral theories are insensitive to the importance of character because they treat states of affairs, rather than persons, as the fundamental bearers of moral value. But, as Williams says, “[w]e do not merely want the world to contain certain states of affairs,” we also want “to act in certain ways” (1985: 56). Deontological moral theories are insensitive to the importance of character because they treat people as interchangeable – consider Kantian universalization or Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” both designed to abstract away from the differences between people. “Unless you are already disposed to take an impartial or moral point of view,” Williams argues, “you will see as highly unreasonable the proposal that the way to decide what to do is to ask what rules you would make if you had none of your actual advantages, or did not know what they were” (1985: 64). The ideal of impartiality can be seen, then, as a consequence of modern moral philosophy’s neglect of the properties of persons (e.g. virtue) in favor of the properties of actions (e.g. rightness).

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The Fact/Value Dichotomy A third allegedly problematic feature of modern moral philosophy is that it draws a sharp distinction between fact and value. In After Virtue (2007 [1981]), Alasdair MacIntyre defends Aristotelian ethics as an alternative to modern moral philosophy – indeed, as an alternative to modernity itself. Modern moral philosophy, MacIntyre argues, fails to provide a foundation for ethics or “justification of morality” (cf. chapters 5 and 6; see also Anscombe 1958; Foot 1978; Williams 1985: chapters 2–4). MacIntyre complains that “[t]here seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture” (MacIntyre 2007 [1981]: 6; cf. 21) which is symptomatic of the fact that “the language of morality is in [a] state of grave disorder,” as “we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality” (2). What is needed is something that could settle moral disagreements, which modern moral philosophy, given its insistence on the fact/value dichotomy, inevitably cannot provide. The dichotomy stands in the way of providing a foundation for ethics in the form of Hume’s “is–ought” principle that “from a set of factual premises no moral conclusion validly follows” (56; see also Anscombe 1958: 31–2). If this principle is assumed, the possibility of rationally securing moral agreement – e.g. by appeal to factual premises – seems to be precluded. However, MacIntyre argues, the principle is false: From “He is a sea-captain” it follows that “He ought to do whatever a sea-captain ought to do” (2007 [1981]: 57), from “This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably” it follows that “This is a bad watch” (57–8), and from “His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows” it follows that “He is a good farmer” (58). The fact/value dichotomy, so the argument goes, is the culprit here. Once the rationally determinable world of facts is sharply distinguished from the inscrutable world of values, there is no hope for providing a foundation for ethics. Moral debate degenerates into a rhetoric contest of emotional pleas; moral knowledge gives way to mere opinion, taste, and preference.

POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS

The discontent with modern moral philosophy discussed above led a number of philosophers (see e.g. Foot 1978; Wallace 1978; Annas 1993; Becker 1998; Hursthouse 1999) to return to the ancient ethical tradition, exemplified by Aristotle, that includes virtue and eudaimonia as central concepts. In this section we sketch the main features characteristic of this revival and explain how these innovations are employed to do moral philosophy in a way that doesn’t fall prey to the above objections.

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Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics We have seen that the revival of the ancient ethical tradition arose, in part, from a discontent with modern moral philosophy’s use of the notion of obligation. To see how the theories developed as part of this revival did not depend on the notion of obligation in this (allegedly) problematic way, we must explain three features of ancient ethical theories: (i) They are virtue ethical; (ii) they are eudaimonistic; and (iii) they do not aspire to be hierarchical and complete. We will explain each in turn. First, the revival of ancient ethical theories is marked by a shift in focus, from obligation to virtue. At the most basic level, the difference between focusing on obligation and focusing on virtue is a difference in the bearer of the relevant property: Being obligatory is a property of actions; being virtuous (or possessing suchand-such particular virtue) is a property of persons. As Williams (1985) argues, this makes a difference when it comes to how we articulate the subject-matter of ethics: The modern moral philosopher’s question is “What is the nature of right action?”; the virtue ethicist’s is “What sort of person am I to become?” (MacIntyre 2007 [1981]: 118). While there is no widely accepted definition of “virtue ethics,”3 for our purposes we may follow Christine Swanton (2003) in defining virtue ethical theories as those that understand the notion of virtue as “central in the sense that conceptions of rightness, conceptions of the good life, conceptions of ‘the moral point of view’ and the appropriate demandingness of morality, cannot be understood without a conception of relevant virtues” (Swanton 2003: 5; see also Annas 2011: 35). In the most general terms, a virtue is a character trait, i.e. a set of strongly entrenched and systematically interrelated dispositions – dispositions to act (and to act in a certain manner, for certain reasons), reason, feel, value, choose, perceive, respond (behaviorally, attitudinally, emotionally), and so on – that are partly constitutive of being a good person.4 Traits frequently recognized as virtues include honesty, courage, temperance, charity, and justice. But whether a given virtue ethicist regards a trait as a virtue depends both on how they understand that trait and, more importantly, on what according to them makes a trait a virtue. This brings us to the second feature of ancient ethical theories 3 4

For some proposals, see Solomon 1988; Schneewind 1990; Trianosky 1990; Crisp 1996: 5; Driver 1996: 111; Oakley 1996; Santas 1993; Watson 1997; Russell 2009: ix; Snow 2010: 1–2. Character traits, as they are understood by virtue ethicists, are, in John Doris’s terminology, “global” rather than “local” traits (Doris 1998; 2002; see further Miller 2013: chapter 1). In contrast with a virtue ethical view that understands virtues as traits that span only a narrow range of circumstances (for example, classroom-examination-honesty or online-survey-honesty), virtue ethicists recognize a virtue of honesty, understood as a single coherent trait that may be expressed in test taking, online surveys, conversations with friends, and many other contexts. More on this below.

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that is important to explain in order to give a full account of their structure: eudaimonism. Ancient ethical theories were eudaimonist (from the ancient Greek eudaimonia, translated variously as flourishing, happiness, or well-being). Adapting Swanton’s definition of virtue ethics, above, we may define eudaimonist views as those that treat eudaimonia as “central” in the same sense that virtue is central for all virtue ethicists. On a eudaimonistic view, ethics concerns one’s life as a whole (Annas 1993: chapter 1). By contrast with the modern moral philosopher’s question of right action, the focus is widened, both synchronically, to encompass all of a person rather than one particular action she performs, and diachronically, to encompass a person’s entire life rather than one moment in it. Moreover, what is sought are not just the conditions of the good life for me in particular, but “the conditions of the good life . . . for human beings as such” – “the reasons we all share in living in one way rather than another” (Williams 1985: 22). The eudaimonist answer, at a most general level, is to live well – to realize eudaimonia in one’s life – and, more particularly, to become a certain kind of person. The question “How should I live?” becomes “What kind of person should I be?” For the eudaimonist, then, the virtues are those traits that are suitably related to (e.g. necessary for, necessary and sufficient for, or generally conducive to) the eudaimonia of the possessor; and the traits that realize eudaimonia, eudaimonists believe, as a matter of fact, are genuine excellences. Both eudaimonia and virtue, then, are central notions in ancient ethical theories. The reader may wonder why we have depicted ancient ethical theories as treating the notions of eudaimonia and virtue merely as central, rather than as basic in the sense that other notions, such as obligation, may be defined in terms of them, or justified by reference to them. To explain why, we must introduce the third feature of ancient ethical theories, usually treated as part and parcel of eudaimonist virtue ethics, but conceptually distinct from both eudaimonism and virtue ethics. Ancient ethical theories reject the demands, implicitly or explicitly accepted by modern moral philosophers, that a moral theory be hierarchical and complete: that it takes some set of notions as basic, and derives all other elements from these basic notions (Annas 1993: 8–10; see further Slote 1989 [1983]: vi; 1997: 178). (It is, in part, for this reason that we have opted for a broad definition of virtue ethics, rather than one that defines virtue ethical theories as those that hold that goodness or rightness derives from, or is ultimately explained in terms of, the virtues: Such a definition would be inconsistent with virtue ethical theories that reject the demands that a moral theory be hierarchical and complete.) This eschewing of the aspiration to hierarchicality and completeness goes hand-in-hand with the rejection of the ideal of codifiability. There is no set of

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rules that can, even in principle, tell us how to act or how to live because acting and living well essentially requires practical wisdom (“phronesis”), which involves, at least, perceptual excellence, i.e. “the ability to discern, acutely and responsively, the salient features of one’s particular situation” (Nussbaum 1990: 37) and deliberative excellence, i.e. correctly identifying the good at which it is appropriate to aim, and the means by which one ought to achieve it (Aristotle 2000: book vi, chapter 9; Russell 2009: 24). Ethics isn’t codifiable – even in principle – into a set of rules, because grasping the situation, and the appropriate thing to do in the situation, requires practical wisdom. Any rule that could be grasped by virtuous and non-virtuous alike is not going to be essential to what the virtuous person, as a practically wise person – a phronimos – knows (Hursthouse 1999: 39–42; 2011). We can see how theories with these features are not susceptible to worries about the role of obligation in modern moral philosophy (pp. 224–5 above). On this approach to ethics, ethical inquiry begins from the question of how to live, and what kind of person to become. There is room for a plurality of concepts – obligation, as well as virtue – but no single notion is regarded as fundamental in the sense that all other notions may be understood in terms of it. Nor is there reason to be suspicious that the notion of an obligation is imbued with some peculiar force or atmosphere. Obligations – flowing, as they do, from the good life and the ideal of an admirable person – are not obligations in the sense that Anscombe argues are unsupportable in a secular framework, nor are they meant to identify some special, narrow, “moral” realm. Nor is the question that is, on the ancient ethical approach, treated as the central question of ethics – “How should I live?” – intended to have some kind of special moral meaning; the question ancient ethical theories seek to answer is just how to live, overall. This is evidenced in such ethicists’ substantive accounts of eudaimonia, and particularly of the virtues, which typically include not only traits whose paradigmatic expressions are other-regarding, such as justice and charity, but traits whose paradigmatic expressions concern the self – traits like temperance and chastity – and traits that may not seem “moral” at all, like wit. We can see this more clearly when virtue and eudaimonism are viewed in the context of the other features characteristic of the revival, to which we now turn. Virtuous Partiality A second, related feature characteristic of the revival of virtue ethics is a departure from the ideal of impartiality (pp. 225–6 above). One such departure derives from the fact that, according to eudaimonist virtue ethics (see above), the virtues are those character traits suitably related to the eudaimonia of the

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possessor. Eudaimonism thus represents a kind of endorsement of partiality, giving the individual agent pride of place in the structure of the theory of virtue. As Aristotle puts it, a person’s eudaimonia is the highest good, at which all of her actions ultimately aim (Aristotle 2000: book i, chapter 1). (Note well, however, that this does not imply that the virtuous person will act with her own eudaimonia in mind – nor, for that matter, does it imply that the virtuous person will act with her own virtue in mind [Baril 2013]. Contrast ethical egoism, on which self-interest provides the criterion of right action, which thus recommends deliberation framed in terms of what will benefit you.) Eudaimonist virtue ethics, then, is well positioned to acknowledge the importance of personal projects and character, in a way that modern moral philosophy is not. A second departure from the ideal of impartiality derives from the fact that many eudaimonist virtue ethicists have inherited from Aristotle a particular conception of eudaimonia, in virtue of which their theories are partialist in a further sense. This conception emphasizes the social and political aspects of human nature. Human beings are essentially “social animals,” whose flourishing requires various forms of friendship – including family ties and the bonds of citizenship – and thus corresponding forms of partiality toward the relevant friends (Aristotle 2000: book ix, chapter 9). These neo-Aristotelians are thus in a position to account for the ethical importance of persons, and their interpersonal relationships, which the ideal of impartiality obscures. Relative Goodness Modern moral philosophers have frequently maintained that the foundation of ethics consists of the truth about what is absolutely good, following either Kant in basing their account of right action on the premise that the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will (Kant 1996 [1785]: §i) or Moore in defining right action as that which will bring about the best state of affairs (Moore 1993 [1903]). One feature characteristic of the revival of virtue ethics is the rejection of this conception of the foundation of ethics, and, in particular, the notion of absolute goodness. Some argue that the very idea of absolute goodness is confused, arguing that “good” is an essentially “attributive” adjective, akin to “big.” Just as there is no such thing as being absolutely big, but only being a big house, a big clock, or a big shrew, so there is no such thing as being absolutely good, but only being a good parent, a good carpenter, or a good human being (Geach 1956). Others find that they simply have no idea what it might mean to say that some state of affairs is simply good, without qualification (Foot 1983). And still others argue that the existence of absolute goodness is an unnecessary theoretical posit (Kraut 2011). If any of these philosophers is right,

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then the project of seeking a foundation for ethics in absolute goodness is ill conceived (Williams 1985). For many eudaimonist virtue ethicists, goodness is always relative, in some sense. On one account, known as “naturalism”5 (Wallace 1978; Thompson 2008) inspired by Aristotle’s “function argument” (2000: book i, chapter 7) goodness is relative to biological species or “life form.” In rough outline, Aristotle’s idea is that some kinds of things – species of living things in the paradigm case – have a characteristic function that determines what it is for members of those kinds to be good instances of those kinds. In the case of living things, proper functioning amounts to flourishing as a member of a particular species, and in the case of human beings such flourishing amounts to rational activity. Another account, defended by MacIntyre (2007 [1981]), makes goodness relative to “practices” – complex, internally coherent, historically situated, contingent forms of socially established cooperative activity – which are, in turn, embedded in traditions (191, 222). According to MacIntyre, the virtues, roughly, are those qualities that enable us to realize the goods internal to practices (2007 [1981], but see further MacIntyre 1999). In any event, the truth about what it takes to flourish as a member of a particular species or about what qualities enable people to realize certain practice-internal goods are matters of fact – “is” claims – but also evaluative truths – “ought” claims. If successful, these accounts bridge the “is–ought” gap – or, more accurately, show that there is no such gap in the first place. In this way, the rejection of absolute goodness and the appeal to relative goodness avoid the problems posted by the fact/value dichotomy (p. 227 above).

VIRTUE ETHICS AND VIRTUE IN ETHICS

The notions of eudaimonia and virtue were revived together, and today eudaimonistic virtue ethics – especially the Aristotelian, naturalist, eudaimonist virtue ethics articulated by Rosalind Hursthouse (1999) – is the most wellknown example of a virtue ethical theory. (For a review of the ethical theories of other Classical eudaimonists, see Annas 1993; for development of a Stoic virtue ethics, see Becker 1998.) But as noted above, virtue ethics is best regarded as a genus, of which eudaimonist virtue ethics is only one species.6 In this section we briefly consider some of the other species of virtue ethical theories. 5 6

But to be confused neither with philosophical naturalism nor with naturalism in metaethics. Swanton 2003: 1. Or, better, virtue theories may be thought of as a family, of which eudaimonist theories are just one genus, including different species, depending on, for example, the particular account of eudaimonia that is offered as part of the account.

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One non-eudaimonist virtue ethical approach is the agent-based virtue ethics developed by Michael Slote (1989 [1983]; 1992; 1997; 2001). Slote’s approach is perhaps the purest virtue ethical approach, treating “the moral or ethical status of acts as entirely derivative from independent and fundamental ethical/aretaic facts (or claims) about the motives, dispositions, or inner life of moral individuals” (2001: 7; see also 1997: 178). According to Slote: “An act is morally acceptable iff it comes from good or virtuous motivation involving benevolence or caring (about the well-being of others) or at least doesn’t come from bad or inferior motivation involving malice or indifference to humanity” (2001: 38). The benevolence in question, Slote says, could be either universal benevolence, or “partial or partialistic benevolence, of caring more for some people than for others” (1997: 224; see also 2001: 29). Slote’s preferred model is that of partial benevolence. He locates his approach in the care ethics of Nel Noddings (1984) and Carol Gilligan (1982) and, historically, in the British Sentimentalist tradition that includes Martineau, Hutcheson, and Hume. Another non-eudaimonist approach is the consequentialist approach developed by Julia Driver (2001), on which “a virtue is a character trait (a disposition or cluster of dispositions) that, generally speaking, produces good consequences for others” (2001: 60). Good intentions, inclinations, or so on, are important, but only contingently, insofar as they tend to produce good consequences. Driver also diverges from eudaimonist accounts in denying that practical wisdom, as it is understood by eudaimonists, is necessary for virtue. She makes a case that there are character traits, such as modesty, that inherently involve a kind of epistemic defect that is incompatible with practical wisdom, as it is understood by the Aristotelians, but which tend to produce good consequences, and thus are, according to her, virtues. One objection to consequentialist approaches is that they do not seem to fully capture the various kinds of responses to the world that are, intuitively, expressive of virtue. Christine Swanton (2003) proposes a pluralistic virtue ethical theory according to which virtue is a disposition to respond well to the demands of the world, where this involves a plurality of modes of moral responsiveness – promoting, honoring, appreciating, loving, and respecting, for example – and a plurality of bases of moral acknowledgment: different types of morally significant features that warrant different types of response. Virtue will involve, for example, fostering bonds between people, respecting individuals in virtue of their status, promoting the good of a stranger, or appreciating natural and aesthetic objects. Robert Merrihew Adams (2006) gives an account of virtue as “being for” the good. Adams defines virtue as persisting, intrinsic excellence in “being for” the good, where there are a plurality of ways of “being for,” including loving,

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respecting, wanting, appreciating, and standing for. There are also a plurality of goods that human beings can be for, but, for Adams, the good is ultimately identified with God, who is the (explicit or implicit) object of all virtuous motivation. Also relevant here is the account of virtue given by Thomas Hurka (2001). Hurka begins with a claim about what is intrinsically good (pleasure, knowledge, and achievement) and understands virtue as loving the good, where, again, this involves a plurality of things, e.g. desiring, pursuing, or taking pleasure in.7 (Virtue ethics, as Hurka understands it, does not understand virtue as relating to something that is independently good; this is one of the central reasons why Hurka conceives of himself as an opponent to virtue ethics – as he understands it.) Virtue itself, according to Hurka, is intrinsically good because, he proposes, if x is intrinsically good, then loving x is intrinsically good (and hating x intrinsically evil). Accepting this recursion clause makes it possible for consequentialist and deontological theories to regard virtue as intrinsically valuable, undermining – in Hurka’s view – a main reason for seeking a virtue alternative to these views. It is worth noting that not all the positions we have included in this review are classified as virtue ethical by their proponents. On Hurka’s and Driver’s own narrower understandings of virtue ethics, for example, they are developing accounts of virtue that are an important part of their respective consequentialist ethical theories. One important consequence of the revival of virtue ethics is that it has stimulated important work on the role for, and nature of, virtue in the moral theories of other important figures in Western philosophy, including Hume (Frykholm 2015; Swanton 2015), Nietzsche (Swanton 2015), and Kant (O’Neill 1996b; Engstrom 2002; Denis 2006; Betzler 2008; Baxley 2010).

CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Since its revival, virtue ethics has flourished as an area of philosophical research, stimulating the development of work on the virtues in other areas of philosophy, most notably, epistemology. Early reliabilist accounts of knowledge and justification focused on beliefs as “outputs” of “processes” (see especially Goldman 1979). Some epistemologists have urged the importance of intellectual agency in connection with the theory of knowledge, by defending the 7

Note that Hurka understands a virtue as an “intentional relation” (alternatively, “attitude” (Hurka 2001: 20) to good and evil (11), and thus as “atomistic”: virtue “exists in occurrent desires, actions, and feelings regardless of their connection to more permanent traits of character” (42).

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manifestation of intellectual virtue – understood (roughly) as a capacity to reliably form true beliefs and to avoid forming false beliefs – as a necessary condition on knowledge (see Zagzebski 1996; Greco 1999; 2003; 2010; Sosa 2007; 2011; 2015; Turri 2011; Miracchi 2015). Other epistemologists have pursued an inquiry into the nature of intellectual virtue (and of particular intellectual virtues such as e.g. open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual autonomy) as distinct from and orthogonal to the theory of knowledge (e.g. Baehr 2011; Roberts and Wood 2007). More recently, the concept of virtue has begun to feature more prominently in aesthetics. Are there “aesthetic virtues,” such as creativity or good taste? Does aesthetic appreciation require, or play a role in developing, a certain kind of character? Does artistic achievement require the manifestation of aesthetic virtue? Matthew Kieran’s recent work (2010; 2011; 2014) gives a glimpse of the resources that become available when we introduce virtue concepts in aesthetics. While the virtue ethics revival is primarily a revival of the idea from Western, and in particular Ancient Greek, philosophy, recent work bringing Western virtue ethics into contact with other philosophical traditions offers the prospect of advancing the study of virtue. Just as virtue ethics and Kant’s ethics have benefited from being brought into contact with one another (Jost and Wuerth 2011), so too may there be mutual benefit in bringing together virtue ethics and non-Western ethical traditions. A number of recent essays have begun this exploration, bringing virtue ethics into contact with ethics in Hindu, African, Indian, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions (Perrett and Pettigrove 2015; Metz 2014; Bilimoria 2014; Alpyagil 2014; and Davis 2014, respectively). Of special note is the recent work bringing virtue ethics into contact with the Confucian tradition (Angle and Slote 2013), and arguing that Confucian ethics, or the work of figures in the Confucian tradition such as Mencius, is best understood as a kind of virtue ethics (Van Norden 2003; Loy 2014; Sim 2015). Finally, as the philosophical study of virtue advances, we become increasingly aware that there are issues that arise in the course of the study of virtues that are best addressed in a cross-disciplinary investigation. Consider the question of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics. Recall that virtue ethicists usually understand the virtues as character traits. Some critics of virtue ethics, such as John Doris (1998; 2002), have suggested, on empirical grounds, that human beings do not have the kind of character traits posited by virtue ethicists, where this would imply that a person has a kind of consistency across many different situations (e.g. that she is honest whether she is at home, at work, or at the bar, whether she is feeling relaxed or anxious, and whether she is being observed by others or not). In general, virtue ethicists have believed they can adequately defend virtue

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ethics against these critiques without the need to appeal to empirical evidence (e.g. by arguing that virtue ethicists have a different understanding of character than the one that critics attribute to them: Kamtekar 2004). More recently, Christian Miller (2013) has argued, on empirical grounds, that human beings do have character traits that are consistent in the way that Doris denies, but that the traits we have seen empirical evidence of fall short of being virtues. This debate has suggested the need for virtue ethicists – if they are to address the question of how life is to be lived – to engage with empirical psychology, in order to determine whether it is possible to be virtuous, whether it is appropriate to aspire to be virtuous, and, if so, how one should go about becoming virtuous.

17 KANTIAN ETHICS an n e mar gar e t b ax l e y

Kant’s ethics has played a prominent role in discussions about the nature and scope of morality, moral obligation, and moral rightness since the publication of its first systematic expression in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785. Although eclipsed in popularity by the utilitarian moral theory that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kant’s views have remained a constant source of inspiration and debate for contemporary moral and political theorists. By highlighting some of the most significant developments in the field of Kantian ethics during the past seventy years, this chapter aims to reaffirm Kant’s pride of place as one of the most influential moral theorists in the history of philosophy. THE REVITALIZATION OF KANTIAN ETHICS: A BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The period beginning in 1945 and culminating in 2015 saw a striking resurgence of scholarship devoted to the interpretation of Kant’s ethics and the flourishing of Kantian ethics more generally. The first major contribution to the study of Kant’s moral theory in the Anglo-American tradition during this period was H. J. Paton’s lucid exposition in The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (1947), focused principally on the fundamental aspects of Kant’s moral theory in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. The Groundwork is one of the most important texts in the history of ethics and the starting point for studying Kant’s moral theory. It is the work in which Kant seeks to discover, formulate, and justify the supreme principle of morality (the Categorical Imperative) – a principle he sees as part of common rational moral cognition. Paton’s incisive analysis of Kant’s account of morality, which draws upon his extensive knowledge of Kant’s entire philosophical system, remains a classical appraisal of Kant’s views. By skillfully illuminating the cogency of Kant’s arguments concerning the nature and grounds of moral obligation, and by defending his views against a host of objections and misunderstandings that 237

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stand in the way of an unprejudiced approach to Kant’s text, Paton demonstrated the vital importance of Kant’s views for ongoing debates in moral philosophy. In addition to his own influential scholarship, Paton’s 1948 renowned English translation of the Groundwork gained Kant a wider audience among English-language readers, and was considered the definitive English edition of Kant’s famous text (along with Abbot’s elegant translation of 1888) for much of the latter part of the twentieth century. A second noteworthy development in the revival of Kant’s ethics in the postwar period was the publication, in 1954, of W. D. Ross’s Kant’s Moral Theory: A Commentary on the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, near the end of Ross’s esteemed career. Although exceedingly brief and often highly critical of Kant’s views, Ross’s work stimulated renewed interest in Kant’s moral theory in the latter twentieth century, in part by bringing deontology back into the spotlight if not into vogue. Ross rejected a number of key Kantian ideas about moral rightness, moral obligation, and moral motivation. For example, he argued that Kant was mistaken to hold that an action is right only if it falls under a principle that can be universalized, and wrong if its principle fails the universalization test. Further parting with Kant, Ross repudiated Kant’s central claims that there is only one genuinely moral motive for action and that duties are unconditional commands, admitting of no exceptions. Ross’s well-known theory of prima facie duties – the theory that duties are binding all-thingsconsidered, unless they are trumped or overridden by some other duty – was developed at least partly in reaction to Kant’s stricter view that moral requirements are Categorical Imperatives that hold absolutely. Yet, despite these points of substantive disagreement with Kant, Ross’s sustained and serious engagement with Kant’s moral theory served to underscore its broader significance for a new generation of moral philosophers at a time when utilitarianism was widely viewed as the dominant ethics of the day. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Lewis White Beck’s groundbreaking scholarship in advancing the study of Kant’s ethics and in setting new, rigorous standards for historians of philosophy with his seminal work, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1960). The first English-language study devoted entirely to the Critique of Practical Reason, Beck’s work filled a notable void within Kant scholarship and today remains the most substantial commentary ever written on the key text in which Kant presents his views on practical reason in one systematic and unified argument. Beck’s interpretation situated Kant’s account of morality grounded in pure practical reason within the context of eighteenth-century moral philosophy while at the same time reflecting a deep understanding of twentieth-century philosophical concerns. Whereas critics of his generation often portrayed Kant’s ethics as

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antiquated, or of merely historical relevance, Beck cast Kant’s ethics as a viable, defensible theory, one worthy of critical philosophical examination. Appearing shortly after Beck’s commentary, Mary Gregor’s pioneering Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten (1963) further transformed the study of Kant’s ethics by demonstrating the indispensability of The Metaphysics of Morals for understanding Kant’s considered ethical theory. At a time when most English-language scholarship focused almost exclusively on Kant’s foundational works in moral theory – the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason – Gregor’s monograph offered the first systematic interpretation of Kant’s comparatively neglected work in practical philosophy. Published toward the end of Kant’s career, in 1797, The Metaphysics of Morals is the last major ethical work Kant wrote.1 It reflects his mature ethical theory and represents his complete moral system, in which the foundational a priori principles and concepts of pure practical reason are applied to human beings. Drawing on his account of the empirical cognition of our nature as finite beings, Kant sets out a rich theory of moral duties, and expatiates on the relation between right and virtue (the two fundamental realms of the moral sphere). For the first time in his published writings, he presents a nuanced picture of his particular conception of virtue as moral strength of will to do one’s duty in the face of a strong opponent to the moral good, emphasizing its crucial role in a complete life guided by practical reason. Kant expands upon his views about the will, its relation to practical reason, freedom of choice, moral motivation, and weakness of will. Turning to themes not fully explored in his earlier moral writings, he enumerates a host of virtues and feelings that he takes to be characteristic of a morally good life, and has interesting things to say about specific vices and tendencies that we must be especially concerned to combat. Gregor’s impact on the field was in challenging entrenched views about the full nature and scope of Kant’s ethics, by drawing proper attention to the work depicting Kant’s settled account of what morality is really like for us as finite (imperfect) rational agents with human bodies and psychologies. Gregor’s scholarly writings after the Laws of Freedom included over a dozen important articles on Kant’s philosophy of law, society, and politics as well as his moral and aesthetic theory. She explored topics often overlooked by English-speaking Kant scholars, including Kant’s account of individual rights

1

The two parts of The Metaphysics of Morals were first published separately, the Doctrine of Right (which deals with right or justice) in January 1797 and the Doctrine of Virtue (which deals with virtue or ethics) in August 1797. The Groundwork was published in 1785, and the Critique of Practical Reason in 1787.

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and property rights, the relation of the state to social welfare, and Kant’s relation to the natural law tradition. Although her work remains a crucial part of the conversation concerning Kant’s mature philosophy of right and moral theory, Gregor’s most enduring contributions to Kant scholarship are her meticulous English translations of Kant’s major writings on practical philosophy, published together in a single volume for the first time in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (in 1996). Gregor’s comprehensive translation quickly became the authoritative English version of Kant’s collected moral and political writings after its publication and will undoubtedly remain so for many years to come. Finally, one cannot think about the development of Kantian ethics during the period under focus here without mentioning the enormous influence of John Rawls, whose magisterial A Theory of Justice (1971) revolutionized twentieth-century ethics and secured Kant’s name a prominent role in contemporary moral and political debates. Rawls’s celebrated work dealt with classical problems of modern political theory, especially issues concerning the grounds of basic liberties, the limits of political obligation, and the justice of economic and other inequalities. While liberal political theory in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century had been heavily influenced by the utilitarianism of Mill and Sidgwick, Rawls aimed to rehabilitate the social contract tradition he found in Locke, Rousseau, and, most importantly, Kant. At the very heart of Kant’s moral theory lies the idea that one of the most distinctive features of us as rational human beings is our ability freely to set our own ends. Rawls wholeheartedly embraced this central Kantian insight, and it profoundly shaped his account of justice. Accordingly, Rawls held that the state’s first duty toward its citizens is to respect citizens’ capacity for freedom and autonomy and to treat them, in Kant’s famous phrase, “always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (GMS 4:439).2 Precisely because of his Kantian commitment to autonomy as the fundamental moral and political value to be respected, Rawls emphasized that his theory granted priority to the right over the good. Thus, in opposition to utilitarianism, perfectionism, and communitarianism, he argued that the liberal state must always safeguard individual (basic) civil and political liberties by treating them as inviolable, and that “the loss of freedom for some” can never be “made right by a greater

2

All references to Kant are to Kants gesammelte Schriften. Citations in this chapter include the volume and page number in this standard Academy edition of Kant’s complete works. All translations are from Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. The following abbreviations are used for Kant’s works cited here: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals – GMS; Critique of Practical Reason – KpV; The Metaphysics of Morals – MS.

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good shared by others” (Rawls 1971: 3). At its essence, Rawls’s account of justice as fairness was Kantian in the way it aimed to realize a society that reflected a genuinely Kantian conception of equality – a world in which all individuals are treated equally as ends in themselves, with mutual respect and dignity based simply on their common humanity. Rawls’s work has stimulated a great deal of innovative work on Kantian moral and political philosophy in the United States and Britain. It has also been influential in Germany, although a different approach to Kantianism embodied in Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action is prominent there as well. Part of Rawls’s lasting influence was in the way he inspired some of the best moral philosophers of the next generation, including his students Thomas Nagel, Tim Scanlon, Onora O’Neill, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgaard, Nancy Sherman, Adrian Piper, Andrews Reath, Hilary Bok, and Erin Kelly, among many others. Having introduced the term “Kantian constructivism” to signify a reinterpretation of Kant’s ethics and its relevance for contemporary debates in his seminal Dewey Lectures, “Kantian constructivism in moral theory” (1980), Rawls initiated what is now widely viewed as a prevailing approach to Kant interpretation and a substantive metaethical view about the nature and source of ethical claims. This cursory overview of some key historical developments in Kantian ethics from 1945 to 2015 highlights myriad ways in which Kant scholarship and Kantian-inspired ethics flourished during this era. In addition to the secondary sources and authors already mentioned, a wealth of valuable new scholarship devoted to Kant’s classical works themselves was published. Numerous comprehensive commentaries on the Groundwork appeared. (See Duncan 1957; Williams 1968; Wolff 1973; Hill and Zweig 2003; Guyer 2007; Timmermann 2007; Allison 2011; Schönecker and Wood 2015.) There are now excellent collected volumes of critical essays on the Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Lectures on Ethics, and The Metaphysics of Morals. (See Höffe 1989; Guyer 1998; Timmons 2002; Reath and Timmerman 2010; Denis 2011; Trampota et al. 2013; Denis and Sensen 2015.) Other interpretative work has taken the form of comprehensive treatments of Kant’s ethical theory (including Aune 1979; Sullivan 1989; Allison 1990; Hill 1992; Korsgaard 1996a; Wood 1999; Guyer 2000; Kerstein 2002; Reath 2006; Engstrom 2009). Finally, some eminent moral philosophers have used resources found in Kant’s texts to develop their own contemporary versions of Kantian ethics (most notably O’Neill 1975; 1989; 1996b; Hill 1991; 2000; Korsgaard 1996b; 2008; Herman 2007; Wood 2007). Numerous aspects of Kant’s ethics have been the focus of extensive interpretation, reconstruction, and debate since the 1950s – far too

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many to comment upon here. The remainder of this chapter thus focuses on two broad themes in Kantian ethics of wider philosophical interest in which significant progress has been made: Kantian moral psychology and Kantian virtue ethics. K A N T I A N MO R A L P S Y C H O L O G Y

Kant’s views about the good will, duty, and moral worth have been the source of some of the most familiar criticisms of his ethics. As readers of the Groundwork will likely recall, Kant begins his analysis of what he takes to be our shared, common understanding of morality by proclaiming: “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will” (GMS 4:393). What makes a good will unconditionally or absolutely good is its special mode of volition – as Kant characterizes it, that the will in question acts as morality demands from a sense of duty, not from inclination. In fleshing out the notion of a will good in itself, irrespective of what it accomplishes, Kant famously contrasts action done from duty and action done from inclination in his illustrations of four kinds of conformity to duty. Neither the prudent shopkeeper, who treats his customers fairly out of self-interest, nor the man of sympathy, who helps others out of a sense of natural sympathy, displays moral worth in his maxim of action. By contrast, Kant finds moral worth in both the person who is beneficent even though his own sorrows have extinguished natural sympathy for others and in the person who is beneficent despite feeling indifferent to the suffering of others (GMS 4:398–9). On a natural reading of these examples, Kant seems to think that a good will shines most brightly in circumstances where doing the right thing is difficult, for instance when the agent’s sense of duty must prevail in the absence of morally favorable inclination or even in the face of contrary-to-duty inclination. It should come as no surprise that historical and contemporary critics have objected to Kant’s rationalist moral psychology on the grounds that it appears to treat moral deliberation and action as strictly a matter of rational conscience, rather than a matter of character, virtue, emotion, and desire. (For two prominent contemporary critiques of Kant’s ethics along these lines, see Stocker 1976 and Williams 1981b.) In reaction to these kinds of complaints about Kantian rationalism, Kant’s defenders have insisted that some of the central features of his moral psychology have been misunderstood and that he has plenty of resources to answer his critics. In the first place, Kantians have attempted to correct some common misunderstandings about Kant’s conception of inclination while defending his central

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charge that inclination is not a moral motive for action expressing a good will.3 Although there are notorious passages in which Kant portrays inclinations as natural opponents to duty – for instance, GMS 4:411, 428; KpV 5:84; MS 6:379–80, 405 – Kant does not think that inclinations are inherently problematic psychological states that we must work constantly to control or extirpate, nor does he deny that inclinations have significance and value in a morally good life. One striking theme that has been the source of much fruitful discussion and debate in the recent contemporary literature on Kant’s ethics is that Kant explicitly recognizes naturally occurring feelings and inclinations that facilitate moral action, and he maintains that we can (and should) cultivate feelings and inclinations as aids to duty and as part of the content of virtue.4 As his more charitable interpreters have shown, Kant’s critical remarks about natural inclinations are primarily intended to show that inclinations on their own do not constitute genuinely moral motives for action. Kant’s reason for holding that inclinations are never proper moral motives for action lies in the fact that natural inclination can lead us to act in ways that conflict with duty just as easily as it can lead us to abide by duty and to do the morally right thing.5 For instance, sympathy can move the sympathetically inclined agent to help her friend when helping accords with duty, but it can also move the sympathetic agent to help her friend when doing so would be wrong – for example, in circumstances where her friend wants or needs something that conflicts with moral concerns (Herman 1981). In short, Kant’s main complaint about inclination is simply that inclination itself – that is, inclination not governed or constrained by a larger sense of duty – is not a stable or reliable guide to conforming one’s actions to duty and to moral concerns (Herman 1981; Allison 1990; Baron 1995; Baxley 2010). In the second place, Kantians have been concerned to elucidate what it means to be motivated by a sense of duty and to explain why Kant thinks morally worthy action of this sort captures something essential about morality and moral character. Scholars have pointed out that, in spite of Friedrich Schiller’s well-known quip, Kant does not think that having a good will is 3

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For an innovative Kantian theory of inclination, see Tamar Shapiro 2009. For a critical discussion of Shapiro’s view that offers an alternative intepretation of Kant’s account of inclination, see Wilson 2016. For discussions of this aspect of Kant’s considered moral psychology and of the positive role inclinations like sympathy might play in Kantian ethics, see, among other sources, Allison 1990; Baron 1995; Wood 1999; Tannenbaum 2002; Sherman 1997; Fahmy 2009; 2010; Baxley 2010; Grenberg 2013; Frierson 2014. As Kant captures this very point, inclinations “lead only contingently to what is good and can very often also lead to what is evil” (GMS 4:411). As he thus sees it, inclination as a motive only contingently or accidentally moves the agent to do what morality demands.

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incompatible with being inclined to do what morality asks of us, for he recognizes that a person with a good will can do her duty from duty with inclination.6 As Paton first pointed out, in his analysis of a good will in the Groundwork, Kant chooses to focus on examples in which an agent’s inclinations do not direct her toward duty, or even pose a hindrance to duty, because it is manifestly apparent that the agent in those cases is genuinely motivated from a sense of duty. In other words, for heuristic purposes, Kant adopts what Paton famously termed a “method of isolation,” isolating the motive of duty from all sensible inclinations, for the purpose of demonstrating cases in which a good will is especially perspicuous and where there is no doubt that the agent is in fact motivated to do the right thing from duty.7 Apart from correcting a crucial common objection to Kant’s ethics, by showing that a good-willed agent can be motivated from duty while having inclinations that accord with duty, Kantians have further developed Kant’s moral psychology in interesting and novel ways. In particular, Barbara Herman (1981) and Marcia Baron (1995) have reconstructed Kant’s rationalist view of moral motivation to show its plausibility and appeal. On Herman’s influential reading, when an agent is motivated to do the right thing from duty, her interest in the moral (or intrinsic) rightness of the action is what moves her to act. The agent does the right thing solely because she recognizes that some course of action is required or obligatory, not because doing so satisfies some desire she 6

Schiller’s well-known joke is that one must do one’s duty from duty with aversion in order to have a good will: Scruples of Conscience: I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it by inclination. And so often I am bothered by the thought that I am not a virtuous person. Decision: There is no other way but this! You must seek to despise them And do with repugnance what duty bids you.

7

This translation of Schiller’s joke is from Wood (1999: 28). Allison (1990: 111) and Reiner (1983: 25–7) emphasize the importance of the distinction between acting from inclination and acting with inclination for Kant’s moral psychology. For an extended discussion of this distinction and how it prefigures in Kant’s reply to Schiller’s critique, see Baxley 2010. Tannenbaum (2002) makes sense of Kant’s distinction by distinguishing between the manner and motive of action, in order to show that it is possible to comfort someone with compassion (or compassionately) from the motive of duty. See Paton 1947: 47. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant compares himself to a chemist devising an experiment, one that will allow him to distinguish the pure moral determining ground of the will (duty or what Kant also terms “respect for the law”) from all empirical incentives of inclination (KpV 5:92; cf. 5:156). Paton’s original point about Kant’s heuristic aim in presenting examples where duty suffices in the absence of inclination, or in the face of contrary inclination, is now widely noted in the secondary literature. See, for instance, Beck 1960; Allison 1990; Baron 1995; Korsgaard 1996a; Potter 1996; Wood 1999; Hill and Zweig 2003; Timmermann 2007; Baxley 2010.

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happens to have. The value of acting from duty thus lies in governing one’s conduct by a fundamental commitment always to do what morality requires, even when morality conflicts with self-interest and concerns about personal happiness (Baron 1995; cf. Korsgaard 1996b; Baxley 2010). By upending a number of longstanding objections to Kant’s views, Herman and Baron demonstrate that Kant’s account of duty is much less austere and more aligned with some widely shared intuitions about moral character and goodness than his critics have often assumed. Expanding on Kant’s official account of moral motivation, Kantians have supplemented Kant’s view of duty as a motive in order to paint a richer and more nuanced picture of the way in which moral principles can influence and govern deliberation and action. Herman was the first to introduce the idea that duty can function in two distinct ways on a Kantian view, even if Kant did not explicitly recognize it himself (1981). As a primary motive for action, duty directly or immediately moves the agent to do something she recognizes as obligatory. As a secondary motive, duty functions in a more extended sense, by serving as an effective limiting condition, ensuring that an agent acts on her inclinations only when doing so accords with moral requirements. Herman’s model, which has been widely accepted by Kantians, represents a compelling Kantian moral psychology in which duty and moral principles authoritatively govern the conduct of rational agents, but also comprehensively shape desire, deliberation, and choice. Building upon her earlier Kantian account of acting from duty, Herman (2007) has most recently argued that the motive of duty is best understood as a “backstop” motive that itself provides the foundation for a fuller Kantian conception of moral character. Finally, Kant’s interpreters have enriched our understanding of Kant’s moral psychology by giving proper attention to Kant’s claim that, in acting in conformity with duty from the motive of duty, the good-willed agent acts purely on the basis of rational principle, from respect for the law alone (KpV 5:71–89). To act out of respect for the moral law is to be moved to act by the recognition that the moral law is the supremely authoritative standard governing human action, where this recognition of the law’s authority is said to instill in human beings a uniquely moral feeling of respect – a rationally based feeling comprising elements of fear and awe. Kant maintains that all finite rational beings inevitably have respect for the moral law, even though we are not always moved to act in conformity with its commands. Scholars have puzzled over Kant’s theory of respect, especially the claim that respect is a non-empirical feeling or incentive (Beck 1960; Reath 2006; Allison 1990). Andrews Reath’s excellent collection of essays, Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory (2006), sheds light on the distinctive conception of rational agency that underlies Kant’s account of

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respect while giving credence to Kant’s view that rational beings can be moved to act by reason alone, without the stimulus of any desire or further source of empirical motivation.

KANTIAN VIRTUE ETHICS

Motivated by an interest in exploring Kant’s later and richer moral psychology as well as by a concern to defend Kant against some prominent critiques from virtue theorists,8 interpreters have recently turned their focus to a previously neglected aspect of Kant’s ethics, namely, his theory of a virtue.9 Although it had long been overlooked or not systematically investigated, especially in English-language Kant scholarship, Kant has a rich and settled account of virtue, one that plays an integral role in his considered and mature ethical theory. Accordingly, over the past few decades, there has been a burgeoning interest in Kant’s later and less well-known ethical texts, including The Metaphysics of Morals, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and the Lectures on Ethics, which together contain Kant’s most sustained discussions of virtue and the individual virtues he takes to be part of a complete life lived in accordance with the dictates of pure practical reason. A number of Kant’s interpreters have aimed to identify and reconstruct his distinctive conception of virtue and explain how the more expansive moral psychology of Kantian virtue supplements the rationalist conception of moral action and agency central to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. (See Louden 1986; Allison 1990; Sherman 1997; Engstrom 2002; Denis 2006; Baxley 2010; Suprenant 2014; Cureton and Hill 2014; Wilson 2015.) Scholars have shown that Kant’s conception of virtue both accords with his foundational moral principles and yet bears favorable comparison to more familiar accounts of virtue found in traditional Greek ethics. As they have demonstrated, Kant thinks of virtue in terms of moral strength of will or moral self-mastery, where strength involves a firm disposition to do one’s duty from the motive of duty and the force to withstand all temptations to transgress the moral law (MS 6:394, 396–7, 405). The Kantian virtuous agent possesses the power of self-command to limit and to control her sensible feelings and inclinations and to abide fully by morality’s dictates from respect for the law alone, in spite of any obstacles that might stand in her way. 8 9

See Baril and Hazlett, this volume, for a broader discussion of the return to virtue theory in the twentieth century. These well-known critiques of deontology and Kantian ethics can be found in Anscombe 1958, Foot 1978, and MacIntyre 1981.

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In an interesting twist within a long tradition of modeling personal or moral self-governance on political governance, Kant explicitly associates his favored conception of virtue with what he terms the “autocracy of pure practical reason,” where autocracy is characterized as a form of moral self-rule or selfgovernance that goes beyond Kant’s more widely discussed conception of autonomy.10 As he characterizes it, the virtuous or autocratic agent is one in whom reason has not merely legislative but executive authority – she gives herself moral laws in virtue of their authority for all rational beings, and she has the power or strength of will to execute those laws in a way that shows full rational self-command. Although critics have objected that, here, Kant appears to identify virtue with what Aristotle and Aristotelians think of as “mere continence” – strength of will in the face of contrary desires – Kant scholars have argued that, properly understood, Kantian virtue goes beyond continence in that the self-commanding Kantian agent has cultivated her sensible nature to conform with duty, and she possesses the power to abide by the norms of pure practical reason without being (strongly) tempted to do otherwise (Baxley 2010).11 Moreover, like Aristotle and many other Greek virtue theorists, Kant sees that certain feelings and inclinations ought to be developed as aids that facilitate moral action and as constituent ingredients in some of the virtues he recognizes as central to a good human life (Sherman 1997; Denis 2006; Fahmy 2009; 2010; Baxley 2010). In addition to these scholarly efforts to interpret and assess Kant’s theory of virtue itself, Kantians have debated whether Kant can reasonably be characterized as a “virtue ethicist,” or whether he is more accurately portrayed as a deontologist whose theory of virtue is subsidiary on the more fundamental notion of moral obligation (Louden 1986; O’Neill 1989; Johnson 2008; Hill 2008). Still others have appealed to various aspects and themes in Kant’s ethics in order to develop their own innovative Kantian theories of virtue, moral character, and moral education (O’Neill 1996a; 1996b; Herman 2007; Johnson 2011; Suprenant 2014; Moran 2012; Hill 2012). In what represents the most systematic and promising contemporary Kantian account of virtue, Herman takes the Kantian concept of a deliberative field from her earlier work as the key to grounding a broadly Kantian conception of moral character. On her view, one has a morally good character insofar as the moral law “belongs to the framework

10 11

For an extended treatment of Kant’s account of autocracy, see Baxley 2010 and 2015. Nussbaum and Annas criticize Kant for ignoring this distinction central to classical Greek views about virtue and for conceiving of virtue as nothing more than moral strength of will over contrary feelings and desires. See Nussbaum 2001: 172 and Annas 1993: 53. Devereux (1995: 407–8) and McAleer (2005: 30) agree that Kant’s account of virtue looks like a recipe for continence.

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within which desires and interests develop and gain access to the deliberative field” (2007: 23). In classical virtue theory, a person’s character typically consists in certain dispositions of emotion and behavior. On Herman’s Kantian account, by contrast, character has a different and (arguably) deeper source in that it derives from one’s evaluative commitments and the way those commitments shape one’s judgments, desires, motives, and choices. One attractive feature of Herman’s Kantian theory of moral character is that it captures the “seamlessness” of everyday morality – the fact that the virtuous person’s life is marked by “an absence of conflict between morality and [self]-interest” (2007: 206). In overturning some long-held assumptions about Kant’s rationalist account of moral agency and action, Herman sheds light on the nuanced ways in which morality and duty are dispersed throughout the Kantian agent’s motivational system so that her desires and motives are reason-responsive. CONCLUSION

This selective discussion of some notable developments in the field of Kantian ethics from 1945 to 2015 is not intended to be exhaustive. During this same time period, there has been much fruitful discussion of the Categorical Imperative, its various formulations, and the implications of Kant’s foundational principle of morality for normative ethics and applied ethics. Scholars have offered persuasive interpretations of Kant’s ethics according to which autonomy and freedom are the ultimate values that define and distinguish Kant’s moral theory (Allison 1990; Guyer 2000). Kantians have clarified Kant’s views of the will and practical reason, and systematically reconstructed prominent Kantian theories of normativity and the rational authority of morality (Korsgaard 1996b; 2008). Yet, the aspects of Kant’s theory highlighted here draw our attention to particular developments in Kantian ethics that are of wide interest for readers concerned with understanding and assessing Kant’s moral theory grounded in duty and the account of moral character and virtue associated with it.

18 CONSEQUENTIALISM AND ITS CRITICS r i c har d ar n e s o n

In the second half of the twentieth century, the doctrine that came to be known as consequentialism has both taken hard thumpings and shown resilience in rebounding from attacks. In this process consequentialism has come to be fairly well understood, but elaborating and clarifying the varieties of nonconsequentialism are still works in progress, so it is perhaps premature to venture any definitive assessment on this dispute. Whether it is reasonable to accept a moral theory depends on the merits of its rivals. Perhaps any theory will have counterintuitive implications; perhaps the true one is least counterintuitive all things considered. For the purposes of this chapter consequentialism shall be understood as act consequentialism: One ought always to do an act that brings about an outcome no worse than what would have been brought about by anything else one might instead have done. In the comparison of the consequences of alternative acts available to the agent that determines which one she should do, omitting to act or doing nothing is counted as just another candidate act alongside others. Different standards of outcome assessment yield different versions of consequentialism. (Toward the very end of the chapter an alternative version of consequentialism, known as “rule consequentialism,” is briefly considered.)1 The formulation just indicated says that the permissibility status of an act is determined by its actual consequences. But at the time of decision, these may be unknown and perhaps unknowable. An alternative formulation of consequentialism says one should do what maximizes reasonably expected consequences.2 In this chapter I set this issue aside. The criticisms to be considered will apply to either formulation of the doctrine.

1 2

There are forms of consequentialism different from the act and rule varieties. See, e.g., Adams 1976. Pettit (1997) makes a case for identifying the consequentialist criterion of right action in terms of what it would be morally rational for an agent to do given available evidence. Parfit (2011) suggests there are just two different noncompeting notions here of what it is right to do.

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The outcomes or consequences of acts have to be construed as overall longterm outcomes. If the outcome of a possible act would be the building of a beautiful skyscraper but one that ten years later will collapse and kill many people, the collapse is part of the outcome. The justification for consequentialism is ready to hand and simple.3 The idea is that rationality in conduct is maximizing – achieving the agent’s goals to the greatest possible extent. The question then becomes: What goals should the rational agent pursue? Different versions of consequentialism specify different goals. Consequentialism as such just imposes the constraint of impartiality on the rational agent’s goals: One person’s doing or getting something has exactly the same value, for purposes of deciding what action among those that the agent could do is morally required, as any other person’s doing or getting a relevantly identical thing. What if there are several disparate impartial goals and they are not fully commensurable? Someone committed to consequentialism is not thereby committed to denying that possibility. Still, one ought to do what would bring about an outcome no worse, impartially assessed, than the outcome of anything else one might instead have done.4 Consequentialism identifies a family of views. The best-known member of the family is utilitarianism, which is act consequentialism plus this standard of outcome assessment: One outcome is better than another just in case the sum of individual welfare contained in one is greater than the sum of welfare in the other. Individual welfare is summed across persons and, perhaps at a discount, other animals. Versions of consequentialism can accommodate some prominent criticisms of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism gives fair distribution no weight in the assessment of outcomes: If two situations contain equal aggregate welfare sums, how welfare is distributed across persons makes no difference at all to the assessment of the situations; for the utilitarian it’s all the same if saints fare well and scoundrels fare badly or the reverse, and it is all the same if the best-off people have everything and the worse-off nothing or if instead welfare is more evenly spread across persons.5 Some might reject utilitarianism on the ground that the 3 4

5

Mill states it clearly (1861: chapter 1). For fascinating discussion of the complexities that limited commensurability insinuates into the determination of what one ought to do (and of other complexities related to the assessment of consequentialism as well), see Hare 2013. The idea that how the good is distributed across persons matters to the assessment of outcomes is asserted by Scheffler (1982). He affirms the more specific prioritarian idea that the moral value in getting a benefit of a given size to a person is greater, the lower the person’s well-being level absent this benefit. The idea that the moral value of a benefit’s accruing to a saint is greater than its accruing to a scoundrel receives exhaustive treatment by Kagan (2012).

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degree of fulfillment of individual moral rights either has some weight in the assessment of consequences or entirely determines whether one situation is morally better than another. If rights fulfillment is a goal to be promoted, it can figure in the consequentialist outcome assessment standard. (See Sen 1982.) Figuring out what is the most plausible version of consequentialism may not be enough to discover a plausible moral theory, let alone the most plausible one. The rival theories unite in denying that good consequences are all that matter in determining what is morally required, forbidden, or permissible to do. In the following sections we rehearse several objections to consequentialism raised by prominent critics. TOO DESTRUCTIVE OF INTEGRITY?

In 1973 Bernard Williams set off a fireworks of brilliant objections against consequentialism. These appeared in his “A critique of utilitarianism,” but as he made clear, the target of his critique was consequentialism. One central objection or series of objections revolved around the idea of integrity. Williams observes that an agent is identified with his actions as flowing from projects and attitudes which in some cases he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about . . . It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his actions in his own convictions . . . It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity. (Williams 1973b: 116–17)

Some problem is highlighted here, but exactly what is it? Suppose we stipulate that a person of integrity stands fast by her deepest convictions and values. A flat-footed response to Williams is that consequentialism does not attack the value of integrity, whatever that would mean, but instead embodies a proposal as to what are the values and convictions to which the person of integrity should be committed and to which, if he commits, he will stand fast. This response brushes off the problem too quickly. As stated, consequentialism is a criterion of right action, not a decision-making guide (Bales 1971). As such, consequentialism does not say what commitments agents should make. And part of what Williams is suggesting is that a commitment to bringing about the best is incompatible with bringing about much good, let alone the best.6 Consider this argument: 6

Versions of this argument appear in Williams 1972 and 1973b.

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1 If good consequences are maximized, people are committed to personal projects. 2 If people are committed to personal projects, they are disposed to pursue their personal projects even when doing so is not good-consequence-maximizing. 3 If people are disposed to pursue their personal projects even when doing so is not good-consequence-maximizing, they are not disposed to act in conformity with consequentialism. 4 If good consequences are maximized, people are not disposed to act in conformity with consequentialism.

The conclusion 4 follows logically from 1–3. Premise 1 is an empirical claim and premises 2 and 3 are partial explications of what it is to be committed to a personal project and to be disposed to act in conformity with act consequentialism. Premise 1 could be true or false, but it surely could be true. Being committed to personal projects, in a way that rules out wholehearted commitment to act consequentialism, might be productive of better consequences than commitment to consequentialism. For example, loving particular types of things like skiing and playing jazz might bring about lots of skiing and jazz value into one’s own life and the lives of people with whom one interacts, and also make one disposed to do wrong acts by the consequentialist standard. But the gains of the former might outweigh the losses of the latter, even if one actually does some wrong acts by that standard. None of 1–4 is incompatible with consequentialism, the claim that one ought always to do whatever would bring about best consequences. But now some of what Williams is asserting comes into clearer view. The consequentialist morality makes the demand on the individual that she conform her conduct to this norm, and this demand alienates the individual from her deepest commitments. The alienation is a split or internal opposition in one’s motivations: One cannot be wholeheartedly committed to one’s personal projects and also recognize that one ought to do whatever would bring about the best, because the sincere recognition of what morality requires must induce some motivation to comply.7 Any morality might issue in demands on individual conduct that in particular circumstances conflict with what individuals would have to do to satisfy their deepest or strongest personal commitments. Sally’s personal commitment might be to run a marathon fast, which it turns out she cannot do unless she murders Tom, but murdering Tom violates his moral rights and according to deontological morality is strictly prohibited. Also, the extent of conflict between moral demands and one’s personal commitments depends on the substance of one’s 7

Parfit (2011) takes this point to tell against the idea that rational persons would choose that everyone conform to (act) consequentialism.

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commitments (imagine, for example, that one has a personal project of conquering all peoples). However, suppose that under scrutiny, it turns out that consequentialism, as it requires maximizing, in standard or normal circumstances makes demands that conflict to a far greater extent with the range of personal commitments that individuals in modern societies are likely to make, than the demands issued by rival moralities. So here’s one objection against consequentialism latent in Williams’s comments about integrity: Consequentialism is too demanding. But alongside the “too demanding” objection is another distinct criticism: Acceptance of consequentialism and conformity to it would be deeply alienating and as such destructive of value in our lives.

T O O A L I E NA T I N G ?

Peter Railton writes, “Living up to the demands of morality may bring with it alienation – from one’s personal commitments, from one’s feelings or sentiments, from other people, or even from morality itself” (Railton 1984: 134). Living an unalienated life would then involve living in such a way that all of these elements are in complete harmony. One acts from personal projects one endorses and desires to fulfill, that are fully compatible with the moral requirements and aspirations one judges to be correct and is disposed to satisfy, having feelings and sentiments that resonate entirely positively with these projects and commitments, and relating to people in ways that are entirely free of conflict.8 One’s actions are wholehearted, unaccompanied by doubt or hesitation. Railton emphasizes another type of destructive conflict of motivation. The motives that induce one to take particular acts, even acts that are morally right and chime in with one’s personal commitments, may reduce the value gained by the acts. Example: One performs a service for a friend, or makes love to a romantic partner, from duty rather than the appropriate motive for the act – in the first case, affection for one’s friend, in the second case, sexual desire to make love to that particular person. (Cf. Adams 1976.) If consequentialism required one always to act from the motive of seeking to bring about the best attainable outcome impartially assessed, adherence to 8

Hurley (2009) urges that if the consequentialist could convince us that what one morally ought to do is always the act that would bring about best consequences impartially assessed, we should then acknowledge a deep conflict between morality and practical reason. What one would have most reason to do, all things considered, would often be to pursue one’s deepest projects or follow one’s own heart’s desire.

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consequentialism would be a giant wet blanket smothering and diminishing many sources of great value in life. But to reiterate a point already noted, consequentialism is a criterion of right action – not necessarily a decisionmaking guide, and not necessarily the motive that causes one to act as one does. Consider an example: If friendship is valuable, acts of forming and sustaining friendship can be right actions according to consequentialism. This can be so even if forming a friendship involves becoming disposed to favor one’s friend, and this motivation may predictably lead one sometimes to perform acts that are wrong according to consequentialism. The commitment to friendship cannot be wholehearted and unconstrained, if one is going to live a life that achieves as much by way of impartially good consequences as one feasibly can. Helping one’s friend in some circumstances might trigger large negative consequences, and one must be disposed to be alert to such situations and able to overcome the impulse toward friendship to avoid pulling the trigger. The person seeking to lead a life that scores high by consequentialist assessment looks to be inevitably up to her neck in alienation and internal conflict. (In this connection, see Stocker 1976.) She is alienated from her personal projects and commitments, since pursuing them on some occasions will be seriously wrong according to consequentialism, and alienated from her friends and friendships, for the same reason, and alienated from whatever current plan for living her life she is now following, since it might turn out that following the plan will carry her over some cliff and down to very bad consequences. But this may be OK all things considered. After all, a recipe for reducing allsided alienation would be to minimize one’s commitments and feelings and beliefs and endorsements to a minimum, reducing as far as possible the possibility of conflict among these elements of one’s psychological make-up. This would be a poor strategy for attaining good for self and others. The consequentialist will say the ideal amount and character of alienation in one’s life is that which maximizes good consequences over the long run of one’s life (Railton 1984). This resolution of the alienation concern may not satisfy the critics. Be that as it may, there’s more to say in the Railton spirit. Railton defends consequentialism by insisting it is a criterion of right action and that’s it. It need not and probably should not become the ever-present dominating motivation in an agent’s life. It should instead play a background regulative role. It should be largely indirectly action-guiding. R. M. Hare appeals to a similar line of thought in wrestling with the objection that consequentialism is “too permissive” in allowing and requiring agents to violate deeply rooted basic moral constraints (Hare 1981; see discussion below).

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TOO DEMANDING?

The “too demanding” objection might seem immediately to be a knockdown objection. Suppose that Sally is in a restaurant and can choose only between fish and chicken tacos, the choice affects no one other than herself, and the only relevant effect of her choice is that the fish tacos would be slightly tastier. Suppose other things equal, an outcome containing more enjoyment is better than one with less. So the best reachable outcome would be attained by choosing fish tacos and any other choice is morally wrong according to act consequentialism. This seems absurd. One can mitigate this objection by accepting scalar consequentialism.9 This says that any act that leads to a less than best outcome is wrong, but acts are more wrong, the greater the shortfall between the moral value of the best outcome one could have reached and that of the outcome of what one actually did. If the shortfall is tiny, one’s act is wrong, but barely wrong, and it would be wrong to fret about the shortfall or blame oneself for doing what is after all barely wrong. In the example Sally’s choice of chicken tacos is just barely wrong. Arguably, that verdict, delivered by a plausible consequentialism, is not counterintuitive. This set of responses, even if deemed acceptable, does not significantly dent the “too demanding” objection, because in actual and likely future circumstances, with the Earth beset by widespread poverty, misery, war, and premature death, and mechanisms in place that enable many of us to contribute to alleviating these ills with reasonable effectiveness, and keep giving at cumulative enormous cost to ourselves, the shortfall between the actual consequences of what one does and the best outcome that might instead have been reached is huge. Samuel Scheffler (1982) addresses this issue. He is explicitly responding to Williams’s arguments, and working also to accommodate ideas advanced by Thomas Nagel (1986). Each person sees things from a unique personal perspective, and from this perspective there are things that matter to that person, but which do not show up as reasons for action at an impartial level, where a reason for any person is a reason for all persons. An adequate morality cannot simply endorse impartial reasons alone but must somehow split the difference between the personal and impersonal perspectives. How to do this is not clear. Scheffler suggests that morality gives each agent a personal prerogative to weight her own personal, agent-relative concerns more heavily than other people’s in deciding what it would be best to do. She is then morally bound 9

See Norcross 2006. See also Brink 2013 on Mill’s anticipation of the doctrine.

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when acting only to produce as much impartially assessed good as would have been achieved had she acted on her personally weighted calculation. Each person in acting then always has a personal prerogative to do what brings about less than the best up to some shortfall. This is a limit that varies depending on what is at stake. A stronger personal prerogative would place a flat upper limit on the amount of sacrifice of what matters to her that any individual is morally obligated to incur, in each choice she makes or over stretches of her life or over her whole life. One could couple this with a requirement that the sacrifice one is bound to incur must be made efficiently toward advancing the greater impartial good. As stated, the Scheffler prerogative permits one to do less than best to achieve any aim or none, so long as the acceptable shortfall earned by one’s interests in the situation at hand is not exceeded. One is permitted not to save the city so that one is morally at liberty to pursue an important project, but one is further at liberty to pursue any trivial aim of little or no personal concern so long as the prerogative limit is not exceeded. Another type of prerogative would limit the sacrifice that is required in order to bring about overall greater good in a given situation by some “fair share,” where all who are duty bound to help contribute a similar fair share. The idea is that it would be an objectionable implication of a proposed principle of beneficence if it required agents to do more and make greater sacrifices when other people are failing to conform to beneficence requirements. “Why should I have to take up the slack when others fail to do their fair share?” one might complain (Murphy 1993). A problem with this suggestion is that the unfairness among potential contributors, if someone takes up the slack and does more than her fair share, would seem generally to be outweighed by the unfairness of the persons in peril or misery, to whom help is owed, not getting the full amount they should receive. The Scheffler personal prerogative idea rests on the assumption that there are agent-relative reasons, genuine reasons that give the agent a reason for action but that do not generate reasons for others. The consequentialist will oppose the assumption and contend that if someone has a reason to do something, others thereby are given reason to promote or facilitate the doing. The Scheffler personal prerogative, at least in the form in which Scheffler endorsed it, is a limit on an assumed background duty of beneficence, a duty to improve the world, to bring about good outcomes according to an impartial standard of what makes outcomes better or worse. What Scheffler shares with the consequentialism he opposes is considerable. The line between those who accept some such duty of beneficence as an important component of morality

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and those (such as Nozick) who deny any such duty and regard beneficence as always morally optional is perhaps more important in the end than the dispute between those who assert, and those who deny, that the duty of beneficence must be balanced against, and limited by, a moral freedom that persons have to live as they choose, to some extent.

TOO PERMISSIVE?

Besides being branded as too demanding, consequentialism is also faulted for being too permissive. The thought is that a person is not morally at liberty to do whatever would bring about greater good when doing so would either run roughshod over bystanders in ways that harm them or use the opportunity provided by the presence of others to advance one’s ends in ways that harm them. There are moral constraints that prohibit us from always doing whatever would bring about the best outcomes. At the start of his great work A Theory of Justice, John Rawls articulates a morality of constraint: Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. (Rawls 1999a: 3)

Justice here refers to enforceable moral duties, those that justify coercion if needed to secure compliance. Rawls surmises that utilitarianism can be understood as based on the idea that the principle of rational choice for a single individual can be extended across society. Just as it is rational for an individual to impose on himself the lesser pain of a trip to the dentist to avoid a later greater pain of serious toothache, it is rational to impose on one individual a loss equivalent to the dentist trip pain in order to gain for another the greater benefit equivalent to serious toothache avoidance. Disagreeing with this idea, Rawls observes, “Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons” (Rawls 1999a: 24; see Brink 1993 for discussion). He could have said the same about consequentialism. Accepting the idea that morality at the level of fundamental principle includes constraints, one could also hold that imposing sacrifice on some for the sake of aiding others could be acceptable in those cases in which the beneficiaries have a moral right to be benefited and the others, on whom sacrifice is imposed, are under a moral duty to aid them. Also, no matter how morally bad murdering a person is, two relevantly similar acts of murder

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would be worse, so a morality of constraints as so far described might yet allow the bringing about of best outcomes by doing whatever will bring about the greatest overall fulfillment (or equivalently, fewest overall violations) of moral rights. Robert Nozick closes off these possibilities in a discussion that sharpens and clarifies the issues. He suggests that our ordinary commonsense idea of a moral right should be understood as a side constraint on choice rather than a goal to be fulfilled. He also makes a substantive proposal about the content of basic moral rights: They are one and all negative rights not to be harmed or subjected to interference rather than positive rights to be benefited (Nozick 1974). The side constraint idea says that moral rights should enter the determination of what is permissible as follows: From the set of possible acts one could now perform, strike out all those that would violate anyone’s rights and limit your choice of action to those that remain. This implies that one should not steal from Pete in violation of one of his moral rights even if doing so would prevent worse rights violations by other people. If people had rights to be helped as well as rights not to be harmed, there could be cases of conflict, in which one could fulfill one’s duty to help only by acting against one’s duty not to harm, and in these cases perhaps one should weigh what is at stake, and sometimes rightly judge that the duty to help outweighs the duty not to harm. Rejecting all positive rights and their corresponding duties, Nozick asserts that we should countenance no such tradeoff and moral balancing scenarios. But suppose we should reject as fanatical the claim that rights are exceptionless so that one should never do what a moral right forbids. That concession still leaves intact a robust doctrine that opposes consequentialism by affirming the existence of moral constraints that should be obeyed even if acting against them would bring about a greater sum of good, at least if the sum is below some threshold, the location of the threshold depending on the seriousness of the constraint. In the face of these objections, the consequentialist has a strategy of response. How successfully it meets the objections is left for the reader to decide. The strategy invokes an error theory. The consequentialist can explain how people might find consequentialism counterintuitive and problematic in its recommendations for conduct, even if consequentialism is true. They would continue to find consequentialism dubious, even in a society that was well regulated to educate and socialize people in ways that are as conducive to conformity to consequentialism as is feasible. The explanation is suggested or at least hinted at by many earlier thinkers but received full articulation in the discussion of “The archangel and the prole” in

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R. M. Hare’s book Moral Thinking (1981).10 Hare notes that human persons are not angels, but rather tend to be selfish, not well informed about facts that are relevant to choices they face, and only imperfectly intelligent, hence not very good at integrating such factual knowledge as they do possess into sensible calculation of what actions and policies to choose. One could add that they are imperfect reasoners about normative issues. Moreover, different persons vary in the degree to which they have these various rational decision-making deficits, and any given person will be afflicted variously along each of the dimensions of deficit in different contexts and settings. Given these background conditions, the decision procedure of considering which of the alternative acts one could perform would bring about best consequences, on each occasion of choice, would predictably be disastrous, unless one happens to have archangelic powers of reasoning on this occasion. For most of us most of the time, a better decision procedure would be rather rigidly to follow commonsense moral prohibitions and requirements such as keep your promises, don’t steal, tell the truth, and don’t harm innocent nonthreatening persons. These commonsense rules will incorporate familiar constraints against harming others and using them to their disadvantage to advance one’s purposes. Moreover, for the rules to function well, we must be trained to internalize them, that is, to treat their dictates as intuitions of conscience, which we have reason to follow. The resulting position is odd. If we are well trained, we will believe, for example, that we ought to refrain from aggressively physically attacking others. We will believe that these and other norms give us basic non-derivative reasons for choice and action. But if we are reflective, we will also believe that only the fundamental level consequentialist principle gives basic non-derivative reasons for action, and the norms at the level of commonsense moral rules (and similarly for laws and other social norms) are just tools for helping to bring about greater conformity by ourselves and others to consequentialism. Roughly, we believe not that killing the innocent and lying and so on are intrinsically wrong but that better consequences will be brought about by pretending that this is so. Our moral beliefs are in tension, to put it mildly. The commonsense rules we should follow are the ones that are actually in place in society and actually coordinating people’s expectations of what others are doing. But our allegiance to the existing code should vary in strength 10

For discussion of Henry Sidgwick’s consideration of the degree to which the consequentialist criterion of right, in actual and likely circumstances, requires the teaching of a moral code much like conventional commonsense morality as a practical decision-making guide, see Hurka 2014: chapter 7. A classic defense of commonsense moral rules against utilitarianism (and consequentialism) is Ross 1930, also discussed in Hurka 2014. On Hare’s strategy, see also Railton 1984 and Eggleston 2014.

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depending on how far it deviates from the code that in actual circumstances would both be feasible and best promote good consequences. Moreover, we should engage in acts of pushing for code improvement whenever such acts would be consequentially justified. Furthermore, depending on the degree to which humans vary in their resemblance to archangels (perfect moral decision makers) or proles (perfectly bad moral decision makers), we should train and encourage people, including ourselves, to follow archangelic fully deliberative decision procedures or instead to follow the prolish decision procedure of mechanically following prevailing moral rules. None of this amounts to a reason to believe that consequentialism is correct. The position rather is that if there is a convincing case for the truth of consequentialism, we should take at a discount our nonconsequentialist moral intuitions arising from our internalization of commonsense moral rules prevailing in our society. After all, we would have these or similar intuitive judgments even if consequentialism was best supported by the reasons there are. The idea that moral thinking operates at different levels, such as the theoretical and the intuitive, is no doubt disturbing and counterintuitive. However, not only consequentialism, but any nonconsequentialist morality that includes moral concern for the degree to which its dictates are followed will accept the need for different levels of moral thinking. Given that we are not fully archangelic but instead to varying degrees prolish, the correct nonconsequentialist principles may be too complex or otherwise unsuitable to serve as a practical decision-making guide. Hence we should distinguish the nonconsequentialist criterion of right action from the best decision procedures we can devise and follow to bring about our conformity with fundamental nonconsequentialist morality. A sensible nonconsequentialist morality will then need to distinguish different levels of moral theory, the derivative levels being tools to facilitate greater conformity to fundamental level principles. The problems we encounter in working out coherent and sensible multilevel theory will be shared by consequentialists and nonconsquentialists and so cannot provide reasons for rejecting consequentialism and opting instead for nonconsequentialism. A FALSE SHORT CUT, A RED HERRING, AND A LONG MARCH

In 1992 Frances Kamm suggested a way to break the deadlock of intuitions between consequentialists and nonconsequentialists on the moral reason-giving force of moral constraints by appeal to the status of the human person as a rational agent and therefore inviolable to a high degree (Kamm 1992). Being inviolable to a high degree, a person is not permissibly subject to being harmed

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either by actions that cause greater good or as a by-product of such actions. This high status is a value that inheres in each person and calls for respect. Thomas Nagel (1995) and (some years later) Michael Otsuka have endorsed this appeal. In Otsuka’s words, “nonconsequentialist prohibitions are justified because they properly reflect our elevated moral status” (2009: 66). But this move is offset by another (Lippert-Rasmussen 1996). The consequentialist can appeal to the status of the human person as a rational agent and therefore unignorable to a high degree. Being unignorable to a high degree, each person’s interests give rise to reasons for their fulfillment by everybody and anybody that are not diminished in strength by the sheer fact that their fulfillment would have to run through a causal path involving losses to others’ interests. The nonconsequentialist appeals to the thought that by possessing a capacity for rational agency some entities qualify as persons and have a special dignity and worth. (See Nozick 1974: 48–9 for a clear articulation of this idea.) The nonconsequentialist associates this dignity with the status of inviolability; the consequentialist associates this dignity with the status of unignorability. Which interpretation is better? We have come back to the issue, whether morality forbids or requires harming whenever harming would bring about greater good. The appeal-to-status gambit has not made progress toward resolving the issue. Consequentialism tends to be associated with aggregation: the ideas (1) that for any harm, however bad, that falls on a person, there is some perhaps very large number of tiny harms to many persons that is worse, and (2) that for any moral wrong, however horrible, that anyone does, there is some perhaps very large number of tiny wrongs that is overall morally worse. Those who regard consequentialism as committed to aggregation tend to cite this as a defect in consequentialism. But this is a red herring. There are versions of consequentialism that reject aggregation and accept that some goods and harms have lexical priority over others. There are versions of nonconsequentialism that accept aggregation. Moreover, when we consider the issue, aggregation, the idea that many small goods can outweigh a large good, and that rights and wrongs trade off against each other in the determination of what ought to be done, is hard to resist without introducing rank implausibility somewhere in one’s morality.11 What would be useful is the further development of work now ongoing toward characterizing the nature and content of plausible individual moral rights with their corresponding duties owed to rightholders. This involves clarifying 11

On aggregation regarding right action, see Thomson 1990 and Scanlon 1998. For doubts about the rejection of aggregation in the domain of right action, see Parfit 2011 (chapter 21) and in the domain of value, Norcross 1997.

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the distinctions partially constitutive of these rights, such as between doing and allowing, between intended and foreseen but unintended consequences of what we do and allow, and between harmful agency that does and does not benefit from the presence of those harmed.12

ACT CONSEQUENTIALISM OR RULE CONSEQUENTIALISM?

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there were recurrent efforts to resolve the nagging intuitive conflict between what ordinary commonsense moral rules permit and require and the revisionary implications of the principle that one ought always to do whatever would bring about the best reachable outcome.13 Some consequentialists have played down the conflict by speculating that in actual circumstances these two independent sets of norms will tend to converge in their practical implications. But it’s doubtful this speculation is true, and anyway, the moral doctrine worthy of our acceptance should yield acceptable judgments for what to do in possible circumstances we can imagine. I have already described a consequentialist strategy that consists in explaining away the appearance that commonsense moral norms are genuinely normative. Another complementary strategy argues directly on moral grounds that the “commonsense” rules are revealed under scrutiny to be a mess and to lack authority.14 Another strategy with perennial appeal has been to hold that the moral rules we should accept are the ones whose general acceptance would have best consequences, and that at the level of individual choice of conduct one ought to follow those rules. If the moral rules selected by this principle are pretty close to the already accepted commonsense moral rules that seem to have some claim on our allegiance, the consequentialism-versus-ordinary-rules conflict diminishes or disappears. Or so it might be thought. Many questions arise. If the ideal code is not actually established and accepted, why should the fact that if it were accepted, that would have good consequences, render it the case that here and now we should conform our behavior to the code? If the code yields implications for conduct opposed to consequentialism, why perform the action that in hypothetical nonfactual circumstances would work for the best rather than what in present actual circumstances would work for the best? 12 13 14

The literature on these topics is voluminous and impressive. See especially Nozick 1974; Thomson 1990; Kamm 1993; 2007; Scanlon 1982; 1998; Quinn 1989a; 1989b; Parfit 2011. Lyons (1965) offers a pathbreaking clarification of discussions of rule utilitarianism. See also Rawls 1955, and for skepticism about rule-utilitarianism, Smart 1956 and 1973. A notable exemplar of this strategy comes from Kagan (1989).

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Following and refining suggestions by Richard Brandt, Brad Hooker in 2000 proposed this version of rule consequentialism: “[A]n act is morally permissible if, only if, and because the act is allowed by the code of rules whose internalization by the overwhelming majority of everyone in future generations would maximize aggregate expected welfare,” adjusted to give some priority for the worst off (Hooker 2000: 32).15 I won’t try to assess this interesting proposal except to note that the questions posed in the previous paragraph perhaps still have bite. CONCLUSION

In the past seventy-five or so years, progress has been made in the controversy between advocates of consequentialism and their critics. The progress has consisted in clarifying options, not in bringing about consensus among disputants.

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Brandt 1992 [1956]; Hooker 2000; 2014. For criticism, see Arneson 2005 and Portmore 2009.

19 THE REDISCOVERY OF METANORMATIVITY From Prichard to Raz by Way of Falk

e van t i f fan y W. D. Falk’s (1947–48) address to the Aristotelian Society – delivered April 19, 1948 – marks a turning point in twentieth-century metaethics. Whereas early twentieth-century metaethics was characterized by questions regarding the semantic and metaphysical commitments of moral terms, fin de siècle metaethics has been largely concerned with normativity more broadly construed. While this shift is generally traced to the 1970s or later, I argue that the beginnings of the metanormative turn can be found much earlier in the work of philosophers such as Falk and Frankena. In fact, there is a sense in which there never was any “turn” to the metanormative; rather, the metaethical and the metanormative have always been two independent yet intertwined branches within twentieth-century ethical theory. That said, the metanormative literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been characterized by a tendency to conceive of the normative fundamentally in terms of reasons for action, which in turn has shaped how metanormative questions regarding the authority of morality are framed. After documenting the turn to reasons, I end with a discussion of some recent alternatives to the “reasons-first” approach to these questions. F R O M M E T A E T H I C S T O ME T A N O R M A T I V I T Y

Here’s a familiar narrative. Although philosophers have been engaged in what could be called “metaethical” questions at least since Plato, the distinctively analytic approach to these questions that characterizes twentieth-century metaethics begins with G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1993b [1903]). In that treatise, Moore characterizes the subject-matter of “Ethics” as being concerned, first and foremost, with the question of how to define “good.” Taking up this question, Moore argues that the concept of “good” is indefinable and unanalyzable because for any putative definition of “good” it is always an open question whether some object that satisfies that definition really is good. Since moral terms cannot refer to natural properties, Moore concludes that they must refer to non-natural sui generis properties. 264

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This kind of non-naturalist realism was greeted with deep suspicion, first under pressure from positivist aversion to metaphysics and later from Quinean naturalism. But if naturalism is ruled out by the open-question argument and non-naturalism is ruled out on metaphysical grounds, the remaining conclusion is that moral terms simply fail to refer at all. Thus, many have thought the real beneficiary of Moore’s open-question argument to be non-cognitivism, the view that moral terms are mere expressions of evaluative attitudes. Then, in the 1980s, naturalist moral realism made a resurgence, buoyed by Frege’s distinction between sense and reference coupled with a causal theory of reference. Frege noted how two terms could differ in their sense or cognitive significance while sharing a common referent. Thus, the fact that moral terms necessarily have a different sense than nonmoral terms is compatible with their sharing a common referent, in the same way that “water” and “dihydrogen monoxide” can have different senses while picking out the same stuff. Further, realists argued that the reference of moral terms could be fixed by whatever natural properties (or cluster of properties) causally regulated the use of those terms. Around the same time that the landscape was becoming safe again for moral realists, the metaethical literature was becoming increasingly interested in broader questions about normativity in general. Moore’s open-question argument began to be read in a new light, as having less to do with philosophy of language and more to do with pointing to the distinctive normative force of morality. In contrast to other normative systems, morality seems to have a special kind of motivational and justificatory grip on us. Thus, attention shifted to questions surrounding the motivational efficacy and normative authority of moral reasons, which in turn occasioned more fundamental inquiry into the nature of normativity itself. The same debates about the metaphysics and semantics of narrowly moral concepts such as “good” and “right” were redirected to broader normative concepts such as “ought” and “reason,” with the debate between realists and anti-realists resurfacing as a debate about normativity per se. Among those who have explicitly commented on this shift, many trace its origins to the 1970s. John Broome, for example, comments that “the 1970s was the age of the discovery of reasons” (2004: 28) citing Joseph Raz as an early explorer. Tim Scanlon begins his Locke Lectures with the observation that: “contemporary metaethics differs . . . from the metaethics of the 1950s and 1960s, and even the later 1970s” in that the current debates concern “practical reasoning and normativity more generally” (Scanlon 2014: 1). Andrew Reisner (2015) has described this as “the normativity revolution,” noting that it was already well under way by the late 1990s. Moreover, the common, though often implicit, assumption of the normativity revolution has been that questions about normativity are fundamentally questions about reasons. As Joseph Raz has

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put it: “the normativity of all that is normative consists in the way it is, or provides, or is otherwise related to reasons” (Raz 1999: 67). In short, fin de siècle metaethics may be characterized by a predominant interest in metanormative questions concerning the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of normativity and practical reasons writ large. But I think the impetus for this shift can be traced further back than has typically been acknowledged, to Falk’s influential paper. F A L K ’ S I N F L U E NC E

Falk’s “‘Ought’ and motivation” has certainly not gone unnoticed in the literature. It is generally credited with inaugurating, or at least invigorating, the “internalism” debate within metaethics. But this is often interpreted as a contribution to metaethics, as a thesis about how to understand the moral “ought.” While this is certainly a part of Falk’s project, there is also a metanormative strand to Falk’s argument, which is arguably both more important and more plausible than his internalist thesis. Specifically, I read Falk as essentially distinguishing between a standpoint-specific sense of moral obligation and the broader “ought” of practical reason. If right, this makes Falk one of the first to analytically mark this distinction. Moreover, despite failing to distinguish between motivating and justifying reasons, Falk essentially analyzes the “ought” of practical reason in terms of reasons for action – or at least takes them to be inter-definable – thus making him a bridge between the early obligation-first view of Prichard and the reasons-first view that would dominate fin de siècle ethics. Falk takes as his starting point the central problematic of Prichard’s “Duty and interest” – on those occasions when duty feels especially burdensome, one may be inclined to inquire: “Exhibit to me . . . the reason or motive sufficient, even at cost to myself, to induce me to do what I ought, but don’t want to do; for though I grant the duty, I see no such reason, and maybe there is none, or none sufficiently strong.”1 Falk agrees with Prichard that this is an ill-formed question, and that philosophical attempts to answer it by establishing a necessary connection between duty and self-interest have been misguided. However, he disagrees with Prichard as to the source of the mistake. According to Prichard, the attempt to establish a connection between duty and interest is motivated by two psychological assumptions: that desire is necessary for motivation and that people are only capable of desiring their own happiness. Prichard’s solution is to reject psychological egoism and accept 1

Falk 1947–48: 112; hereafter, references to this work will be indicated by OM, followed by a page number.

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that “the desire to do what is right, if strong enough, will lead him to do the action in spite of any aversion from doing it which he may feel on account of its disadvantages” (Prichard 2002a [1928]: 38). In contrast, Falk holds that the problem “does not lie principally in the psychological errors of his opponents as alleged by Prichard,” but rather lies “in a persistent uncertainty shared by moralists and ordinary men about the relation to motivation of the very use of such words as ‘ought’, ‘duty’, ‘obligation’” (OM, 112). Falk agrees with Prichard that proponents of a connection between duty and interest err in presupposing that morality needs an external sanction in order for one to be motivated to do one’s duty. However, Falk sees Prichard as guilty of the very same problem, for he “shares his opponent’s view that morality needs a sanction, admittedly a more respectable one” (OM, 119). Whereas his opponents require a sanction grounded in self-interest, Prichard requires the presence of a disinterested desire to do one’s duty. But this desire is still an “external” fact that exists “apart from and additionally to the fact of duty” (OM, 119) and hence can only be contingently connected to duty. The solution, according to Falk, is to observe that “our thinking that we ought to do some act already entails that, by comparison, we have a stronger reason in the circumstances for doing it than any other” (OM, 124). Falk does not clarify whether he thinks the judgment is the motive or simply gives rise to it (e.g. by occasioning the relevant desire), but either way the view counts as a version of “judgment internalism”2 since it affirms a necessary connection between the thought or judgment that one ought to ϕ and the motivation to ϕ. So far, this is squarely in the metaethics camp. But in defending his internalism, Falk goes on to clarify two senses of obligation, and this is where he makes the metanormative turn. Falk distinguishes between an “external” sense of “ought” and a “purely formal motivational” sense. In the external sense, to be obligated to do something is to be “subject to some manner of demand, made on him without regard to his desires,” where this demand issues from outside the agent “whether made by a deity or society, or the ‘situation’” (OM, 125). When “obligation” is used in this sense there is a merely contingent connection between obligation and

2

This label comes from Darwall (1997: 308). Unfortunately, Falk does not clearly distinguish between judgment internalism and “existence internalism,” which holds that a necessary connection to motivation is necessary for the obligation (or reason) to exist. For example, Falk elsewhere states that: “the very fact of a duty entails all the motive required for doing the act” (OM, 121), which would imply existence internalism. But since he holds that the fundamental error made by proponents of a connection between duty and interest has to do with “the relation to motivation of the very use of such words as ‘ought’, ‘duty’, ‘obligation’” (OM, 112, added emphasis) he is best interpreted as defending judgment internalism.

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motivation, “for no one really need do any act merely because it is demanded of him, whether by a deity or society or the ‘situation,’ but only if, in addition, he finds within himself a motive sufficient for satisfying the demand” (OM, 126). It is unfortunate that Falk fails to distinguish between motivating and justifying reasons here, because he is essentially making two importantly different distinctions that end up getting conflated, and the metanormative distinction risks being lost altogether. Because Falk uses the term “external” to describe one half of the distinction, it is reasonable to assume that “internal” is the natural contrary; and, because Falk is interested in the relation between these two senses of “ought” and motivation, it is reasonable to think that what distinguishes “internal” reasons from “external” reasons is whether motivation is “built into” the obligation itself (or perhaps into judgments about the obligation).3 But by disentangling these two claims, it is possible to better appreciate Falk’s metanormative contribution. When Falk first introduces the purely formal motivation sense of “ought,” he says of the person who is asking for a reason to perform his duty: [W]e could also have presented him as asking “why should I, or ought I to do the act which I morally ought to do?”; and if he had been using the second “ought” in say some externalist sense he would not have been asking a spurious question . . . In fact, whenever in any externalist sense a person ought to do some act, the further question of whether in the motivation sense he ought to do this same act can still always be asked. (OM, 128)

As I read this, Falk is drawing our attention to the fact that there are two ways of understanding the concepts of obligation and duty, such that on one reading, the question “Ought I to do what it is my duty to do?” can be meaningfully asked, while on the other it cannot. As Falk puts it in summarizing the central confusion he sees in Prichard’s response to the opening question: “what kind of answer is appropriate to the questioner’s doubt depends on the meaning attached to his admission that he ought to do the act. On an externalist view of ‘ought’ his request is legitimate and in need of some factual answer; on a purely formal motivation view his very request is absurd” (OM, 138).4 But this is precisely how the distinction between a “qualified” or standpoint-relative sense of “ought” is distinguished from the “unqualified” “ought-simpliciter” of practical reason – for any merely qualified normative standpoint (e.g. morality, prudence, etiquette, the law) we can ask whether one ought-simpliciter to act 3

4

For example, Frankena (1976 [1958]), begins his paper by “borrow[ing] W. D. Falk’s labels . . . [of] internalism and externalism” to mark the distinction between “those who regard motivation as external and those who regard it as internal to obligation” (49). See also Frankena: “to say one ought in this [the purely formal motivational] sense is to say he has a reason or motive for acting with regard to which no further question can be asked” (1976 [1958]: 70).

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as one ought-as-judged-from-that-standpoint to act.5 In other words, I read Falk as observing that sometimes we can speak of “duty” or “obligation” as if it were just one normative standard among many – e.g. the standard of Divine command or social contract or some more primitive fact about the situation impersonally considered – while at other times we speak of our “duty” as referring to what, all things considered, one just plain ought to do. There are two potential problems for this reading. One is that Falk describes the relevant sense of “ought” as the purely formal motivational sense. But, I think it is best to read the motivational component as a distinct substantive claim. That is, we should distinguish the conceptual claim that there are these two senses in which we can talk about what one morally ought to do from the substantive claim that one or the other of these senses constitutively involves motivation. Second, Falk goes on to identify the moral “ought” with the purely formal “ought.” Again, I think it is best to understand this as a separate metanormative claim, one that Frankena rejects a decade later on the grounds that “an act may be morally wrong even though I am impelled to do it after full reflection . . . [for] what one is impelled to do even after reason has done its best is still dependent on the vagaries of one’s particular conative disposition, and I see no reason for assuming that it will always coincide with what is in fact right or regarded as right” (1976 [1958]: 71). In talking about what one is “impelled to do even after reason has done its best,” it is not clear whether Frankena has the justificatory or motivational sense of normativity in mind. But this is at least close to a statement of the kind of “internalism” about practical reason that Bernard Williams (1981a) would make famous two decades later. Here in the late 1940s and 1950s we see precisely the kind of metanormative debate over the normative authority of morality characteristic of the normativity revolution, and we see that debate framed in terms of reasons for action. THE TURN TO REASONS: EXPLANATION AND JUSTIFICATION

Action theory was the first to embrace the turn to reasons. While it is true that philosophers have long viewed human action as distinctive in virtue of being responsive to and guided by reason, twentieth-century analytic philosophy was particularly focused on explaining human action in terms of the reasons for which one acts, where a reason was understood as “a moving or impelling thought, the thought of that for the sake, or in view of which, some act is done” 5

See, e.g., Stephen Darwall: “we must be asking whether considerations that present themselves as reasons from within the moral point of view . . . really are reasons” (1990: 258).

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(OM, 116). That is, the fundamental unit of explanation was the reason, and twentieth-century action theory was interested in analyzing just what it is for something to be such a reason. The most influential works in action theory in the twentieth century were Elizabeth Anscombe’s monograph Intention, published in 1957, and Donald Davidson’s work in the 1960s and 1970s.6 Anscombe and Davidson were both interested in the relation between intention and reasons, and they agreed that in describing intentional action one is pointing to something for which reasons can be given. Anscombe and Davidson disagreed on whether reasons could be causes, a debate that would animate much of action theory, particularly as it relates to questions of free will. But they agreed that when one explains an intentional action by citing the reason, one is offering a “rationalizing explanation” in that the explanation serves to both explain and justify that behavior in the sense of making the action intelligible, in contrast, say, to instinctual or reflex explanations which require no such intelligiblity. Metaethicists were interested in a different, more robust notion of justification. They were interested in the question of whether the reasons for which one acts are good reasons. After all, it is possible that a person could perform some act ϕ on the basis of some fact f which she believes justifies her ϕ-ing – making f her reason for acting – yet, she could be wrong about this. It could be that f offers no justification at all – or at least none sufficiently strong – to actually justify her ϕ-ing. Thus, we need to distinguish motivating from justifying reasons, where the former is the fundamental unit of explanation and the latter is the fundamental unit of evaluation. The reason the 1970s has been described as the “discovery of reasons” (in metaethics) is that in this decade the turn to reasons is made explicit and systematized. In 1975, Gilbert Harman argues explicitly for “a ‘good-reasons’ analysis of moral ‘ought’ judgments and related moral judgments” (1975: 7) according to which “to say that P ought to do D is to say that P has sufficient reasons to do D that are stronger than reasons he has to do something else” (6). Harman argues that an advantage of this analysis is that it allows one to capture W. D. Ross’s (2002 [1930]) distinction between pro tanto and all-things-considered duty,7 because the concept of a pro tanto reason, like the concept of a 6 7

Especially his 1963 “Actions, reasons, and causes,” but see also all the essays in Davidson 1980a. Ross used the terms “prima facie duty” and “duty sans phrase.” Since he intended “prima facie duty” to refer to “an objective fact involved in the nature of the situation” rather than something that offers “only an appearance which a moral situation presents at first sight, and which may turn out to be illusory” (2002 [1930]: 20), the term pro tanto is more commonly used in the literature. A duty sans phrase is what one is obligated to do taking into account all morally relevant factors; hence, all-thingsconsidered.

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pro tanto duty, is a weighted notion in the sense that reasons come in varying strengths and certain reasons or combinations of reasons can outweigh or override other (coalitions of ) reasons. And by moving to the concept of a reason, one can apply the same analysis to other nonmoral types of “ought” claims, such as the ought of rationality or of epistemic expectation (Harman 1975: 7). Perhaps the most significant early cartographer in this age of discovery was Joseph Raz, whose Practical Reason and Norms (1975) systematically describes the logic and architecture of reasons as the fundamental unit of practical reasoning. Raz conceived of reasons as facts (rather than statements or psychological states such as beliefs and desires), for “reasons are used to guide behaviour, and people are guided by what is the case” (17); and he offered a thorough taxonomy of the different kinds of reasons (complete, conclusive, absolute, and prima facie) and the different kinds of functional role they can play, including mitigating, intensifying, or defeating the strength of a given reason. While it is more common to think of reasons as “considerations that count in favor of”8 performing an action or believing a proposition than as “operative reasons” for adopting a specific “practical critical attitude,” the fundamental ontology and architecture of the current metanormative literature has been profoundly influenced by Raz’s work.

MORAL OBLIGATION AND THE NORMATIVE QUESTION

So far I have argued that Falk’s distinction between the “external” and the “purely formal motivational” sense of moral obligation could be read as articulating the distinction between the “ought” of practical reason and the “oughts” of specific standpoints, such as morality, self-interest, social convention, and so on. I then showed the former came to be analyzed in terms of the pro tanto reason. I end by articulating how that model has shaped the debate over morality’s normative authority and the relation between morality and practical reason and by looking at notable alternatives to the reasons-first model. On the pro tanto model, there are various facts about any given situation. Some of those facts have a certain normative significance, which can be understood in terms of a valence and weight or force. If one thinks of reasons as vectors (where direction is determined by valence, and magnitude by weight), then what one all-things-considered ought to do is determined by the vector sum of all the relevant reasons. Now consider the fact that some action is morally wrong or morally obligatory. Prichard’s question, taken up by Falk, 8

See especially, Jonathan Dancy 2000; 2004; T. M. Scanlon 1998; 2014.

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can be interpreted as asking why that fact provides one with a reason for action (indeed, a rather weighty reason). And answers to this question face what Tim Scanlon refers to as “Prichard’s Dilemma”: Attempts to explain how the fact that an action is wrong provides a reason not to do it face a difficult dilemma. Understood in one way, the answer is obvious: the reason not to do the action is just that it is wrong. But this is surely not the kind of answer that is wanted: it simply takes the reason-giving force of moral considerations for granted. Suppose, on the other hand, that we were to appeal to some clearly nonmoral reason . . . This account might supply a reason for doing the right thing, but it would not be the kind of reason that we suppose a moral person first and foremost to be moved by. (1998: 149–50)

This way of framing the challenge follows naturally from the pro tanto model, but it presupposes what Korsgaard (2009) refers to as a “substantive” conception of morality in the sense that it identifies morality with a set of substantive facts that (putatively) count in favor or against performing some action. On this conception, the metanormative challenge is to say what it is about these facts in virtue of which they provide reasons (indeed, reasons that typically outweigh nonmoral reasons). On the substantive model, moral deliberation – i.e. deliberation about what one morally ought to do – is a type of subdeliberation, the conclusion of which enters as input to practical reason alongside reasons of other kinds, such as selfinterested or legal reasons.9 In contrast to this model, Christine Korsgaard (2009) defends a “formal” conception of morality, which she identifies with “a method of reasoning about practical issues” (47). On this conception, moral deliberation is not a subspecies of practical deliberation, but a constitutive component of practical reasoning – being obligated to do something is not a fact about the situation that carries a certain weight within practical deliberation; rather, it is a formal constraint on practical deliberation. Korsgaard defends a specifically Kantian version of the formal conception, according to which practical deliberation consists not in weighing various considerations, but in testing one’s maxims against the supreme standard of practical reason, the Categorical Imperative.10 A consideration that fails to satisfy the standard of the Categorical Imperative “is not merely outweighed – rather, it is not a reason at all” (2009: 51). For example, I borrow your book promising to return it when I have finished reading it, but I end up enjoying the book so much that I decide I would prefer to keep it for myself. On the weighing model, there are two considerations with opposite valence – the fact that 9 10

Cf. Bernard Williams 1985: chapter 1, “Socrates’ question.” Katsafanas, this volume, discusses Korsgaard at some length, with emphasis on her constitutivism.

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I promised to return your book counts in favor of returning it, while the fact that I desire it for myself counts in favor of keeping it; practical deliberation then consists in weighing the normative force of these considerations against each other. On the Kantian formal conception, practical deliberation consists, first, in formulating the relevant maxim – e.g. that I shall keep your book, despite having promised to return it, because I want it for myself – and then testing this maxim against the Categorical Imperative. Upon finding that the maxim fails the standard of universalizability, it follows that my desire to keep the book for myself is not simply outweighed, but is no reason at all. I am obligated to not act on that maxim. On the formal conception, questions about morality’s authority are fundamentally different from those that arise for the pro tanto model. On the formal conception, morality is not an external standpoint, like etiquette or self-interest or the law, that issues specific commands that stand in need of practical justification; rather, the principle of morality just is the fundamental principle of practical deliberation. Thus, all reasons are “moral” reasons in the sense that all facts derive their reason-generating force in part by satisfying the relevant moral standard. This, however, is consistent with denying that all reasons are “moral” in the narrow sense of having respect for the moral law as the end of one’s maxim. Thus, the metanormative question for the formal conception is not about the authority or weight of a specific set of considerations, but about the formal principle itself: What is it about the Categorical Imperative that makes it the ultimate source of normative authority? In contrast to both of the above models, there is another way of conceiving of the relation between morality and practical reason, one that is plausibly attributed to Prichard. Like the substantive model, Prichard holds that one’s moral obligations are determined by substantive facts about the situation, e.g. the fact that a given action would constitute repayment of a debt or the utterance of a falsehood. However, for Prichard, moral obligation is a normative primitive – once one has decided that one is morally obligated to do something, there is no further question to ask regarding whether one is practically justified in doing it. In this way Prichard agrees with the formal conception that moral deliberation is not a type of subdeliberation but is constitutive of practical deliberation. However, Prichard also recognizes the justificatory force of teleological reasoning: In the light of the two different senses of the word “ought”, it will become obvious that the phrase “justifying an action”, i.e. justifying the statement or conviction that we ought to perform it, has two corresponding senses. It may mean either proving that, or giving a reason why, the action will be the proper action for achieving our purpose, or proving that, or giving a reason why, we are morally bound to do it. (2002b [1928]: 128)

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Moreover, Prichard holds that these two senses of “ought” are incommensurable. When a person must choose between morality and self-interest, “he can have no means of choosing which he shall do, since there can be no comparable characteristic of the two alternative actions which will enable him to choose to do the one rather than, or in preference to, the other” (Prichard 2002a [1928], 38). Normative pluralists like David Copp (1997; 2009) also reject the assumption that there is a single univocal “ought” of practical reason. For Copp, the standard is the normative primitive: “all normative statuses are generated by normative systems,” where “a normative system is a system of standards that actually plays a role in people’s lives” (2009: 25). The view is pluralist because Copp recognizes a plurality of different normative systems which give rise to a plurality of different types of “oughts” which are incommensurable with one another. Since there are countless numbers of standards, including such silly or trivial ones as a standard of “moonlove” (which calls on people to dance outdoors in a public place at midnight any day there is a full moon), and since intuitively such standards are not genuniely normative, the pluralist must answer the following metanormative question: In virtue of what does a given system generate genuine reasons? Like the substantive model, moral deliberation for a pluralist is a type of “subdeliberation,” but the question regarding morality’s authority is a question about the system of moral norms, rather than about a specific subset of normatively relevant facts. CONCLUSION

I have tried to accomplish three main goals in this chapter. First, I have attempted to sketch some of the debates and positions that have taken centerstage in analytic ethical theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century. Second, I have tried to challenge a common narrative according to which there is a turn to normativity that distinguishes late from early twentieth-century metaethics, by arguing that the shift was already present in Falk’s 1948 address, who was responding to Prichard (who in turn was responding, in part, to Sidgwick). Finally, I looked at the particular “reasons-first” view that came to dominate fin de siècle metaethics, how it has shaped the nature of debates over morality’s authority, and how that model has come under pressure in the early twenty-first century.

20 CONSTITUTIVISM pau l kat sa fanas

Constitutivism is the view that we can justify fundamental normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims merely in virtue of acting.1 Constitutivists aspire to show that action has structural features – constitutive aims, principles, or standards – that are present in each instance of action and that generate substantive normative conclusions. In showing that the authority of fundamental normative claims is sourced in our own actions, constitutivists hope to avoid familiar objections to justificatory projects in ethics. This chapter provides a very brief overview of constitutivism. The first section outlines the basic structure of constitutivism. The second and third sections examine how the constitutive feature would generate normative results. The fourth considers an objection to the constitutivist theory. The fifth distinguishes between constitutivist theories that attempt to provide fully general accounts of normativity and more modest versions. The sixth section asks how much normative content constitutivist theories are supposed to generate. The final section concludes.

THE BASIC STRUCTURE OF CONSTITUTIVISM

First, a word on constitutivism’s origin. Constitutivism can be seen as emerging in response to concerns about the relationship between normative claims and facts about the agents to whom they apply. Beginning in the mid-seventies, this was one of the focal points for writings on ethics. J. L. Mackie’s influential argument from queerness prompted some of these debates. Mackie wrote: “an objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it” (Mackie 1977: 40). It’s mysterious what this property could be. 1

See Alvarez and Hyman, this volume, for discussion of the history of philosophy of action.

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On the basis of these sorts of reflections, Bernard Williams (1981a) argued that an agent has a reason to X only if there is a “sound deliberative route” from the agent’s subjective motivational set to X-ing. These claims spawned an enormous literature, with philosophers falling into two broad camps: externalists claim, and internalists deny, the following claim: “An agent A can have a reason to X even if A does not have, and would not have after procedurally rational deliberation, a motive whose fulfillment would be promoted by X-ing.” Each side of the debate has costs. Briefly, internalists have difficulty establishing genuinely universal normative claims, such as “you have reason not to murder.” After all, it seems possible for an agent to lack any motives that are suitably connected to not murdering. Externalism vouchsafes universal normative claims, makes it less obvious how these claims connect to motivation: By hypothesis, some of them will be entirely disconnected from the agent’s actual motives.2 This can make external reasons look, as Mackie puts it, decidedly queer. In response to these debates, externalists and internalists attempted to diagnose problems with one another’s views. Attempts at synthesis emerged, with Michael Smith (1994) arguing that we should reconfigure the debate in terms of what an idealized, perfectly rational version of the self would desire, and John McDowell urging a focus on the phronimos (McDowell 1995b). Meanwhile, neo-Kantian theories developed by Barbara Herman (1996), Christine Korsgaard (1996b), and others tried to reconcile universal and categorical demands with the idea that these demands issue from the agent herself. Constitutivism can be seen as a new entry in these well-worn debates. For constitutivism operates by showing that action or agency has features that generate universal normative commitments. Although the details vary, there are two general strategies: an aim-based version of constitutivism and a principlebased version. The aim-based version tries to show that there is an aim present in every episode of action, and then argues that the aim generates normative reasons; the principle-based version tries to show that each action is governed by a particular normative principle. Let me explain. I’ll begin with the aim-based version. We can define constitutive aims as follows: (Constitutive Aim) Let A be a type of attitude or event. Let G be a goal. A constitutively aims at G iff (i) each token of A aims at G, and (ii) aiming at G is part of what constitutes an attitude or event as a token of A.

2

I discuss these points in more detail in Katsafanas 2013.

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The clearest examples of activities with constitutive aims are games. Take chess. Arguably, chess has the constitutive aim of checkmate: Every token of chessplaying aims at checkmate, and aiming at checkmate is part of what constitutes a token action as an episode of chess-playing.3 In other words, if you’re moving chess pieces about on a board without aiming at checkmate, you’re not playing chess; and if you are moving pieces about on a board while aiming at checkmate, this is part of what makes your movements count as episodes of chess-playing. The constitutivist about action hopes to show that action itself has a constitutive aim. This is, of course, counterintuitive. Why think that action has any constitutive features whatsoever? It’s clear enough the activities such as chess have constitutive features. But that’s not surprising: Chess is a game, defined by its rules, with clear criteria of success and failure. How could we show that action itself has constitutive features? David Velleman tries to show that action has a constitutive aim of selfunderstanding: In each case of action, the agent aims to attain understanding of what she is doing and why (Velleman 2009). Christine Korsgaard argues that action has a constitutive principle of self-constitution, where self-constitution is secured by acting on the Categorical Imperative (Korsgaard 2009). And I argue that action has two constitutive aims. First, action constitutively aims at a form of reflective approval: In deliberative action, I aim to perform actions of which I approve, where this approval is stable upon the revelation of further information about the way in which the action is motivated. Second, action constitutively aims at challenge-seeking, in the sense that each episode of action aims not merely at some determinate goal, but also at the encountering and overcoming of challenges in the pursuit of that goal (Katsafanas 2013). Of course, each of these arguments is controversial: You wouldn’t just glance at action and conclude that it aims at self-understanding, for example. So each theory requires a foundation in an account of intentional action that is independently plausible. If we just assert, for example, that action is movement governed by the Categorical Imperative, then Korsgaard’s account would follow. But this would be of no interest; all the work would be done by the initial assertion. Thus, constitutivists typically aspire to begin with some very minimal, widely accepted account of intentional action, and show that this minimal account entails that action has a constitutive feature.

3

Actually, this is a bit of a simplification: You can also play chess while aiming to attain a draw. So, to be precise, we should say that the constitutive aim of chess-playing is attaining checkmate or a draw. But, in order to avoid clunky formulations, I’ll ignore this complication above. It does not affect any of the arguments.

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The most powerful version of constitutivism would start with an absolutely uncontroversial account of action and show that it yields a constitutive feature. For example, suppose we can start with the idea that action is goal-directed movement, and show that this entails that action has a constitutive aim of self-constitution. That would be of enormous interest; nearly everyone accepts the initial account of action, so, if the arguments work, it would follow that everyone should accept the constitutivist’s conclusions. But suppose, by contrast, that we must start with a more substantive and controversial account of action. Then, even if the constitutivist’s arguments work, they will only be as powerful as the arguments for the initial theory of action. For example, if Korsgaard’s constitutivism starts with the assumption that action aims at governance by the Categorical Imperative, then all the work is done by the initial defense of the conception of action. (I’ve argued elsewhere that something like this is true: Both Velleman and Korsgaard present themselves as starting with minimal and almost universally accepted accounts of action, but, in fact, their arguments equivocate; they end up relying on substantive, highly controversial, and undermotivated accounts of action.) So how do the constitutivist arguments begin? In each case, the theories begin with a relatively uncontroversial account of action and then proceed to argue that the uncontroversial account yields surprising conclusions: (1) Korsgaard begins by claiming that action is simply movement attributable to the whole agent, rather than to some part of the agent (2009: 18). She then argues that an action is attributable to a whole agent only if the agent acts on a normative principle (119–20); that different normative principles engender different degrees of agential unity (120–79); that the Categorical Imperative is the only principle that fully unifies us (169–77); and, finally, that it follows that the Categorical Imperative is the constitutive principle of agency. (2) Velleman begins by claiming that action is immediately known, in the sense that agents have non-observational knowledge of what they are doing and why they are doing it (Velleman 1989). He then argues that we can best account for the presence of this immediate knowledge by positing that agents have a standing desire for self-understanding, which inclines them to act in ways that they antecedently expect to act (as he puts it, “the agent attains contemporaneous knowledge of his actions by attaining anticipatory knowledge of them” [2004: 277]). On this basis, he argues that action constitutively aims at selfunderstanding. (3) I begin with two claims: that we aim to perform actions of which we approve and that we aim not only to attain end states, but also to manifest particular forms of activity. The latter claim is based on a fact about human

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motivation: In addition to desires for particular objects, we are motivated by drives. Drives are characterized by their aims: The sex drive aims at sexual activity, the aggressive drive at aggressive activity. Drives incline us to seek objects upon which to vent this activity, but the objects can be adventitious; the essential thing is the expression of the aim. I argue that drives operating in this way, continuously generating objects of desire, can be understood as inducing an aim of seeking to encounter and overcome certain types of resistances. Moreover, I argue that in deliberative action, we take the outcome of deliberation to settle what we are going to do; and this involves assessing an outcome as preferable to others; and this involves aspiring to approve of what you do; and, this involves seeking for the approval to be stable in the face of further information about the motivational inputs to our deliberation. From this, I argue, we can derive a constitutive aim of agential activity. Coupling it with the first aim, we get the following structure: Action constitutively aims at selecting activities such that they involve overcoming challenges that induce resistances; and, in light of the first aim, we’re committed to approving of this aim, as something that structures all of our actions. (See Katsafanas 2013 for the details.) These are just sketches and probably raise as many questions as they answer. But my hope is that they give some indication of how the constitutivist argues: We start with an independently plausible account of action and try to show that it yields substantive normative conclusions. THE REASONS GENERATED BY THE CONSTITUTIVE FEATURE

Suppose we can in fact show that action has a constitutive aim. What would follow from this? The fact that action has some constitutive aim is a merely descriptive premise; how do we get normativity from this? This brings us to the second step of the constitutivist project: showing how constitutive features generate reasons. I’ve suggested that the constitutivist should defend a principle of the following form: (Success) If X aims at G, then G is a standard of success for X, such that G generates normative reasons for action.

Returning to the chess example: If chess has a constitutive aim of checkmate, then by Success players will be committed to treating checkmate as providing them with reasons for action. Success should be understood as a fully general claim about aims: If you have an aim, then all else being equal you have normative reasons to fulfill it. For example, if Nolan aims at eating cake and

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Franny doesn’t, then all else being equal Nolan has a reason that Franny lacks: a reason to eat cake. (I’ll consider objections below.) If we accept something like Success, then reasons are fairly cheap: Any aim will generate prima facie reasons. What’s interesting about the reasons generated by the constitutive aim, though, is that they would have universal scope. They would apply to agents just in virtue of the fact that they are performing actions. Just as the chess player’s reason to promote checkmate arises from the nature of the game and thus applies independently of his contingent psychological preferences, so too the agent’s reason to realize action’s constitutive aim would arise from the nature of agency as such and would thus apply independently of her contingent psychological states. So the reasons derived from the constitutive aim would be universal. Many philosophers regard this as a criterion of adequacy for ethical theories. But should we accept something like Success? Although Velleman (2009) and Katsafanas (2013) defend versions of it, it’s not entirely uncontroversial. After all, we might deny that aims generate reasons. This skepticism is sometimes motivated by reluctance to say that aiming at reprehensible activities, such as murder, provides one with a reason to murder. Accordingly, we might think that aims generate reasons only if we antecedently have reason to adopt the aim; or we might deny any connection whatsoever between aims and reasons. However, I’ve elsewhere argued that the standard ways of arguing against principles like Success in fact present no difficulties for the constitutivist. While there is not enough space to explain this point fully, I’ll give one example. Suppose the objection to Success is based on Broome-style wide-scope readings of the instrumental principle. Although this might seem problematic, it actually presents the constitutivist with no trouble at all. It merely requires a reformulation of Success in something like this form: Rationality requires that if you have an end G, then [either you give up this end or you take the necessary and available means to G]. (See Broome 1999.) Reformulating Success in terms of rational requirements won’t bother the constitutivist, as the constitutive aim won’t be capable of being abandoned; thus, rationality will require that you take the necessary and available means to attaining it. Analogous arguments are available for other standard interpretations of the relationship between aims, goals, and reasons (see Katsafanas 2013: chapter 2 for the details). If we’re terribly skeptical about these responses, though, a second variant of constitutivism is available. Recall the distinction between aim- and principlebased versions of constitutivism. Rather than arguing that action has a constitutive aim and trying to show that the aim generates reasons, we could directly argue for the presence of a normative feature in action. Christine Korsgaard pursues this strategy. To simplify a bit, suppose we accept a roughly Kantian

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account of action according to which action is movement governed by the Categorical Imperative. Then each instance of action would be governed by the Categorical Imperative, and being governed by the Categorical Imperative would be part of what makes an event qualify as an action. So the Categorical Imperative would be the constitutive principle of action. Moreover, we would not need a second step to establish the normativity of this principle: The principle already contains normative content. I’ve argued elsewhere that we should see the aim-based version of constitutivism as roughly Humean, and the norm-based version as Kantian (Katsafanas 2013). The aim-based version establishes the universality of a particular aim in action, and then appeals to some independent principle for generating reasons from this aim. The principle-based version argues directly for a normative notion of action. Accordingly, the theories will face objections at different points, as I’ll explain below. THE STATUS OF THE REASONS GENERATED BY THE CONSTITUTIVE FEATURE

I’ve mentioned one desideratum for an ethical theory: that it provide universal reasons. But some philosophers also seek to show that ethics generates overriding reasons. Suppose action has a constitutive feature (an aim or a principle) that yields normative reasons. Notice that it does not immediately follow that the reasons derived from the constitutive feature are overriding. Return to the chess example. Chess players have reason to checkmate their opponents, but other reasons will also be present: The player may aspire to enjoy the game, let’s say, and therefore have reason to do what promotes enjoyment. And she may have reason to try out some new strategy, rather than taking the most direct and obvious route to checkmate. These reasons may lead her to make different choices than she would if they were absent. So the reasons derived from the constitutive aim interact with the reasons arising from other sources. But the reasons derived from the constitutive aim do have a special status: The constitutive aim can’t be abandoned without abandoning the activity. You can’t fully disengage from it. You can, however, disengage from the other sources of reasons: You can’t give up the aim of checkmate without ceasing to play chess, but you can give up the aim of enjoyment or of trying out a new strategy. In this sense, the reasons derived from the constitutive aim are inescapable, whereas the reasons derived from other sources are escapable. Thus, constitutivism generates an inescapable normative standard while allowing all other standards to be escapable.

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Of course, the constitutive feature is escapable in one sense: We can stop participating in the activity governed by the constitutive aim. I can stop playing chess, for example, and thereby escape any reasons generated by chess’s constitutive features. But notice that action itself is crucially different. Suppose a constitutivist can establish that action itself has some constitutive aim. Certainly, agents could escape this aim by ceasing to perform intentional actions. They can go to sleep, for example. But, given that ethical theory aspires to provide norms for intentional action, constitutivism provides reasons with a scope as wide as that of ethical theory. The reasons derived from the constitutive aim of action would be inescapable for those performing intentional actions. But it still does not follow that the reasons derived from the constitutive aim are weightier than other reasons. Nor does it follow that the reasons generated by the constitutive feature are particularly substantive. In principle, it’s possible that constitutivism generates only weak and always overridden reasons. So we’ll have to say more about the status of these reasons. Some constitutivists, like Korsgaard, want to show that constitutivism justifies most of the content of modern morality; others, like Velleman and I, think it can’t do that, but can yield a number of interesting normative results. I’ll explore these possibilities below. CAN WE BE ALIENATED FROM THE CONSTITUTIVE FEATURE?

But there’s also a different reason for worrying about the attempt to anchor normativity in inescapable features of agency. After all, can’t you be moved by the constitutive aim, and regard it as inescapable, while being alienated from it? It certainly is possible to deplore aims that figure in wide swathes of agency: Consider the way in which religious ascetics respond to desires for material comfort, sexual pleasure, and so forth. They may regard these aims as ineradicable, but nonetheless contend against them. The constitutive aim would be a bit different: Even though desires for comfort and sex are widespread, they are not omnipresent; they are not aims that are manifest in every episode of action. So the person who deplored the constitutive aim would be even more radical than the ascetic. Nevertheless, can’t we take the same attitude toward constitutive features, coherently deploring an omnipresent aim? Some constitutivists recognize this difficulty and try to respond to it. Velleman, for example, claims that the constitutive aim of self-understanding is deliberatively self-validating:

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even if we all of us share this aim . . . you can still ask whether we ought to have it, and why. To my ear, this question sounds like a demand for self-understanding . . . So interpreted, the question demands that the constitutive aim of action be justified in relation to the criterion set by the aim itself. Such a justification is easy to give. (Velleman 2009: 138)

In other words, if action constitutively aims at self-understanding, then asking why we ought to have and to fulfill this aim is a request for self-understanding: It is a request that presupposes the very aim that it questions. In that sense, Velleman claims, it is self-validating: Any attempt to question it will already presuppose it. So alienation from the constitutive aim isn’t possible (or at least isn’t coherent). I attempt a different answer. As I see it, one of the constitutive aims of agency is approving of one’s action while aiming that this approval be stable in the face of further information about the action’s etiology. If every episode of action contains a second constitutive feature – call it F – then F will be part of the etiology of each action. Thus, insofar as one meets the first constitutive condition, one will aspire to meet the second: Insofar as one aims to approve of one’s action in light of further information about the action’s etiology, and insofar as F is part of each action’s etiology, the agent will be committed to taking F’s presence as not undermining her approval of the action. So the agent is left with two options: Deplore action as such, or approve of the constitutive feature. There are only two fully coherent responses: Total rejection or total acceptance. Or so, at any rate, I argue (Katsafanas 2013). Regardless of whether these strategies work, the constitutivist does need to say something about the possibility of alienation from or rejection of the constitutive aim. DOES CONSTITUTIVISM PROVIDE A FULLY GENERAL ACCOUNT OF NORMATIVITY?

Constitutivism operates by identifying a constitutive feature of agency which is then taken to generate substantive normative conclusions. But this is just a schema, identifying a type of ethical theory. There are many ways to instantiate these features. A central dimension on which constitutivist theories vary concerns their aspirations: The constitutivist can attempt to provide a fully general account of normativity or a more localized account. Korsgaard, for example, tries to offer an account of normativity as such: She writes that

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the only way to establish the authority of any purported normative principle is to establish that it is constitutive of something to which the person whom it governs is committed – something that she either is doing or has to do . . . The laws of logic govern our thoughts because if we don’t follow them we just aren’t thinking . . . the laws of practical reason govern our actions because if we don’t follow them we just aren’t acting. (Korsgaard 2009: 32)

So, according to Korsgaard, both practical and theoretical normativity must be accounted for in terms of constitutive features; anything less would be a failure. Some philosophers have mistakenly taken this to be an essential component of the constitutivist project. Matthew Silverstein, for example, writes that principles such as Success cannot succeed: [F]or they draw on the explicitly normative principle that one has a reason (or is at least rationally required) to achieve or promote one’s aims or ends. The whole point of constitutivism is to derive action’s standard of correctness from non-normative facts about the nature of agency. Action’s constitutive norm is supposed to be the foundation of all practical normative authority . . . And so it cannot rely on some other norm for justification. (Silverstein 2016: 233)

Now, Silverstein is right about Korsgaard: As the quotation above demonstrates, she thinks that constitutivism is the only possible justificatory strategy in ethics. But Silverstein is wrong that the “whole point of constitutivism” is to provide a foundation for all normativity. We needn’t be committed to this maximally ambitious version of constitutivism; less ambitious versions, which seek to secure incontestable sources of practical normative authority, without thereby trying to secure all sources, would still yield substantial and distinctive results. After all, we could treat constitutive aims as one source of normativity among others. There would be nothing incoherent about combining constitutivism with realism: We could hold that certain norms arise from constitutive features, whereas others are just irreducible normative truths. Or we could combine constitutivism with a Humean account: We could hold that there is some function from our actual or hypothetical subjective motivational states to reasons, while also endorsing the constitutivist schema. My constitutivist account – and, if I understand it, Velleman’s – takes this latter form. The interest of constitutivism would then lie in its ability to generate inescapable reasons, rather than (as for Korsgaard) all reasons. It may be helpful to offer a more concrete illustration of the way in which a constitutivist could treat constitutivism as a source of some, but not all, reasons. Consider the instrumental principle. This is the best candidate for a constitutive feature of agency: if anything is constitutive of agency, this is. Action is bringing things about. To bring things about requires that you take the necessary and

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available means. So, insofar as we are aiming to bring things about, we are aiming at taking the necessary and available means to bringing them about. More precisely: (1) An agent’s A-ing is an action iff in A-ing the agent aims to bring about some end. (2) An agent aims to bring about an end iff the agent aims to take some of the necessary and available means to this end. (3) Therefore, an agent’s A-ing is an action iff in A-ing the agent aims to take some of the necessary and available means to her end.

From (3), it follows that taking the necessary and available means to one’s ends is a constitutive aim of action. If we accept Success, this entails a version of the instrumental principle. But, Silverstein objects, have we really shown that there’s a reason for taking the means to your ends? No, he thinks: The mere fact that I inescapably aim at X doesn’t yet entail that I have a reason for trying to attain X. To establish that – to move from claims about inescapable aims to claims about reasons – we have to make substantive normative assumptions. I think here we reach bedrock. One type of philosopher says: Even if you have some inescapable aim, even if the aim is present in everything you do, you can still ask whether you have a reason for pursuing the aim. And another type of philosopher says: That’s nonsense. When you ask whether you have a reason for A-ing, you’re asking whether you should pursue A. But in the constitutive case, the question is idle. There’s no alternative to A-ing. So your question about whether there’s a reason to A, although it has the grammatical form of a question, is moot. Inescapability is the fundamental form of normativity. When you’re asking about normativity, you’re asking whether you should pursue something; an appropriate answer to that question is showing that you cannot do anything but pursue the thing. (For a more detailed treatment of this point, see Katsafanas 2013: chapter 2.) But suppose we’re philosophers of the first type: We insist that we can question whether there’s a reason to act on inescapable aims. Then we have to rest content with the idea that constitutivism relies on a further normative principle specifying that there’s a reason or a rational requirement to take the means to your ends. Constitutivism so interpreted wouldn’t be a fully general account of normativity. But in response, I’m tempted to say: So what? If we can show that our derivation of practical normativity relies on the assumption that we have reason or a rational requirement to take the means to our ends, then we’re still in far better shape than other ethical theories. What are worrying and controversial about ethics are questions about substantive goods: We want to know whether we have reason to reject inequality; whether we have reason to

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strive for some forms of life and avoid others; whether cruelty is wrong; whether compassion good; and so on. What worries many of us is that these claims might be unjustifiable. But if they’re justifiable so long as we accept the claim that we have reason or rational requirements to take the means to our ends, then the concerns are far less pressing. I, for one, would welcome an ethical theory that actually showed that insofar as you’re committed to instrumental rationality, you’re committed to treating slavery, cruelty, and so forth as wrong. The maximally ambitious, Korsgaardian version of constitutivism has a certain appeal. But it’s not all or nothing: Less ambitious, Humean versions of constitutivism still establish substantive and important results. H O W MU C H C O N T E N T I S DE R I V A B L E F R O M CONSTITUTIVISM?

I’ll close with a related point. Some constitutivists aspire to show that we can derive something like traditional bourgeois morality from the constitutive features of agency; others aspire to show only that some substantive norms are derivable. Korsgaard is in the first camp: She claims that we can derive “Enlightenment morality” from the constitutive features of action (Korsgaard 1996b: 123), where “Enlightenment morality” seems to be roughly coextensive with the moral claims typically embraced by contemporary, liberal, highly educated classes in the urban USA and Europe. Velleman denies this, holding instead that we can give a constitutive account of various norms that “favor morality without guaranteeing or requiring it” (2009: 149). My own version of constitutivism is closer to Velleman’s than to Korsgaard’s: I think we can derive certain principles that enable us to assess competing evaluative and normative claims, but these principles do not result in the justification of a unique ethical view (Katsafanas 2013). So Velleman and I think that constitutivism enables us to rule out some ethical views and to recommend others, but not to reach a justification of a single ethical view. CO NC L U D I NG RE MAR K S

I’ve given a very brief overview of the constitutivist strategy, discussed some ways in which the constitutivist theories vary, and offered clarifications in response to standard objections and confusions. While much work remains to be done, I hope this chapter gives an indication of how constitutivism works and why it is appealing.

21 JOHN RAWLS’S POLITICAL LIBERALISM c had van sc h o e lan d t an d g e ra l d gau s

INTRODUCTION

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is generally recognized as the greatest work of political philosophy in the twentieth century; his Political Liberalism may well be the most revolutionary.1 PL has set the agenda for much of political philosophy in the twenty-first century. As we shall emphasize, Rawls’s political liberalism was not simply a new approach to political theory, but part of a wider rethinking of the relation of moral and social theory, and of the place of diversity in moral thinking. Rawls developed PL in response to his increasing appreciation of the depth of disagreement among reasonable people and the complexities of formulating a moral theory appropriate for societies with such diversity. In our view, PL is best understood as presenting a variety of strategies to address that diversity.2 Some of those strategies are developed both in the essays leading up to PL and across the editions of PL itself, as Rawls gained better understanding of the depth of the disagreement and the revisions such disagreement necessitated. In this chapter, we will first discuss the basic development of Rawls’s conception of justice from one grounded in a comprehensive philosophic doctrine in TJ to a freestanding political conception in PL. Next, we will discuss the way the political liberal project developed in light of Rawls’s recognition that there will be an enduring reasonable pluralism about justice itself. This recognition produced important revisions in the view, including the 1

2

A Theory of Justice was first published in 1971, with an important revision published in 1999. Political Liberalism was first published in 1993, and its final revised edition with additional introductions and the important essay “The idea of public reason revisited” published in 2005. Our references throughout are to the revised editions of these works, and we use the abbreviations TJ and PL. Note that while pagination of the main text is the same in all editions of Political Liberalism, this unfortunately is not the case with the important front matter of the introductions. Further in-text references to Rawls’s other works, as with works by other authors, are by year. For critical reception of Rawls, see Rossi, this volume. We consider a number of interpretations of the ideas in PL, and how they form multiple “models” of political liberalism, in depth in Gaus and Van Schoelandt 2017. Other authors that hold that PL explores multiple philosophic avenues include Brian Barry (1995) and Burton Dreben (2003).

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nature of a well-ordered society. Lastly, we address some of the ways political liberal ideas, such as that of an overlapping consensus, continue to provide tools for ongoing research agendas.

F R O M A T H E O R Y O F J U S T I C E T O P O L I T I C A L LI B E R A L I S M

Justice as Fairness’s Reliance on a Comprehensive Doctrine Political philosophy, Rawls (1999d: 421; cf. 2001c: §1) says, presents a conception of justice that provides “a shared basis for the justification of political and social institutions.” The history of liberal-democratic thought displays numerous reasonable conceptions of justice that offer guides for structuring society. These various conceptions each offer their own specifications of the liberal values of liberty and equality, as well as how these are to be combined or traded off against each other, and ultimately provide different recommendations for society’s basic social institutions.3 In A Theory of Justice, Rawls (TJ, 7) aimed to “formulate a reasonable conception of justice for the basic structure of society.” This included his two principles of justice according to which, first, all citizens are to be guaranteed equal basic liberties, and, second, institutions ensure all a fair equality of opportunity while allowing inequalities in wealth and income only insofar as doing so works to the benefit of the least well off. Moreover, Rawls (TJ, xviii) argued that his own conception of “justice as fairness,” when compared to traditional alternatives, “best approximates our considered judgments of justice and constitutes the most appropriate moral basis of a democratic society.”4 To this end, Rawls presented the “original position,” a hypothetical contracting situation in which the parties under a “veil of ignorance” – restricting information about themselves and their society – select principles of justice.5 Denied information about their particular life plans, each party aims to maximize their “primary goods,” goods that rational individuals, “whatever else they want, desire as prerequisites for carrying out their plans of life” (TJ, 348). Endeavoring to maximize primary goods such as liberties and wealth (TJ, 54) in this choice situation, Rawls argues, the agents will select his two principles of justice. 3

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Scholars dispute how to specify which institutions are, or ought to be, a part of the “basic structure” on Rawls’s account. For one discussion of this issue, particularly regarding the place of families, see Neufeld and Van Schoelandt 2014. Rawls’s concern for adjudicating disputes through consideration of our considered judgments goes back to his 1951 “Outline of a decision procedure for ethics” (1999b). On the original position and the selection of principles within it, see TJ, chapter III. Cf. Gaus and Thrasher 2015.

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The project begins with an assumption of enduring reasonable disagreement about the good, such as what (if any) religion to adhere to, the life plan to pursue, and personal virtues to seek. Rational diversity of views is a basic supposition, grounding both the structure of the original position and the attraction of principles allowing each to pursue their own conception of the good. Despite this diversity, Rawls (TJ, 4) hoped to show that a society could be well ordered by justice as fairness, in the sense that “(1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles.” Justice as fairness, then, was presented as a conception of justice that members of society could share to order their society’s basic institutions within which they would pursue their diverse conceptions of the good. The extensive third part of TJ was meant to show that such a society could remain stable – that members of society could be expected to maintain allegiance to the principles of justice over time. Put another way, the aim was to establish that a society, once well ordered by the principles of justice, would not be undermined by some coming to view justice as irrational or incompatible with their conception of the good. Showing that the two principles could be stable in this way was essential to justifying them (TJ, 124, 398–9, 465, 472, 505). In particular, Rawls aimed to show that members of society would see maintaining commitment to justice as fairness as part of, rather than conflicting with, the good life. (See particularly TJ, chapter ix.) This stability argument was built upon a normative theory of the good that includes, among other things, plans of life having a particular sort of structure (TJ, 358), the goodness of exercising our natural capacities and valuing the capacities developed and exercised by others (374–6),6 a sociability leading human beings to have “shared final ends” and to “value their common institutions and activities as good in themselves” (458), the value of sincerity (499–500), and a natural “desire to express their nature as free and equal moral persons” (462).7 Given these claims about a rational and good plan of life, Rawls maintained that commitment to, and compliance with, the requirements of the two principles of justice is congruent with the good life; the threat of defection rooted in alienation was thus, he concluded, met.8

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Rawls called this “the Aristotelian Principle” and its companion effect. Weithman (2010) gives an extensive and insightful analysis of the role these aspects of a theory of the good play in TJ. See also Weithman’s (2016) discussion of stability considerations in the original position. Without congruence of justice and the good, people are likely to see their sense of justice as itself oppressive and to be rejected so they may pursue the good unhampered. For general consideration of the need for, and strategies for finding, congruence between the good and the right, see Kurt Baier 1995: 4–7, and Jerome Schneewind 1996.

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As Rawls’s appreciation of the depth of reasonable pluralism and its implications deepened, however, he concluded (PL, xvii) that this theory of the good, on which the stability arguments rested, constituted a controversial “comprehensive philosophical doctrine.” “Modern democratic society,” he concluded (PL, xvii), “is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally.” Furthermore, we cannot expect that this diversity of comprehensive doctrines will go away, for “a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime.”9 An alternative approach was thus needed that did not rely on any comprehensive doctrine, all of which are bound to be controversial among reasonable members of society. Recasting the Argument as a Freestanding Political Conception In light of this enduring pluralism of incompatible reasonable comprehensive doctrines, Rawls reformulates his project in PL, recasting justice as fairness as a “freestanding political conception having its own intrinsic (moral) ideal” (PL, xlv; cf. xlii, 12, 40, 140). Rather than relying on controversial moral and philosophic views, PL endeavors to construct the conception of justice from shared commitments and ideals in democratic political culture, such as a conception of free and equal citizenship (PL, 8–9, 78). Insofar as these shared political values can be specified independently of any particular comprehensive doctrine, they are freestanding. As specifically political ideas, they do not necessarily commit one to any particular stance on broader moral or philosophic issues. So, for instance, the conception of citizens as free is not a metaphysical claim of freedom from physical determinism or a moral ideal of Kantian autonomy. Though easy to overlook, it is worth noting that a great deal of the structure of TJ carries over to PL. As Samuel Freeman (2006: 195) notes, Rawls reinterpreted many of the ideas that were part of TJ’s thin theory of the good as part of the political conception. For instance, aspects of the account of rational life plans in TJ come into PL as part of the conception of free and equal citizens, and thus ground appeal to the same list of primary goods in both works. Likewise, Rawls presents a political, rather than comprehensive or philosophic, analysis 9

PL, xvi. On the burdens of judgment that generate this pluralism, see Gaus and Van Schoelandt 2015.

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of the good of community (PL, 201–6). The political interpretations of such values allow Rawls to maintain the main structure of justice as fairness, importantly including the argument from the original position.10

Stability through an Overlapping Consensus Recall that for Rawls the central problem with the account in TJ was that the stability argument depended upon a comprehensive philosophic doctrine. Although PL maintained the specification of the original position and the principles of justice from TJ, it takes a very different approach to stability. Stability is now partly secured by the important values comprising the political conception. Although the conception of justice is freestanding in relation to particular comprehensive moral or philosophic doctrines, it is constructed from values within democratic political culture, such as the conception of citizens as free and equal. These values are shared by members of democratic societies, and held to be very weighty. When a conflict arises between the requirements of the conception of justice and the comprehensive doctrine of some member of society, it may be hoped that on reflection she will find the political values weighty enough to warrant maintaining her commitment to justice. The intrinsic values of the conception of justice itself, however, cannot be counted upon as sufficient to provide for the stability, since members of society may still find themselves tempted to abandon justice to pursue the good as they understand it within their comprehensive doctrines.11 To fully address the stability problem, PL proposes that justice as fairness can gain further stability through an “overlapping consensus.” In PL consideration of the possibility of an overlapping consensus makes up a second stage of the argument for justice as fairness. The first stage relies only on the political values to form the freestanding political conception of justice. In that way, it appeals strictly to the values that Rawls takes to be shared by reasonable members of a democratic society. In the second stage, the full range of values that reasonable members of society hold become relevant. The second stage, then, takes into account the diverse and conflicting comprehensive doctrines of the members of society. What is at issue is whether or not the diverse comprehensive doctrines that members may hold could be expected to support, or at least not too greatly conflict with, the political conception of justice. Unlike the account in TJ, Rawls is not providing a single, particular way 10 11

Rawls (PL, xvi) indicates that with the new political understanding of the conception of justice, PL takes “the structure and content of Theory to remain substantially the same.” Weithman (2010: 51ff ) provides a valuable discussion of this possible temptation away from justice.

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that he expects this support to be generated by all of the members of society. Instead, “the political conception is a module . . . that fits into and can be supported by various reasonable comprehensive doctrines that endure in the society regulated by it” (PL, 12). The idea here is that many different routes may be taken to get the necessary support of the conception of justice, with members of society finding different reasons within their own comprehensive doctrines to maintain commitment to justice. Rawls (PL, 145–6) argues, for instance, that various comprehensive liberal philosophic doctrines upholding a moral ideal of autonomy may provide strong support for the conception of justice, while various religious doctrines that reject a moral ideal of autonomy may still be amenable to the conception of justice insofar as they contain a doctrine of free faith.12 Some members of the public will not so much positively endorse the conception of justice from their comprehensive doctrines as simply not find excessive conflict (PL, 11, 40, 140). In light of the intrinsic values expressed by the conception of justice, even those experiencing some conflict can be expected to remain committed to justice. Insofar as each, taking account of her own comprehensive views, has sufficient reason to continue to support justice as fairness, the conception of justice will be stable.13

Public Reason To facilitate members of the public applying the principles of justice, the agents in the original position produce “a companion agreement on the guidelines for public inquiry and on the criteria as to what kind of information and knowledge is relevant in discussing political questions, at least when these involve the constitutional essentials and questions of basic justice” (Rawls 2001c: 89; cf. 1999d: 429; PL, 62, 225). These guidelines assist citizens in applying the principles in coordinated ways by structuring their deliberations, using common methods of inquiry. Appeal to, say, divine revelation, the work of philosophers outside the democratic tradition (such as Lenin), or highly controversial scientific claims may not be employed in constitutional interpretation or political debate about basic justice. Diverse citizens adhering to 12 13

See Taylor 2011: 244–8 for a helpful, and skeptical, discussion of Rawls’s idea of an overlapping consensus. One may note that in TJ and at least parts of PL, stability is a population-level trait: It does not require that everyone find congruence between the right and the good or be a part of the overlapping consensus. Instead, the overlapping consensus need only include the plurality of views likely to be held by many over a number of generations (PL, 15; 1999c: 475, 495; 1999d: 425n, 430). Overlapping consensus is sometimes used, particularly by other authors, but also at times by Rawls, in a way requiring inclusion of all reasonable people.

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these guidelines may also help assure each other about their commitment to the shared conception of justice.14 Note that this interpretation of public reason sees it as an auxiliary to a particular conception of justice, serving to interpret and stabilize that conception.

REASONABLE PLURALISM ABOUT JUSTICE

Justice as Fairness as Merely a Member of the Liberal Family If pluralism were restricted to conceptions of the good and all citizens could be expected to recognize justice as fairness as the most reasonable conception of justice, little more would need to be said. Rawls, however, came to see that it was unrealistic to expect that all members of society would endorse the same conception of justice as most reasonable. The same enduring features of life that generate disagreement about the good also generate disagreement about justice. PL explains reasonable pluralism about the good as deriving from the “burdens of judgment” (54–8). These burdens include the facts that we confront conflicting evidence, moral concepts are vague and open to diverse interpretations, and people weigh competing values differently. A key moment in the evolution of the political liberalism project occurred when Rawls fully realized that these same burdens affect deliberations about political values on which the freestanding political conception of justice is built. The values comprising a democratic political culture are vague and open to divergent, conflicting interpretations. Citizens thus disagree about the most reasonable way to form these values into a freestanding liberal conception. Even if they all recognize the same range of conceptions of justice as reasonable, they should be expected to disagree about which is most reasonable. Though Rawls continued to see justice as fairness as the “most reasonable,” he acknowledged that “many reasonable people will disagree” (PL, xlvii–xlviii). Understanding the way that the burdens of judgment affect justice will thus “lead us to recognize that there are different and incompatible liberal conceptions” (PL, xlvii). This reasonable pluralism about justice rules out the possibility of achieving TJ’s goal of society well ordered by a single conception of justice. Though PL still deals primarily with working out the case of justice as fairness, Rawls thought that, realistically, we are faced with a “family of reasonable though differing liberal political conceptions” (PL, xxxvi, xlvi, 43). On this account, citizens will endorse diverse conceptions of justice as most reasonable. At the 14

Though, for an important criticism, see Thrasher and Vallier 2015.

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population level, at any given time, citizens will be clustered around a relatively small number of conceptions, some of which will be more widely held. Over time, some conceptions may lose favor, others may gain adherents, and wholly new conceptions may arise. One plausible implication, which Rawls endorsed in his last writings (PL, 440–90), is that each citizen will promote policies (at least regarding constitutional issues and matters of basic justice) in accordance with her favored conception of justice. Moreover, insofar as public reason is derivative of a conception of justice, each member of society will appeal to reasons corresponding to that conception in public discourse. The distinction between political liberalism and various specific liberal conceptions is thus critical. Political liberalism is a metatheory of justice. One level of theorizing about justice regards formulating and assessing particular conceptions of justice, and at this level Rawls endorsed justice as fairness with its two principles. Political liberalism, however, is a theory of democratic society in which there will not be agreement on which conception of justice is best. As Rawls (PL, 439) put the point: “Political Liberalism is about a family of reasonable liberal ideas of political justice, and these are now specified in the early pages. Justice as fairness itself now has a minor role as but one such political conception among others.” The ongoing project of political liberalism, then, accepts and attempts to address this pluralism, rather than defending justice as fairness or any other particular conception as best.

Justice Pluralism and the Well-Ordered Society While citizens reasonably disagree as to which conception is the most reasonable, PL maintains that they all can be expected to endorse as reasonable a family of liberal conceptions. Members of this family specify the details differently, but each would give special priority to certain rights, liberties, and opportunities, and “measures assuring to all citizens adequate all-purpose means to make effective use of their liberties and opportunities” (PL, 6). Since all of these conceptions are within the liberal family, they will overlap on core matters such as freedom of speech. The diversity of conceptions would, however, lead citizens to support different policies in some cases, and to appeal to different sorts of reasons in doing so.15 They will not see a common conception of justice as most reasonable. 15

As an illustration of the likely diversity, one may consider that the liberal family would include, besides justice as fairness, some forms of liberal utilitarianism (e.g. that described by Rawls 2001c: 120, or Riley 1988), and versions of classical liberalism like those defended along Rawlsian lines by Lomasky (2005) and Tomasi (2012).

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Rawls (PL, xlvii) seems to acknowledge two possibilities for a society with this pluralism about justice when he discusses the value realized when “a basic structure of society is effectively regulated by one of a family of reasonable liberal conceptions of justice (or a mix thereof ), which family includes the most reasonable conception.” Should the society in fact be regulated by a single conception of justice, it would, after all, seem well ordered. It is not clear, though, how Rawls thinks this would come about, for without agreement among the members of society on which conception is most reasonable they face a selection problem.16 Rawls (PL, 388n) rejects relying simply on democracy to select a conception: “The conception of political justice can no more be voted on than can the axioms, principles, and rules of inference of mathematics or logic.” Without specification of a means to coordinate on a particular conception, it seems that the parenthetical “mix thereof” is the only option. This seems to imply that the members of society would be pursuing their different conceptions of justice, and society’s institutions are shaped and regulated by this mix of conceptions, presumably even changing over time as the mix itself changes. On this outcome enduring pluralism about justice undermines the possibility, or at least the plausibility, of a society being regulated by a common conception of justice. This is a striking implication. Central to the development of justice as fairness was the idea of a well-ordered society “in which everyone accepts, and knows that others accept, the very same principles of justice” (PL, 35; cf. PL, 39, 201). Moreover, this sharing of the conception is essential to the public role of a conception of justice “to specify a point of view from which all citizens can examine before one another whether or not their political institutions are just” (Rawls 1999d: 426).17 If there is no way for citizens to coordinate on a single conception of justice they will not have a common point of view for assessing their institutions and justifying to each other institutional arrangements. Insofar as a shared conception was meant to serve “as the basis of public reason” (PL, 48, 11), the members of society will also lack shared guidelines for public discussion. They will instead “offer one another fair terms of cooperation

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An account in which the society is well ordered by a single conception of justice despite ongoing pluralism about which conception is most reasonable would also need to address what Gerald Gaus (2016) calls “the Gap,” meaning that a member of society must accept that there will be a gap between what is required by the public conception of justice (that she is expected to endorse) and what is required by the conflicting conception that she thinks most reasonable. It seems that in such a case the member would have justice-based reasons for working against the public conception of justice, and this may undermine that conception’s stability. For an extended discussion of the social role or function of a conception of justice and its implications, see Van Schoelandt and Gaus 2018.

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according to what they consider the most reasonable conception of political justice” (PL, 446, emphasis added). CONCLUSION

In our view Rawls’s political liberalism project sought to change the very nature of political philosophy. Rather than the traditional aim of articulating an account of political justice – an aim still regulative in TJ – PL theorized about reasonable disagreement about justice and possible terms on which reasonable persons may reconcile. This was a radically revisionist project; it required formulating a new vocabulary – e.g. of “the reasonable” (as a replacement for the concept of truth), overlapping consensus, a political conception of justice and the person, and freestanding argument. Rawls undertook this project late in his career;18 it remained dynamic and unfinished, with unexecuted plans for a yet more radical recasting (PL, 438–9). As we have argued elsewhere (Gaus and Van Schoelandt 2017), those who would freeze it at the time of his death, treating it as a completed, coherent doctrine, do it disservice. Political Liberalism should be read as a fecund source of revolutionary ideas and models of political life under disagreement, models that can be developed in startlingly different, and enlightening, directions.19 Rawls has left us with exciting avenues to explore, problems to solve, and fecund ideas to develop. What more could we ask from a great philosopher?

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He was already ill by the time he drafted the introduction to the 1996 paperback edition of PL. Compare, for example, Quong 2010; Gaus 2011; Lister 2013; Muldoon 2016.

22 THE TWILIGHT OF THE LIBERAL SOCIAL CONTRACT On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism

enzo rossi

INTRODUCTION

Political liberalism is a distinctive account of the normative foundations of liberal institutions and practices, developed by John Rawls and others in the final decades of the twentieth century. It remains a fairly active but hardly dominant research program in political philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Its most complete and influential statement is to be found in the second edition of Rawls’s second book, Political Liberalism (1994), and in a few preceding and subsequent works by Rawls (2001a; 2001b). Like Rawls’s enormously influential theory of “justice as fairness” (1971), political liberalism was developed during a time many saw as the triumph of liberalism, if by liberalism we understand a reasonably stable and not too onesided marriage between constitutional parliamentary democracy and capitalism. In retrospect, neither the early 1970s nor the early 1990s look that way. Triumphalism withered away in the years following the publication of both works. The early seventies mark the beginning of the end of balance in that metaphorical marriage, with the return of extreme inequality and the slow unraveling of mass involvement in representative politics at the end of the trente glorieuses (1945–75), to use the phrase popularized by Thomas Piketty’s (2013) famous study of inequality in capitalist liberal democracies. Rawls had been working on A Theory of Justice since the early fifties though, so his view can retrospectively be seen as a eulogy for an age of significant state-led attempts to mitigate the adverse effects of capitalism on at least some of society’s most vulnerable segments. More importantly for our present purposes, the late eighties and early nineties – when Political Liberalism was completed and published – were widely seen as a victory march for liberalism, despite the changed economic circumstances. This was due to the collapse of liberalism’s main rival, the Soviet Union’s “actually existing socialism.” That triumph quickly turned into a crisis even faster than was the case for social democracy. New, serious 297

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challenges for Western liberal democracies emerged, and started dominating academic and public discourse by the turn of the century: increasing cultural diversity, sovereignty erosion through globalization, new nationalisms, international terrorism, the rise of China, illiberal populism. Rawls formulated political liberalism ostensibly to address what he perceived as theoretical weaknesses of his earlier work; one may also see it as a timely, even prescient response to actual political problems of liberal societies, especially as concerns the accommodation of diversity, the role of religion in public life (especially in the United States), and the place of non-liberals within those societies. So, just as A Theory of Justice appeared soon before many started to question the social justice of the increasingly marketized Western polities, Political Liberalism – a theory of (liberal) legitimacy – appeared at a time of intense scrutiny of the ability of liberal democracies to offer satisfactory grounds for their authority. Both books revived liberal social contract theory, albeit in different ways, as we shall see below. The next section of this chapter provides a philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the latter effort, political liberalism.1 The subsequent sections provide a conceptual framework to make sense of its reception. I characterize two main families of responses to political liberalism, and devote a section to each. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching philosophical question: Was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for either liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that question. Nonetheless I conclude that the research program of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The program is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states.

POLITICAL LIBERALISM

John Rawls is widely credited with reviving Western political philosophy in the twentieth century. This may be true, if by “political philosophy” we mean the sort of normative theory practiced within the vast majority of Anglophone philosophy departments, as opposed to the more social theory inflected, less “normativistic” (Jaeggi 2009) strands of political thought commonly associated with the European continent. At any rate the aspect of Rawls’s work that concerns us here is, perhaps primarily, a contribution to a tradition that predates 1

For a sustained explication of Rawls, see Van Schoelandt and Gaus, this volume.

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that schism, namely the social contract tradition – a tradition intimately though not exclusively linked with what would later be recognized as the liberal canon. Reference to the social contract may perplex some in a chapter devoted to political liberalism, as Rawls’s revival of contractualism is usually associated with A Theory of Justice. Famously, in that work the “original position” updated the state of nature of early modern political philosophers, whereas there is no such thought experiment in Political Liberalism. But there is another important sense in which the later work is contractualist, and in some ways closer to the project of the early modern social contract theorists. For one thing, the original position aims at developing a theory of justice rather than legitimacy; whereas Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were primarily concerned with showing why we should have a coercive order at all. But there is a theory of political obligation within justice as fairness – just not a contractualist one, even though it provides the link to the contractualist theory of legitimacy found in Political Liberalism. Rawls’s theory of political obligation remains roughly unchanged between the two books. This theory says that we have a “duty of justice”: a natural duty to obey just institutions (1971: 114ff, 334–5; 1996: 142ff ). Crucially, this duty arises just in case citizens recognize the relevant just institutions as just: “Citizens would not be bound to even a just constitution unless they have accepted and intend to continue to accept its benefits. Moreover this acceptance must be in some appropriate sense voluntary” (1971: 336; also see 1996: xviiiff ). In the earlier work Rawls maintained that, with just institutions in place, citizens would develop an appropriate sense of justice and so recognize them as just (1971: chapter viii). Later he came to see this view as mistaken, for under the freedom afforded by just institutions citizens would develop a variety of conceptions of the good, which in turn would support a variety of conceptions of justice for institutions. This pluralism is not to be stamped out; it is to be respected as the product of just institutions. Rawls calls this “the problem of stability,” and makes it the main motivating question of Political Liberalism: “How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” (1993: xx). Explaining what sort of consensus could sustain such a society is the project of political liberalism. It is a contractualist project because it is about individuating what (hypothetical) features of the citizens’ motivational and volitional sets make it the case that a state may legitimately coerce them. Before discussing Rawls’s solution, let us bring the problem of stability into sharper focus. Somewhat misleadingly, Rawls uses the term “stability” in a technical sense, to cover two distinct yet connected issues: the need for peaceful coexistence (as the term would suggest), and the need for a morally acceptable

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consensus (hence the occasional phrase “stability for the right reasons”). Importantly, we can see each of the two aspects of the problem of stability as embodying a key desideratum of political liberalism: a realistic desideratum, directed at including genuine diversity, and an idealistic desideratum, directed at establishing the sort of consensus of free and equal citizens that would satisfy broadly liberal moral commitments. The desiderata are in tension.2 Throughout this chapter, I will present the reception of political liberalism as revolving around the assessment of Rawls’s way of dealing with that tension. So what is Rawls’s solution to the problem of stability? Given that few would argue that a coercive institution can be compatible with any and all conceptions of the good, Rawls needs a criterion for individuating the conceptions of the good worthy of inclusion. To this end he introduces the idea of reasonable pluralism. The set of reasonable citizens is the widest possible set of citizens that may form a consensus around a broadly liberal political conception of justice, such as (but not limited to) justice as fairness: Reasonable persons see the inevitability of serious and persistent disagreement and, further, that it would be wrong to try to stamp it out. They “see that the burdens of judgment set limits on what can be reasonably justified to others, and so they endorse some form of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought” (1996: 61). One may question the inference from reasonable disagreement to liberal freedoms, but Rawls does not, so his reasonable citizens “desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept” (1993: 52). Again, notice the two desiderata play out in the notion of reasonable pluralism: Crudely, Rawls wants diversity, provided it is compatible with consensus on liberal values. How can this be achieved? How much diversity is compatible with reasonableness? The answer is in the idea of reasonable comprehensive doctrines forming an overlapping consensus on a political – i.e. not comprehensive – conception of justice for the basic structure of society. Let us parse that jargon-ridden formulation. A comprehensive doctrine, whether religious or philosophical, is a conception of the good covering most aspects of what is valuable in human life. A political conception of justice is the set of norms regulating the basic structure of society, that is “society’s main political, constitutional, social, and economic institutions and how they fit together to form a unified scheme of social cooperation over time” (1996: xii n. 7). Note how a political conception is smaller in scope than a comprehensive conception: The former only applies to the domain of the political; the latter regulates all that is valuable in human life,

2

For a detailed discussion of this tension see D’Agostino 1996.

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Overlapping consensus (justification) Political conception of justice

Comprehensive doctrine A

Comprehensive doctrine B

Figure 22.1 From comprehensive doctrines to an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice.

including the political. So the political conception of justice cannot be added to the comprehensive doctrine, which, as such, admits of no other moral authorities. It follows that if many comprehensive doctrines are to converge on a single political conception of justice they must be able to overlap on some key political commitments. One must be able to support a single (liberal) political conception starting from a plurality of comprehensive doctrines:3 While we want a political conception to have a justification by reference to one or more comprehensive doctrines, it is neither presented as, nor as derived from, such a doctrine applied to the basic structure of society, as if this structure were simply another subject to which that doctrine applied . . . We must distinguish between how a political conception is presented and its being part of, or as derivable within, a comprehensive doctrine. I assume all citizens to affirm a comprehensive doctrine to which the political conception they accept is somehow related. But a distinguishing feature of a political conception is that it is presented as freestanding and expounded apart from, or without reference to, any such wider background. (1996: 12, emphasis added)

To fix ideas, Figure 22.1 gives a simple schematic representation of how comprehensive doctrines (just two, in this case) can provide the justificatory support for an overlapping consensus. 3

Rawls was heavily influenced by Judith Shklar here: “Liberalism does not in principle have to depend on specific religious or philosophical systems of thought. It does not have to choose among them as long as they do not reject toleration” (Shklar 1989: 24). However, as Bernard Yack (2017) observes, while Shklar was guided by a properly political concern with limiting state power, Rawls reinterprets this idea as being about the moral justification of liberal authority.

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Ideally held reasons

Overlapping consensus

Figure 22.2 Citizens’ reasons in an overlapping consensus.

Note the role of justification. In a legitimate liberal state a political conception of justice must be presented in compliance with what Rawls calls public reason, i.e. publicly justified in terms of values and ideas others may reasonably accept, since they are implicit in the public culture of society. Now, insofar as they are implicit in the public culture, are these sources of justification available to citizens as they actually are, or as they should be? One overly simplified way to answer that question is to say that they are available to reasonable citizens as they are. What exactly “available” means, and what percentage of citizens are actually reasonable, are much debated questions we will touch upon below. For now, simply note how different ways of answering those questions will place different amounts of emphasis on the realistic or the idealistic desideratum of political liberalism. The realistic desideratum posits that the overlapping consensus should be formed by reasons citizens actually have. The idealistic desideratum says that those reasons are reasons citizens should have. So, for instance, is there a sense in which liberal rule ought to be justified to the many residents of liberal states who do not share the commitment – required by reasonableness – to seeking fair terms of cooperation among free and equal citizens? How, exactly, is public justification supposed to make a difference to the justificatory status of a (liberal) regime? As anticipated, different strands in the reception of political liberalism can be individuated on the basis of their answers to those and other, related questions. Figure 22.2 shows the reasons that may contribute to an overlapping consensus. As we will see in the next two sections, it also provides a synoptic representation of the main cleavages among interpreters and critics of Rawlsian political liberalism. Schematically: Rawls thought that the overlap of the two sets is large enough or, to put it differently, he took actual liberal-democratic citizenries to be

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sufficiently close to reasonableness. As Thomas Nagel put it, what is distinctive about this approach is that it tries to retain an element of voluntarism, and as such stands in opposition to broadly consequentialist views of legitimacy that focus exclusively on the values and virtues embodied, protected, or expressed by political institutions: The task of discovering the conditions of legitimacy is traditionally conceived as that of finding a way to justify a political system to everyone who is required to live under it . . . the search for legitimacy can be thought of as an attempt to realise some of the values of voluntary participation in a system of institutions that is unavoidably compulsory. (Nagel 1991: 33–6, emphasis added)

Not many scholars carry on that exact project, partly because it has come under severe criticism, partly, perhaps, because philosophers are often disinclined to stake their normative positions on the delicate balance of attitudes in existing citizenries.4 Most responses to Rawls’s project are either more idealistic or more realistic – they place more weight on the reasons citizens should have and do have, respectively, and less weight on the intersection. To be sure, that cannot do justice to the nuance of the many views put forward in each of the families of responses I identify, but it should give a sense of the various directions of inquiry sparked by Rawls’s contribution. So our discussion, if only for reasons of space, is limited to relatively constructive engagements with political liberalism, however critical. In fact Figure 22.2 cannot capture the views – however compelling – of those critics of political liberalism who deem the entire project incoherent or unstable (e.g. Raz 1990; Wenar 1995; Wall 2002; Bohman and Richardson 2009; Enoch 2015):5 On those views there is either not enough or no overlap between the two sets of reasons, and/or neither set can legitimize liberalism on its own. More generally, as in previous iterations of debates on the social contract, those drawn to a substantive welfarist, perfectionist, or more generally consequentialist approach to normative political theory will have little time for what remains a broadly deontological-procedural approach (Arneson 2000). Neither can the figure capture critiques that reject broad commitments to forms of liberal democracy, if anything because political liberalism itself is not addressed to that

4

5

An important exception is George Klosko (2000), who tackles the problem of stability through an empirical investigation of the possibility of the overlapping consensus Rawls had only discussed speculatively. Other noteworthy contributors to the project of political liberalism as understood by Rawls are Quong (2010) and Weithman (2010), who introduce many important clarifications and addenda. I shall not discuss their views here, however, since the overall position they defend remains very close to Rawls’s. For an overview of the most important objections of this sort see Quong 2013: §7.

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audience: For better or worse, political liberalism is an internal articulation rather than an external defense of liberal-democratic commitments.

IDEALIST REACTIONS

There are a number of pro tanto reasons why a philosopher may wish to lean toward the idealistic side when formulating a theory of liberal legitimacy through public reason. The question, however, is whether one can focus primarily on the idealistic desideratum while still satisfying the realistic one, or, alternatively, manage to explain why the realistic desideratum is not worthy of much consideration. In this section we will consider a few such attempts, arranged in a crescendo of idealization. Before discussing those explicit attempts to formulate alternative theories of public reason, however, I should at least mention the important theoretical strand sparked by the well-known debate between Rawls (1995) and his major German contemporary, Jürgen Habermas (1995). Initially many commentators judged the terms of the debate to be unclear. Over time, however, the issues at stake have been made clearer.6 Habermas himself distilled the kernel of their disagreement in a recent precis: a problem . . . in my view, besets the construction of the “overlapping consensus”. The correctness of the political conception of justice is supposed, on the one hand, to be measured by whether it can be integrated into the different comprehensive doctrines as a module; on the other hand, only the “reasonable” doctrines that recognize the primacy of political values are supposed to be admitted to this test. It remains unclear which side trumps the other, the competing groups with a shared worldview who can say “no”, or practical reason that prescribes in advance which voices count. In my opinion, the practical reason expressed in the citizens’ public use of their reason should have the final word here, too. This admittedly calls for a philosophical justification of the universal validity of a morality of equal respect for everyone. Rawls wants to sidestep this task by confining himself to a “freestanding” theory of political justice. (2011: 285)

Here we begin to see the contours of the idealistic responses to political liberalism: What matters is not so much picking out the intersection of actual and ideal reasons, but identifying the correct ideal reasons that are to inform a hypothetical agreement. Following broadly from that approach, Rainer Forst has developed a conception of liberalism whereby Habermas’s universal morality of equal respect is instantiated in the more explicitly Rawlsian idea of a

6

See, e.g., Finlayson and Freyenhagen 2011.

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“right to justification,” or Recht zu Rechtfertigung, in the more vivid German phrase (Forst 2011). Habermas and, to a lesser extent, Forst may be seen as hopeful that their preferred ideal reasons could in some sense be read into any or most actual claims for political participation in liberal democracies.7 That weakens but retains Rawls’s aspiration for some overlap between public justification and citizens’ actual reasons. Other theorists take on board the Rawlsian project of public justification while explicitly rejecting the effort to find a suitable intersection between the actually held and ideally held reasons that may be used in the political sphere of liberal democracies. They insist that, crudely, what is important about public justification is that it picks out a relevant class of justificatory considerations that have the ability to ground liberal political authority sub specie aeternitatis, as it were. The most prominent exponent of this sort of view is Gerald Gaus. Gaus’s position has changed considerably over time, culminating in a project to extend his take on the idea of public reason well beyond the realm of liberal political philosophy, to the wider sphere of “social morality” (2011). For our purposes here, however, we should focus on his earlier, closer engagement with political liberalism. Coarsely put, Gaus argues that public justification’s legitimizing force is found entirely in the epistemic qualities of an appropriately specified, public account of normative justifiability, and so not at all in citizens’ actual dispositions toward the publicly justified institutions. For Gaus, Rawls is guilty of “justificatory populism” (1996: 130–4): public justification that employs reasons available to actual (albeit reasonable) citizens sanctions normative principles that do not satisfy even rather modest standards of rational justification. We should rather use reasons that are merely accessible to citizens (i.e. public), even though they may not be acceptable to them. As Steven Wall noted, Rawls’s idea of public justification can be read as containing two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: proponents of the public justification principle rightly insist on the publicity and acceptability requirements. Violation of the publicity requirement makes it difficult, if not impossible, for people to understand the reasons which explain why they should accept the authority that constrains them. Violation of the acceptability requirement makes it impossible for them reasonably to accept these reasons. (Wall 2002: 388, emphasis added)

Gaus’s account of public justification, then, seeks to combine both requirements into a notion of accessibility. It is not possible to discuss this move satisfactorily here.8 Suffice it to note how one may question whether mere 7

I criticize similar views in Rossi 2013a.

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For such a discussion see Rossi 2014.

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accessibility could embody the voluntarism – however faint and hypothetical – that distinguishes public justification views from broadly consequentialist approaches to (liberal) legitimacy.9

REALIST REACTIONS

On the other side of the spectrum of reactions to Rawls’s project we find theorists who, to put it roughly, think that anything resembling a social contract for a liberal-democratic society should be based on reasons actually shared by the citizenry, and that Rawlsian reasonableness constraints on public justification are too stringent. The rough idea here is that one may consistently uphold liberal-democratic institutions even while violating Rawls’s “duty of civility” to couch one’s arguments in terms that others may reasonably accept. Politics is, these theorists argue, more akin to a domain of conflict with winners and losers than to an enterprise of joint construction of common ground. Consensus of the sort envisaged by Rawls is chimeric, and trying to achieve it can be stifling if not downright oppressive. Defenses of that general position take various forms, which we may divide into three groups, with some overlap at the margins: (i) proponents of modus vivendi, (ii) agonistic democrats, and (iii) realist liberals. In Political Liberalism Rawls contrasts the idea of an overlapping consensus with that of a “mere” modus vivendi (1993: 126), which is “political in the wrong” way, as it may sanction that power equilibria are reached in ways that do not respect the equal standing of those involved. A number of theorists, however, resist Rawls’s negative characterization of modus vivendi; e.g. Gray (2000), Hershowitz (2000), Horton (2003), Mills (2000), Arnsperger and Picavet (2004), and Wendt (2016) offer intermediate positions. If there is a common denominator to those views, it is that under conditions of pluralism often a modus vivendi agreement is as much of an agreement as one can, or perhaps even should, hope for. A worrying question remains, however, as to whether it is worth retaining the voluntaristic aspirations of the idea of an agreement or compromise, while not being prepared to ensure that the agreement is indeed voluntary in a robust sense (Rossi 2010). Agonistic democrats take some of the concerns of modus vivendi theorists in a more radical direction. Chantal Mouffe is perhaps the most prominent exponent of this approach,10 which she anchors in a critique of Rawls’s project. Her 9

10

A worry made more salient when one considers how Gaus’s approach may be extended: Kevin Vallier (2011), for instance, has taken the focus on justification’s epistemic qualities to an extreme where even mere accessibility becomes surplus to requirement for liberal legitimacy. But also see Connolly 1991; Honig 1993.

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main contention is that the project of making society’s fundamental norms of justice float free from the controversial comprehensive doctrines held by the citizenry amounts to “the elimination of the very idea of the political” (Mouffe 1993: 51), for the political properly understood does not admit of neat partitions between questions of basic rights and justice and other questions of values and interests, or between public and private. Among genuine political adversaries there can be no consensus of the sort envisaged by Rawls nor, relatedly, can there be neat lines between liberal rights and the democratic reach of a sovereign people (Mouffe 2000). It is not entirely clear, however, whether this more confrontational and fluid model of democracy will satisfy the moral commitments of many liberals (Fossen 2008). More recently, realist political philosophers have been defending positions in some respects comparable to Mouffe’s. The starting point here is Bernard Williams’s posthumous work on liberalism and the methodology of political philosophy. Williams proposes an account of liberal legitimacy that eschews the heavy moral commitments found in political liberalism; nonetheless, he retains the idea that a legitimate political order must, inter alia, have “something to say” to those it coerces. It must “make sense” (2005: 4–6) to them. And, as it turns out, under modern conditions only a liberal order can satisfy those requirements, Williams argues. One can see how this could be interpreted as yet another attempt to weaken the demands of the overlapping consensus while preserving some of the voluntaristic appeal of public justification (Sleat 2010), in which case one may wonder whether this is not just an iteration of the modus vivendi strategy (Horton 2010), with the accompanying problems (Rossi 2013b). However, on closer inspection one can come to understand Williams’s quasi-contractualist talk of acceptability and justification as simply a heuristic to distinguish between raw domination and political coercion (Hall 2015) – more of a recognition of the limits of liberal contractualism than a new lease of life for it. PROSPECTS

The preceding discussion shows how the most prominent research programs sparked by or at any rate developed in reaction to political liberalism have traveled rather far from Rawls’s project. We should be weary of doing philosophy by opinion poll. Nonetheless, taking stock of the prevalence of academic skepticism regarding Rawls’s project may tell us something salient in the political climate of the early twenty-first century, which is characterized by increasing diversity as well as by a decline of state power. The relatively recent rise (or return) of populism in many Western liberal democracies has been

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accompanied by the development of increasingly insular and polarized media discourses, by a decline of trust in scientific expertise, and, especially in the United States, by the return of religion in politics – so, in general, public political discourse in liberal democracies is increasingly unhinged from the epistemic and moral parameters set out by political liberalism. This is perhaps tragically ironic given that Rawls’s efforts were aimed precisely at accommodating pluralism and at finding a way to make sincerely held religious belief compatible with liberal commitments. It looks as though Rawls was prescient but ineffective: He had the right diagnosis in terms of what was going to be the next big challenge for liberalism, but also an ineffective cure. Some may even speculate that, to the extent that the cure was applied at all, it was counterproductive: Consider the frequent invocation of a backlash against norms of civility for public political discourse. That loose narrative yields a moral with regard to the two strands of reactions to political liberalism we have been considering, namely that the idealistic reactions are bound to fare worse than the realistic ones. But in what sense can political circumstances play a role in determining whether a normative political theory fares worse than another? One may simply insist that Rawls or even the philosophers who carry political liberalism further in an idealist direction are correct in their interpretation of what liberal legitimacy requires, and so that, from a liberal point of view, we live in dark times indeed. That is a consistent position. On the other hand, one may question the wisdom of using high abstraction and moral condemnation to avoid having to come to terms with some of the most pressing political problems we face.11 At any rate, as we have seen, it is not as if the realistic correctives to political liberalism are devoid of serious problems. It might just be the case, then, that at least in this form contractualist liberalism has run its course, given the levels of diversity in contemporary liberal societies, as opposed to the early modern European societies where the approach originated. Political liberalism and its constructive reception are worthwhile efforts to save that approach, and the debates we surveyed here are an instructive way to understand its limitations as we continue to look for alternative solutions, be they unabashedly teleological liberalism, realist liberalism, or departures from liberalism in the direction of radical democracy and other, less traveled roads. The difficulties with political liberalism discussed here certainly show how this research program has the merit

11

A point eloquently made by Charles Mills (2005), and also found, mutatis mutandis, in much contemporary realist political thought (Rossi and Sleat 2014).

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of having brought issues of cultural and moral diversity to the forefront of political theorizing. However, since the tradition of liberal contractualism is closely bound to the rise of modern states, it casts far less light on those aspects of the crisis of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes that can be ascribed to globalization and the decline of state power.12

12

Research for this chapter was supported by the Dutch National Science Organisation’s Vidi project “Legitimacy Beyond Consent” (grant n. 016.164.351). The work was presented at the University of Milan. I’m grateful to the audience for their feedback, and to Giulia Bistagnino for her thoughtful commentary.

23 FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND REAL POLITICS Susan Moller Okin on “Multiculturalism”

lo r na fi n lay s o n

INTRODUCTION

According to some accounts (Stone 2007; Tuana 2011), feminist philosophy emerges only in the 1970s.1 This claim about the recent emergence of feminist philosophy does not mean, however, that before the 1970s there was no feminist thought. In perhaps the broadest sense – referring to any systematic, principled, or reasoned thought (not necessarily written) that is somehow oriented toward the advancement of the social standing of women or the critique of their subordination – feminist philosophy is probably as old as humanity itself. What is new is, arguably, a certain style of feminist thought that is deemed “philosophical” in a narrower sense – a style marked by a particular kind of abstraction from empirical fact, by a distinctly “normative” character (understood to be somehow different from or to go beyond traditional political advocacy). Concomitant with this new style of thought is the institutional recognition of feminist philosophy as philosophy. Species change in important ways when they become domesticated. It thus makes sense to ask: What happens to feminist thought, when it finally becomes a member of the academic-philosophical family? A second question, particularly important in my view, is: What relationship exists between feminism inside the institution of academic philosophy and what goes on outside? In particular, how might developments within academic philosophy reflect wider political developments, or become swept up by prevailing political winds? I’ll approach these broad questions concerning recent history of feminist thought through discussion of a single case-study: liberal feminist Susan Moller Okin’s influential critique of a position she calls “multiculturalism.”

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It has begun to spread from the margins of philosophy toward the center of the discipline only much more recently still.

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IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD FOR WOMEN?

The above is the title of a now classic essay by Okin, first published in 1999. The answer that she gives in response to her rhetorical question is, in short: “yes.” She detects “a deep and growing tension” between feminism and multiculturalism (1999: 10). And she argues that feminism should take priority. Okin begins by mentioning the controversy over the wearing of headscarves by girls of Moroccan origin in French public schools in the late 1980s. Rather than declaring a position on this issue, however, she makes a different point: Amid all this fuss about headscarves, she claims, little attention was paid to polygamy, a “problem of vastly greater importance for many French Arab and African immigrant women” (9); this practice was “quietly permitted” by the French authorities even as they contemplated a ban on the foulard or headscarf (later to become the voile or veil: Scott 2007: 16). Okin infers from this, surely correctly, that the furore over the headscarf could not have been motivated by any genuine concern for the plight of women on the part of the French authorities. But then a potential confusion arises as she draws her main conclusion from the present example: “The French accommodation of polygamy illustrates a deep and growing tension between feminism and multiculturalist concern for protecting cultural diversity” (Okin 1999: 10). Is Okin’s assumption here that the French state, while uninterested in the plight of women, is interested in “protecting cultural diversity”? That would be a contestable reading of the behavior and posture of the French state, to say the least (and one belied in the eyes of many critics by the recurrent affaires over the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls and women).2 If the authorities “quietly permitted” polygamy, perhaps there are other available explanations, for example expediency or potentially prohibitive costs of prosecution. Or could the same factor – a disregard for the interests and dignity of women – lie behind both the problematizing of headscarf-wearing girls and the apparent indifference to the issue of polygamy? Perhaps Okin would think these questions beside the point. Perhaps the sense in which the policy toward polygamy “illustrates” the “deep and growing tension” is less direct, and her point is that turning a blind eye to practices like polygamy is just what a state guided by multiculturalist principles would do (even if in fact states sometimes do such things for other reasons). Her claim is that a commitment to multiculturalism would sanction non-intervention in the face of minority cultural

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According to Joan Wallach Scott (2007: 12–13), the notion of equality implicit in French “universalism” is premised upon a “sameness” which is no mere abstraction but requires assimilation to the norms of French culture.

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practices such as polygamy (practices held to be highly problematic from a feminist point of view). “Multiculturalism” is a vague term. In its most basic and literal sense, it means either: (i) the coexistence of (members of ) multiple cultures in one area, or under one state; or (ii) the advocacy, defense, or celebration of such coexistence. Those who criticize or oppose multiculturalism, understood in either way, would like to see less cultural diversity, in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense: They would like smaller minority populations, and for any remaining members of minority cultures to be less different from the majority than they are (or seem to be). Of course, the issue is highly racialized, far from being only about a (raceless) “culture”: Those who say that multiculturalism has gone too far are not typically lamenting what they see as excessive numbers of French people in the UK, for example, or excessive toleration of them (with their peculiar accents and broken English); nor are they talking, for example, about Catholics, with their own dedicated schools, their large families and their views on abortion. The term “culture” is uncomfortably ambiguous, ranging across religion, nationality, and other factors, but it is clear in practice that the term “cultural minorities” refers specifically to shifting sets of people defined either in terms of their minority racial, ethnic, or national background (Black British, Arab, Pakistani), or in terms of a religion closely associated with this background (Rastafarian, Muslim).3 Okin, however, is using the term “multiculturalism” in a different sense, referring to a movement within late twentieth-century liberal political philosophy which developed in response to questions surrounding the rights of minority communities in the USA and Canada, such as the Amish and indigenous peoples. Okin defines “multiculturalism” in this sense as “the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should also be protected through special group rights or privileges” (Okin 1999: 10–11). Okin tells us: “In the French case . . . the right to contract polygamous marriages clearly constituted a group right not available to the rest of the population. In other cases, groups have claimed rights to govern themselves, to have guaranteed political representation, or to be exempt from certain generally applicable laws” (11).

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It’s not necessary – or sufficient – to have a darker complexion (than the majority) to count as a member of a “cultural minority,” but it helps. And yet, while skin color functions as one major marker of difference, what is more fundamental here is membership of a group that is currently designated a genus non gratum, be it the group of Asians, “Muslims” (not all of whom are darkskinned), or – to take one especially stigmatized group in the UK – Irish travelers.

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However, Okin’s chosen example seems ill-suited for the points she wants to make. The French state did not, it seems, offer a group right to any minority group with respect to polygamous marriage in the 1980s. After all, polygamy was not illegal in France until 1993 (when it was banned largely due to concerns about immigrants claiming too much housing benefit in order to support large families). So while Okin may be right to say that polygamy was tolerated by the French authorities, this might have to do with the fact that it was not a crime: No “special right” was involved. And subsequently, the authorities even made up a new crime – not one just for immigrant and minority groups, but certainly one aimed at curbing their practices in particular (although as Okin observes [10], the crackdown was not performed with much consideration for the women formerly in polygamous families). Okin could again reply that these facts are not important: The point is that if a state were following multiculturalist principles, and had a law in place against a practice like polygamy, then it might well offer a special right of exemption for certain cultural minorities in order to protect their “ways of life” (and that this would be a bad thing, from a feminist point of view). Well, I suppose it might. Trying to evaluate the case seems like a strange exercise, so hypothetical are its premises and so abstract its description. But that is quite characteristic of late twentieth-century analytic philosophy, which sees itself as engaged primarily with normative matters and questions of principle rather than empirical questions or concrete details – although, again, it would have been preferable if Okin had taken more care with her answers to the empirical questions when not directly focused on philosophical concerns.4 Let us in any case try to evaluate the supposed implications of multiculturalism. First, we have to establish what sort of normative project Okin is engaged in. One possibility is that she is conducting what is known as ideal theory: She could be interpreted as asking what the just liberal state would look like under idealized conditions, and answering that it would not adopt the multiculturalist policy of making exemptions to laws against practices such as polygamy. This does not seem to me the best reading of her intervention, however. It fits badly with her frequent (albeit misleading) appeal to concrete cases, which she uses to paint a picture of a decidedly non-ideal world; and multiculturalism, in the sense that interests Okin, anyway arose as a response to non-ideal conditions: legacies of racist oppression and persecution, ethnic cleansing, and intercultural tension.

4

Okin’s misinformation is also of a kind which slots neatly into a prevalent racist narrative – similar to the common misconception that immigrants in the UK go “to the front of the queue” when they apply for housing benefit. (Of course, we could discuss whether a state which allowed this, hypothetically, would be doing something good or bad; but why would we?)

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So let us assume that Okin is instead asking what a liberal state should do, and what might realistically be demanded of an existing liberal state, given conditions which fall short of ideal: Should such a state, while banning polygamous marriage in general, make an exception for certain cultural minorities, in order to protect their ways of life? This last question is still not clear. What could be meant by “banning” in the context of marriage? Contemporary Western feminists tend reflexively to think of marriage as a state institution. On this understanding, allowing (a certain kind of ) marriage means that it is state-sanctioned, which also comes with various legally enshrined rights and privileges. (Historically, in the West, these privileges have been for the man only, while the woman was consigned to the status of her husband’s property.) State marriage also places certain restrictions on the parties involved: For example, while married to one another, neither party is permitted to marry another person. But state marriage is one (historically and geographically specific) model. Prior to 1837, births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales did not have to be registered by the state, but were typically recorded in parish registers. There is no state marriage in Lebanon or in Israel today: Marriage is a matter for religious authorities, and those wanting a civil marriage have to go abroad to get one. The polygamous immigrants to France who so interest Okin would also not have had state marriages, but religious ones. Where marriage is a religious institution, the state may still endow (certain kinds of ) marriage with some form of recognition: In 2008, for example, the UK government recognized polygamous marriages performed outside the country – to perform them inside the country is illegal – for the purposes of welfare payments (though not for citizenship or pension purposes).5 So what would it mean to grant a “special right” to polygamous marriage, in the context of a liberal-democratic state such as France? It could mean that there is a special institution of polygamous state marriage, just for the members of particular cultural groups. As far as I’m aware, however, this is not something which advocates of multiculturalism have ever demanded. And indeed, it doesn’t seem a natural fit with the goal of protecting minority ways of life, given that state marriage was never part of the way of life of (e.g.) Muslim communities in the Middle East or North Africa in the first place. Another 5

At the time of writing, the UK’s benefits system is undergoing a (highly controversial) overhaul, with a new “Universal Credit” system expected to be implemented in 2022 – following multiple delays and in the teeth of vehement opposition. According to a decision made by the Lib Dem / Tory coalition government in 2010, the new system will not recognize additional partners in polygamous relationships, who must apply separately – a decision which “could in some situations mean that polygamous households receive more under Universal Credit than they do under the current rules for means-tested benefits and tax credits” (Fairbairn et al. 2018).

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possibility is that the state recognizes polygamous marriages in a more limited sense – for example, for the purposes of housing and welfare – but does this only for members of certain minority groups. A final possibility is that what it means for the state to grant a special right is that it does not treat non-state polygamous marriage as a criminal offense when it is practiced by certain groups (whereas it does treat this as criminal for the majority). This presumably concerns polygamous religious marriages which take place within the relevant state’s territory, since it is not generally within a state’s power to decide what its citizens may do abroad. At most, a state might refuse to allow a man’s second wife to come into the country, where the application for entry is based on her marriage to him.6 But this latter scenario seems best classified as another kind of state refusal to recognize polygamous marriage (my second possibility above). It is not entirely clear which of these scenarios Okin has in mind, and what would count for her as a better, more feminist policy than presently exists (in France, the UK or elsewhere); but since the first possibility was never really on anyone’s agenda, I’ll assume she is concerned with either the second or third. The third would make Okin’s project still more puzzling, however. Polygamous marriage in countries including France and the UK is already criminalized, without any “cultural” exemptions; so, at most, Okin could be cautioning us lest a deviation from current policy be enacted in response to pressure from multiculturalists. What more could she want, after all? Police raids, by the “liberal” state, on families suspected of having suspiciously large numbers of children or more than one female adult resident in the house? Assuming that the marriages had taken place abroad, what crime could the polygamists then be charged with? If what is meant is, instead, that states should not allow multiple wives to be “brought into the country” (Okin 1999: 9), then, as noted above, this seems to fall back under the category of (the refusal of ) recognition: Further spouses are not recognized as valid for the purposes of immigration. This was, in fact, the change that the French state enacted in 1993 when it “banned” polygamy. There is no particular reason to think that this approach to immigration policy “saves” women from polygamy. At most, it is an attempt to save the citizens of liberal states from having it go on under their noses – although its success at achieving even that end is questionable: additional spouses can still immigrate to France – as to other states with similar policies – either independently or 6

If she is already a resident in the country, or gains residency rights by some other means, then it seems there would be nothing to stop the couple marrying outside the country in question, before returning to it.

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illegally, with all the costs and dangers that entails. Once again, Okin seems to be doing little more than defending, for better or worse, what is the status quo in many countries, including France and the UK. So is Okin’s point that liberal states should not recognize (non-state) polygamous marriages to the extent that they currently do? For example, that they should withhold housing benefit calculated to take into account multiple wives already resident within their borders? What exactly would this achieve? Is the idea that it would be a deterrent, enough to make would-be polygamists change their ways, and that would-be second wives would instead live happily ever after in monogamous relationships? The more likely consequence, it seems to me, is that families would end up living in still more cramped and impoverished conditions than they would be likely to experience under a state that made some concession to “multiculturalism” and (for example) facilitated more adequate housing. Judging by Okin’s censure of the French government for “abdicating its responsibility for the vulnerability that its rash policy has inflicted on women and children” (10) following its withdrawal of recognition for second or third wives, she is mindful of the negative consequences described above, and would perhaps like to see the women in question offered some support and assistance to accompany the process of “decohabitation.” But could this not be done anyway? That is, is it not possible to offer women meaningful opportunities to exit abusive or unsatisfactory relationships – whether polygamous or monogamous – but do so without effectively “starving them out” through withholding benefits, so that their exit would be more meaningfully chosen? There are, in fact, non-governmental groups in countries including France which try to do just that. As Mamalea Bapuwa, of the Association of African Women, puts it: “It’s a question of choice. We can’t push people in this direction. Once a woman has made up her mind and has decided she wants to de-cohabitate, she comes to see us” (Oger 2005). Feminists who share Okin’s concern about polygamous marriages might instead urge support for such organizations, or urge the state to support them – although if feminists want this increased support to be provided by the state, then in my view they will have to work toward the realization of a very different kind of state from that which exists in contemporary liberal democracies. Otherwise, simply lobbying existing states for a tougher line on minority practices such as polygamy is more likely to produce a “partial uptake” which serves only to make things worse for the women involved than they already were: Those “liberal” governments, hostile or indifferent to immigrants, minorities, and women alike, will simply tighten immigration controls and withdraw benefits (now under a “feminist” pretext), while continuing to cut the support

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services of which women of all backgrounds may, at one time or another, find themselves in need. *** I have dealt only with the earlier stages of Okin’s argument. The puzzles continue to accumulate throughout her essay, as she moves over a familiar agenda of topics – including rape, child marriage, and clitoridectomy – and it would take more space than I have available to deal adequately with any of them here. Many parts of the discussion seem at best tangentially related to her professed topic of interest: for instance, the “barbaric” rape laws in parts of Latin America. (Is this to prepare the way for a “feminist” military intervention?) Then there is the series of anecdotes about cases where male perpetrators of violent crimes had charges against them dropped, or their sentences “significantly reduced,” apparently on the basis of “cultural defences” (Okin 1999: 18). It is true that male violence against women generally goes unprosecuted, and that even in those cases which do come to court, the perpetrator is very often let off or given a comparatively light sentence, for a variety of spurious reasons.7 “Cultural defences” may sometimes be used for this purpose, too. But it is not clear what this has to do with multiculturalism, in the sense that interests Okin at least. These cases are not best understood in terms of a special right allowed to members of certain groups. It is a normal part of legal practice to consider mitigating circumstances, whatever the background of the defendant. Is that the problem? Would it be better not to take such things into account? Or only to do so when the circumstances in questions are not “cultural”? And is the abusive, violent, and misogynistic upbringing of a white man in a Western patriarchal culture not also . . . cultural? If so, then we may drop the “multi-,” and instead mount a feminist campaign for more ruthless sentencing for violent crimes against women in general – but only if we think that this is the most promising focus for our energies, taking into account the fact that the vast majority of instances of such violence never get anywhere near a courtroom in the first place, and also taking into account the fact that legal institutions have not in general shown themselves to be very receptive to feminist concerns. (The effect of such efforts may just be to accentuate an existing overall tendency toward selective, relative harshness in the sentencing of defendants with the “wrong” racial or class background.)

7

In the Brock Turner case, for instance, where a student raped an unconscious woman before being chased off by two passers-by, he was given a six-month prison sentence (of which he served three). The leniency was justified by the judge on the grounds that Turner was a promising swimmer.

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After so much sinister hinting at what seem like quite alarming “feminist” positions, Okin’s eventual conclusion is actually rather tame. She argues that group rights may not be a good solution for minority women, or at least that, if there are going to be group rights, women – especially younger women – should be involved in the process by which such rights are negotiated. It may be true that some possible group rights would harm female members of “cultural minorities” rather than helping them, and few feminists would take issue with the idea that, in a situation where a minority group is negotiating its rights with the state, young women should be able to take their part in that process along with other members of the community (nor would plenty of multiculturalists, for that matter). But by this point, the damage is done. CO NC L U D I NG RE MAR K S

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, my intention here has not been to give a typical, generalized overview of the history of feminist philosophy. Instead, I wanted to explore one case-study which helps shed light on the ways in which feminism can be shaped both by its absorption into an academic discipline and by surrounding political forces, and on the perils of not getting the facts straight – sometimes an occupational hazard for philosophers given to principle and abstraction – when very real practical matters are at stake. By way of conclusion, I’ll now say something briefly about each of these aspects. First, how does Okin’s work illustrate the effects of what I’ve called the “domestication” of feminism, i.e. its absorption into the academic discipline of philosophy? Okin adopts a stance and a conception of her own project that is absolutely typical of political philosophy at least from the late twentieth century onward – but not so typical of feminist thought and activism outside of the academy: She takes the central question to be: What policies should a just state adopt? And she proceeds to try to answer that question from a feminist point of view. She further assumes that the state in question will be a liberal state, an assumption which feminists who are not liberals (or not in favor of the state at all) will of course have difficulty sharing – but it is a reflection of the extent to which liberalism has become hegemonic in academic political philosophy. The convergence on a broadly liberal framework is arguably also present in feminism outside academia, albeit to a lesser extent. The assumption that the project must be one of designing “just institutions,” however, is more peculiar to analytic political philosophy under the influence of John Rawls (as is the relative disregard for matters of political and social fact). (On Rawls, see Van Schoelandt and Gaus, and also Rossi, this volume.) Feminist writers and activists

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outside of academic philosophy have sometimes been concerned with the question of what (actual or possible) states should do; but they have also thought, for example, about how to get those states to do what feminists want (see e.g. MacKinnon 2017).8 Okin, by contrast, limits herself to the question of what feminists should want (liberal) states to do (perhaps regarding the more practical question, in line with the norms of her discipline, as not properly “philosophical,” and arguably also underestimating the systematic reasons why existing liberal states cannot and will not be transformed into feminist institutions). Feminist activists have also been interested, crucially, in what we – and not only the state or those who wield state power – can or should do, under conditions not of our making and which we seek to change.9 This is not Okin’s question, and so the idea that we might put our weight behind groups – including those formed by “minority” women – that exist to support women wishing to escape from oppressive domestic situations does not register for her as an answer. When she does mention instances of “indigenous” resistance to the oppressive practices she attributes to minority groups, she does so in order to deflect charges that she adopts a dominant Western “I” and ignores or marginalizes the voices of the Other (Al-Hibri 1999), and in order to strengthen the feminist case for harsher state policies as against multiculturalist concessions. (Notice that, again, this is a conclusion about what liberal states should do.) More troubling, in my view, is the aforementioned disdain for factual questions. We saw some striking examples of this above: Okin writes as if a special “group right” to polygamy was extended to minority groups by the French authorities in the 1980s, a time when there was no law against it; and she implies, without evidence, that the French authorities were motivated by a concern for multiculturalism (or perhaps by pressure from those with such a concern). It is not that such misrepresentations never occur outside academia (including within feminist circles); far from it. What is distinctive to academic political philosophy, I would suggest, is the casual indifference to whether the empirical 8

9

True, MacKinnon is not exactly an outsider to academic political philosophy, in the sense that she is referenced in philosophical literature, appears on syllabi, etc. But her position is that of a professor of law, and much of her work falls within legal theory and practice. She also expresses impatience with what she clearly sees as academic-philosophical projects of “what-iffery” and wordplay. For example, as I’ve argued elsewhere (Finlayson 2016), the second-wave slogan “the personal is political” was originally intended to apply to the way in which activist groups should understand the social world around them and their efforts at resistance to patriarchy; yet this meaning is virtually inaccessible to contemporary political philosophers, who can see it only in terms of its implications for the designing of just state institutions and policy. Weeks (2011) makes a similar point about the Wages for Housework movement.

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claims made are true or not (because they don’t affect the “principle”), and the glib equivocation between factual assertions and “mere” hypothetical examples. Finally, in what ways does the case-study above illustrate the shaping of academic feminist thought by political currents – including currents within feminist discourse – outside the academy? Okin is writing in the late 1990s. This was a period – much like the present time – in which the far right was on the rise in many European countries (for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen steadily increased his political presence in France, eventually coming second in the first round of the presidential elections in 2002). It was during this same period that there was a series of controversies (affaires) around the issue of the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in school: first in 1989 (mentioned by Okin in her piece), then again in 1994, and again in 2003 (see Scott 2007).10 In Joan Wallach Scott’s analysis, the escalating anxiety over the wearing of headscarves was not a consequence of any significant increase in the incidence of that phenomenon (nor of a heightening feminist consciousness), but had everything to do with the attempt of the moderate right wing to compete with the ascendant far right, who in turn could be seen capitalizing on the perceived abandonment by the moderate left of its traditional working-class base (see e.g. Eribon 2018) – a process that is continuing and intensifying to this day, with the next generation of the Le Pen family in France (see Louis 2017) and the corresponding phenomena of the rise of UKIP in Britain and Donald Trump in the USA. Yet Okin fails to see her own relentless problematizing of the practices of the groups most targeted by this rightward swing – exemplified for example in her use of terms such as “growing tension” and even “extinction” (Okin 1999: 22) – against this background. Instead, she paints a picture not unlike that presented by right-wing groups and those sections of the media that are most in their sway: a picture of a world in which “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” have “gone too far,” and have come to impinge on “our” most cherished values.

10

More recently, in 2016, the anxiety over the veil reached new heights, with the so-called “burkini ban”: In this case, banning led to women being stripped by armed police on a beach.

section four ANALYTIC AESTHETICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

24 ANALYTIC AESTHETICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART s t e p h e n dav i e s

Let me begin with a complaint. Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein devoted some of their attention to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. But many analytic philosophers now are dismissive of the area. I doubt that this negative attitude is well founded. Analytic aestheticians grapple with questions as deep and subtle as any addressed elsewhere in philosophy, and its practitioners are as well trained as are their colleagues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, and so on. So rich is the range of issues that are considered by analytic philosophers of art that it is very difficult to list them all in a chapter such as this. Early in the twentieth century, some major philosophers (think of Bosanquet, Collingwood, and Dewey, among others) discussed aesthetics. But the logical positivists, especially A. J. Ayer among Anglophone philosophers, espoused non-cognitivism about value judgments. If value judgments do not express genuine propositions, then branches of philosophy that aim to study them must be of dubious standing. While ethics and political philosophy recovered from this attack, it is widely thought that aesthetic judgments tend to be much more subjective. This may have inhibited the rehabilitation of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, even though they deal with much more than such evaluations and even if it can be argued that, given their function, such judgments are sufficiently objective to be useful. I judge that the area is currently strongest in the UK. There may be more philosophers interested in the domain in Canada and the USA, but they are more dispersed and outnumbered than their British colleagues. Despite its strong analytic tradition, aesthetics and the philosophy of art are hardly practiced in Australia. OVERVIEW: AESTHETICS VERSUS ART

The central concerns in aesthetics in the immediate post-war era followed on from those apparent earlier in the twentieth century. The authors emphasized 323

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the autonomy and independence of art from the circumstances of its creation and from practical concerns, and formalism was common. The appreciation of art was described in terms of the recognition in artworks of their positive aesthetic properties, such as grace or power. Such properties were available to suitably skilled observers through direct acquaintance. They supervened on non-aesthetic, neutrally describable, perceivable features of the work. Accordingly, any change to a work’s appearance could affect its aesthetic character and any two perceptually indistinguishable works would share their aesthetic character, whatever differences there were in their respective provenances. Discussion of the conditions for the proper reception of art were psychologistic, appealing to the long-favored notion of disinterested attention, for instance. On this account, aesthetics and the philosophy of art are inseparable sides of a single coin. In this vein, in his landmark Aesthetics (1958), Monroe C. Beardsley preferred to discuss “aesthetic objects” rather than artworks, though his focus was on works of art. After anticipations in the 1960s, and increasingly in later times, this model was challenged and rejected. The key properties of works of art are often semantic or representational and do not really correspond to sensuous aesthetic properties as these were traditionally conceived. Art can be humorous, rebellious, and ironic for instance; it can involve quotation, allusion, and influence, which are not features typically associated with the aesthetic. Additionally, many of the properties significant in art, both for its identity and for its content, involve socio- and art-historical relativities. For instance, a work’s period and genre can affect the properties that can be ascribed to it. Accordingly, lookalike artworks could be very different in their appreciable qualities. What is needed for art appreciation is not a distinctive psychological state, such as an aesthetic attitude, but regular attention informed by knowledge of the conventions, practices, and work-traditions a given piece presupposes and addresses. In effect, aesthetics and the philosophy of art parted company, though the separation was often disguised by expanding the notion of the aesthetic to take in the new kinds of features that are central to artworks’ comprehension and enjoyment. One consequence was the rise of aesthetic theories about the environment or nature, and how their properties and modes of appreciation differ from those relevant to art. And the shift from individual psychology to group histories and social relativities undermined attitudes proclaiming the eternal objectivity of artistic values, which made space for the development of feminist perspectives on art, for instance. In the following history I chronicle how the analytic philosophy of art changed over the decades and highlight the philosophers whose ideas drove those modifications. But there are more general trends that can be emphasized here.

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In the 1940s, literature and painting were the primary focus for analytic philosophers of art. Music became equally prominent from the 1980s. But even in the present, some art forms receive significantly less attention than others. This remains true of dance, sculpture, poetry, theater, and architecture, for instance. By contrast, since 2000 much notice has been paid to cinema. This reflects a greater interest in popular art in general than was apparent in earlier decades. Some of the topics that concerned philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s have remained of great interest, such as questions of definition, ontology, value, interpretation, and appreciation. Some other debates that flourished earlier faded from view. Semiotics and symbolism were hot topics in the 1940s and 1950s but are not now covered, or at least not in such terms. Arguments about whether photography is an art were published in the 1970s and 1980s, but are rarely seen now. Articles on the nature of aesthetic supervenience and on metaphor are significantly less common than they once were. Other subject-matters are new. This is an inevitable consequence of changes in art practices – for instance, developments in conceptual art and the postmodern adoption of appropriation and installation art – and of more general advances in technology, computing, image processing, and the like. Asking if computers can make art, or if videogames can be art, was not possible in the 1940s. An additional consideration draws attention to art-relevant studies in other disciplines. The attitude of analytic philosophers of art in the 1940s and 50s to the behaviorist psychology of the time was highly negative. A residue of skepticism remains to the present, but philosophers’ interest in and use of studies in areas such as cognitive studies on art and neuro-aesthetics have become more common. Other changes in emphasis may be harder to account for. At the start of our period there was little consideration of the audience’s emotional engagement with and response to art. The stress was rather on objectivity and “distance.” But from the 1970s and increasingly, the emotions felt by the audience have become a focus of interest, either because they can be puzzling (as when people claim to enjoy being frightened by art-horrors) or because they evidence nonpropositional ways of understanding and valuing art. Some of the changes in the philosophy of art reflect ones common across the whole discipline. For instance, Handbooks, Companions, and Encyclopedias of aesthetics, art, and art forms have proliferated since the 1990s, as have introductory texts, specialist journals, and e-journals. Though in what follows I focus on changes and developments in analytic philosophy of art, one point of constancy is worth stressing. The history of

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aesthetics is an ongoing part of the subject-matter of aesthetics throughout the period. As bookends we might mention Beardsley’s Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966) and Paul Guyer’s three-volume A History of Modern Aesthetics (2014). ANALYTIC AESTHETICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY O F A R T S I N C E 19 45

Curt J. Ducasse’s Art, the Critics, and You (1948) was a representative work of aesthetic theory. He emphasized the disinterestedness of the aesthetic stance so strongly that he insisted that art critics, who earn their living from art, are incapable of adopting it and therefore cannot appreciate art appropriately. A seminal paper by William Wimsatt and Beardsley was “The intentional fallacy” (1946). They argued that recourse to evidence of poets’ intentions beyond what was manifest in their works was neither appropriate nor necessary in interpretation. This defense of the autonomy of art from its creator illustrates another aspect of aesthetic theory. The zenith for the aesthetic theory of art was marked by Beardsley’s 1958 book, Aesthetics, in which he conceived of aesthetics as metacriticism. He defended the independence of the “aesthetic object” (artwork) from its maker’s intentions and its creative circumstances, considered the ontological relation between aesthetic objects and their presentations, analyzed expressiveness and representation as objective, intention-independent features of aesthetic objects, and discussed the conditions for informed criticism and appreciation, which should concern themselves only with properties internal to the work. Beardsley’s defense of aesthetic theory is nuanced and subtle. In the first of a series of papers in 1959, Frank Sibley analyzed “aesthetic concepts” or properties in a similarly careful manner. These various accounts moved far beyond the cardinal eighteenth-century aesthetic properties of the beautiful and sublime to cover a wide range of artistically relevant characteristics, such as symbolism and expression, and in that way set the stage for the subsequent blurring of the distinction between aesthetic and artistic properties. The 1950s also saw a slew of articles arguing against either the possibility of defining art or the usefulness of the attempt. This was not a reaction to anything happening within aesthetics, but showed instead the influence of Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Another widely discussed notion adopted from that source was that of “seeing as,” which was used repeatedly in the analysis of pictorial depiction and in discussing the relation between aesthetic features and the properties that ground them. Notes from Wittgenstein’s lectures on aesthetics were published in 1966 and their influence

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is often apparent later, for instance in books by Richard Wollheim (1968) and Roger Scruton (1974). In an article of 1964, Arthur C. Danto described “the artworld,” a historically structured collection of works, conventions, styles, practices, and ideas. Without knowledge of the “atmosphere of theory” the artworld generates, one cannot separate artworks, such as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, from the non-artworks they emulate. Similarly, two artworks could be identical in appearance and nevertheless have different contents, depending on differences in their causal histories and intentional creation. These conclusions plainly implied that aesthetic theory cannot account for the identification of art as such and its differentiation from non-art items. Two important books were published in 1968, Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects and Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art. As regards aesthetic theory, both books provided opposition. Wollheim questioned the traditional account of the aesthetic attitude and also argued that art is essentially historical, by which he meant that it must be understood in terms of the art-historical context in which it is produced. Goodman argued that lookalike forgeries differ in their artistic merit from the originals they impersonate. But what I would emphasize is that both books explicitly demonstrated the centrality of ontological issues to the philosophy of art. Wollheim was interested in what kind of objects works of art are, despite differences between, say, music and painting. He claimed that they are types (as distinct from universals) with physical properties transmitted to them by their tokens. Goodman, on the other hand, was interested in precisely that difference. Paintings are autographic, singular artworks; no copy, however similar, is a genuine instance of the work. Music, by contrast, is an allographic, multiple art form in which anything that conforms to the work-determining notation thereby is a genuine instance. Discussions of ontology – of the nature of artworks and the manner of their existence – have been a constantly fertile field in the philosophy of art, but the following decade was dominated by the issue of art’s definition. George Dickie produced a series of articles in the middle 1960s debunking the aesthetic theory of art and its appreciation before laying the ground for his institutional theory, which achieved its book-length form in 1974. Arthood is the status of candidate for appreciation conferred on an artifact by some person (usually the artist) acting on behalf of the informal institution of the artworld. So, arthood was held to be a matter of social recognition rather than a consequence of possessing aesthetic or any other features. This controversial theory attracted a great deal of attention. Against it, Beardsley (in a paper of 1983, published after his death) defended the view that something is an artwork if it is intended to be capable of affording a significant

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aesthetic experience. So, whereas Dickie was a proceduralist, Beardsley was a functionalist (S. Davies 1991), and the ensuing debate was drawn on those lines. Dickie placed the weight on authority, Beardsley on skill. And while Dickie was keen to enfranchise anti-aesthetic art, readymades, and the like, Beardsley was eager to exclude them from the realm of art proper. Dickie proposed a major revision of his view in 1984, stressing more the mutual dependence of artwork, artist, public, and artworld. Beginning in the 1970s and extending over the following decades, Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant wrote about the aesthetic appreciation of nature and of the environment, contrasting this with approaches to the enjoyment of art. This research program later culminated in books (e.g. Berleant 2002), alongside which Malcolm Budd’s The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (2002) should be ranged. Work in this sub-area continues to be widely pursued. A key article of 1970 was “Categories of art” by Kendall L. Walton who argued that a work’s properties, including its expressive character, depend on its category or genre. Otherwise identical works belonging to categories in which different features are variable could display different artistic characteristics as a result. This has proved to be a key argument for contextualism and against pure aestheticism. Other significant works of the period were Alan Tormey’s The Concept of Expression (1971), which mounted a powerful attack against the widely held Romantic conception according to which the work of art expresses and clarifies the artist’s state of mind, and Guy Sircello’s A New Theory of Beauty (1975), which provided an adverbial analysis of beauty attributions. An article of 1975 by Colin Radford asked why we feel sorry for fictional characters when we know they do not exist and so do not suffer their fates. This rekindled an old debate that continues unabated today. Another old paradox that considered why we apparently enjoy tragedies has also been revived, along with ones about fear, horror, and disgust. Drawing on several of his articles from the 1970s, Danto developed his position in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), which undoubtedly became the philosophy of art’s book of the decade. Whether something can become an artwork, he suggested, depends on when and by whom it is offered. Rauschenberg can create an artwork by painting his bed where Da Vinci cannot. It was the historical task of art to develop to a point where it can mimic mere real things, thereby posing the question why one is an artwork and the other not. (Plainly this is not a distinction an aestheticist about art can explain.) In a later book, Danto (1986) argued that, by reaching the point where it provoked that question, art had discharged its historical task. Freed from this burden, anything could become art, but there could no longer be progress in art.

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Meanwhile, the project of definition continued, with recursive structures defining art (now) in relation to art (past) becoming popular, although the protagonists (including Levinson 1990 and in subsequent papers) disagreed about the specific nature of the art-defining relation. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Art (1980) developed the idea of works of art as norm kinds intimately embedded in sociohistorical practices. Joseph Margolis (1980) described art as “culturally emergent.” An alternative ontology (Currie 1988) characterized works of art as all multiple in principle and as action types rather than as objects or event-specifications. As well, the period saw the first release of English translations of earlier work by Roman Ingarden (1986; 1989) on the nature of literary works and of musical works. A focus of debate throughout the decade was the musical work (in classical music). Contextualists (such as Jerrold Levinson) argued that these were created through acts of indication and possessed their instrumentation essentially, whereas Platonists (such as Peter Kivy [1993]) argued that they existed eternally as abstracta that were discovered and that their orchestration was incidental to their identities. Another musical topic familiar to musicologists, psychologists, and philosophers, that of the musical expression of emotion, was also to the fore at this time. Previously, in an influential book, Susanne Langer (1942) had argued that music is a presentational symbol of the general form of feeling. (She extended that thesis to all the arts in Feeling and Form of 1953.) In the 1980s and later it was argued (by Kivy [1989] and S. Davies [1994]) that music is expressive by virtue of recalling recognizably expressive human behaviors in the contour of its movement and the pattern of the waxing and waning of its tensions. A significant monograph of the time was Wollheim’s Painting as an Art (1987). Among other matters, this included discussion of “seeing in,” a simultaneously twofold experience of a painting as a marked surface and as a depicted content which allows the observer to adopt both internal and external perspectives on the work. Also noteworthy was his interest in probing both the artist’s and the viewer’s mind and psychology and how the former conveys his or her intentions to the latter. The year 1987 also saw Flint Schier’s analysis of pictorial depiction in Deeper into Pictures. He rejected resemblance and syntactic accounts of representation in favor of the view that a system is naturally depictive if, on the basis of recognizing what one picture is of, the viewer can go on to interpret other pictures in that system. A similar account was subsequently produced by Dominic McIvor Lopes (1996). Resemblance is a phenomenal by-product of recognition, not its basis, and pictures involve the same recognitional capacities as the perception of non-representations does. A rival account is due to Robert Hopkins (1998), who analyzes depiction as depending on perceived

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resemblance between a thing’s outline shape as perceived from a fixed point of view and the design surface of the picture. More recent work on depiction includes John Kulvicki’s On Images (2006), which is as much concerned with graphs and maps as with art pictures, John Hyman’s The Objective Eye (2006), which examines the objective principles (of shape, relative size, occlusion, and color) governing pictorial depiction, and Cynthia Freeland’s Portraits and Persons (2010), which analyzes portraiture. Lopes (2005) devoted a book to the evaluation of pictorial art. The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a number of monographs on fiction and literature: e.g. Margolis 1995. These sometimes covered topics in philosophical logic about the nature of fiction, but also focused on the nature of narrative, literary interpretation and criticism, the emotional response to literature, and the like. The most discussed book of the 1990s, Kendall L. Walton’s Mimesis as MakeBelieve (1990), built on his earlier work on fiction and imagination, applying these fruitfully to a wide range of topics, including those just mentioned above. Walton’s key insight was that art centrally involves the imaginative engagement of its audience. This does not come down to the familiar claim that it takes imagination to enter into the fictional (or virtual or abstract) world of the work. The point rather was that the audience plays an imaginative game (the rules of which are prescribed by the artwork’s creator and the conventions of genre, etc.) in which the artwork serves as a prop. In other words, the audience, not just the work, operates under the scope of the fictional operator, and the work’s fictional worlds are nested within this broader one. Two book-length discussions of the value of art appeared in 1995. Malcolm Budd’s maintained that an artwork is valuable as art if it is such that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable, and it is valuable to the degree that this experience is intrinsically valuable. He applied this view in more concrete terms to pictures, poetry, and music. Alan H. Goldman’s position was that artistic value resides in the satisfaction that attends exercising different mental capacities operating together to appreciate the rich relational properties of artworks. In 2001, James O. Young wrote on the value of art as a source of knowledge. Feminist discussions of art that challenged patriarchal assumptions about the universal objectivity and the apolitical nature of the art canon also rose to prominence in the 1990s. Such concerns featured in a special number of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1990 and in collections (1993; 1995) edited by Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer and by Peggy Zeglin Brand and Korsmeyer. Korsmeyer’s Gender and Aesthetics (2004) is also noteworthy.

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As regards the definition of art, Robert Stecker’s Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (1997) was representative in offering a hybrid, disjunctive definition. (It had become widely accepted that there was no one way in which artworks qualified for their status as art.) He claims (roughly) that an item is an artwork at time t if and only if it is in one of the central art forms at t and is intended to fulfill a function art has at t, or it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling such a function. As its title suggests, the book also delved into issues of interpretation and value that, as we have noted, were preoccupations of the time. Meanwhile, the art-status and meaning of gardens was explored in monographs by Mara Miller (1993) and Stephanie Ross (1998). A number of books debated the understanding and appreciation of art music and the manner of its expressiveness. Ontological issues were discussed by Lydia Goehr (1992). But at this time there was a shift away from classical music to the distinctive features of other kinds, such as rock (Gracyk 1996) and jazz (in a series of papers spanning the 1990s and 2000s by Lee B. Brown, for instance; Brown's views are summarized in Brown, Goldblatt, and Gracyk 2018) as well as consideration of the performer’s, not only the listener’s, perspective (Godlovitch 1998). This broadening of interest called for ontologies that considered electronic music, works for playback issued on disks, studio modifications, and the like. Works on the performing arts in general were by Paul Thom (1993) and David Davies (2011) and on theater were by J. R. Hamilton (2008) and Paul Woodruff (2008). Many of these same topics received book-length treatments in the new millennium: the role of intention (Livingston 2005a); musical expressiveness and the idea that literature can provide an education of the readers’ emotions as they evolve in the process of reading the work (Robinson 2005); the nature of music; and the ontology of art (D. Davies 2003; Lamarque 2010). Cluster theories of art, according to which various combinations from a set of features can be sufficient for something’s being art, became popular. The protagonists differed not only over which features belonged in the set but also over whether the project was an attempt at definition or not. Berys Gaut (2000) characterized the approach as anti-essentialist, whereas Denis Dutton (2009) regarded his version as a definition. (Certainly, the cluster theory departs from a classical model of definition requiring necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient, but so do recursive and disjunctive definitions.) In 2014, Lopes argued that art can be defined as the sum of the art forms, with the analytic focus falling now on what makes something an art form.

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There was an expansion of the definitional focus. Noël Carroll had offered a detailed definition, ontology, and defense of mass art. Other topics covered later included videogames as art, computer art, and comics as art (for example, Meskin and Cook 2012). Among the broader issues debated was whether art is a Western invention of the eighteenth century or is ancient and universal. Meanwhile, the applicability of aesthetic judgments and standards was broadened to take in somaesthetics and bodily aesthetics (Shusterman 2008), and food, wine (Allhoff 2007) and whiskey (Allhoff and Adams 2009). Paul C. Taylor’s Black Is Beautiful (2016) focused on the aesthetics of race. After the pioneering work of Stanley Cavell, Carroll (1996; 1998; 2007a) led the way in discussing the philosophy of film. Since 2000 the output and range of issues covered has been huge. Notable monographs include Gaut’s The Philosophy of Cinematic Art (2010) and Ted Nannicelli’s A Philosophy of the Screenplay (2013). A book series, Philosophers on Film, contains edited collections of essays, with each volume devoted to a different film. One line in the philosophy of film looks specifically at the idea that some films are a way of doing philosophy. Though connections between art and ethics have been considered since the Greeks, and an earlier work in our period is R. W. Beardsmore’s Art and Morality (1971), as well as books by Martha Nussbaum (e.g. 1990), great interest has been shown in the topic in recent years. Noteworthy monographs are Gaut’s Art, Emotion, and Ethics (2005), Matthew Kieran’s Revealing Art (2005), James O. Young’s Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (2007), Elisabeth Schellekens’s Aesthetics and Morality (2007), Richard Eldridge’s Literature, Life, and Modernity (2008), and Wolterstorff’s Art Rethought (2015). They consider such topics as the interaction of ethical and aesthetic value, what art can teach us about morality, and the moral significance of ways of engaging with art. Two subthemes are worth noting: the idea of virtue in aesthetics (for instance, Goldie 2010) and pornography (a 2011 collection edited by Maes). Analytic philosophers have extended the repertoire of philosophy of art in new directions with monographs on topics rarely considered prior to 2000. These included conceptual art (Goldie and Schellekens 2009), the aesthetics of the everyday (Saito 2007; Leddy 2011), humor (Cohen 1999; Morreal 2009; Carroll 2014), and art and evolution (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Dutton 2009). Research in psychology of art and neuro-aesthetics grew considerably and philosophers reviewed and applied these developments (Higgins 2012, and collections edited by Schellekens and Goldie [2009] and by Currie and others [2014]), though some philosophers (e.g. Noë 2015) remained skeptical that work in this area has much to contribute to philosophy of art and aesthetics.

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In this account I have described the eclipse in analytic philosophy of art of one primary model, aesthetic theory, by another, which is more contextual, historical, and social. But some (e.g. Iseminger 2004) have tried to modify their account of the aesthetic to accommodate more recent insights, while others (e.g. Zangwill 2007) have defended the traditional account. And beauty has again come into favor as a subject for analysis (with books by Zangwill 2001; Nehamas 2007; Scruton 2009).1

1

With thanks to Susan Feagin, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Kathleen Higgins, Peter Lamarque, and James O. Young.

25 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION t r e n t d ou g h e rty

At the beginning of the period covered, Logical Positivism was still regnant, though no longer invincible. In the preface to the second edition of Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J. Ayer writes, “In the ten years that have passed since Language, Truth, and Logic was first published, I have come to see that the questions with which it deals are not in all respects so simple as it makes them appear” (Ayer 1952: 5). And given how central the notion of verification is to the verification principle, it is very non-trivial that he admits “I have to acknowledge that my answer [to the question What is verification] is not very satisfactory” (9). And then again, “Concerning the experiences of others [the “Problem of other Minds”] I confess that I am doubtful whether the account that is given in this book is correct” (19). And yet again about the emotive theory of value, “I must acknowledge that the theory is here presented in a very summary way, and it needs to be supported by a more detailed analysis” (20). This is significant, for it sets the stage for a major transition, though one still some time off. For the present, Ayer would try to save his principle. Here is his 1946 restatement of the infamous Principle of Verification: “[A] statement is held to be literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable” (9).1 Although Ayer backs off some of his claims and will go on to offer many qualifications to the verification principle, he does not qualify his statements about religion. On this matter, he is unequivocal. This mention of God brings us to the question of the possibility of religious knowledge. We shall see that this possibility has already been ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics . . . For to say that “God exists” is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance . . . all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. (114–15) 1

This is the brief form. The fuller version, with so many qualifications it becomes quite cumbersome, appears on page 13 (1952). I provide his brief form so its essence can be grasped.

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The reason for this, says Ayer, is that theism cannot be confirmed either deductively or inductively. It cannot be confirmed deductively, he says, for “It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies” (114). But “God exists” is clearly not a tautology. And also, “there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god such as the God of Christianity, is even probable . . . this is also easily shown” (115). It’s worth examining briefly how this is “easily shown.” P1: If the existence of [such] a god is probable, then the proposition that he exists would be an empirical hypothesis. P2: If the proposition that such a god exists is an empirical hypothesis, then it would be possible to deduce from that proposition experiential hypotheses not deducible from other empirical hypotheses alone. P3: It is not possible to deduce from the proposition that a god exists experiential hypotheses not deducible from other empirical hypotheses alone. C1: It is not the case that the proposition that such a god exists is an empirical hypothesis. (MT: P2, P3) C2: It is not the case that the existence of [such] a god is probable. (MT: P1, C1)

P3 is the central substantive claim. Ayer reasons as follows. Regularity in nature is oft cited as sufficient evidence for the existence of God. But if the assertion that “God exists” entails nothing more than an assertion of regularity in nature, then to assert the existence of a god is to do nothing more than to assert regularity in nature. The move from “X is sufficient evidence for Y” to “the assertion of Y entails nothing more than an assertion of X” is, to say the least, highly suspicious. In fact, the theory of meaning assumed here is entirely discredited. About the same time as Ayer was engaging in a rather desperate defense of verificationism, John Wisdom published his essay “Gods” (1944–45) with its famous gardener story. Noting that an atheist or agnostic might criticize a theist who prays for rain and then looks to the skies, he comments “disagreement about whether there are gods is now less of this experimental or betting sort than it used to be. This is due in part, if not wholly, to our better knowledge of why things happen as they do” (from Hick 1970: 429). The idea that science has somehow radically changed the intellectual landscape with respect to religious belief is at this time something of a trope. As with Ayer, one can sense some cracks in the foundational commitment to emotivism about religious belief. “Perhaps when a man sings ‘God’s in His heaven’ we need not take this as more than an expression of how he feels,” says Wisdom in fine non-cognitivist fashion. But then actual debates taking place in

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the public arena about religion make him uncomfortable, for “The disputants speak as if they are concerned with a matter of fact, or of trans-sensual, transscientific and metaphysical fact, but still of fact and still a matter about which reasons for and against may be offered, although no scientific reasons” (435). Rather than really being a genuine dispute about a matter of fact, “a difference as to the existence of a God is not one as to future happenings . . . it is not experimental and therefore not as to the facts” (437). Note that Wisdom does not so much as offer an argument for this conclusion; it’s just a piece of dogma at the time. He offers only a brief story that is supposed to evoke the right response. In brief, two people examine a garden or what appears to possibly be a garden and debate whether there is a gardener who tends it. In Wisdom’s original version, they cannot find any features of the garden that settle the matter and so he concludes “the gardener hypothesis has ceased to be experimental” (434). Though never making it explicit, the clear implication in context seems to be that this robs the claim of any cognitive content. Anthony Flew, in 1950, finding Wisdom’s putative wisdom “haunting and revelatory” actually tells a better version of the story in which the conversants perform tests to try to settle the matter, such as putting up a fence, patrolling with bloodhounds, etc. Yet the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Sceptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” (from Hick 1964: 225)

This famed parable, much better in Flew’s telling than in Wisdom’s, is delivered in a manner something along the lines of the modern “mic drop.” Yet the presumably rhetorical question has a very obvious answer: causal powers. The thesis of theism is precisely that there is an unembodied mind that exercises mental causation of the kind many philosophers think humans do, except not upon a confined region of space but upon the whole. Flew does offer one reasonable complaint. “Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding ‘There wasn’t a God after all’ or ‘God does not really love us then’” (227). This is a reasonable complaint, that is, when aimed at a certain kind of ordinary believer. It is not, however, a very good complaint when aimed at a thoughtful believer. One such thoughtful believer of the time was Basil Mitchell. He opens his reply to Flew with these words. “Flew’s article is searching and perceptive, but

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there is, I think, something odd . . . The theologian surely would not deny that the fact of pain counts against the assertion that God loves men” (Hick 1970: 469). Indeed, “This very incompatibility generates the most intractable of theological problems – the problem of evil” (469). It is nothing less than bizarre that someone who took themselves to be competent to write about the status of religious claims with respect to evidence would ignore the problem of evil. Another legend of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy who shared that culture’s general disdain for religion is Bertrand Russell. On the one hand, Russell had no truck with verificationism. On the other hand, he was a practitioner of what is broadly called “linguistic philosophy” or “linguistic analysis” in that his rejection of rational religion is often based on linguistic grounds. His willingness to debate the question of God’s existence with Father Frederick Copleston, SJ, in 1948 shows he takes the question much more seriously than logical positivists of the strict observance. The debate even begins by agreement on the meaning of “God” as “a supreme personal being – distinct from the world and creator of the world” (Russell and Copleston 1970: 282). This is very much to Russell’s credit. However, once the debate gets under way, Father Copleston’s attempt to establish the existence of God through a series of rational arguments is blocked not primarily with counterarguments, counterexamples, or first-order objections, but rather on linguistic grounds. After Father Copleston presents a version of Leibniz’s argument from contingency for a necessary being, Russell responds thus: “The word ‘necessary’ I should maintain, can only be applied significantly [with meaning] to propositions” (284). Explaining, he says “to my mind, ‘a necessary proposition’ [sic] has got to be analytic. I don’t see what else it can mean.” As a result, “I don’t admit the idea of a necessary being and I don’t admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings ‘contingent’.” After his laudable agreement that “God” has a meaning, he says “you’re using God [sic] as a proper name; then ‘God exists’ will not be a statement that has meaning” (286). And finally, after Father Copleston claims the universe must have a cause because every constituent part needs a cause, Russell avows, “I don’t think there’s any meaning in it at all. I think the word ‘universe’ is a handy word in some connections, but I don’t think it stands for anything that has a meaning” (287). So even though Russell doesn’t go in for verification/falsification principles of meaning, it is still issues about language and meaning to which he turns to battle the case for rational religion. “Linguistic philosophy,” committed to some kind of verificationist/falsificationist theory of meaning, would continue in some form or other to dominate the 1950s both in philosophy in general and in philosophy of religion in particular. Nearly the lone defenders of rational religion within the mainstream academic philosophical community were John Hick and Basil Mitchell. The

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introduction to Mitchell’s edited collection Faith and Logic is largely devoted to an explication of how logical positivism had faded from the scene. He is able to say at that point that “there are few Logical Positivists in the field to-day” (Mitchell 1957: 4). Yet the battle was lingering, like a game of chess where everyone knows the outcome, but the inevitable victor must chase his opponent’s king across the length of the board. William P. Alston, who will go on in the mid to late 1970s to become one of the most pivotal figures in this era, in 1954 and 1955 makes a powerful and detailed argument that positivists are committed to metaphysics aplenty while at the same time undercutting any argument from pragmatism proper to verificationism (Alston 1955). In 1960 and 1961, Alston and Plantinga2 published essays on the ontological argument for God’s existence in The Philosophical Review, then and now a major general-philosophy journal. Interestingly, both are in response to philosopher of mind Norman Malcolm’s 1960 sympathetic treatment immediately preceding theirs. This is interesting because Malcolm was not primarily a philosopher of religion, and his essay is the only one in the entire section on the existence of God of John Hick’s magisterial and widely popular anthology The Existence of God written by a then-living person. Ironically, both Alston’s and Plantinga’s articles argue against his version of the argument. A few years later, though, Plantinga will develop a fascination with the argument and first, in 1965, produce an anthology of medieval, modern, and contemporary essays on the subject, and then, in 1974, give his famous defense of a modal ontological argument in The Nature of Necessity. Yet in 1960 John Hick is still defending the idea that theological assertions are assertions, in Theology Today. It is no wonder, then, that Alvin Plantinga reports in 1963 that “many Christian intellectuals darkly mistrust analytic philosophy, suspecting that it is either a danger to the faith or a trivial waste of time” (18). Things, however, were about to dramatically change. First, the seeds of the final destruction of verificationism were already planted in the fifties. The notion of conclusive verification had been jettisoned by leading philosophers of science in favor of the notion of incremental confirmation. In 1952 Carl Hempel had given devastating logical counterexamples to Flew’s views, and subsequently Hempel’s own deduction-based thought was replaced by forms of probabilistic confirmation theory. Rudolf Carnap gave a major boost to probabilistic confirmation theory in his 1950 Logical Foundations of Probability. It soon became abundantly clear that the central notion of “verification” or confirmation was a field in its own right and that the hope of tying a line of demarcation between

2

Plantinga was briefly a student of Alston’s at Michigan, where he had three classes with him.

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science and non-science was hopeless. Broadly Bayesian confirmation theory would become so successful that in the end its own generality would be an insuperable barrier to using the notion of confirmation to erect a wall between science and non-science. It is thus quite ironic that one of the nails in the coffin of logical positivism was forged by a man who was at one time the most famous logical positivist. The watershed work, after a sort of “cooling off” period as logical positivism languished, was Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds in 1967. The main object of the book was to establish this analogy. Just as there are somewhat plausible but ultimately inconclusive arguments for the existence of other human minds yet such belief is nevertheless rational, so belief in a Divine Mind, though there are plausible but inconclusive arguments, is also rational. In short: They are in the same boat. Such belief is what he later comes to call “properly basic.” This idea would be developed in a year-long project at the Calvin College Center for Christian Studies “Toward a Reformed View of Faith and Reason” in 1979–80. This resulted in a pair of 1981 articles, and then in 1983 the highly cited essay “Reason and belief in God” in the watershed (Plantinga shed a lot of water) book Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, edited by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff and featuring articles by both the duo and William Alston, George Mavrodes, and others. In these essays, Plantinga further defends the position that although there are no successful arguments for God’s existence, belief that there is a God is properly basic in the sense that, though such basic beliefs are unsupported by arguments, they are nevertheless fully “proper” and upright in every epistemic respect. It is unfortunate that he calls the opposing view the “evidentialist objection” (Plantinga 1983: 16), for “evidentialism” would also be used just two years later by epistemologists Feldman and Conee for something completely different (Feldman and Conee 1985). This has led to much confusion.3 After “Reason and belief in God,” Plantinga spent a decade publishing a paper or so a year, mostly in epistemology, before bringing out the first two volumes of his trilogy on warrant at the same time in 1993. The first volume, Warrant: The Current Debate, is a survey of major views in epistemology, and the second, Warrant and Proper Function, is a statement of his own view. In this case, his epistemology is of direct relevance to the philosophy of religion, but we will return to this later. Just a year after Plantinga published God and Other Minds, Richard Swinburne published his own first book, Space and Time, in 1968. His interest in philosophy

3

For an account of this see Dougherty and Tweedt 2015.

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of science would characterize his career. A couple of years later came his first major foray into philosophy of religion with his book The Concept of Miracle (1970), which considers the relationship between divine agency and the space– time continuum. It’s also interesting that Swinburne’s book on a technical formal subject also came a year apart from Plantinga’s. For Plantinga, in The Nature of Necessity (1974), it was quantified modal logic; for Swinburne, with An Introduction to Confirmation Theory in 1973, it was a probability theory, followed the next year by a very nice edited collection on the problem of induction (Swinburne 1974). It is no accident that these two most influential philosophers of religion in the twentieth century established proficiency in advanced logical methods early in their careers. It is laudable, first, that they foresaw that these methods would be important to philosophy going forward. More important for our purposes is the influence this insight had on subsequent philosophy of religion. For as we will see, this effected a transformation in how religious matters are discussed which could not stand in more stark contrast to the postwar positivist picture. The project embarked upon by Richard Swinburne in his 1977 work The Coherence of Theism would come to transform the face of philosophy of religion. Basil Mitchell had introduced the notion of a cumulative case for a religious worldview in 1973 in his The Justification of Religious Belief. Richard Swinburne would inherit not only Mitchell’s position as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion (in 1985) but also his interest in a rational defense of the Christian faith via cumulative case. And over the next forty years he would produce a system of natural theology and Christian apologetics that would reinvigorate theistic argumentation in a way unparalleled since William Paley. This was accomplished primarily in a trilogy on theism followed by a tetralogy on Christian theology. Together they constitute an almost unparalleled achievement of systematic philosophy in any humane discipline in centuries. Because of this, I will briefly discuss the series. In the first volume, The Coherence of Theism (1977), Swinburne is still a bit on the defensive in terms of subject-matter, for he cannot at this point take for granted that the notion of God is coherent. However, the book also lays the foundations for a member of the subsequent tetralogy, The Christian God, which provides a detailed account of God’s central attributes. The central book of the trilogy is The Existence of God (1979). Its central feature is the use of Bayesian confirmation theory to extend Basil Mitchell’s “cumulative case” apologetic. A key element of Swinburne’s method in this and many subsequent works is to read the Bayesian method of confirmation off of paradigm examples of good science and then apply that method to assessing the case for theism. There are two features of good scientific theories according to Swinburne: simplicity and explanatory

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power. The simplicity of theism comes from its positing at the base of its system a single entity with a single property (or perhaps a tercet of properties) held in the simplest possible way (zero limitation). The explanatory power of theism comes from the fact that, since God knows what is best and desires what is best and has the power to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, an event confirms theism to the extent we think it good and disconfirms theism to the extent we think it bad. That a world should contain embodied rational, moral agents exercising free will in morally significant ways is clearly a good and so confirms theism. But of course there exist also bad states of affairs that, by themselves, disconfirm theism. To this Swinburne gives two answers. First, the confirmation might still exceed the disconfirmation markedly. Second, he offers a version of the “soul-making” theodicy previously set forth by Hick (1966). He does this first in a chapter in The Existence of God, then at book length in a member of the subsequent tetralogy, Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998). The final member of the trilogy, Faith and Reason (1981), considers, among other topics, how to move from the “faith that” God exists made reasonable in the prior volumes to “faith in” God in a religious sense. I have already discussed two members of the tetralogy. The remaining two are Revelation (1991) which examines not only how language can be used to describe God but also the role of creeds and the criteria of identity over time for a church. In Responsibility and Atonement (1989) he lays out a moral theory that he then uses to describe a theory of Christian salvation in keeping with ancient traditions. The collective impact of these seven books is hard to exaggerate. It moved over the course of decades from a defensive posture of establishing the coherence and reasonableness of belief to detailed and original work in confessional theology. This resurgence of philosophically sophisticated and “aggressive,” i.e. positively argumentative, traditional theism threw down a gauntlet. Would the mainline of atheism continue to hold on to a discredited philosophy of meaning, turn a deaf ear, or engage with counterargument? The year after Swinburne’s trilogy was completed, J. L. Mackie published the best defense of atheism in the period covered in this chapter: The Miracle of Theism (1982). Mackie had established himself early as an outlier. In 1955, when almost everyone else seemed to be denying that there was even any meaning to theological utterances, Mackie had published in Mind a careful statement of the logical problem of evil.4 4

See Mackie 1955. Interestingly, Flew seems to vacillate between saying religious statements are meaningless, much like Mackie, and arguing they are false in New Essays (1955). He would later come to hold a deistic view.

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Notably, after the rise of Plantinga and Swinburne, the best instance of atheistic philosophy of religion opens with these words: “My aim in this book is to examine the arguments for and against the existence of God carefully and in some detail” (Mackie 1982: i). The aim notably does not focus on issues of meaning. He mentions positivism only in the Introduction, and dismisses it quickly, saying, “I need say no more about the meaning of religious language, particularly because this is very thoroughly and satisfactorily dealt with by Swinburne” (3). He agrees to Swinburne’s definition of “God” and even says that the question of God’s existence “can and should be discussed rationally and reasonably, and that such discussion can be rewarding” (1). This is a far cry from the atheists of his earlier days. Mackie covers several arguments for and against the existence of God, treating both historical and contemporary sources. It stands alone among all other defenses of atheism between the Second World War and the present in that it treats a wide range of arguments in considerable detail and with considerable sympathy. The next best two books are Graham Oppy’s, which extend to the last decade of the period covered herein: Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (1995) and Arguing about Gods (2006). The problem with these two books, though, is that the former doesn’t treat any version of the ontological argument in any detail and the latter doesn’t treat any particular argument in any detail. They are each very interesting and at times insightful surveys, but they do little more than provide overviews and research guidance. Oppy has, however, added some details in numerous articles extending to present. Clearly, he is the vanguard of contemporary atheism. But we have gotten a little ahead of ourselves with this peek into the future, for now it is time to resume the tale from the late 1970s/early 1980s. Two events harnessed the infused energy from the new-found freedom to discuss philosophy of religion openly. In 1975, while in Oxford, William P. Alston had a religious experience that imparted a new interest in explicitly religious philosophizing. In 1976, after Alston had come back from Oxford, he was asked to be the keynote speaker at the annual Wheaton philosophy conference. He sat down with C. Stephen Evans and Arthur Holmes and told them that the conference had been a wonderful experience. As a result, he wanted to create an organization that would allow for the wider distribution of such academic experiences.5 About two years later, in 1978, the first meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophy was held. Shortly afterwards, in 1984, the society launched their journal, Faith and Philosophy. 5

Personal conversations with C. Stephen Evans, then faculty member at Wheaton and co-organizer of the conference, and Alvin Plantinga.

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This swelling of interest in philosophy of religion, combined with this networking, further increased interest in new reflections on philosophy of religion. Consider this impressive list sampling the explosion of work in the 1980s and 1990s. Each is an anthology full of excellent essays by an array of authors. 1983 Alfred J. Freddoso (ed.), The Existence and Nature of God 1986 Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (eds.), Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion 1988 Thomas V. Morris (ed.), Philosophy and the Christian Faith 1988 Thomas V. Morris (ed.), Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism 1990 Michael D. Beaty (ed.), Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy 1993 Eleonore Stump (ed.), Reasoned Faith 1993 Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint (eds.), Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology 1993 Linda Zagzebski (ed.), Rational Faith 1996 Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil

Beginning only slightly later than this group is a remarkable series shepherded into print by William P. Alston, the Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. The importance of these books makes the cumulative weight of the series quite remarkable. And this underscores what a pivotal figure Alston was, not just in his own writings but in his organizing activities as well. Consider some prominent works in this series. 1989 Edward Wierenga, The Nature of God 1989 William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge 1991 Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity 1991 William P. Alston, Perceiving God6 1993 John Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason 1995 William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart 1999 Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God

Every single one of these books is a classic on its topic. One deserves special mention, however. Schellenberg’s hiddenness book sparked a relatively new vein of thinking in analytic philosophy of religion. God’s seeming absence from the world was far from an original observation. However, the transformation of it into an interesting piece of analytic philosophy was a real move forward, and it inspired a lot of very good reflection.7

6 7

This book was published by Cornell University Press during the time Alston was editing the Cornell series, but it is technically not in the series. However, it has always had honorary membership. For a sample see Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser (eds.), Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (2002).

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It was also in the 1980s and 90s that other major contributors to the renaissance began producing some of their most important work in philosophy of religion. Special mention must be made of three women whose work is outstanding. Marilyn McCord Adams,8 Eleonore Stump, and Linda Zagzebski all exhibit strong interest in medieval philosophy and all three have produced highly original and rigorous work touching on metaphysics, ethics, and philosophical theology. In a discipline and era where it was hard for women to get ahead, these three achieved a level of recognition at the top of their fields. Stump’s magnum opus Wandering in Darkness (2010) is at once one of the most traditional and cutting-edge works produced in the period covered. Given that atheism was very rearguard at the beginning of the period covered, it is unsurprising that the revolution in philosophy of religion was largely led by Christians. Flew was outstanding in his continued engagement with philosophy and religion, and Mackie stood out as well, but two figures played a pivotal figure in the atheistic side of philosophy of religion. William Rowe began to contribute near the beginning of the renaissance with his very interesting study The Cosmological Argument (1975). But where he really made his contribution was in his seminal article “The problem of evil and some varieties of atheism.”9 While acknowledging what is now widely agreed upon, that there is no logical inconsistency between the existence of bad states of affairs (“evil”) and God’s existence, Rowe suggests there is nevertheless a serious evidential challenge from evil to atheism in that observations of instances of evil can count as significant evidence that there is no God in anything like the traditional sense. This paper evoked much by way of response,10 and though he ultimately came to reject his original formulation (see Howard-Snyder 1996), Rowe continued to modify his view. Eventually, the argument was given a Bayesian form, and it didn’t fare well. However, the mantle of main defender of the atheistic argument from evil was taken up, now in Bayesian form, by Rowe’s latter-day colleague Paul Draper a decade after Rowe brought the so-called evidential argument from evil to the fore. In his 1989 “Pain and pleasure: an evidential problem for theists,” Draper thoroughly modernizes a Humean argument from evil. Throughout his career he has continued to modify and develop his view. As a foil to Swinburne, he has argued that certain naturalistic 8 9

10

Sadly, Adams passed away during the writing of this chapter. She was an inspiration to me in many ways. See Rowe 1979. It is worth noting that the argument actually appeared just a bit earlier than this in his Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction (1978). It is actually to this slightly earlier presentation that Plantinga’s essay of 1979 is a reply. See Howard-Snyder 1996, for a key collection of replies. Also see Trakakis 2007, for most of Rowe’s relevant papers and a collection of replies.

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hypotheses both are simpler than their theistic rivals and have more explanatory power. The state of the art on this issue at the end of the period covered here is a debate between Dougherty and Draper in 2013 (see Dougherty and Draper 2013). Each argues that the best account of simplicity is that at work in the rational assessment of scientific theories; they just differ about which account of simplicity that is. The last two books by our two major protagonists in this story, Plantinga and Swinburne, fittingly complete the story of the transition over this period. In 2011, Plantinga produced his last book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Its central theme is that although there might be shallow conflict between religion and science – there do exist young earth creationists – there is deeper concord than there is between science and naturalism, and this for two reasons. First, there is a surprisingly good argument for design in the fine-tuning not of biological organisms but of the laws of physics themselves.11 Second, naturalism, when pursued rigorously and consistently, does not leave room for true minds, minds not exhausted by physical systems. And if the mental is no more than a special category of the physical, the mental is as determined by the laws of physics as any other physical system. Thus, one’s thoughts – including the thought that naturalism is true – are, like the shapes of clouds, determined by the prior distribution of particles and the physical laws that govern them. Since this cannot produce rational outcomes, naturalism undercuts its own rationality. In the book, he interacts with evolutionary theory (he does not deny common ancestry between humans and other Hominidae), quantum theory, and the “cognitive science of religion.” Swinburne’s last book in this period, Mind, Brain, and Free Will, came out just two years later, in 2013. In it, he spends considerable time interpreting recent neuroscientific experiments which have been interpreted as hostile to free will. Both these books exhibit a high degree of knowledge of the relevant first-order science and great subtlety in examining its relevance to religion. Both have the same upshot: Religious belief has nothing to fear and much to gain from scientific understanding. In conclusion, it is well to stop and take stock of how different the situation has become. In 1945, it was taken for granted that methodology in science and religion could hardly be farther apart. In fact, it was issues pertaining to verification/confirmation that lay at the heart of this supposed disconnect. But here, at the end of the period discussed, both atheist and theist agree that the best way to assess religious hypotheses is to apply the standards of science. The 11

Swinburne spelled this argument out carefully in The Existence of God in 1979. It was also this argument that finally convinced Anthony Flew; see Flew 2007.

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reason is that reflection on the very concept of verification in the fifties sparked a revolution in confirmation theory that led to a rise in a kind of Bayesian learning theory that takes a form of probabilism (in some species or other) to be the very form of rational assessment. Thus it will apply across the board in every discipline. Thus the concept of verification, once the principal barrier between science and religion, has now built a bridge between them.

Part II Continental Philosophy

section five CENTRAL MOVEMENTS AND ISSUES

26 EXISTENTIALISM s t e v e n c r ow e l l

Discussing existentialism in a volume on the history of philosophy from 1945 to 2015 poses some unique challenges. The first concerns the extension of the term. While it was customary for writers on existentialism in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s to include a core set of philosophers under this rubric (Sartre, Camus, Marcel, Jaspers, and Heidegger), all but Sartre (and Beauvoir)1 denied being existentialists. Further, these same writers often expanded the list to include supposed precursors such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and even Socrates, Pascal, and Dostoevsky, who would have found the term quite alien. Mention of Dostoevsky suggests a second challenge: the fact that Sartre and Beauvoir were as well known for their literary output as for their more philosophical work meant that “existentialism” came to designate a peculiarly philosophically inflected cultural movement into which a great number of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and others were conscripted.2 A third challenge concerns historiography: does the term “existentialism” – like the terms “rationalism” and “empiricism” – contain a core set of ideas that can, in a family-resemblance kind of way, be found in philosophical work composed at some temporal remove from the canonically existential thinkers? Is “existentialism,” like “idealism,” the name for a recurring philosophical issue? Or is it, as some early commentators and some of the existentialists themselves – notably Camus – held, essentially a kind of protest against philosophical business as usual? The present chapter will address these challenges as follows: While the focus will be on existentialism as a historical phenomenon – namely, the adoption of the term by Sartre and Beauvoir to designate the intellectual and political

1 2

It is noteworthy that though Beauvoir was central to the historical phenomenon, “existentialism,” the earliest canonical lists in the United States did not include her. Limiting ourselves to literature, the following are just a few of those who have been considered “existential” authors: Kafka, Beckett, Artaud, Hesse, Hamsun, Wright, Ionesco, Genet, Albee, Kerouac, and Saurrate. See Malpas 2012: 291–321.

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movement that they would orchestrate via the journal Les Temps Modernes, founded by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others in 1945 – the aim is not primarily historiographical. Instead, the chapter will suggest why standard accounts tended to circulate around a specific list of contemporaries and precursors; that is, why, in the 1950s and early 1960s, both in Europe and in the Anglophone world, existentialism seemed to be a relatively coherent philosophical outlook despite important differences among what came to be its canonical representatives. I suggest that “existentialism” is not merely a period of intellectual history but, like “rationalism” or “empiricism,” has its ground in the nature of philosophical thought itself. As for the concern about generic boundaries, the relation between existential philosophy and the wider cultural use of the term will mostly be left to one side. THE EMERGENCE OF THE TERM “EXISTENTIALISM”

In 1945 Sartre delivered a lecture under the title L’existentialisme est un humanisme. In it he explicitly adopted a term for his own (and Beauvoir’s) thinking that he had previously rejected, spearheading what Beauvoir, in The Force of Circumstance, called their “existentialist offensive.”3 The notoriety that befell this lecture, published in 1946, inaugurated existentialism as a cultural craze in France. The term had originally been used by Gabriel Marcel for his own position, but his disdain for Sartre led him to abandon it.4 In general, the term became so closely associated with Sartre and Beauvoir that others who shared a similar philosophical outlook – notably Camus and Merleau-Ponty – distanced themselves from it. In this sense, then, existentialism is the Symphilosophein of Sartre and Beauvoir.5 Their use of the term, however, drew on sources in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought (above all, on Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger) already grouped under the label Existenz-philosophie, introduced by Jaspers. In opposition to Hegel’s rationalistic “System,” Kierkegaard had championed the “existing individual” whose personal struggle for meaning was rendered invisible by the Hegelian dialectic’s relentless “mediation.” Jaspers, in turn, drawing in part on Kierkegaard and on his own work in psychopathology, developed a concept of Existenz-Erhellung according to which the meaning of human life (“transcendence”) is to be found in “limit-situations” 3 4

5

See Jonathan Webber’s account (2018: chapter 1). See McBride 2012: 50–69. Marcel’s “religious” existentialism, grounded in “ontological mystery,” and his critique of Sartre’s “atheist” version are sketched by Marcel (1968). The critical part was first published in 1946. For recent treatments of the entwined personal and philosophical careers of Sartre and Beauvoir see Simons 1999 and Webber forthcoming.

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such as death, guilt, and suffering, which break through the rational and conventional frameworks shaping the individual’s everyday pursuits. But it was Heidegger who exerted the greatest influence on Sartre’s understanding of the term. Heidegger had been a student of Edmund Husserl, whose “phenomenology” was supposed to be the basis for a rigorous science of consciousness and ultimately for a rationalistic metaphysics. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which adopted the phenomenological method, proposed a (seemingly) radical reorientation of phenomenology based on the “Analytic of Dasein.” Dasein, a German term for existence, designates “the entity which each of us is him or herself,” and its mode of being, Existenz, is radically distinct from that of other things (Heidegger 1962a: 27, 67). Sartre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness, the “bible” of existentialism subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is in a certain sense a revision of Being and Time. Sartre himself hints at this in a passage where he describes a writer considering “objective” reasons (not) to write: “Isn’t this just a repetition of another such book?” (Sartre 1956 [1943]: 75). But by 1945 Heidegger had already turned his back on Being and Time, claiming that its emphasis on Existenz had obscured its real target, namely, the question of being (Sein), and in 1946 he explicitly disavowed any connection with Sartre’s existentialism (Heidegger 1998). Thus on historical grounds one should certainly be clear about the distinction between Existenz-philosophy – Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger – and existentialism.6 But there are also good reasons for including such figures in any list of precursors, if only because Sartre himself draws upon and criticizes their ideas. To this list other “existentialists” were added – for example, Nietzsche, Shestov, Buber, Berdeyev, Ortega y Gassett – but only after Sartrean existentialism had captured the imagination of a wide swath of European and Anglo-American intellectual life. Though Sartre taught for years at a lycée in Le Havre, he never held a university appointment, and after the war he tended to write in cafés. In contrast to prevailing norms of academic philosophy, the themes of Sartre’s novels and plays, as well as his choice of examples in philosophical writing, revealed a taste for the abject. Marcel, for instance, called Sartre’s description of being in Nausea “obscene” (Marcel 1968: 58). Sartre’s “outsider” image dominated the reception of existentialism in France and beyond, and contributed to the formation of the interdisciplinary existentialist canon. In the 1950s, when introductions to existentialism began to appear in the United States, they all noted this “scandalous” reputation and its stark contrast 6

See Schacht 2012: 111–16. One should also note that many thinkers who drew upon the tradition of Existenz-philosophy but had little to do with the French variant were labeled “existentialists” in the latter’s historical heyday: Löwith, Bultmann, Tillich, Binswanger and many others.

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with mainstream philosophy, which one writer characterized as “predominantly analytic, scientifically molded, and imbued with some form of naturalism” (Collins 1952: xi). William Barrett made this contrast the focus of his influential Irrational Man, noting the distortion philosophy undergoes when it becomes professionalized: Though “French Existentialism, as a cult, is now as dead as last year’s fad,” its importance lies in the fact that “it was a philosophy that was able to cross the frontier from the Academy into the world at large” (1958: 4, 8–9). In 1955, John Wild had gone further: the Cold War demanded the articulation of “sound and appealing cultural aims,” but “academic philosophy, at least, seems bankrupt.” Without embracing existentialism, Wild welcomes its “challenge” as a way of “escap[ing] from the provincialism of Anglo-American analysis” (1955: 3, 7). Walter Kaufmann proposed that “existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy” (1956: 11), and William Barrett followed him: existentialism is a “revolt against such simplifications” as those found in the “positivist picture of man”; instead, existentialism “attempts to grasp the image of the whole man, even where this involves bringing to consciousness all that is dark and questionable in his existence” (1958: 22). Reflecting back on this reception in 1972, Karl-Otto Apel saw a “division of labor” between “analytical philosophy,” assigned to “the domain of objective scientific knowledge,” and “existentialism,” presiding over “the domain of subjective ethical decisions” (Apel 1980: 233–4). A recent anthology of existentialist writings echoes this: faced with the “modern [scientific] world view,” existentialism’s “clear-sighted recognition of our lack of absolutes . . . makes explicit the understanding of our predicament that lies at the root of a wide variety of recent challenges to the essentialism and foundationalism of traditional philosophy” (Guignon and Pereboom 1995: xvii). As this last remark suggests, existentialism is no longer understood simply as a protest against academic philosophy but as a reasonably coherent canon of thinkers whose work offers an alternative approach to the situation of the human being in the modern world, one that challenges the traditional primacy of reason (“essentialism and foundationalism”). Historically considered, existentialism is a phenomenon of the Cold War period. Already by the 1960s Sartre had revised his position in the direction of Marxism.7 Camus died in an auto 7

The relation between existentialism and Marxism will not be treated in this chapter, but it should be noted that because French existentialism is characterized by the idea of the “engaged” intellectual, political disputes played an important role in the movement. Sartre himself was nudged away from certain aspects of the position of Being and Nothingness by Merleau-Ponty’s (ultimately political) criticism that its idea of freedom failed to do justice to the weight of history. Stewart (1998) collects some of the most important primary texts in this “debate,” together with a number of critical accounts.

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accident in 1960, and Merleau-Ponty died of a stroke in 1961. Meanwhile, the French intellectual world was turning against the “subjectivism” of phenomenology and existentialism in favor of structuralism and, finally, the post-structuralism and deconstruction of Foucault and Derrida. However, the philosophical significance of existentialism did not vanish with the popular movement. That significance lies in a fluid but broadly identifiable cluster of ideas8 that can be found in the writings of existentialist “precursors” and of contemporary philosophers, only some of whom self-identify as existentialists. Here I will present a few of these ideas, focusing on Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s existentialism and its connection to some of the other thinkers in the canon. Since the context demands brevity, we will be guided by the following thesis: The philosophical significance of the existential concept of (human) existence lies in its focus on meaning, and the chief contribution of existentialism consists in identifying authenticity as the norm or measure that makes such existence thinkable. Authenticity, the measure of the meaning of a human life, can be defined in terms of neither truth (knowledge), defined neither in terms of truth nor goodness/rightness (value, obligation), nor beauty – the measures by which traditional “rationalist” philosophy understands human being. In the next section, then, I will say something about how meaning becomes a philosophical problem. The third section will consider how Sartre and Beauvoir address it, and a final section will identify some examples of contemporary existential thought.

THE PROBLEM OF MEANING

Sartre’s existentialism is most closely associated with his slogan, “existence precedes essence,” and many of its central theses – such as the absurdity of being, the anguish of freedom, and the alienation underlying social relations – derive from this idea. But a proper understanding of it requires broadening the intellectual horizon beyond a focus on the upheavals of the war and the immediate post-war period to the scientific displacement of human reason that gave rise to the modern world. Already Pascal had confessed that “the silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread,” and Nietzsche sums the sentiment up nicely in his remark that: “Since Copernicus man seems to [be] slipping faster and faster away from the center . . . into ‘a penetrating sense of his nothingness’” (1969 [1887]: 155). As the allusion to astronomy attests, this “nothingness” is not 8

Cooper (2012: 29) provides a list of such ideas, discussing them further in Cooper 1999.

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a matter of skepticism with regard to knowledge; rather, it pertains to the loss of meaning, that is, “nihilism.” To say, as Nietzsche does, that “God is dead,” is not to say that we no longer know anything or value anything; it is to say that the meaning of human existence can no longer be thought in terms of purpose. Nietzsche himself saw the problem in aesthetic terms: the “strong nihilist” is an artist of the self, shaping her drives according to the measure of “style” (1974 [1882/1887]: 232). Such a self is a genuine “individual” because its style makes it unique. Though he does not use the term, the “authenticity” of this shaping process – a kind of attunement to one drive that orchestrates many, rather than adherence to a universally binding rational standard – is Nietzsche’s measure of a meaningful life. Thus nihilism, the denial that existence has a purpose, allows meaning to emerge as a distinct philosophical problem. Something similar is found in Kierkegaard. Under the slogan, “subjectivity is truth,” he highlights the way that meaning is invisible both to science and to ethics (Kierkegaard 2009: 159–210). The slogan does not advocate skepticism or relativism but points to the irrelevance of “objective” scientific knowledge – whether natural or historical – for the individual’s deepest concerns. In his reflections on Abraham, Kierkegaard outlines what such subjective truth involves by evoking the despair that attends the ethical conception of the human being. If ethics demands universality – that is, if who I am is defined by what reason demands of everyone – then nothing that is uniquely “mine” is philosophically relevant. Abraham’s faith cannot be reconciled with this universality; it suspends the ethical injunction against killing, but it does so in the name of a “purely personal virtue,” an “absolute” relation to God unmediated by reason. Subjective truth, authenticity, is not a proposition but lies in the passion with which Abraham holds fast to the “paradox of existence”: The “single individual is higher than the universal” (Kierkegaard 2006: 40, 49). In the passion of commitment, or “leap of faith,” the singularity of my life, its meaning, comes into focus, though reason may condemn it as absurd or worse. Thus “existence,” in what will become the characteristically existentialist sense, is not merely the instantiation of a universal; it is the risky business of achieving a meaningful life by cultivating an “inwardness” that is incommensurable – though not necessarily incompatible – with the public categories of reason. Meaning demands its own measure. It was Heidegger – a close reader of both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – who first developed the implications of this concept of existence systematically. The human being (Dasein) is not a rational animal but care (Sorge), a being for whom what it means to be is not a given but always at issue in existing, at stake in one’s choices. As with Kierkegaard, the measure of such meaning does not lie in what one does or tries to be but in how that trying is related to itself. In trying to be a

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father, for instance, I generally act “anonymously,” that is, in accord with the public commonplaces that define the role. In acting as “one” does, I can fall into inauthenticity, since such commonplaces appear to be simply the nature of things. This appearance can break down, however. In the mood of anxiety (Angst), which is the existential “death” of my everyday way of being a father, such commonplaces no longer grip me and I experience my responsibility for endowing them with normative (motivational) force, or for abandoning them. Authenticity consists in acting in light of that responsibility: the meaning of my existence as a father is at issue in resolute choice, in the commitment that allows certain norms and not others to count.9 Neither scientific consensus (“fathers are donors of certain genetic material”) nor ethical injunctions (“fathers should put their children first”) have priority over this dimension of choice and commitment, measured by its authenticity. This does not mean, however, that science is epistemically suspect or that ethics is irrelevant. Existence “precedes” all such rational (“essential”) determinations.

SARTRE’S EXISTENTIALISM

Sartre retains much of this Heideggerian picture, but he departs from it in two significant ways.10 First, he returns to Husserl’s focus on consciousness, which Heidegger had rejected; and second, he locates the phenomenology of consciousness within an ontological framework derived from Hegel. The story is often told how Raymond Aron introduced Sartre to phenomenology by pointing to an apricot aperitif and remarking that phenomenology allowed one to philosophize about such things. Phenomenology’s attention to firstperson description of the world of “lived experience” rather than to the representations of the world found in third-person theories – as seen in phenomenology’s focus on “intentionality” as the consciousness of something as something – meant that the gritty realities of life, not bloodless abstractions, were the proper topics of philosophy. Thus Sartre developed Heidegger’s claim that “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (Heidegger 1962a [1927]: 67) into the idea that consciousness (the pour-soi or “for-itself”) is a kind of nothingness, the “negation” of being (the en-soi or “in-itself”), and that “human reality” is the permanent, and permanently unstable, attempt to negotiate this opposition.11 9 10 11

A rationally irreconcilable clash of norms thus becomes possible, hinting at the connection between existentialism and the “tragic view of life,” which has been widely discussed since the 1950s. See Fell 1979. The ideas sketched in this section are more extensively discussed by Crowell (2012b: 199–226).

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Being, en-soi, is ultimately absurd; nothing can be said about it except that it is. If, nevertheless, the world we experience is a world of meaningful things – alarm clocks, cafés, park benches, tree roots, trysts, and betrayals – this is because consciousness, a “worm” coiled “in the heart of being” (Sartre 1956 [1943]: 56), haunts that being as not being it. Consciousness is de trop, bound to a being from which it can derive no reason for its own being. The very structure of consciousness – consciousness of being and pre-reflective consciousness of itself as not being that being – is freedom, an ontological dislocation from being that can only be described, paradoxically, as “being what it is not and not being what it is” (28). To say that existence precedes essence, then, is to say that there is no ego or self “in” consciousness who would occasionally exercise a capacity for free choice. All such capacities, properties, motives, reasons, drives, character traits, or habits of a “self” are only objects for consciousness. As with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, the Sartrean self is “made to be,” something to be achieved; however, since consciousness can never coincide with being, the self achieved in this way is simultaneously alienated from itself. Freedom admits of no ground; we are “condemned” to freedom and stand under a “constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates the free being” (72). The ontological freedom of consciousness underwrites both Sartre’s atheism and the characteristically existentialist view of the human being as irrational, that is, as contradictory in its being. The traditional idea of God as causa sui – a freedom (pour-soi) that coincides with its being (en-soi) – involves a contradiction, and the human being’s attempt to make itself something (to “be” a father) reflects this: I can never be a father “in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell” (1956 [1943]: 102). The human being is thus a “failed God,” the “useless passion” of trying to coincide with what it is trying to be. Less metaphorically, there can be no cognitive or ethical recipes for being a father (no rational “definitions”), since a father is an existing human being and thus something that in principle could never coincide with such a cognitive or ethical “essence.” Instead, “essence is what has been” (72), where what I have done (made myself be) is fixed in the past as my “facticity,” separated from my present by the radical freedom of consciousness, my “transcendence.” Existence, or human reality, is thereby characterized as a “project” that is exposed to self-deception at every level. Projects are ways of understanding myself not in a reflective or deliberative way, but as I am absorbed or engaged 12

12

This concept of absurdity – the absolute abyss between reason and what is – is also central for Camus, but his version of authenticity involves embracing that absurdity, while for Sartre human reality is something like a compromise with it. Cooper (1999: 9) dismisses Camus from the existentialist canon for this reason.

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(engagé) in the particular natural, historical, and social “situation” or world in which I find myself. Being engaged in a project allows things to show up as meaningful (to be experienced as something), but it does so only by concealing the freedom that lies at its heart, the fact that “every determination is a negation.” For instance, to experience something as fragile is to go beyond (negate, transcend) the en-soi toward a possibility that, as possibility, cannot arise from being. Its source lies, instead, in the projection of myself as a collector of antique vases, in my choosing this identity as “my possible.” The destruction which, from the perspective of the en-soi, is merely the rearrangement of being – and so lacks any trace of negation – is, from the perspective of the collector, “fragility,” i.e. the negation, or possible non-being, of a “vase.” Sartre’s existentialist theory of value (including ethical value) derives from this conception of how meaning is grounded in projects. For instance, if I am engaged in trying to be a father (if fatherhood is my “possible” or project), then things in the world show up as values in relation to fatherhood, more or less relevant to that project. The colleague dominating a department meeting will be experienced as a disvalue keeping me from leaving in time to pick up my daughter from daycare; the distance to be traversed by car will fill me with the irritation of an impediment. As long as I am unreflectively engaged in such trying, everything takes place as though the way things show up as meaningful were an objective feature of the world, motivating me by their very existence. Yet, this origin of values in freedom can become evident to me when, in anguish (angoisse), I realize that nothing compels me to act in this way rather than that, that it is my “choice of myself in the world” – my commitment here and now and not some supposed “fixed and abiding character” – that gives the commonplaces of fatherhood their normative exigency. If my commitment to fatherhood no longer grips me, or if I suddenly see that my conception of what it means is just “typical of my class,” what appeared to be motives determining my freedom turn out to be inert objects for consciousness whose exigent “value” exists only through freedom (Sartre 1956 [1943]: 71). It is not the value of something that gives it normative force over my freedom; rather, it is my freedom, commitment, and choice that makes something a value capable of motivating me (77). The imperatives of “everyday morality,” as imperatives, have no ground in being; nor can they be derived from freedom considered as practical reason. Reasons that justify what I do arise through my project, the groundless negation of being in the direction of a self with which freedom can never coincide. Because the original consciousness of freedom is anguish, awareness of freedom is something we generally flee, either through unreflective engagement, or through the reflective strategy of self-deception Sartre calls “bad faith.”

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If bad faith is an explicit form of inauthenticity – a game played with the responsibility of freedom – engagement has the potential to be authentic. Sartre has little to say about authenticity in Being and Nothingness, but he explicitly opposes it to “sincerity,” which is a form of bad faith – namely, the attempt to convince others, and myself, that I am what I appear to be, like a thing (1956 [1943]: 109–12). In contrast, authenticity is an attitude toward the groundlessness of my existence that, as Sartre puts it, “is opposed to the mind of the serious man” (78) who believes (circularly) that his values, based on his free choices, justify those choices. To exist authentically is, instead, to recognize something like Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: “I make my choice, without justification and without excuse” (78). Some recent authors – notably Richard Rorty (1989) and Jonathan Lear (2011) – have followed Kierkegaard further, proposing that authenticity has the characteristic features of irony: One is committed to an interpretation of how one ought to conduct oneself, while simultaneously remaining aware that the commitment is not a justification. If the authority of “ought” is understood as constituted by the commitment, it is, “ironically,” not an authority. Meaning is always at issue. The structure of existential freedom entails a view of social relations – captured in the famous line from Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people” – that has proved both controversial and fruitful. If my consciousness of objects involves a one-way negation that yields a meaningful world centered on my projects, my consciousness of another subject involves a double negation: I am conscious of the Other as subject insofar as I grasp myself as the object that the Other’s consciousness is “negating.” The Other is thus a unique constraint on my freedom. Whereas I cannot, by myself, make myself coincide with what I am trying to be, the Other’s “look” fixes me with an “outside,” a “me,” which I cannot simply shake off (1956 [1943]: 351–4). This limit on my freedom is registered in shame, the consciousness of having been alienated from my freedom by the Other’s view of me. Sartre’s ontology thus finds permanent conflict at the heart of social relations; in order to regain my freedom (the subject-position) I must reduce the Other to an object, an attempt that never succeeds for long. This analysis, a version of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic without resolution, has been roundly criticized – since, for instance, it seems to rule out “mutual recognition” as a political ideal13 and it reduces love to a play of sadism and masochism – but it also provides the outline of a critical social theory. Given the 13

In Existentialism is a Humanism, and more systematically in What Is Literature? (1949), Sartre argues for a universal obligation to promote “freedom,” in the sense of liberation, by taking the side of the oppressed. But at worst, these arguments yield no obligation, and at best they yield an obligation only for specific projects, such as being a writer.

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instability of any individual’s attempt to transform the Other into an object, social institutions can be contrived so as to ensure that certain Others will be marked as objects to begin with. Sartre applied this insight in his book, AntiSemite and Jew (1944), and in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Franz Fanon developed it into an analysis of racism and its institutional forms. But it was through Simone de Beauvoir’s work The Second Sex (1949) that this analysis has had its widest impact. If “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1989 [1949]: 267), this means, among other things, that in patriarchal institutions “woman” is constituted through systems that from the outset constrain her ability to occupy the subject-position, to shape the world according to her projects. That is because the situation in which those projects would be exercised is shot through with “values” which presuppose that the particular perspective of “man” is identified with the universal, ungendered “pure” subjectivity of the pour-soi, freedom and autonomy (1989: xxi–xxiv). Though Beauvoir, too, embraces authenticity (commitment, autonomy) as the measure of a meaningful life (1989: xxxv), her view of social relations, unlike Sartre’s, does not bottom out in eternal conflict. Rather, she champions an “ethics of ambiguity.” Emphasizing the material ground of human reality, Beauvoir recognizes that in a world disclosed through the projects of differently embodied subjects, ontological freedom cannot be authentic in the absence of the real material freedom of others. Thus, willing oneself as free requires willing others to be free as well. In the “ambiguity” of an embodied freedom, elements for a non-conflictual intersubjectivity, an existentialist ethics, can be discerned.14 In embracing the ambiguity of a natural freedom, Beauvoir’s thinking actually lies closer to Merleau-Ponty than it does to Sartre. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the phenomenon of embodiment, and not a dialectic between the two ontological regions of the pour-soi and the en-soi, that reveals what is most distinctive about human existence as being-in-the-world. Sartre had considered the body under two irreconcilable aspects – the body-subject as the material exercise of freedom and the body-object as a thing in the world (1956 [1943]: 404–60) – but Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) argues that these aspects belong to a more original phenomenon, the “structure of comportment,” which can be captured neither in terms of radical freedom nor in objective scientific categories. The intentionality of consciousness (freedom’s project) is prefigured in the “motor intentionality” of the body itself, which grasps the “expressive” meaning of things without standing in a relation of negation to

14

See Arp 2012.

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them, but also without constructing them in terms of a pre-given reason. Embodiment is both part of the world and our opening onto the world; it is thus an ambiguous mode of being, undecideable in terms of the traditional categories of subject and object. For Merleau-Ponty, such a mode of existence heralds a new logos, or reason, that derives neither from freedom nor from the world “viewed from nowhere,” but from the sens sauvage of the world as lived. CONTEMPORARY EXISTENTIALISM

In the 1970s scholarly societies devoted to the major existentialist thinkers began to appear, and today existentialism has a well-established place in the philosophy curriculum. Courses on existentialism generally include the canonical figures we have mentioned, thus treating it as a chapter in the history of philosophy. But just as “Humeanism” now refers not merely to the philosophy of David Hume but to a stance on the relation between reason and desire, so “existentialism” can be seen as a position on the relation between reason, freedom, and meaning that can be found in contemporary philosophical work, even where no reference to canonical existentialists is made. I will conclude with a few examples. A key element of the existential stance is that the meaning and value of things is originally disclosed not in deliberation and reasoning but in engagement with them. Our representations of the world do not explain our actions; rather, our dealings with things explain our representations. This stance on intentionality was developed by Hubert Dreyfus into an influential critique of the original program of artificial intelligence (Dreyfus 1972): the human mind is not a computational system but is “embodied and embedded” in a world whose meaning is correlated with “mindless” coping, that is, skilled practices. Such practices, involving what Merleau-Ponty called “motor intentionality,” are basic; they cannot be reconstructed as products of the mental processing of information (Dreyfus 1991). Such engagement is possible, on the existentialist view, only because the human being is free – that is (as Sartre put it), “condemned” to be a locus of responsibility and choice, not just occasionally, but essentially. John Haugeland’s work in philosophy of mind draws out this aspect by focusing on how engaged world-disclosure depends on norm-responsiveness, and how this, in turn, achieves authentic self-consciousness, as it were, in resolute choice or commitment (Haugeland 1998a). Our cognitive achievements do not rest on rational foundations; rather, reasons arise through our commitment to norms for whose normative force we are responsible. The nature of this responsibility, and the rationally ungrounded character of the “worlds” we inhabit, become evident when the current normative framework can no longer be made to

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work. Such existential “death,” on Haugeland’s view, underlies the anxiety of paradigm change described by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The existentialist idea of a situated subjectivity – for instance, Sartre’s idea that consciousness is not the property of an ego, that the ego is “in the world, like the ego of another” – requires us to reject the Cartesian, “introspective” model of first-person access to ourselves. The implications of this rejection are developed in Richard Moran’s account of first-person authority as “avowal” (Moran 2001). Self-knowledge is not a matter of reflecting on epistemically privileged contents of consciousness; it is a performative stand-taking with regard to the way the world is. First-person “privilege” means, as Sartre would say, that I am responsible for what I take the world to be like, based on my commitment to a way of being in it. As for Sartre, so also for Moran; this leaves plenty of room for strategies of self-deception and bad faith. From an existential point of view, the situated subject is essentially a project, a “choice of myself in the world.” This idea informs Christine Korsgaard’s concept of “practical identity,” a “description under which you value yourself . . . and find your life to be worth living” (Korsgaard 1996b: 101). Such an affectively embraced “description” concerns what gives one’s life meaning – the project of being a teacher, mother, hedge-fund guy, community organizer, and so on – and it is only because we have such identities (they are always plural) that we have first-person reasons to do one thing rather than another. Like Sartre in Existentialism is a Humanism, Korsgaard tries to bootstrap this notion of practical identity into an argument for Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but her starting point acknowledges the ambiguity of the human being – neither merely an animal among animals nor a “pure practical reason.” Much of the contemporary “anthropological turn” in Kant-inspired ethics can be understood in these existential terms. Finally, the critical social theory of Sartre and Beauvoir – both the idea that the self is not a given character or gender but a performance based on freedom in situation, and the idea that such a situation usually involves structures of oppression whereby a dominant group defines what is “normal” and so normative – has been developed extensively by Judith Butler (e.g. 1990). Against gender essentialism, Butler argues that identity arises from the way we perform our freedom in social conditions that work relentlessly to conceal it. Authenticity turns out to involve a kind of “queer” sensibility, that is, enacting one’s awareness that to naturalize any identity, including gender identity, is a form of bad faith. As we saw above, existentialism gained traction as a counterpoint to the naturalistic consensus of analytic philosophy. But today the positivistic

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conception of nature is giving way to less reductionistic accounts and the resources of existentialism are being marshaled toward a new naturalism. These developments suggest that the historical phenomenon, French Existentialism, was merely the most public eruption of a way of thinking about meaning, selfhood, freedom, and being that reaches back as far as philosophy does and imposes itself whenever philosophy seeks to embrace the full life to which it belongs.

27 SARTRE AND MERLEAU-PONTY ON FREEDOM tay lo r car man

Freedom was the central problem and preoccupation of French existentialism – not only of its central figure, Jean-Paul Sartre, but also of his sometime intellectual friend and rival, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. They had in common what they inherited from their immediate German predecessors – from Edmund Husserl a commitment to phenomenology as a method of inquiry, from Martin Heidegger a conviction that traditional philosophy had failed to take seriously the existential sources of its own questions and concepts. Like Husserl and Heidegger, they were critics of theoretical abstraction and scholastic refinement, champions of the concrete, eager to remind philosophical reflection of its groundedness in what Sartre called the “pre-reflective cogito” (cogito préréflexif), or as Merleau-Ponty said, translating literally from the German Erlebnis, “lived experience” (l’expérience vécue).1 On many substantive matters, however, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty differed profoundly – or, it would be more correct to say, Merleau-Ponty departed sharply from Sartre. For although Sartre’s early works, up to and including Being and Nothingness (1943, hereafter BN), make almost no mention of MerleauPonty, much of Phenomenology of Perception (1945, hereafter PP)2 is animated by an ongoing, implicit and explicit, critical conversation with Sartre. What Merleau-Ponty most emphatically rejects is the categorical distinction Sartre draws between “being-in-itself” (être-en-soi) and “being-for-itself” (être-poursoi) – that is, between objective reality, which has a positive intrinsic nature of its own, and the subjectivity of consciousness, which is constituted by the essentially negative relation in which it stands both to itself and to the initself. That dualism of en-soi and pour-soi, objectivity and subjectivity, permeates Sartre’s thought, just as Merleau-Ponty’s effort to problematize, subvert, and complicate it is a recurring theme in the Phenomenology, and indeed in all his subsequent writings. This deep difference of philosophical outlook and 1 2

See also Crowell, this volume. Page references are to the 2005 French edition, given in the margins of Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]).

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argument marks their entire relationship, but nowhere is it clearer than in their accounts of the essence and limits of human freedom. SARTRE

Strange as it might sound, Sartre’s famous declaration of radical freedom has fairly little to do with the metaphysical puzzle known to students of philosophy as the problem of the compatibility of free will and determinism. Sartre was not particularly interested in whether free choice can in principle be reconciled with causal mechanism; like Kant, he takes it for granted that it cannot be. When he speaks of physical causality at all, which is rarely, he places it beyond the domain of action and decision altogether: “a being that is caused is wholly engaged by its cause within positivity: to the extent that it depends in its being on its cause, it cannot contain the slightest germ of nothingness,” which is to say, freedom. Consciousness as such, Sartre insists, lies outside the network of physical causes: “in so far as a questioner must be able to take a sort of nihilating step back in relation to the thing he is questioning, he escapes from the causal order of the world and extricates himself from the glue of being” (BN 59). Putting mechanical causation aside, then, Sartre’s question is not whether actions are psychologically conditioned but, rather, how it is possible to understand them as motivated by anything other than an “arbitrary or capricious” free will (BN 594). The causal conditions relevant to Sartre’s account of freedom are not the blind forces of physical nature, but the “reasons” (motifs) one has for doing what one does, that is, “the set of rational considerations that justify it,” and the “motives” (mobiles) that impel one to act, that is, “the collection of desires, emotions and passions that drive me to perform a certain act” (BN 585, 586).3 What matters to Sartre’s account is solely what figures into the rational and psychological explanation of action, which he regards as a primitive phenomenon, distinct from and irreducible to brute facts and forces of nature. Dismissing what he calls “those tedious arguments between determinists and the partisans of freedom of indifference” (BN 573), Sartre poses instead what he takes to be a deeper, more pressing question, namely, “how a reason (or a motive) can be constituted as such” (BN 574). He agrees with Hume that libertarians are wrong to suppose that actions lack psychological causes altogether, since uncaused actions would be random, hence unintelligible as actions; determinists are right that we are not free to do just anything whatever, “if we mean by ‘freedom’ a capricious pure contingency, unlawful, gratuitous 3

Hazel Barnes, in her 1956 English translation of Being and Nothingness, very confusingly used the word “cause” for motif. Sarah Richmond correctly renders it “reason” (Sartre 2018).

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and incomprehensible” (BN 594). But determinists typically stop short of asking how anything can be the cause of an action, as opposed to a mere event. Actions, Sartre insists, have the kinds of causes they can have – namely, motivating attitudes – only by being performed for reasons: “To talk of an act without a reason is to talk of an act that lacks the intentional structure of all action.” Action consists precisely in “the complex organization of ‘reason-intention-actend,’” so the question is not whether but how actions are brought about, or rather what it means to say of some behavior that it is an action (BN 573–4). What, then, is the relation between reasons and motives? It is tempting to say that reasons are objective, motives subjective, but that can be misleading (BN 586–7). What Sartre says instead is that reasons are aspects of the world, situational facts we have in view when we act: “the contemporary state of things, as it is disclosed to a consciousness” (BN 587). Motives, by contrast, are psychological phenomena that are ordinarily transparent to us and that appear only upon reflection, or in our observing the actions of others. Sartre’s distinction between motive and reason closely corresponds to Husserl’s distinction between the noesis and the noema of an intentional attitude – the real mental state and its ideal content – both of which Husserl says are immanent in consciousness (see also Smith, this volume). Sartre, however, rejects Husserl’s internalism and maintains instead that motives qua psychological conditions of action are themselves transcendent to consciousness: they are only ever given to consciousness de facto, as objects of reflective awareness (or observation), already etched into the past, as it were, hence “separated from us by a breadth of nothingness” (BN 590). Sartre’s doctrine of radical freedom, then, is that a motive functions as the cause of an action only by already having been selected by reasons for doing what one does, that is, by being freely taken up. The motive as such, taken by itself as a given psychological fact, “can act only if we reclaim it; on its own, it has no strength” (BN 590). Motives are psychological causes, but they are so only in virtue of our having in effect chosen them by directing our actions toward ends and pursuing those ends for reasons. An end can motivate an action only by being recognized by the agent as affording or justifying the action, and that recognition, Sartre thinks, is a choice, which we can then retrospectively, upon reflection (or observation), identify as having been the agent’s motive. To say that actions flow directly – and only – from choices is to say that what constitutes a psychological attitude as a motive can be nothing other than the agent’s own recognition of that attitude as answering to the situation. Our actions are caused, but we in effect choose their causes by acting for reasons; the causes are not brutely given, nor do they literally impel us to do what we do. To suppose that actions are brought about by antecedently given psychological forces, Sartre

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thinks, is to project an imaginary, pseudo-explanatory power backward, from an end, which provided a reason, which was in turn simply what allowed us to recognize the action as an action. What about external conditions of action, causal factors that are not in ourselves, but out in the world? Doesn’t the brute presence of physical reality constrain my freedom? Sartre thinks not. Imagine that I am out hiking. After a few hours, I get tired. What happens next? “I give in,” Sartre says. “I throw my bag down on the side of the road, and I drop down beside it” (BN 595). Was I free not do so? Didn’t my fatigue put a limit on my freedom? I might say I was “too tired” to go on. But was I? And even if I wasn’t literally unable to go any further at that moment, wasn’t it just a matter of time? Wouldn’t my exhaustion eventually catch up with me and literally force me to the ground? Yes, but fainting is not an action; deciding to stop walking is. Stopping was a choice I made, and Sartre maintains that choices – indeed, actions as such – are essentially free: “human-reality is action,” Sartre says categorically, and “The existence of an act implies its autonomy” (BN 623). But how are we to reconcile this notion of freedom with the phenomenological force of the example, namely the pressure that my fatigue seems to put on my decision to stop and rest? Sartre’s answer is that that (so-called) pressure – commonly known as the force of circumstance – “weighs” on me only through commitments I have already made: beliefs I maintain, desires I embrace, values I hold dear – in short, antecedent choices. The question, then, is not whether I could have continued but, rather, could I do so “without markedly changing the organic totality of projects that I am, or would the fact of resisting my fatigue . . . be possible only with a radical transformation of my being-in-the-world?” Of course, I could have gone on, “but at what cost?” (BN 595). Freedom is not the same as power, nor is radical freedom tantamount to omnipotence. Sartre’s thesis is not that we can magically transform the causal structure of the world through arbitrary acts of will.4 He is, after all, a kind of realist about the en-soi: it exists independently of the pour-soi, it has its own intrinsic causal structure, and it is profoundly indifferent to our attitudes. Obviously, brute physical reality puts limits on what we can and cannot do. As Sartre says, “we perceive the resistance of things” (BN 435). But what form does that resistance take?

4

Indeed, Sartre’s argument in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions is that emotions are necessarily irrational and ineffectual precisely because they are exercises of magical thinking. This is surely one of Sartre’s least convincing claims and exposes, it seems to me, the general absurdity of his position.

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The en-soi confronts me, Sartre says, only in the guise of a situation. Suppose on my hike I come upon a boulder that I can’t climb. The rock is not a meaningless datum, but an obstacle; it presents itself to me precisely as “not climbable.” But what gives it that significance? In a word, I do: “the rock appears to me in the light of a projected rock-climbing . . . [T]he rock is outlined against the ground of the world as a result of the initial choice of my freedom” (BN 637). For someone else, someone just out for a stroll, enjoying the view and with no interest in climbing, the boulder is neither climbable nor unclimbable, but (say) beautiful or ugly. The scenario Sartre describes is clear enough, but he wants to infer from it the very strong general claim that the world is only ever present to us in light of our projected actions, which is to say our choices. I said that Sartre is a kind of realist about the en-soi, but his realism has a Kantian, or more precisely neo-Kantian, tinge. The terms “in-itself” and “foritself” sound Hegelian, but in fact they perform none of the dialectical function of Hegel’s jargon. The Sartrean en-soi is a much closer relative to the Kantian Ding an sich, namely that “thing in itself” which exists independently of us, but which we can know only as it appears to us, indeed only as it appears as mediated by our spontaneity. Just as, for Kant, we can have no knowledge of objects brutely present to intuition, so too, for Sartre, the en-soi – in its sheer implacable, recalcitrant plenitude – comes to us only as filtered through our choices. The only thing to say about it a priori, abstracting from the projects that imbue it with sense and structure, is that it (somehow) pushes back on us. Absent the particular way in which it shows up as either obstacle or opportunity, affordance or threat, the en-soi as such is merely, Sartre says, “an unnamable and unthinkable residuum” (BN 630). Borrowing a phrase from Gaston Bachelard, Sartre therefore calls the resistance we run up against when we encounter obstacles a “coefficient of adversity” (BN 425, 629, 632 et passim).5 In itself the world has no meaning: “it is through us, which is to say by means of an end that we have posited beforehand, that this coefficient arises” (BN 629). We cannot confront the en-soi directly as a naked presence, untainted by our projects, an alien imposition on our freedom. Instead, “the world, through the coefficient of adversity, reveals to me the way I care about the ends I assign to myself, in such a way that I can never know if the information it gives me is about me or about it” (BN 638). Far from being any kind of external limit on our freedom, then, “a thing’s coefficient of adversity, and its character as an obstacle . . . is indispensable to the existence of 5

This turns out to be one of Sartre’s favorite locutions. See also BN 440, 455, 503, 518 n100, 552–3, 561, 602, 608, 637–8, 657, 661, 663, 665, 714, 718–19.

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a freedom” (BN 632). Particular objects may thwart particular efforts, but the fact of resistance as such is no more a threat to freedom than the opacity of objects is a threat to vision: “although brute things . . . may limit our freedom of action from the outset, it is our freedom itself which must previously have constituted the framework, the technique and the ends, in relation to which these things will show themselves as limits” (BN 630); the coefficient of adversity is “an ontological conditioning of freedom” (BN 632). What then is a situation, according to Sartre? It is the indissoluble compound of our transcendence in the world and the world’s resistance to our efforts, a resistance that includes what he calls our “facticity,” by which he means the trace or fossil left by each contingent choice resolving itself with the passage of time into a fait accompli.6 The situation, he says, is freedom’s contingency within the world’s plenum of being, in so far as the datum, which is there only in order not to constrain freedom, is revealed to that freedom only as already lit up by the end that it chooses. In this way the datum never appears to the foritself as a brute and in-itself existent; it is always encountered as a reason, since it is revealed only in the light of an end which illuminates it. Situation and motivation are one and the same. (BN 636)

For Sartre, then, the world’s coefficient of adversity and our freedom, while analytically distinct, are ontologically inseparable: “it is possible theoretically – and impossible practically – to distinguish facticity from the project that constitutes it into the situation” (BN 781). Sartre’s conception of freedom’s relation to the constraints reality places on our actions is interestingly parallel to John McDowell’s more recent account, also neo-Kantian in spirit, of the relation between thought and the world as we encounter it in perception. For both, what might look like two merely externally related things colliding with each other when we, as it were, run up against the world in fact turn out to be two sides of a single coin. Just as freedom, according to Sartre, does not stop short of the coefficient of adversity supplied by the en-soi but saturates it, imbuing it with meaning, so for McDowell, “thinking does not stop short of facts”; rather, “spontaneity permeates our perceptual dealings with the world, all the way out to the impressions of sensibility themselves” (McDowell 1994: 33, 69). The inextricable entanglement of facticity and transcendence constitutes what Sartre calls “the paradox of freedom: there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom” (BN 638). 6

Although facticité and délaissement (abandonment) in Being and Nothingness echo the terms Faktizität and Geworfenheit (thrownness) in Being and Time, Sartre and Heidegger in fact use these terms very differently.

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Merleau-Ponty agrees that freedom and situation are inextricably linked, but he thinks Sartre has distorted the phenomenon, and moreover rendered his account of freedom senseless by misconceiving the relation between facticity and transcendence. Merleau-Ponty’s critique is twofold. First, he argues that in reducing (again, recurring to ordinary language) the force of circumstance to a mere “coefficient of adversity,” an abstract value knowable only as animated by our prior commitments, Sartre misdescribes – or indeed, misses altogether – the phenomenon of facticity understood as what Heidegger (1962a [1927]: §29) calls our “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) into the world. Second, by insisting that situational resistance is effective only as filtered through our choices, Sartre detaches choice itself from the background existential conditions that render it intelligible. The picture that emerges, Merleau-Ponty maintains, is not only phenomenologically wrong, but conceptually incoherent. Merleau-Ponty agrees with Sartre that freedom is not just contingently but necessarily situational. Indeed, he is very nearly quoting Being and Nothingness verbatim when he writes: “in [the] exchange between the situation and the one who takes it up, it is impossible to determine the ‘contribution of the situation’ and the ‘contribution of freedom’” (PP 518; cf. BN 638). Merleau-Ponty also refers approvingly to Sartre’s observation that dreaming excludes freedom precisely because in dreams “there are no obstacles and there is nothing to do” (PP 501; cf. BN 630). The agreement does not extend very far, however, for immediately after saying that in our actions “there is never determinism,” Merleau-Ponty adds, “and never an absolute choice,” since “even the situations that we have chosen, once they have been take up, carry us along as if by a state of grace.” For Merleau-Ponty, just as the concept of freedom implies both its finitude and its dependence on what he calls “supports from within being” (PP 518), so too: “The idea of a situation precludes there being an absolute freedom at the origin of our commitments” (PP 519). The question at stake between them, then, is not whether the world constrains our actions but, rather, how it does so, and whether freedom itself is limited by the very fact of that constraint. Sartre thinks it is not, any more than the rules of chess limit our movements of the pieces on the board, that is, beyond our having freely committed ourselves to the rules, precisely in order to play the game. Merleau-Ponty maintains, on the contrary, that freedom is – indeed must be – limited by the situation in which it finds itself. If it is to have “room for maneuver” (du champ), he says, freedom must have “a field” (un champ), an open space of possibilities in which to move. But every space of possibilities is

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delimited by a horizon of impossibility, a horizon that is fundamentally restrictive in just the sense that Sartre thinks it cannot be. This is why Merleau-Ponty invokes the Gestalt-psychological concept of a field (champ) or background (fond) on which we perceive things as foregrounded figures. Figure and ground are constitutive structures of perceptual awareness, two moments of a single phenomenon. The ground against which we experience things as figures cannot itself be experienced as a figure, just as the field in which possibilities emerge as possibilities cannot just be one more possibility, subject to choice, “up for grabs,” as it were. It must lie outside or beyond the range of choices, offering them up as either feasible or infeasible, open or closed. We are beholden to the world – thrown, as Heidegger says, into a space of possibilities and necessities beyond our choice, beyond our control, even beyond our theoretical and practical understanding.7 Our freedom could never manifest itself as concrete action, Merleau-Ponty says, “without taking up something proposed to us by the world” (PP 502). How does the world “offer up” or “propose” possibilities (and impossibilities) to me, prior to my being able to take them up by choosing them? Merleau-Ponty refers to Sartre’s example of the boulder. Is Sartre right that I choose to cast the boulder in the role of obstacle to my hike? In the particular scenario he describes, maybe. But the example doesn’t generalize as Sartre would like it to. For although the appearance of things is sometimes shaped by my choices, it is not generally or fundamentally up to me to decide how the world presents itself to me. Standing at the foot of a mountain, I have no choice but to see it as large: “Whether or not I have decided to undertake the climb, these mountains appear large because they outstrip my body’s grasp and . . . nothing I do can make them appear small” (PP 503). As if anticipating the objection, Sartre counters that even my own body is not simply given, rather “it is I who choose my body as puny, as I pit it against the difficulties I generate” (BN 638).8 But Sartre’s thesis of radical freedom rests on an equivocation. It is true, of course, that the way the world shows up for us depends on us; all relations depend on their relata. The looming height of the mountain is relative to the size and capacities of our bodies. But the size and capacities of our bodies are nothing like judgments or decisions, acts of consciousness or will. Merleau-Ponty recognizes the neo-Kantian source of Sartre’s 7

8

Unlike Sartre, Heidegger draws a sharp distinction between thrownness and projection, which also implies that mood or disposedness (Befindlichkeit) cannot be subsumed by understanding, even in Heidegger’s broad sense of that term. For an illuminating discussion of this point and its philosophical implications, see Katherine Withy 2014. Even more extremely, Sartre says, “in a certain sense, I choose to be born.” The only thing I cannot choose is not to choose. “Thus facticity is everywhere, but eludes me” (BN 721).

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view that the significance the world has for me can only be a function of my choices: “Certainly nothing has sense or value except for me and through me, but this proposition remains indeterminate and is again mistaken for the Kantian idea of a consciousness that only ‘finds in things what it has put there’” (PP 502). Kant’s idealism is in turn grounded in the intellectualism of Descartes’s conception of us as thinking things. But cognitive attitudes are supported by a kind of intelligence and intentionality whose form is not that of predicative judgment and rational inference, but of bodily capacity and practical skill. I can easily think the mountain as a superficial irregularity on the surface of a small planet, but: Beneath myself as a thinking subject (able to place myself at will either on Sirius or on the earth’s surface), there is . . . something like a natural self who does not leave behind its terrestrial situation . . . Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, and a world, I sustain intentions around myself that are not decided upon and that affect my surroundings in ways I do not choose. (PP 503)

Earlier I said, on Sartre’s behalf, that freedom is not power. And yet, although the concepts are distinct, they cannot come apart completely. For Sartre, as for the Stoics, we are free even when we are in chains. But separating freedom from all worldly efficacy in this way, as Hegel observed, drains the concept of its content: freedom cannot just be the freedom to say (or think) no; it must also be positive. The primacy of the situation, for Merleau-Ponty, consists not in the abstract mutual interdependence of freedom and adversity, as Sartre maintains, but in our entanglement in pressures genuinely forced upon us, on the one hand, and our finite power to oppose them, on the other: “there is no freedom without some power.” And again: “The idea of a situation precludes there being an absolute freedom at the origin of our commitments” (PP 519). Here Merleau-Ponty is alluding to Sartre’s famous hypothesis of an “original” or “fundamental project” (BN 731) underlying all of a person’s particular choices and in effect constituting the entire shape and meaning of an individual life.9 Sartre relates this idea, albeit somewhat ambivalently, to Kant’s notion of a subject’s “intelligible character,” as distinct from the empirical character manifest in the person’s concrete actions (BN 626–7, 731; Kant 1997: a539/b567ff ). Any particular “empirical attitude” I might have, Sartre says, “is by itself the expression of the ‘choice of an intelligible character’” (BN 731). Although in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant does not, pace Sartre, describe the intelligible character as a “choice,” in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant

9

The concept of a fundamental project is the regulative principle guiding Sartre’s practice of biography and autobiography. For examples, see his slim memoir (1964), his hefty tome on Jean Genet (1963), and his massive three-volume study of Gustave Flaubert (1981; 1987; 1989).

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does say that humanity’s innate propensity to evil must be understood as “an intelligible deed,” hence exercised by the faculty of choice (Kant 1998: 6:31ff ).10 Considering that Sartre rejected the idea of sin along with the idea of God, it is ironic that his notion of radical freedom turns out to be such a direct descendant of Kant’s account of radical evil, or peccatum originarium (original sin). Sartre insists that the fundamental project that animates and unifies an individual life, the “intelligible choice” that makes up one’s character, belongs neither to the noumenal realm of Kantian metaphysics nor to the unconscious instincts and repressed ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis. It must instead manifest itself immanently in the living of the life itself: it is, Sartre says, “as a matter of principle, something that must always be extricated from the empirical choice as its ‘beyond,’ and as the infinity of its transcendence” (BN 732). Needless to say, Sartre’s appeal here to a kind of “infinity,” “beyond” the concrete situation, does not sit well with his otherwise resolutely Heideggerian devotion to human finitude. More poignantly, however, Merleau-Ponty argues, even if we accept the idea that a human life is grounded in and held together by something like an original or fundamental project, it is hard to see how such a project could flow from anything like an ungrounded, radical choice. Merleau-Ponty is more consistent on this point than Sartre, who helps himself to a concept of intelligible character, but then disavows its more traditional dubious reliance on an atemporal or otherworldly self, or soul. And yet, as Arthur Danto rightly observed, a Sartrean original project “is after all not so remarkably different from a soul” (Danto 1975: 143). Merleau-Ponty sees more clearly than Sartre that, soul or no soul, the very idea of a radically ungrounded “choice” is an absurdity: “The choice of intelligible character is not only excluded because there is no time before time, but also because choice assumes a previous commitment and because the idea of a first choice is contradictory” (PP 501, translation corrected).11 For Merleau-Ponty, as for Heidegger before him, what puts us in a position to make choices at all is our already being thrown into a world that precedes us, transcends us, and resists our will.

10 11

For an illuminating comparative analysis of Sartre and Kant on this topic, see Baldwin 1979. Charles Taylor identifies the absurdity of Sartre’s belief that “the will’s deliberation is always rigged” in favor of a radical choice that has always already been made (BN 591). If this were so, it would be impossible for moral dilemmas to be truly grievous, as involving genuine rather than fake anguish. For, as Taylor says, a conflict of two competing moral claims “is a dilemma only because the claims themselves are not created by radical choice” (1985b, 30).

28 HEIDEGGER, CRITICAL THEORY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY j u l i an yo u n g

Relations between the two dominant traditions in twentieth-century German philosophy – the Freiburg-based phenomenology of (inter alios) Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and Arendt, and the Frankfurt-based critical theory of (inter alios) Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas – have varied between poor and very poor. The root of the friction is political. While the phenomenologists – Heidegger, Gadamer, and Arendt, in particular – value “tradition,” the critical theorists, inspired by Marx, look for radical social reform or even outright revolution. Among the critical theorists, Habermas, at least, believes that social and political conservatism is not just a personality quirk of the Freiburg thinkers but is intrinsic to phenomenology itself. The phenomenologists, he believes, conceive of human flourishing as requiring a “lifeworld” whose customs constitute an unchallengeable “social a priori,” and this, he claims, evinces nostalgia for a premodern past, a past that has disappeared in multicultural modernity (Habermas 1984: 126–31). The hostility between the two traditions comes to a head, of course, in the matter of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. In a savage review of 1953, Habermas claimed Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics to be essentially tainted by Nazism (along with the entire tradition of post-Kantian German philosophy), to which Heidegger responded that anyone who read his work in that way has yet to “learn the craft of thinking” (Wolin 1993: 186–97). Surprisingly, however, beneath these fractured relations, there lies an important unity, a unity concerning the proper topic of twentieth-century philosophy. That topic, both Frankfurt and Freiburg agree, is, in Heidegger’s language, “the question concerning technology” (see Heidegger 1997b [1955]). The proper form of modern philosophy is the philosophy of technology, because technology, they both agree, is both the defining and the most worrying aspect of modernity. The most sustained and sophisticated of the Freiburg discussions of technology is Heidegger’s. In this chapter, I aim to reveal, first, the unity between the Heideggerian and Frankfurt School critiques of technology, and, 375

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second, the difference. I shall conclude with some remarks as to which tradition contains the deeper truth.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL TECHNOLOGY CRITIQUE

Concern that modern technology represents a qualitative break with the technology of the past is as old as the Industrial Revolution. Already before the end of the eighteenth century, the German Romantics – Schelling, Schiller, and Novalis, in particular – were observing that the modern bureaucratic-state– market-economy complex was becoming, in Novalis’s words, a “mill as such, without a builder and without a miller, a real perpetuum mobile, a mill which grinds itself” (Rohkrämer 2007: 35) and which is, as such, worryingly beyond human control. And it seems likely that Goethe’s retelling the tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice (the apprentice casts a half-understood spell to animate the broom to do his work, but, because he cannot undo the spell, ends up the broom’s slave) is intended to express the same worry: that the master–slave relation between humanity and machine is being reversed, a state of affairs we refer to, these days, as “the singularity.” This worry was deepened, and transmitted to twentieth-century thinkers, by Max Weber. One of the first theorists of bureaucratization and management science, Weber identified the defining feature of modernity as “rationalization,” which he defined as “control [or mastery, beherrschen] through calculation”: control, in particular, over social phenomena through the application to them of the “calculative” methodology of natural science. The results of this application that particularly concerned Weber were the industrial division of labor, the reduction of the productive process to a series of, in themselves meaningless, assembly-line micro-tasks, and the parallel process occurring within the burgeoning bureaucracies of the modern mega-state. At first a neutral theorist of bureaucracy and management, Weber eventually became extremely pessimistic about the direction of rationalized modernity. Rationalization, he saw, is mechanization: bureaucracies and assembly lines are social (or partially social) machines within which human beings are disciplined into repetitive, mindless drudgery with the absolute reliability of machine parts. Rationalized modernity has thus become an “iron cage” within which the lives of all individuals undergo a “mechanized petrifaction” that turns them into Berufsmenschen: quasi-robots whose being is determined by their economic function (Weber 2001 [1905]: 123–4).1 The result is the reversal of the master–slave relation: the 1

See, too, “Science as a Vocation [1917]” (Weber 1958, 77–128).

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social technology we designed to serve our interests has become our anonymous master. Rather than being a distant dystopia, “the singularity” had already arrived by the beginning of the twentieth century. And barring some “new prophesy,” some radical turning in the course of Western history, it is here to stay. Weber’s critique provides the foundation of the Frankfurt School’s own critique of technology. (Following an introductory chapter, the first hundred pages of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action are devoted to “Max Weber’s theory of rationalization.”) Horkheimer and Adorno, the collaborating,2 central figures in the “First” Frankfurt School, endorse Weber’s account of modernity. We live, they agree, in the age of the completion of rationalization, the age of the completion of – a term they treat as a synonym for “rationalization” – “enlightenment.” We live in the totally rationalized, or as they often put it, “administered” society. The triumph of the Enlightenment, the application of “enlightenment” reason to social phenomena, has subjected us to a “continual social coercion” that reduces us to “mere cell[s] of functional response” (Horkheimer 1947: 145) – Berufsmenschen, in other words. As “cells,” they add, we cease to be genuine individuals, are reduced to mere samples of a species (29). With every step we take away from nature we return to, if not nature, then the pseudo-nature of the totally administered society (22). Horkheimer and Adorno deepen Weber’s critique in two ways. First, in their analysis of the “culture industry” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]: 94–136), they show how the “mass media,” the integrated complex of news reporting, advertising, and the so-called “entertainment industry,” is really an extension of the discipline of the workplace into one’s nominally “free” time. In particular, the Hollywood film, they argue, valorizes conformist stereotypes, presenting the actual world as, if not exactly paradise, then at least the best of all possible worlds, as indeed the only possible world. For all his hostility to capitalism, Marx allowed an area of freedom beyond the reach of workplace discipline in which “real life” could occur – “at table, in the bar, in bed” (Marx 1893: 12) – and implicitly Weber does the same. For Horkheimer and Adorno, however, there is nowhere that escapes the reach of the system: “administration” is total. Borrowing Ernst Jünger’s phrase, their Frankfurt colleague Herbert Marcuse speaks of the “total mobilization” (Marcuse 1964: 21) of modern society for the purpose of production and consumption.

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Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]. The 1947 book was written by Horkheimer alone but is prefaced by the remark that “it would be difficult to say which of the ideas originated in his [Adorno’s] mind and which in my own” because “our philosophy is one” (vii), for which reason I shall treat both books as co-authored.

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The second way in which Horkheimer and Adorno deepen Weber’s analysis consists in their discovery that modern technology has, in Heidegger’s terminology, an “essence,” an essence which is itself “nothing technological” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 20). For Weber, the shift from traditional to modern technology has profound implications for human freedom. But the idea that this shift is grounded in an ontological shift is absent, or at least never quite explicitly present, in his thought. This is a notion Horkheimer and Adorno introduce.3 Quite possibly influenced by Heidegger (early Horkheimer was an admirer of Being and Time [Horkheimer 1982: 255]) but most explicitly and obviously by the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, they introduce the idea that what underlies modern technological practice is “reification” or “objectification”: reification of beings in general, but in particular of human beings, into mere “objects of administration” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]: 16, 23; Horkheimer 1947: 39–40). The reason modernity treats individuals as “cells of functional response” is not that modern humanity has become uniquely wicked but, rather, that we see human beings as “cells of functional response,” see them not as people but as “human resources,” as Heidegger would say. (“Evil,” as Arendt puts it, is, typically, not monstrous but rather “banal,” a failure in Heidegger’s “craft of thinking.”) This total administration extends, most sinisterly, to one’s relation to oneself. Weber had pictured the prisoner in the cage – his traditional conception of himself as a unique individual to some degree still intact – beating his fists against the bars of the cage. Horkheimer and Adorno, by contrast, in their account of the culture industry as (in the phrase they borrow from de Tocqueville) “leav[ing] the body free and operat[ing] directly on the soul” (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947]: 105), disclose us as contented prisoners in the cage, prisoners at least without any strong sense that anything is amiss – at least mostly without any such sense. Episodes of seemingly mindless violence and uncontrollable “rage” (Horkheimer 1947: 144) (one might think of the rage of “white nationalism”) indicate that awareness of one’s imprisonment has not entirely disappeared. The aim of critical theory is liberation. True to its Marxist inspiration, while traditional philosophers have sought merely to understand the world, critical theorists seek to change it. They seek to overcome oppression. Critical theory, says Horkheimer, thinks in the “service” of an “oppressed humanity” (1947: 221, 242). The critical theorist’s “vocation” is not, as with “traditional” theory, theory for its own sake, but rather the “struggle [for a better world] of which his 3

The insight that technology is grounded in ontology was also developed independently by Heidegger (see Thomson 2005: 44–77).

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own thinking is a part, and not something self-sufficient and separable from the struggle” (216). How, then, does the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno belong to the struggle? Part of the answer is that it clears away the “false consciousness” (198) generated by the culture industry. It “raises our consciousness,” makes us aware of our oppression, an awareness without which, of course, there can be no resistance to oppression. But then what? That, says Horkheimer and Adorno, is not their department. Since the categories generated by modern society preform all current thought, including that of the critical theorist, any projection of a future social order is bound to be tainted by the inadequacies of the present (Horkheimer 1982: 200–4; 1947: 184–5). Critical theory must, therefore, remain essentially “negative,” a purely critical activity. This strikes Habermas – and Marcuse – as a gesture of despair: Critical theory does not need to present a portrait of utopia for it to describe concrete steps that can be taken to ameliorate the oppressive character of the status quo. Habermas, the “Second” Frankfurt School’s leading representative, is, first and foremost, a defender of the Enlightenment, a project which, like Horkheimer and Adorno, he identifies with “rationalization.” “The Enlightenment” is, he writes, the “unfinished project of modernity” (Habermas 1997), and, because it is unfinished, it is premature to conclude – as Weber does explicitly and Horkheimer and Adorno implicitly – that the project has failed. Habermas accepts that the Weber-Horkheimer-Adorno account of reifying rationalization as the dominant (in Freud’s language) reality principle of modernity is, to a large degree, true. Specifically, it is the governing principle of what he calls “system,” the economic base of society together with the subsystems of law and state bureaucracy that support and, to some degree, regulate it. In the current world, he says, system is driven exclusively by money and power (Habermas 1989: 154, 259). Rather than subjecting itself to democratic control, system “steers” the actions of individuals to ends (the production of obesity-creating sodas or planet-polluting vehicles) they do not endorse and likely, in fact, oppose. There is, therefore, a high degree of oppression in modern society. Weber is absolutely correct in identifying “loss of freedom” as a major “pathology” of modernity (Habermas 1989: 148, 333, 340). This, however, is not all there is to be said about rationalization. For as well as the “bad” rationalization outlined above, present in modernity, there is also (though Habermas never states the contrast quite this baldly) “good” rationalization. This consists in the “rationalization of the lifeworld” (which is also its “linguistification” [sic.] [1989: 86]) that distinguished modern from premodern societies. Beginning in the coffee houses and newspaper columns of the eighteenth century (one might also think of the clubs of the Scottish Enlightenment), “bourgeois society” developed the practice of “communicative rationality,”

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a practice which played an increasingly important role in the shaping of civil and political opinion. Communicative rationality is realized by a discussion to the degree that it approximates to an “ideal speech situation.” An ideal speech situation (Habermas 1984: 22–6 et passim) is a “discourse” in which, to put it briefly, all participants treat each other as intellectual equals (do not pull rank), attempt to produce evidence for their assertions (avoid dogmatism), and refrain from all forms of “influence” (bribery, rhetoric, poetry, charm, charisma) other than rational argument. The result is that the “consensus” which terminates the discourse is determined solely by the “force of the best argument” (Habermas 1989: 145). (Think of the “ideal philosophy seminar.”) An ideal speech situation may be concerned with either matters of fact or with morality. When it is the latter, what occurs is “discourse ethics” (Habermas 1984: 19; 1989: 77–96). Discourse ethics is how we should – and in modernity to a considerable degree do – determine what is and what is not a “moral norm.” According to Habermas’s “constructivist” account, in other words, a moral norm is a principle of action to which all those who would be affected by its observance would agree, were they to engage in a rational and impartial discussion of its merits (1984: 19; 1989: 94; cf. Katsafanas, this volume). The idea of a moral norm as something capable of universal acceptance makes clear Habermas’s debt to Kant, a debt he explicitly acknowledges. Discourse ethics is, he says, intended to capture “what was intended by the categorical imperative” (1989: 95). As Habermas conceives them, moral norms define the “lifeworld” in which we have our distinctively human being. In traditional lifeworlds, these norms are passed down by tradition and constitute the “social a priori” that “cannot become controversial” which I referred in my first paragraph. In the modern age, however, as lifeworlds impact on each other (Islamic immigration, free movement within the European Union), “orientation crises” occur in which the inherited norms of a society become “dysfunctional” – they no longer have the unifying effect that comes from general consensus – and so require “repair work” (1989: 134). The way in which such crises ought to be – and to a considerable degree are – resolved is through discourse ethics. Increasingly, “inherited” social norms are being replaced by linguistically “achieved” norms, inherited normative consensus is being replaced by “achieved consensus” (53, 73, 77). In the past, “system” was subject to lifeworld norms. Traditional marriage, for instance, was (as Jane Austen reminds us) both a social and an economic transaction, with the norms of the lifeworld determining the possibilities and limits of the economic transaction. As society becomes more complex, however, “uncoupling” occurs: “system” begins to follow imperatives other than those of the lifeworld. (One might think of the rise of banking in fourteenth-century

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Italy despite the medieval ban on usury.) Uncoupling, Habermas thinks, is not necessarily sinister. He is, he insists, not opposed to the “market economy,” not opposed to rationalized capitalism, as such. (His endorsement of the market is, I assume, based on the notion that the state can rectify the deleterious effect of the capitalist system through redistributive taxation, worker participation in corporate ownership, a robust welfare system, and the like.) What is sinister, however, and what is increasingly happening in modernity, is that system, created in order to serve lifeworld norms, bites the hand that created it. It begins to “colonize” the lifeworld (Habermas 1989: 331), disempowers it and threatens it with destruction. As the history of the West has advanced, a “norm-free sociality” (Habermas 1989: 114) has begun to replace the norm-governed sociality of the lifeworld, which begins to shrink into a quaint, “provincial” subsystem (173). Increasingly, the lives of individuals are no longer shaped by lifeworld norms but are “steered” by the imperatives of system. The result, as Marx pointed out, “makes a mockery of bourgeois ideals” (Habermas 1989: 185), the founding ideals of the Enlightenment: equality, fraternity, and, above all, liberty. Enlightenment rationalization, to a large degree, has indeed become, as Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “irrational” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]: 72; Horkheimer 1947: 94, et passim): while purporting to promote those ideals, it actually destroys them. Since the problem is “colonization,” the task before us, clearly, is one of “decolonization,” of re-establishing the subordination of system to the norms of the lifeworld. We must re-establish control over the sorcerer’s apprentice’s wayward broom. This is to be done by reinvigorating the moral-political “public sphere” of the eighteenth-century coffee houses, by, that is, allowing good rationalization to reassert its dominion over bad rationalization. We must, Habermas writes, “pin . . . down . . . a resistant structure, namely the structure of a rationality which is immanent in everyday communicative practice, and which brings the stubbornness of life-forms into play against the functional demands of autonomized [sic] economic and administrative systems” (Habermas 1992a: 155). Through the consensuses achieved by communicative rationality, and their being put into effect by the mechanisms of liberal democracy, we must reassert control over system, reorganize society so that, once again, system serves human interests, rather than human beings serving the interests of system. We must, in short, reverse the reversal of the master–slave relation. H E I D E G GE R ’ S T E C H N O L O GY C R I T I Q U E

Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Heidegger takes there to be an “essence,” an “enabling ground” (Heidegger 1998 [1936]: 136) of modern technological

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practice. And like them Heidegger takes that essence to be “nothing technological” but rather a mode of “disclosure (Entbergung),” a way in which reality becomes intelligible. He calls this “das Ge-stell,” “the framework” or “Enframing” in the standard translation. Gestell (I shall leave the term untranslated) is that mode of disclosure in which everything shows up as “Bestand” – “standingreserve” in the standard translation, but I shall say “resource,” using the term in an extended sense so as to cover not just raw materials but technological devices of every sort. Since all societies have to work, that things show up in work-suitable ways – as “ready-to-hand” or “equipment,” in the language of Being and Time – is a defining condition of our “being-in-the-world.” The possession of, as I shall say, a “technological disclosure of being” (henceforth TDB) in which things show up as one kind of “resource” or another is universal to all humanity. Heidegger, however, takes Gestell to be uniquely definitive of modernity. There must therefore be more to Gestell than the TDB. This “more” consists in the fact that, while, in the past, the “unconditional self-assertion” of the technological will – Nietzsche’s “will to power” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 74–109) – had made only “scattered appearances and attempts,” attempts which had been “incorporated within the embracing structure of the realm of culture and civilization” (Heidegger 2001 [1946]: 109) and so held in check, this is no longer the case. In the past, we had disclosures of being other than the TDB. Now, however, the TDB has “driven out every other possibility of disclosure” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 27). As the Frankfurt theorists have all understood with various degrees of clarity, the TDB has “totalized” itself so as to become the only way in which the real is disclosed to us. In Habermas’s language, system has colonized the lifeworld, so that we have become, as the title of Marcuse’s famous book has it, “one-dimensional man.” So far, there appears to be a virtually complete convergence between the Frankfurt and Heideggerian critiques of modern technological practice. And when we turn to Heidegger’s criticism – as opposed to description – of modern technology, his account of the “danger” inherent in the dominion of Gestell, in at least one important respect, a substantial area of convergence appears to continue. The danger of Gestell “attests itself,” says Heidegger, in two ways (1997b [1955]: 26–7). First, it endangers all non-human beings. Since they never disclose themselves as anything other than to-be-exploited resource, modern technological practice can only be a “setting-upon” (15), a violation or “rape” of nature. (The significance of the fact that the endangerment of non-human beings is not part of the technology critique of any of the Frankfurt thinkers is a matter I shall return to shortly.) But, second – here is Heidegger’s apparent convergence with Frankfurt – Gestell also threatens human freedom. Given that

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Gestell is the only mode in which anything can be disclosed, it follows that human beings, too, are reduced to mere resource. Already in 1943, Heidegger notes with dismay the appearance in language (that “house of being”) of the term “human resource (Menschlichesmaterial)” (101). Gestell, he says, “endanger[s] man in his relationship to himself” (27): we are beginning to experience each other – and ultimately ourselves – as nothing but Berufsmenschen, “cells of functional response.” TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

There seems to be, then, if not a complete, at least a substantial convergence between the Frankfurt and Heideggerian critiques of technology. Not only do the two accounts agree that the totalized TDB is, or in Habermas’s case threatens to be, the essence of modernity, they also appear to agree on at least one of the dangers posed by this essence – the threat to human freedom. In fact, however, this appearance of convergence is entirely delusive. For “freedom” as conceived by Heidegger is, in reality, a completely different phenomenon from freedom as conceived by Frankfurt. Freedom as understood by Frankfurt, the freedom that we lose within the iron cage, is common-or-garden “freedom of the will.” The problem of modern technology is that, in Habermas’s language, it compels us to act in the interests of “system” rather than allowing us to act for the sake of what we truly “will.” The “true freedom” Heidegger sees as threatened by Gestell, by contrast, has nothing to do with freedom of the will. This, he says, is because he uses the term “freedom” in the “original” sense which is “not connected with the will or even with the causality of human willing” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 25). It consists, rather, in inhabiting a spiritual space which Heidegger refers to (using an Old High German expression) as “the free (das Frye)” (Heidegger 2001 [1951]: 147), and as “the open” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 25). To be in a “free relationship” to technology, to “[un]chain” oneself from it (3), is to be in “the open.” What is it to be in “the open”? As with all things Heideggerian, understanding “the open” requires that one grasp, either discursively (philosophically) or intuitively (poetically), his philosophy of being. One of Heidegger’s important statements about “being” is that it constitutes the “hidden essence of truth” (Heidegger 1959: 83), which suggests his account of truth as a promising point of entry into his philosophy of being. Propositional truth, Heidegger observes, requires successful reference, and that, in turn, requires “disclosure” (to which to refer). A “horizon” of disclosure (63) is an ontology or, as we perspicuously say, a “frame of reference.” One cannot understand – assign a truth-value to – Heraclitus’

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mot about never being able to bathe in the same river again unless one understands that he is presupposing, not the usual frame of reference in which entities show up as familiar commonsense objects such as rivers, but rather a “constituent stuffs” frame of reference in which things show up as, for instance, bodies of water. Notice that for unambiguous reference to either the water or the river to occur, one of the modes of intelligibility must be put out of action, must, as Heidegger puts it, be “concealed” (1998 [1930]: 148), by the other. Truth presupposes reference, reference presupposes a horizon of disclosure, and disclosure must simultaneously be concealment. To stand in “the open” is to grasp (either discursively or intuitively) that disclosure is concealment. It is to grasp, in particular, that the TDB is a disclosure that conceals other possible disclosures. It is to take the “step back” (Heidegger 1969 [1957]: 49–52) from the technological “veil,” a step which “allows the veil to appear as that which veils” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 25). (Compare “stepping back” from one’s glasses, so that one notices what one is usually oblivious to: that one is seeing through glasses.) In doing so we enter the realm of “freedom” (25). We free ourselves from the “one-dimensional” compulsion to view everything as resource. Being in the open involves, however, more than this. Disclosure conceals. But when we take into account the possibility of non-human intellects, we see that there is no limit to the range of modes of disclosure lying beyond the limits of what is intelligible to us. Heidegger calls this “unexperienced domain of being” (1998 [1930]: 143) “the mystery” (148; 1997b [1955]: 25). And since the magnitude of the mystery is unlimited, it is, as Kant points out with respect to all forms of the infinite, “sublime,” in Heidegger’s language “awesome” (2001 [1934–35]: 65). A further fact about the human “understanding of being” is that it is not, Heidegger points out, “an achievement of subjectivity” (1998 [1949]: 249). Intelligibility as such, in fact, could not be a human “achievement,” since to create intelligibility we would already have to possess a medium of intelligibility in which to intend, plan, and perform the act of creation. Intelligibility as such is something with respect to which we are receptive rather than creative. It is “sent” to us from out of the mystery (252–7; 1997b [1955]: 24). Actually, however, when we reflect on the fact of intelligibility, we see that the “clearing” of world is not merely “sent” but is, rather, “gifted” to us. For a healthy intellect to fully engage in “meditative thinking” (1959: 46–7) on the nature of truth and being is for it to be overcome by wonder, “the wonder that around us a world worlds, that there is something rather than nothing, that there are things, and we ourselves are in their midst” (Heidegger 1982 [1941–42]: 64). And so, too, it is to be overcome by “gratitude (Danken)”

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(1976a [1943]: 310), the affective companion to apprehension of the wonder-ful. To apprehend the world’s wonder is to be grateful for the privilege of being in the midst of beings whose very existence – no longer a prosaic matter of course – is a fragile miracle. Thinking (Denken), says Heidegger – revealing the strongly Christian strain in his later thought – is thanking (Danken): “insofar as we think in the most serious way, we give thanks” (2002b [1951–52]: 149–52). This, then, is Heideggerian freedom. To become free, to enter the open, to “find one’s way back into the full breadth of the space proper to [humanity’s] essence” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 39), is not merely to escape the onedimensionality of Gestell. It is also to stand, in gratitude, before the wonder of “the mystery.” And while Gestell-blinded man thinks of himself as the “lord of the earth” (27), one who stands in the open of the wonder realizes that it is his “destiny” to become the “guardian” of the earth. I shall elaborate on this contrast in the following sections.

CRITICAL THEORY IS A HUMANISM

I suggested earlier that the Frankfurt School’s identification of “reification” as the disclosive “essence” of modern technological practice appears to be closely similar to Heidegger’s identification of reduction to “resource” as that essence. In fact, however, there is a significant difference. To treat beings as mere resource, says Heidegger, is to “subjugate, “exploit,” “despoil” (2001: 148), violate them. And this is true, regardless of whether they are human or non-human beings. This is what is claimed in Heidegger’s much excoriated remark that: “agriculture is now a motorized food industry – in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the starving of nations, the same as the manufacturing of hydrogen bombs.”4 What critics of this passage miss is that “essence” is, in Heidegger’s use, a technical term that refers, here, to Gestell. The passage is not claiming a moral equivalence between Auschwitz and the agribusiness but rather that both of them spring from Gestell, from the reduction of beings to resource: in the case of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, reduction to “negative” resource, to pollution. Although the passage does not claim a moral equivalence between the two modes of “setting upon” (“air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium”: Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 15), it does suggest 4

Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 15 (emphasis added). But only the first seven words of this passage appear in the printed version of the lecture that became “The question concerning technology.” Cf. Heidegger 2012 [1949]: 27.

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that something ethically reprehensible occurs in both cases. For Heidegger, to treat any being exclusively as resource is something we should not do. “Reification,” on the other hand, only has a negative moral connotation in the case of human beings. Indeed in its original appearance in the works of Marx and Lukács the concept has no application at all to beings other than human beings. Following Marx’s talk of the “inversion” of “social relations” into “relations among things,” Lukács defines the product of reification as “a relationship between people that takes on the character of a thing.” Horkheimer and Adorno extend the application beyond the human case (Horkheimer 1947: 40) but there is no clear sense in their work that there is anything morally disturbing about the reification of non-human beings. This, indeed, is written into the very language of “reification.” While it is intuitively wrong to treat people as things, to “objectify” them, to treat “things” as things, seems entirely – tautologically – appropriate. The classical statement of the moral outlook underlying the Frankfurt School’s talk of reification (recall Habermas’s claim that discourse ethics is the realization of the Categorical Imperative) is Kant’s formulation of the Categorical Imperative as the principle that one should always “[a]ct in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never simply as a means.” As rational agents, people are objects of respect, so it is wrong to dispose of them as mere “things,” as mere means available for the satisfaction of desire. But, so Kant’s injunction implies, respect stops where the human stops. With respect to nonhuman beings, there is no moral barrier to treating them as mere means. For things, after all, are just things. What the Frankfurt School’s choice of “reify” as the key term in its critique of modern technology betrays, I suggest, is that critical theory – Marxist and neo-Marxist thought in general – is, in Heidegger’s pejorative use of the term, a “humanism” (Heidegger 1998 [1949]: 239–76 passim), a manifestation of human chauvinism. Critical theory continues to regard humanity as “lord of the earth.” Only human beings receive ethical protection. It is thus unsurprising that no environmental ethics has emerged from the Frankfurt School.5 Indeed, with respect to Habermas at least, it is difficult to see how it could. Since moral norms 5

Of course, critical theorists worry, like everyone else, about global warming. But there is no indication of a grounding of such a worry in anything other than human interest. A partial exception to this is, perhaps, Herbert Marcuse (1966), who argues that if our “libidinal” energy were to be released from the “genital primacy” imposed by the repressive culture of modernity, it would transform itself into a “polymorphous sexuality” in which we come to care for the things of the earth (in the manner of Margaret Mead’s Arapesh people) as we care for someone we love. Although Marcuse does not speak of this as responding to an ethical demand, one can reasonable take this to be his background assumption. Before going over to Frankfurt, Marcuse was, however, a student of Heidegger’s and is not, therefore, a “pure” Frankfurt thinker.

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are to be the product of “discourse ethics,” and since fish and fowl and rivers and mountains do not engage in such “communicative rationality” (not to mention children, the mentally disabled, and future generations), it is difficult to see how an environmental ethics could, even in principle, emerge from discourse ethics.6

GUARDIANSHIP AS THE HUMAN ESSENCE

What is wrong with “humanism”? Heidegger’s answer is that, for all that it sets man up as “lord of the earth,” humanism “does not set the humanitas of the human being high enough,” and therefore “does not realize the proper dignity of the human being.” That dignity lies in the “essence” of human being which is to be, not the lord of the earth, but rather the “shepherd,” the “guardian,” of being (Heidegger 1998 [1949]: 251–2; 2001 [1951]: 182). What tells us this is the meditative thinking that “frees” us from the one-dimensionality of Gestell and allows us to realize our “ek-sistence” (1998 [1949]: 251), our “standing out” into “the open” in which the wonder of the gift-giving graciousness comes to presence. To stand in the wonder of the world that is gifted to us is necessarily to take “care (Sorge)” of it (252). To emerge from the blindness of Gestell into the “full breadth of the space proper to our essence” is for “exploitation” to give way to “caring-for (Schonen),” world-mastery to guardianship (Heidegger 2001 [1951]: 149 et passim). What, in concrete terms, is guardianship? In his meditation on Rilke’s poetry, Heidegger appropriates the poet’s description of “nature,” the “primal ground” of “what is as a whole” (2001 [1946]: 107), as “the venture (Wagnis),” a venture which, if we stand in its “gravitational” attraction (97), appropriates us to itself. When this happens – when we stand fully in the “truth of being” – we “go with the venture, will it” (97) rather than willing against it. Jesus’s words are appropriate here: “not my will,” we say, “but thine be done.” The human will places itself, as it were, in the service of a higher “will.” Technological activity of course continues. But it becomes Gelassenheit (Heidegger 1959: passim), “letting-be,” in both of the senses implicit in the word: letting be in the sense of leaving alone, leaving inviolate what belongs to the defining structure of nature’s venture – the climate, for example – and letting be in the sense of letting beings that are implicit in that structure come into being through the work of our hands – as, for example, the sculptor “lets be” a figure “slumbering” in the rock, and the architect “lets be” a building already implicit in the site. 6

There is more to be said here, which limitations of space preclude.

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Who are the beings that are ventured? “Plant and animal,” Rilke tells us, but “we” too, except that “we . . . are no more dear to it” (Heidegger 2001 [1946]: 197) than other beings that are ventured. Brought up by our Old Testament heritage to think that God cares only about us and has created the rest of nature as our support system and playground, to stand in “the free” is to overcome this “delusion” (Heidegger 1997b [1955]: 27) and to realize that no being is beneath our respect and care. Of course, to say that human beings are not the exclusive objects of care is not to exclude them from the domain of the to-be-cared-for, a domain to which they, too, of course, belong. Guardianship is – inter alia – caring-for human beings. A crucial part of such caring-for is, surely, to release them from the technologies that they have foolishly allowed to become their masters. Heideggerian freedom, Heideggerian guardianship, in short, embraces the realization of Frankfurt freedom as part of its task, just as the breadth of the horizons of Heideggerian philosophy embraces the limited horizons of Frankfurt philosophy.7

7

I am grateful to Iain Thomson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

29 AUTHENTICITY AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE c har l e s g u i g n o n an d ke v i n ah o

T H E E X I S T E N T I A L I S T MO M E NT

If there ever were a time in twentieth-century Europe that could be called “the existentialist moment” (Baert 2015), it would undoubtedly be October 29, 1945. On that day, at the Club Maintenant in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre gave his legendary lecture, “Existentialism is a humanism.” The Nazi Occupation of Paris had ended just a few weeks earlier and the unprecedented horrors of the Second World War were becoming ever more evident. The atomic bomb’s devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the revelation of the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, the complicity of France’s own collaborators – these all forced an entire generation as never before to face the existential givens of death and freedom. The old ideologies and long-established “-isms” that previously seemed to carry a promise for the post-Enlightenment West – capitalism, communism, fascism, anarcho-syndicalism – were all thrown into question. Sartre seemed to be saying in 1945 that all that is real is the existing individual standing on his or her own, with no fundamental relationship to anyone or anything else. Needless to say, the public reception of the lecture was extraordinary. The auditorium was packed; Sartre’s voice was barely audible beneath the buzz; chairs were broken; people fainted (Bernasconi 2006: 53). A new world seemed to be opening. Although Sartre later rejected the picture of the forlorn subject portrayed in “Existentialism is a humanism,” the enduring cultural impact of the event was clear. The core idea was captured in the slogan “existence precedes essence,” a one-liner suggesting that humans exist in a way that is fundamentally different from that of other things. Whereas an oak tree has determinate features built into its nature that makes it an oak, there is no pre-given nature or “essence” that determines what it is to be a human being. We are, in this sense, self-making beings who determine our being through the concrete ways we take up and realize the project of living in a personal way. We are, in the end, the ensemble of choices we make in living out our lives. As Sartre 389

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says, “There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he conceives himself to be . . . Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre 2001 [1946]: 293). The upshot of this picture is that there is no stabilizing ground, no antecedently given justification, no “right” way to be human independent of what individuals do. A person chooses the path she takes, and this path has value not through some wider cosmic justification but solely because he or she has chosen it. This, for Sartre, is “the first principle of existentialism.” The strong orientation toward individualism in this worldview tapped into the Zeitgeist of the post-war world. After Auschwitz, what previously had been taken as binding moral absolutes no longer seemed to ensure guidance. On the Sartrean view, because we are ultimately alone as self-governing individuals who are contingently thrown into a specific time and context, it follows that the primary aim of existence is to be “true to one’s self,” that is, to live according to one’s own desires, needs, and feelings. Simone de Beauvoir captures this idea in The Ethics of Ambiguity when she writes, “the genuine man will not agree to any foreign absolutes . . . He will understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of God, but of being right in his own eyes” (1976 [1947]: 14, emphasis added). Under the influence of the “existentialist moment,” one began to see the moral and political discourse in Euro-American culture in light of critiques of bourgeois conformism, consumerism, and corporatization. Socially aware writers of the time introduced us to “the man in the grey flannel suit” (Wilson 1955), “the organization man” (Whyte 1956), and “the one-dimensional man” (Marcuse 1964) that described human beings as automata in Max Weber’s bureaucratic “iron cage,” unwilling or unable to express their own unique individuality. And the nihilism and moral emptiness of such a life was captured in plays such as Death of a Salesman (Miller 1949) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill 1956). The backlash to this vision of life was an explosion of directives on how to unleash one’s “human potential,” to break out of calcified routines and discover one’s innermost self. From the Beat poets and writers of the 1950s to the sexual revolution, LSD and New Age experimentation of the 1960s – from Erhard Seminar Training and the dawn of life-coaches in the seventies and eighties to the pop psychology of Oprah, Deepak Chopra and Dr. Phil today – the “age of authenticity” had begun. Underlying this new phenomenon, as we shall see, was a new configuration of the self and society, especially the advent of a more demanding form of individualism – what Yuval Levin (2016) calls “enervated hyperindividualism.”

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I ND I V I D U A L I S M I N Q U E S T I O N

Sartre had claimed that existentialism is a humanism in a very traditional sense of that word. On this sort of view, human beings are distinct among entities in that they have capacities not shared by anything else in the totality of what-is. Sartre’s predecessor, Martin Heidegger, had distinguished between two basic types of entities: human existence (Dasein, from the German “being-there”) and various ways of being that are simply “on hand” – what is inert or “other” to the human. The conception of human existence that has proven most influential in recent years is what Robert Bellah and his colleagues have called “ontological individualism” (1985). This is the view that humans are discrete individuals, selfcontained subjects with no defining or crucial relations to anything outside themselves. A consequence of this outlook is the belief that society is no longer viewed as a natural, value-filled order but rather as something “man-made” and artificial, a collection of individuals who are contingently held together in “associations” by means of mutually beneficial “social contracts.” This form of individualism is the source of the social contract theories that spread like wildfire in the eighteenth century and continue to dominate our thinking to this day. Ontological individualism is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that it sometimes seems beyond the pale of criticism. Ayn Rand developed one of the most influential forms of this view in novels such as The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Through the work of her student Alan Greenspan, who was Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1978 to 2006, this idea, called “neo-liberalism,” dominated American economic policy even after the “Great Recession.” Rand’s philosophy is a form of capitalism that relies on a glorified image of the potentialities of individuals to accomplish great things – provided there is a free market system. The view of ontological individualism continues to be influential in social sciences other than economics, such as psychology, sociology, and political science. It is expressed effectively by one of Bellah’s respondents, identified as “Margaret,” who says: I do think that it’s important for you to take responsibility for yourself. I mean, nobody else is going to really do it. I mean people do take care of each other, you know, when somebody’s sick, and that’s wonderful, [but] in the end, you’re really alone and you really have to answer to yourself. (Bellah et al. 1985: 15)

Built on assumptions such as these, both the subject-matter and the methodology of social sciences aspire to the degree of clarity and assurance about results characteristic of the natural sciences. This so-called “physics envy” is the basis for the fact that approaches to knowledge and the knowable like these are often

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called “positivistic” or “naturalistic.” Positivism was an enduring trend in English-speaking philosophy throughout the fifties and sixties. By the second half of the twentieth century a number of influential philosophers, including Richard Rorty, Wilfred Sellars, and W. V. O. Quine, sought ways of combining pragmatism and naturalism into new approaches to metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. The contribution of ontological individualism was that it enabled positivists to see reality as composed of distinct units that interact according to specifiable laws. The model for such abstractions was logic, and mainstream philosophy itself came to be called “logical positivism.” In terms of a distinction that dates back to Weber, the type of rationality characteristic of the physical sciences is said to be “instrumental reason,” a mechanical procedure, replicable on computational devices, that leads to conclusions by means of rule-governed steps. Instrumental reason is distinguished from “substantive reason,” which is supposed to provide us with direct insights into ultimate ends or values, insights similar to the Platonic ideas. The common assumption underlying all these views is that, once the Platonic conception of knowledge as direct cognizance of ultimate truths has been superseded, so-called “substantive reason” is no longer tenable as a form of rationality. And if that is the case, it comes to appear that what we call “reason” is nothing more than a means/ends technique that provides us with little real insight or higher forms of knowledge. The very idea of “rationality” turns out to be empty, a merely calculative program that can never lead us to any substantial or meaningful truths. All uses of reason turn out to be as vacuous as the formula “A = A.” The result is that any attempt to use reason to arrive at insights into the good – for instance, or into the nature of justice – must necessarily fail. The outcome of this reflection on reason is that rationality can play no real role in reflecting on social justice or the good life, a failure that Max Horkheimer (1947) referred to as “the eclipse of reason.” When reason no longer has a clear role to play in discovering what is right and just, it seems that all that is left as a criterion of worth is individual authenticity, where this is understood as a free, spontaneous, and unreflective expression of whatever strikes a speaker as “right” in some sense at a particular moment. A compelling example of how authenticity has been understood in recent American history is the campaign and general style of presentation of Donald Trump. During the election cycle of 2016, the claim was frequently made that Trump could win over the masses of “ordinary people” because he was so obviously “authentic.” Here the word means “genuine” in the sense of uncalculated yet filled with conviction. So long as one is authentic, such traits as consistency, steadiness, and the reliance on evidence (or “facts”) are regarded as

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fundamentally “inauthentic,” “fake,” a product of the artificial showmanship of mainstream politicians. Being authentic alone determines whether assertions and actions are valid in any sense. Not only is consistency now taken as inauthentic, the epistemic value of a person’s word is affirmed by the claim that he or she is unpredictable, a constantly moving target whose only aim is constant disruption. To the extent that this style of presentation moves the populace in the desired way – precisely because that is its only goal – it provides a replacement for the ideals of truth and reality that are now abandoned. THE ETHIC OF AUTHENTICITY AND ITS CRITICS

The ideal of free, spontaneous expression as the ultimate value and source of knowledge after the “eclipse of reason” brings to full force what has been called the “ethic of authenticity” (Taylor 1991; Ferrara 1993; Varga 2011). Where once there had been the search for the truth, now there is only my truth. The ethic of authenticity assumes, following Sartre, that “we want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular instance” (2001 [1946]: 306). The idea that one’s own passionate and unfettered expressions are to be valued over anything else leads to the question: What are our expressions for or about? And is there any basis for our expressions other than our own personal preferences? Critics have referred to this outcome of the ethic of authenticity as “decisionism,” according to which it is not the content of one’s avowals and actions that matter but, instead, the degree of passion and commitment underlying those expressions. On this account, it seems possible that a serial killer could be authentic if he is committed to killing in his innermost desires and if he spontaneously expresses these desires through his actions. In The Jargon of Authenticity (1973 [1964]), Theodore Adorno addresses the problems seemingly built into the ethic of authenticity by taking direct aim at what he calls the “German existentialists,” meaning especially Martin Heidegger, the primary architect of existentialist authenticity and the only major twentieth-century figure who liberally uses the term. (Heidegger’s German term is Eigentlichkeit, from the stem eigen meaning “own” or “proper,” and so translatable as “being one’s own” or “ownedness.”) Adorno begins his critique by describing a gathering of philosophers, sociologists, and theologians in the early 1920s who were enamored with the new philosophy of authenticity. A friend of his was attracted to the group but was disinvited because he was unwilling to use the same slogans they repeated to one another. He was judged to be “not authentic enough” (1973 [1964]: 3–4). According to Adorno, this example exposes the cult-like quality built into the language of authenticity, its use of a jargon of sacred and value-laden

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terminology that is stripped of its religious content so that “one needs only to be a believer – no matter what he believes in” (21). Adorno argues that Heidegger’s use of terms like “engagement,” “moment of decision,” and “commitment” creates a qualitative “aura” that attracts those who are longing for a sense of the sacred in a godless world. But the aura leaves them bewildered and confused in terms of how to act, because the terms are merely attitudinal – they have no specific moral content. Because the cult of authenticity demands the expression of commitment for the sake of commitment alone, it is, according to Adorno, a kind of dangerous obscurantism in which “the formal gesture of autonomy replaces the [actual] content of autonomy” (20). But Adorno sees a deeper problem beyond mere obscurantism. He points out that, in his account of human existence (or Dasein), Heidegger holds that in our average, everyday lives, we are inauthentic because we invariably conform to “the They” (das Man or the anonymous anyone), that is, to the leveled-down norms and conventions of the public world. “The Self of everyday Dasein,” Heidegger writes, “is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self” (1962a [1927]: 167). Adorno focuses on this aspect of Heidegger’s thought about social relations. But he ignores the fact that Heidegger also calls attention to the way the “theyself,” a product of social conditioning, also provides us with a moral framework, a shared sense of qualitative worth that guides us in deciding what actions are worthwhile. Critics like Adorno mistakenly assumed that, by interpreting everyday existence as a mode of being that is mired in inauthenticity, where “everyone is the other, and no one is himself,” Heidegger seems to be presenting a view of authenticity that is amoral or even intrinsically immoral (1962a [1927]: 165). In claiming that only one’s own committed decision, free from the corrupting power of “the They,” leads to authentic action, Heidegger seemed to undermine the authoritative norms of one’s own tradition. The prevailing individualism in our culture leads one to think that the highest ideal for us is freedom of choice, for instance the ability to choose one’s own doctors or one’s own program of health treatment. When the shared wisdom of the community or the insights of tradition are rejected as inauthentic, however, then choice can only be based on “what feels good.” But relying on feelings alone often results in barren and unfulfilling patterns of behavior. This is because the satisfaction of one desire quickly recedes, requiring the satisfaction of another, and then another, and so on. According to critics of such an unguided freedom, this sort of addictive cycle becomes a signature feature of post-war life. It creates what has been called the “empty self” (Cushman 1990), one that needs to be soothed with the unending consumption of novel pleasures. “It is a self that seeks the experience of being continually filled up

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by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation and fragmentation of its era” (1990: 600). Indeed, Christopher Lasch (1978) identified a connection between the modern “cult of authenticity” and the emergence of clinical narcissism. For the individual with no higher guide than transient desires, the aim is to “live for the moment . . . [to] live for oneself, not for one’s predecessors or [for] posterity” (5). Characteristics of the pathology include: “a sense of inner emptiness,” “boundless repressed rage,” “intense fear of old age and death,” “fascination with celebrity,” and “deteriorating social relationships” (33). On this account, the narcissistic expression of authenticity in the age of greed and consumption is not only one that is intensely superficial and self-absorbed; it can also be violent, anti-social, and void of the capacity for compassion and empathy. AUTHENTICITY AS A VIRTUE

Contemporary philosophy has produced more benign conceptions of authenticity than the individualist accounts considered thus far. A pivotal figure in the past century was the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. His magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960), had a profound influence in a variety of areas of recent intellectual life. Gadamer was a student of Heidegger’s in the 1920s, and the two remained close both intellectually and as friends throughout their lives. Gadamer was vehemently opposed to the idea that ontological individualism gives us the last word about what human existence involves. He agreed with Heidegger in saying that human beings must be understood as temporal “happenings” or “events” running their courses from birth to death. And against Adorno’s individualist reading of Heidegger, he insisted correctly that the ontological “given” of this temporal event is not an isolated consciousness or “subject” but is, rather, a shared community in which people are first and foremost bound together by commonalities such as language and tradition. These commonalities provide us with what he calls prejudices – the German word like the English means originally “pre-judgments,” what is known in advance – that is, that shared outlook that first gives us a window onto the world and forms the basis for accord in any human relations whatsoever. Opposing the Cartesian conception of the human being as an essentially isolated “sub-ject,” Gadamer writes: The focus on subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being. (2006 [1960]: 278)

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Charles Taylor, following Heidegger and Gadamer, puts this point in the following way: “We are aware of the world through a ‘we’ before we are through an ‘I’” (1985a: 40). Gadamer called this initial condition Gehören, a German word meaning both “belonging” and “listening,” and he argues that we exist initially and essentially as placeholders in a “community” (or Gemeinschaft).1 This account of the communal self provides the groundwork for a rich and morally viable conception of authenticity, especially if we consider authenticity from the perspective of virtue ethics. As opposed to traditional normative ethics that focus either on following rules and doing one’s duty (deontology) or on calculating the pleasurable consequences of one’s actions (utilitarianism), virtue ethics is concerned with character traits, where these are understood as deeply embedded dispositions that are required for leading a good life and for responding in the appropriate way to given ethical situations (Swanton 2003). Virtue ethics, then, is less concerned with “doing what is right” according to fixed moral principles than with “living one’s life” in a mature and fully developed way. The focus on life “as a whole” reveals the telic aspect of virtue ethics, where the aim is to realize a projected ideal or purpose (telos) of what is definitive for us as humans, namely, the completion or fulfillment of our natures that Aristotle calls “happiness” (eudaimonia). One’s telos, however, is not regarded as something that is achieved at the end of life or at some other future point beyond it; rather, it is an activity or way of living that pulls together the scattered and distracted moments of our everyday lives into a coherent and unified whole. The revival of virtue ethics in the 1980s through the work of figures such as Alasdair MacIntyre (2007 [1981]) and Bernard Williams (1985) opened up a way to rethink authenticity as a virtue, not necessarily as a moral disposition (such as “kindness”) but rather as a necessary requirement or condition for the possibility of moral agency itself. Following Heidegger, who says that virtue “is that which brings [Dasein] to itself in its most [authentic] Being” (2003 [1924–25]: 116), a number of recent commentators (e.g. Hatab 2000; Guignon 2008; Wrathall 2015) have explored the ways that Heidegger’s conception of authenticity is fundamentally shaped by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.2 On this reading, ethics is understood not in terms of following moral rules but in terms of the Greek conception of ethos, understood as embodied and enculturated norms or character traits that make it possible to respond to moral situations in a steady and

1 2

Gadamer later admitted, however, that the only thing that binds us together today is the assurance that nothing binds us together. (Personal communication with Guignon.) Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, perhaps more than any other text, played the decisive role in shaping Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein in Being and Time. See Heidegger 1962a [1927].

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clear-sighted way. This important idea can be grasped by understanding what Heidegger means by the temporal structure of human existence. For Heidegger, humans exist temporally as a “thrown project” (1962a [1927]: 185). We are thrown into a shared historical situation (or past) that limits and constrains us in certain ways. Yet, we simultaneously give meaning to and interpret this situation by projecting into future possibilities. This means we are “futural” (zukünftig) insofar as we understand who we are in terms of possibilities we project for ourselves, but these possibilities are, in turn, made meaningful by the situation into which we have been thrown. The “event” or “happening” of existence continuously moves back and forth, stretching forward into the future as we ceaselessly make and remake ourselves against the constraints and limitations of our shared language and tradition. On Heidegger’s account, this movement opens up a disclosive horizon or “clearing” (Lichtung) that shows where we stand, what we care about, and what matters to us as our lives move forward. But it also reveals what he calls our own “guilt” (Schuld), where this is interpreted not in some religious or moralistic sense but rather in the existential sense that we are “not the basis for ourselves.” Against the radical freedom espoused by figures like Sartre and Beauvoir, existential guilt reveals that our freedom is always constrained, that we begin in the shared historical situation in which we find ourselves, one that opens up a range of possibilities but at the same time limits our “ability to be.” We do not have spontaneous and unfettered mastery of ourselves because the possibilities we choose to take over are not, strictly speaking, our own. They matter to us only because of how we have been thrown into the world. To this end, we begin the activity of existence or self-making only against the backdrop of the public world or “there” (Da) that we happen to find ourselves in, as we project forward toward our own wholeness or completion. Understanding authenticity as a virtue in this way requires becoming aware of our own guilt. For Heidegger, this awareness illuminates a way of living that is focused and steady, and it “holds together” our existence as a thrown project (1962a [1927]: 365).3 This sense of “steadfastness” or “steadiness” (Beständigkeit) creates what Heidegger calls the “constancy of the self,” a sense of integration and coherence that allows us to resist being pulled into the multifarious distractions and opinions of “the They” and momentarily opens us up to our “potentialityfor-being-a-whole” (1962a [1927]: 277). Although it is true that the virtue of steadiness or self-constancy has no specific evaluative content – in the sense of 3

This awareness is revealed to us through what Heidegger refers to as “the call of conscience”: “It calls Dasein forth (and ‘forward’) into its ownmost possibilities, as a summons to its ownmost potentialityfor-Being-its-Self” (1962a [1927]: 318).

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“doing the right thing” – it does appear to be a necessary requirement for moral agency. This helps explain why Heidegger holds that: Being guilty is . . . the existential condition for the possibility of the “morally” good and for the “morally” evil – that is, for morality in general and for the possible forms which this may take . . . The primordial “Being-guilty” cannot be defined by morality, since morality already presupposes it for itself. (1962a [1927]: 332)

To be honest about our own guilt and resolve regarding who we are and where we stand in particular situations can be viewed as a precondition for any moral action. Interpreting authenticity as a virtue in this way not only redeems its proponents against the charge of “decisionism” and of promoting an immoral (or amoral) account of human existence; it also opens up a new configuration of the self. “Being true to oneself,” on this account, is a praiseworthy ideal or character trait insofar as it reveals a kind of existential integrity and cohesiveness regarding who we are and why we respond to given moral situations in the way that we do. But it is not merely a personal virtue; it is a shared ideal that reflects – and so can also update and reshape – the values of a common heritage. Against the spontaneous and erratic expressions “tweeted” out by Donald Trump in the middle the night, this account of authenticity reveals how the historically embedded traits of steadiness, trust, and self-constancy are essential for moral agency. These values endure and are sustained through the cultivation of public practices and institutions like universities and the free press. But as we are now seeing, they are also threatened when the self is unmoored, cut off from the very ground that made it possible.

30 HERMENEUTICS IN POST-WAR CONTINENTAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY dav i d l i ako s an d t h e o d o r e g e o r g e Taken in general terms, “hermeneutics” refers to the study of understanding and interpretation, and, traditionally, this study focuses on considerations of the art, method, and foundations of research in the arts and humanities. The study of hermeneutics has been developed and applied in a number of areas of scholarly inquiry, such as biblical exegesis, literary studies, legal studies, and the medical humanities. In the context of post-war Continental European thought, however, hermeneutics is brought into a novel philosophical context and, with this, comes to designate a philosophical movement – or, at least, a number of related philosophers and themes – concerned with the scope and limits of phenomenology, the character of human existence, the relation of the natural sciences and humanities, as well as a range of interrelated matters in the philosophy of history, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, practical philosophy, as well as in epistemology and the theory of meaning. No philosopher is more closely associated with this post-war movement of philosophy than Hans-Georg Gadamer. But the movement is also shaped by Gadamer’s contemporary, Paul Ricoeur, and is further hewed by Gadamer’s celebrated engagements with figures from other schools of thought, especially Jacques Derrida, associated with deconstruction, and Jürgen Habermas, associated with critical theory (see Young, this volume). Contributions to the movement have also been made, whether expressly in the name of hermeneutics or not, by philosophers as divergent from one another as Gianni Vattimo in Continental European philosophy and John McDowell in analytic philosophy. Accordingly, today the philosophical study of hermeneutics is important not only within Continental European philosophy, where it counts as among the most important contemporary orientations, but also for a range of areas both within and outside the broader philosophical discipline. The focus of this chapter is to introduce the movement of hermeneutics through a brief overview, first, of the pivotal figures of Gadamer and Ricoeur and basic themes of their approaches, then, second, of Gadamer’s hermeneutical 399

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encounters with Habermas and Derrida, and, finally, through an outline of some of the more influential further developments of the philosophical study of hermeneutics in the post-war era.

PIVOTAL FIGURES AND THEMES

Given that Gadamer’s name has become all but synonymous with the philosophical study of hermeneutics in post-war Continental European philosophy, his approach serves as a useful point of departure for any introduction to the topic. Although Gadamer received his primary philosophical inspirations from his teacher Heidegger (esp. 1962a [1927]), Gadamer’s systematic attempt to develop an original hermeneutical orientation – as well as his development of a narrative of the entire previous history of hermeneutics – has made him into the preeminent figure in twentieth-century hermeneutics. Gadamer identifies his philosophical project as that of “philosophical hermeneutics” in order to specify the difference between his concerns and those of other theories of understanding and interpretation. Gadamer further clarifies the scope and limits of his project, moreover, in his discussion of predecessors associated with hermeneutics in Truth and Method. Gadamer takes up these predecessors with a specific purpose in mind in Truth and Method, namely, the “historical preparation” for his elucidation of an “elements of a general theory of hermeneutical experience” (Gadamer 2004: 175–254; 1990a: 177–246). But Gadamer’s discussion of his predecessors may be grasped more generally as a “preparation” of the entirety of his project of a philosophical hermeneutics.1 In this discussion, Gadamer clarifies the scope and limits of his own project, first, through a critical (and some have argued reductive) assessment of two nineteenth-century predecessors, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey.2 Gadamer argues, in turn, that his project may be grasped as an attempt to advance – and perhaps even advance beyond – the context of Martin Heidegger’s discovery of a “hermeneutics of facticity” in Heidegger’s early work from the 1920s (2004: 245; 1990a: 259). Specifically, Gadamer believes that both Schleiermacher and Dilthey recognize the promise of hermeneutics to elucidate those forms of intelligibility – namely, 1 2

Gadamer’s larger relation to his predecessors in the German philosophical tradition is a rich topic. See e.g. Gjesdal 2009 and George 2016. For an overview of the charge of Gadamer’s reading of the history of hermeneutics as reductive, see Grondin 1993: 55–6. In recent years, there has been extensive scholarship in English on the history of hermeneutics that has frequently sought to challenge Gadamer’s readings of the main figures of that tradition, especially Schleiermacher and Dilthey as well as Herder. For examples of this scholarship, see Gjesdal 2009; Forster 2011; Makkreel 2015.

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understanding and interpretation – that concern our experience as historically conditioned beings. Both thinkers also recognized that this promise of hermeneutics lies in helping us resist an excessive exaltation of method in the Enlightenment generally and in modern natural science in particular. Yet Gadamer thinks Schleiermacher and Dilthey fail to make good on this promise because, in different ways, they both remained prejudiced by this same exaltation of method. Gadamer criticizes Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic approach as overly “Romantic” and historicistic – that is, as treating historical knowledge in methodological terms modeled on the natural sciences – in Schleiermacher’s very ambition to establish a general or “universal hermeneutics” (Gadamer 2004: 184; 1990a: 188). For this reason, Gadamer reads Schleiermacher as elucidating a universal “art of understanding” in the form of “an independent method” (2004: 185; 1990a: 188). Gadamer criticizes Dilthey’s approach, in turn, for attempting to establish, on an analogy with the natural sciences, the epistemic foundations of research in the human sciences or humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) (2004: 214; 1990a: 222). While both Schleiermacher and Dilthey turn to hermeneutics to elucidate the terms of our relation to history, then, neither adequately grasps what Gadamer calls the “historicity” (2004: 234; 1990a: 246) and, later, the “linguisticality” of our experience, that is, the significance of its inextricable embeddedness within historical and linguistic traditions (2004: 391 [trans. modified]; 1990a: 393). Gadamer argues that the early Heidegger comprises a breakthrough in the tradition of modern hermeneutics with his discovery of “the hermeneutics of facticity.” With this turn of phrase, Heidegger signifies that hermeneutics concerns not only the art of understanding or the epistemic foundations of research in the humanities. Such concerns, Heidegger thinks, are in fact derivative. Rather, Heidegger argues that the distinctive mode of being of human beings – or, as he terms this in Being and Time, existence (Dasein) – is itself hermeneutical. Understanding and interpretation are not just important for our cultivated attempts to understand other persons or texts but, instead, are part and parcel of the very disclosedness (Entschlossenheit) of existence itself. As Gadamer puts it, for Heidegger, “understanding” is “the original form of the enactment (Vollzugsform) of existence (Dasein), which is being-in-the-world. Before any differentiation of understanding into the various directions of pragmatic or theoretical interest, understanding is the mode of being of existence (Dasein)” (2004: 250; 1990a: 264). To be human – or to “exist” – means to understand, to interpret. The possibilities of understanding and interpretation constitute an irreducible dimension of existence, implicit in our very access to (the being of ) other people and things, whether that existential “disclosure” occurs at the primordial, practical level or at the derived theoretical one.

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Gadamer thus emphasizes that Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity no longer treats understanding and interpretation solely as theoretical or epistemic terms but, instead, expands them into an ontological register. It is crucial for Gadamer, moreover, that Heidegger’s stress on our ontological facticity brings into focus the finitude of our possibilities of understanding and interpretation, thereby capturing the very nub of our existence as historically conditioned beings. Gadamer situates Heidegger’s insistence on our existential finitude with reference to the critique that Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity poses to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (see Smith, this volume). Husserl, we recall, maintains that our accessibility to ourselves, as well as of the things and others that comprise the lifeworld, is, at bottom, complete, because founded on transcendental “consciousness” (Bewusstsein). Heidegger, by contrast, maintains that our accessibility to being remains always incomplete because always delivered over to the facticity of existence.3 Gadamer emphasizes that for Heidegger, as opposed to Husserl: “Phenomenology should be ontologically based on the facticity of Dasein, existence, which cannot be based on or derived from anything else, and not on the pure cogito as the essential constitution of typical universality” (2004: 245; 1990a: 259). Considered on the basis of existence (Dasein), our efforts to understand are not founded on and never admit of transparency to ourselves. We experience ourselves first of all and for the most part not through a purported transcendental consciousness of the lifeworld but, instead, as thrown, that is, as always being bound up in historical conditions that do not originate with ourselves but that nevertheless limit and make possible how we take up ourselves, others, texts, or other beings. Gadamer inherits Heidegger’s breakthrough in the modern tradition of hermeneutics, developing and deepening the hermeneutics of facticity Heidegger discovered. To see how Gadamer accomplishes this development requires an explication of the central concepts of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960), concepts which are meant to collectively form a complete description of the ontological condition of human understanding.4 In the important 1966 essay “The universality of the hermeneutical problem” (which may be read as a companion piece that gives concise expression to the central arguments of Truth and Method), Gadamer describes two interrelated experiences 3

4

Here we observe an important but often neglected connotation of Heidegger’s term for existence, Dasein: Husserl believes that we find firm foundations in consciousness, Bewusstsein or “being aware,” whereas Heidegger, by contrast, believes that such alleged foundations vanish when we take ourselves up in our ordinary factical existence, Dasein or “being there.” (See also Wrathall and Londen, this volume.) Helpful general overviews of these concepts and themes in the secondary literature include Di Cesare 2013, and the essays in Dostal 2002, Grondin 1993, Risser 1997, and Warnke 1987.

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of alienation (Verfremdung) that have arisen in modern life and culture. The first is what he calls aesthetic alienation, which refers to the fact that we have lost our ability to authentically or genuinely experience the beautiful. Instead, “we relate ourselves, either affirmatively or negatively, to the quality of an artistic form . . . When it loses its original and unquestioned authority, this whole world of experience [in art] becomes alienated into an object of aesthetic judgment” (Gadamer 1976: 4; 1993: 220; cf. Heidegger 2002 [1946]: 57).5 The second major form of alienation refers to our similar inability to experience history because we have opted instead for “the mastery of historical method . . . [and] such control does not completely fulfill the task of understanding the past and its transmissions” (Gadamer 1976: 6; 1993: 222). Recovering from these alienations provides the basic motivation for Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Aesthetic alienation is instantiated in the modern tradition of aesthetics since Kant, which thinks of art in terms of formal qualities and isolates art from the true and the good, while historical alienation finds its expression in nineteenth-century Romanticism and historicism and their attempts to objectively pin down and methodologically reconstruct the past. For Gadamer, both these modern understandings illegitimately import the standards and objectives of the natural sciences into the realms of the arts and humanities. Thus, Gadamer’s recovery from these distinctively modern paradigms takes the form of a rehabilitation of “leading concepts” from the tradition of humanism, especially formative education (Bildung), common sense (sensus communis), judgment, and taste. We must reawaken ourselves to the fact that both art and history speak directly to us, and allow ourselves to be open and receptive to this truth. This goal requires distancing ourselves from the modern understandings of these phenomena that alienate us from their claims to truth – and doing so requires a return to and rehabilitation of the humanistic tradition. For Gadamer, humanism predates the modern natural sciences that produced the alienations his hermeneutics seeks to overcome. The concepts of humanism provide Gadamer with his starting point because, unlike the natural sciences, the humanities still point toward an alternative and more original understanding of art and history in terms of their legitimate and autonomous claims to truth: “My starting point is that the historical humanities, as they emerged from German Romanticism and were imbued with the spirit of modern science, maintained a humanistic heritage that distinguishes them from all other kinds of modern research and brings them close to other, quite different, 5

On Heidegger’s earlier critique of the modern reduction of art to aesthetics (developed during the 1930s), see Thomson 2011: 40–64.

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extrascientific experiences, especially those peculiar to art” (Gadamer 2004: xxvi; 1993: 438). Gadamer’s hermeneutics would entail a revolution in how research is conducted in the arts and humanities, in which our route of access to these domains would acknowledge the fact that they speak their truth directly to us. This directly disclosive model of understanding is governed by “application” (Anwendung), that is, the permission to apply “the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation” (2004: 307; 1990a: 313). Instead of interpreting by disinterestedly applying a rule-based methodology, research in the arts and humanities should embrace the fact that readers are always actively taking part in the meaning they find the text imparting to them – always allowing themselves to be addressed by the text – and in turn taking that meaning up from the perspective of the particular situations in which they find themselves. With this theoretical reorientation as the backdrop, Gadamer proceeds to outline the elements of “hermeneutic experience” (hermeneutische Erfahrung) in his influential and detailed account of how we understandingly relate ourselves to texts, artworks, and the past. The concept of “prejudice” (Vorurteil) provides “the point of departure for the hermeneutical problem” (2004: 278; 1990a: 281). Building on Heidegger’s analysis of the fore-structure (Vor-Struktur) of understanding, Gadamer argues that we come to every act of understanding already equipped with some nexus of background assumptions, vocabularies, and perspectives with their own sources in history, culture, and life experiences. Human understanding remains radically finite because it is ineluctably conditioned by and embedded in these contexts beyond our knowledge and control, and Gadamer provocatively describes this conditioning as prejudice. Against the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice,” Gadamer seeks to rehabilitate the concept (2004: 272; 1990a: 275). We cannot help but understand against the background of the prejudices we have, so one of his operative tasks becomes distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate prejudices in order to ensure that we responsibly understand the subject-matter (Sache) at issue. Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice is thus motivated by his validation of legitimate authority, a crucial notion initially explained in terms of individual persons. If I encounter someone who has more knowledge than I do about some topic, I recognize this other person as a legitimate authority in virtue of his superior wisdom and experience. In such cases, his authority is earned; for, “what the authority says is not irrational and arbitrary but can, in principle, be discovered to be true” (2004: 281; 1990a: 285). Only prejudices that have authority in this sense should be validated. For Gadamer, however, the most important source of in principle legitimate authority is not any individual or institution but rather “tradition” (Überlieferung): “That which has been sanctioned by tradition and custom has

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an authority that is nameless, and our finite historical being is marked by the fact that the authority of what has been handed down to us – and not just what is clearly grounded – always has power over our attitudes and behavior” (2004: 281; 1990a: 285). Tradition, the transmission of historically inherited contexts of meaning, exercises a binding power that precedes and conditions all our attempts to understand: “an event of tradition, a process of handing down, is a prior condition of understanding” (2004: 308; 1990a: 314). Whenever I am able to successfully understand, I always do so in virtue of the historical inheritance of these contexts of meaning that condition my understanding and so set implicit boundaries and constraints on rational inquiry. But such tradition is also what positively enables me to understand at all; without an inherited and dynamic sense of what matters and of what is possible, I could not engage in the attempt to understand in the first place. The recognition that tradition is always operative in understanding is what Gadamer calls “historically effective consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein): “we should learn to understand ourselves better and recognize that in all understanding, whether we are expressly aware of it or not, the efficacy of history is at work” (2004: 300; 1990a: 306). The cultivation of this awareness that history always affects us is one of the main objectives of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Since historical tradition and prejudices are always at work in our understanding, our task becomes the careful and ongoing interrogation of these conditions so that we understand responsibly. This entails acknowledging the finitude of human understanding and, accordingly, also recognizing what positively enables understanding. Historically effective consciousness achieves its culmination not in a mere acceptance of the effects of history, then, but in the active accomplishment of what Gadamer calls “the fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung). For Gadamer, the fusion of horizons results from the productive tension of past and present that enables understanding. Tradition is not a static inheritance to which we are passively subject but instead names the dynamic interplay of past and present, of the challenge posed to meanings from the past by new contexts from the present, as well as the challenge posed to the present by the bequest of the past. The fusion of horizons thus refers to this irreducible interrelatedness of past and present, and so to the productive way in which their interaction enables us to understand: In the fusion of horizons, past and present contexts of meaning dynamically confront each other, and out of that confrontation understanding emerges. The next major step in Gadamer’s development of hermeneutic experience is his thesis that understanding is always also a matter of language: “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (2004: 390; 1990a: 392). This is

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Gadamer’s notion of the linguisticality of understanding. When Gadamer claims that “being that can be understood is language,”6 he wishes, first of all, to express the idea that to understand is always to try to articulate meaning in words (2004: 470; 1990a: 478). Language is a form or mode of mediation. Because the past is operative in all understanding, and to understand always involves bringing meaning into words, understanding thus means mediating past and present by bringing what the past has to say into words now in the present: “In fact, historical consciousness too involves mediating between past and present . . . language is the universal medium of this mediation” (2004: 470; 1990a: 479). To say that “being that can be understood is language” thus also indicates that language is speculative or, in a term familiar from Heidegger, disclosive. Since we cannot understand except through language, we can only ever experience an intelligible world linguistically: “language is a medium where I and world meet, or, rather, manifest their original belonging together” (2004: 469; 1990a: 478). Language is a medium – a mode of mediation of past and present – that makes the being of the world and everything in it accessible to us. For Gadamer, we are best understood as participants in this mediation, a movement of belonging that takes shape (or, rather, takes place) as an ongoing back and forth without end.7 A final crucial aspect of Gadamer’s account of language is also one of the most celebrated, namely, his claim that language is paradigmatically “conversation” (or “dialogue,” Gespräch): “language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding” (2004: 443; 1990a: 449). This claim follows from his elucidation of the speculative character of language. Language, as a mode of mediation of past and present, world and human, is oriented by the possibility of arriving at mutual understanding, perhaps even accord or agreement, with someone else about a matter of common concern. For Gadamer, this is constitutive of conversation in general: Conversation is a process of coming to an understanding. Thus it belongs to every true conversation that each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view and transposes himself into the [perspective of the] other to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual but what he says. (2004: 387; 1990a: 389)

Gadamer’s detailed phenomenology of conversation suggests that in a genuine dialogue it is possible for something to come forth that neither partner 6 7

Cf. Heidegger’s famous claim that: “Language is the house of being” (2002a [1946]: 232). Jeff Malpas has brought to light the connection between hermeneutics and considerations of topology and place, with reference to Heidegger and Gadamer as well as the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. For a recent overview of his topological project in hermeneutics, see Malpas 2017.

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previously anticipated or could have seen. From this unforeseen emergence, real understanding occurs between partners.8 Genuine conversation or dialogue issues in understanding, and all understanding can be thought of on the model of a conversation, taken in an elevated sense, as conversation between interlocutors, past and present, reader and text. These claims have guaranteed Gadamer’s reputation as perhaps the preeminent philosopher of dialogue in our times. Alongside Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur stands as another pivotal figure in the post-war development of hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics may be best described as expansive, integrating competing and disparate methods, strategies, and commitments into one inclusive conception of hermeneutical inquiry.9 For instance, he follows the ontological turn in hermeneutics, accepting the claim that understanding forms part of the ontological constitution of human being. Unlike Heidegger and Gadamer, however, Ricoeur places a heavy emphasis on methodological considerations in hermeneutics. The productive tension between these elements of his thought is one of the distinguishing features of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Ricoeur criticizes Heidegger for taking a “short route” from a hermeneutics of facticity to an ontology of understanding, by which he means that Heidegger begins his analysis with the assertion that understanding is ontologically constitutive while jettisoning the traditional hermeneutical concern with questions surrounding the methodology of interpretation (Ricoeur 1974: 6). Ricoeur’s preferred path is the “long road” to hermeneutics (Grondin 2015) on which the ontology of understanding coexists alongside thorny but critical methodological questions. Ricoeur’s strategy of reconciling seemingly competing hermeneutical concerns is related to his claim that understanding and explanation remain in dialectic. Against Dilthey’s influential demarcation of understanding in the human sciences or humanities from explanation in the natural sciences, Ricoeur synthesizes them into one theory of interpretation in which they both form part of the same “unique hermeneutical arc” (Ricoeur 1981: 161). Interpretation involves both the rigorousness of objectivity that Ricoeur thinks is implied in the ideal of a human science as well as the existential possibility of following out the meaning of a text in one’s life. For Ricoeur, objective explanation is a step on the way to self-understanding. This puts the two seemingly disparate activities on the same spectrum and also shows once again Ricoeur’s concerns with both method and ontology.

8 9

See also Heidegger 2010 [1944–45]: 1–103. For helpful accounts of Ricoeur’s project, see Kearney 2004; Grondin 2015; Piercey 2016.

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Ricoeur’s liberalized conception of hermeneutics is reflected in his omnivorous interests in – and his many books about – a wide range of topics, including evil, symbolism, religion, action theory, psychoanalysis, social science, metaphor, narrative, myth, politics, and virtually the full range of the arts and humanities. For Ricoeur, hermeneutics requires attention to the manifold forms of human self-understanding. In his important book on Freud, Ricoeur draws a highly influential distinction between the hermeneutics of trust and the hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur 1970: 20–36). The hermeneutics of trust, best exemplified by phenomenology, evinces a faith that the object of interpretation can be manifestly true and is capable of speaking directly to the interpreter. Ricoeur associates the hermeneutics of suspicion, meanwhile, with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In this tradition, meaning is always masked by the false consciousness of class structures, the will to power, or the unconscious. For the hermeneutics of trust, truth is manifest to the attentive reader, while for the hermeneutics of suspicion, truth is disguised and must be uncovered by the active intervention of the interpreter. What is less often noted about Ricoeur’s distinction between these methods is his recognition that hermeneutics requires them both: “there is no general hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis, but only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of interpretation. The hermeneutic field, whose outer contours we have traced, is internally at variance with itself” (1970: 26–7). Hence, Ricoeur embraced the “conflict of interpretations” (20). In his ecumenical view, the phenomenon of interpretation is so complex and so central to human self-understanding that it cannot be monopolized by any one style, method, tradition, or school.

HERMENEUTICAL ENCOUNTERS

For both Gadamer and Ricoeur, the hermeneutical task of understanding depends on encounters with “the other.” It is fair to say that each of them gave heed to this insight in his own philosophical practices. Both Gadamer and Ricoeur engaged extensively with other philosophers, including philosophers from divergent schools of thought, as well as a wide range of works from the arts, humanities, and other areas. Yet, perhaps none of their hermeneutical encounters has been as influential – or done more to foster and enrich the development of the philosophical study of hermeneutics – as Gadamer’s engagements with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.10 10

While the topic remains beyond the scope of this brief chapter, commentators also sometimes recognize the importance of one of the first critics of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics for the development of hermeneutics in the post-war era, namely, Emilio Betti (see e.g. Grondin 1994:

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While Gadamer had become aware of Habermas much earlier, their philosophical and professional relationship entered a new phase when Gadamer helped Habermas become an extraordinary professor at the University of Heidelberg in the early 1960s. Gadamer’s biographer Jean Grondin reports that Gadamer and Habermas helped to mentor one another’s students and enjoyed abiding “trust and respect” (Grondin 2003: 305). As the political climate of the 1960s intensified, however, their respective philosophical projects put the two colleagues on a collision course, as it were. This collision may be said to have found its first expression in 1967 in a piece by Habermas published in a special issue of the Philosophische Rundschau, a journal then edited by Gadamer and Helmut Kuhn (Grondin 1994: 130). The debate is brought into focus, in turn, in essays published at the outset of the 1970s (Grondin 2003: 310). In the interim, the legacy of that debate has proliferated and taken on elephantine proportions (Smith 2015: 600–11). The debate is more layered and nuanced than can be treated in brief, but some of its basic terms can be outlined. Habermas, a generation younger than Gadamer and associated with the political left, concerned himself with the establishment of a legitimate basis of ideology critique (see Young, this volume). Although Habermas eschewed norms and methods of the natural sciences for such a basis of critique, he sought a basis in the model of research in the social sciences, and in particular psychoanalysis. Habermas sought a basis for critique that would expose and thus contribute to our emancipation from hidden pathologies operative in accepted and even cherished ideals passed down by tradition. In this context, Habermas objected to Gadamer’s claim for the “universality of hermeneutics,” arguing (among other things) that Gadamer’s insistence on the authority of tradition left no room for a legitimate basis of such critique. Of course, Habermas’s philosophical objection also spoke to contemporary sensibilities of the political left; for many, hermeneutics had come to be associated not only with the transmission of meaning from tradition but also with the conservation and even veneration of the very tradition they felt themselves called to overturn (Grondin 2003: 306–7). Gadamer, in any case, provided a rejoinder to Habermas’s objection. Gadamer argued that, in fact, Habermas’s own position remained uncritical, because it is hermeneutically naïve to suppose that the norms and methods of research in 125–9). While Gadamer became the most influential thinker of hermeneutics, several figures followed Betti in maintaining that hermeneutics should be principally oriented toward methodological issues. The most influential such figure in English was E. D. Hirsch, who developed a methodological critique of Gadamer (see Hirsch 1967). In recent years, methodological hermeneutics has enjoyed something of a resurgence. Makkreel 2015 is an outstanding example, and includes substantive discussions of Heidegger and Gadamer.

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the social sciences, such as psychoanalysis, make good on the promise of a valid basis of critique at all. Perhaps just as important as the debate between Habermas and Gadamer, however, is the influence of this debate on Gadamer’s further pursuit of his project of developing a philosophical hermeneutics. If the debate may have been influential on both Habermas and Gadamer,11 it proved an impetus for Gadamer to draw renewed attention to aspects of his philosophical hermeneutics that speak to criticisms raised by Habermas. First of all, in essays subsequent to his hermeneutical encounter with Habermas (such as “What is practice? The conditions of social reason”), Gadamer highlights the proximity between the concerns that guide his philosophical hermeneutics and those found in critical theory (Gadamer 1987). Second, Gadamer draws attention to the fact that the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation do not amount to a blind acceptance of the authority of tradition; on the contrary, such hermeneutic experiences remain critical in that they require us to interrogate what from tradition retains relevance and legitimacy, as well as how and why (as we saw earlier). Finally, Gadamer’s encounter with Habermas may also be said to have influenced Gadamer’s efforts in a number of later essays to examine the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation as forms of practical rationality.12 The 1981 meeting at the Goethe Institute in Paris that featured Gadamer and Jacques Derrida represented another landmark encounter between two preeminent orientations of Continental European philosophy in the late twentieth century. The philosophical hermeneutics delineated more than twenty years prior in Truth and Method had attracted widespread attention, and Derrida’s provocative project of deconstruction burst onto the scene with a series of writings published in the late 1960s. Both Gadamer and Derrida had, by this point, garnered numerous philosophical supporters as well as detractors, and both Gadamer and Derrida characterized themselves, at least in part, as working within broader contours for philosophical inquiry set by Heidegger. As became evident at their meeting in Paris, however, significant differences seemed to separate them, having in no small part to do with their complex and divergent 11 12

Scholars have suggested that the debate between Habermas and Gadamer is an influence on Habermas’s later development of his theory of communicative action. See e.g. Figal 2010: 1–2. Bubner, Cramer, and Weihl 1970 is an important first source for the debate between Gadamer and Habermas, as well as for contributions to the debate between hermeneutics and ideology critique. See in particular Jürgen Habermas, “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,” in Bubner et al. 1970: 120–59. (This piece is available in English as Habermas 1990a: 245–72.) A second important source is Apel et al. 1981 [1971]; along with several other influential contributions, this volume includes an important “Replik” by Gadamer (283–317; available in English translation as Gadamer 1990b: 273–89). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, Paul Ricoeur makes an important contribution to this debate (1990: 298–334).

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ways of inheriting Heidegger as well as Nietzsche. The main philosophical problem that emerged at the 1981 meeting concerned the very possibility of hermeneutic understanding. As Derrida pointedly put it in his first response to Gadamer, “I am not convinced that we ever really have this experience that Professor Gadamer describes, of knowing in a dialogue that one has been perfectly understood or experiencing the success of confirmation” (Derrida 1989 [1984]: 54). In fact, Derrida’s objection to Gadamer’s hermeneutical insistence on the possibility of mutual understanding anticipated much of the subsequent character of their encounter. One commentator summarizes this widespread appraisal of their initial encounter by calling the event a “conversation that never happened” (Bernstein 2008). Gadamer made a lengthy contribution to the 1981 symposium with his sweeping and important essay “Text and interpretation” (Gadamer 1989), in which he outlined his theory of understanding and carefully distinguished it from deconstruction. Then Derrida, for his part, gave a much shorter paper on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche that did not mention Gadamer at all, as well as a short and enigmatic series of questions in response to Gadamer’s paper (Derrida 1989 [1984]). Hence the meeting proved to be a disappointment for many, though it also acted as an impetus for further inquiry. As Gadamer intimated, “the encounter with the French philosophical scene represents a genuine challenge for me,” a hermeneutic challenge which he still sought to meet (Gadamer 1989: 24; 1993: 333). The conversation between hermeneutics and deconstruction thus did not end with the meeting in Paris in 1981. Indeed, one might even suggest that it only began with that initial engagement. This is true in a very tangible sense, as Gadamer and Derrida went on to have a more productive discussion about Heidegger’s politics in Heidelberg in 1988 and then continued to write texts about each other until their deaths in 2002 and 2004, respectively.13 That their dialogue did, in fact, continue is true in a deeper sense too, as both of their orientations were profoundly affected by their ongoing dialogue, and this is perhaps where the true significance of the encounter lies. The effect of their interaction is particularly striking on Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In Truth and Method and the period immediately following it, Gadamer discussed the experience of understanding in terms that, to some, suggested an appropriation of the other, such as the fusion of horizons. This emphasis opened Gadamer up to the charge that his account of understanding entailed interpretative violence to the other.14 His

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See Gadamer 1989; 2007; Derrida 2005b; Calle-Gruber 2016. See, for example, Caputo 1987: 115, as well as the following polemical comment by Derrida: “Gadamer’s philosophy is so marked by terms taken from digestion . . . he is such a gluttonous thinker. His hermeneutics is, after all, precisely about assimilating what is foreign. What is radically

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engagement with Derrida – in which Derrida often stressed discontinuity and the ubiquitous risk of misunderstanding – impressed upon the later Gadamer the need to draw attention to the hermeneutic importance of genuine difference.15 As he puts it in a text published in 1997, hermeneutics entails “recognizing in advance the possibility that your partner is right, even recognizing the possible superiority of your partner” (Gadamer 1997: 36; 1993: 505). The later Gadamer, in no small part thanks to his repeated encounters with Derrida, placed renewed emphasis on the significance of the other, exteriority, difference, and alterity for hermeneutical experience. Nor did Derrida himself emerge from his discussions with Gadamer unchanged. In a remarkably moving and elegiac memorial address delivered after Gadamer’s death, Derrida used the poetry of Paul Celan, deeply admired by both thinkers, as a starting point – what Gadamer would have called a common subject-matter – for a conversation. In the course of this meditation, Derrida calls dialogue “foreign to my lexicon, as if belonging to a foreign language” (2005a: 136). Nevertheless, he pays careful attention to Gadamer’s philosophy of dialogue and even notes a hermeneutical commonality between his and Gadamer’s interpretations of Celan in respecting the “indecision” common to poetry and reading (Derrida 2005b: 145; see also 146, 152–3). In a generous concession to the late hermeneut, and with perhaps a hint of regret about the legacy of their original 1981 meeting, Derrida notes: “I do not know if I have the right, without presumption, to speak of a dialogue between Gadamer and me” (2005b: 138). Yet, Derrida also refers appreciatively to their “interminable conversation” (163). Even if neither Gadamer nor Derrida substantively revised their core commitments in light of their mutual encounter, one can still detect a dramatic shift in emphasis on the part of both thinkers in the wake of what can only be described as their ongoing dialogue.

F U R T H E R DI R E C T I O N S

Neither Gadamer nor Ricoeur – nor even Gadamer’s engagements with Habermas and Derrida – has proven to be the final word in the philosophical study of hermeneutics in the post-war era. In the discipline of philosophy today,

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alien in the other doesn’t have a chance – it will be digested, melted down in the great tradition, wolfed down mercilessly” (Birnbaum and Olson 2009). Grondin 2003: 328–9 thoroughly summarizes the events of the encounter between Gadamer and Derrida. See also Richard E. Palmer’s comments at Gadamer 2007: 372–3. (On difference, see also May, this volume.)

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the study of hermeneutics continues to play an important role in Continental European philosophy as well as in the now global reception of post-war Continental European philosophy, including in analytic philosophy.16 Hermeneutics has also received attention (though sometimes critical) in other areas within philosophy, such as feminist philosophy.17 Hermeneutics has also developed into an important methodological approach in a number of disciplines. This scholarly expanse cannot be examined in this brief chapter, but a few figures most closely associated with the recent philosophical development of hermeneutics may be surveyed, thus demonstrating the continued vitality of the tradition of hermeneutics. Among the best known of these recent hermeneutical philosophers is Gianni Vattimo, who studied with Gadamer in the 1960s and translated Truth and Method into Italian. In Vattimo we find an avowedly “postmodern” hermeneutics. On his understanding, hermeneutics does not refer to a distinctive set of philosophical arguments but, rather, names what he calls the “koiné or common idiom” of our time (Vattimo 1997: 1). For Vattimo, hermeneutics describes our contemporary historical situation, in which there is no neutral ground or absolute foundation for truth (10–12; see also Vattimo 2014: 55). Vattimo’s postmodern hermeneutics does not despair at this ultimate groundlessness but, instead, embraces the fact that there is no absolute truth but only interpretations, fictions, and aestheticized experiences of reality (Vattimo 1988: 29; 1997: 4). Vattimo also identifies hermeneutics with what he calls “accomplished nihilism” or the exhortation to own up to this groundlessness and seize it as an opportunity for emancipatory play free from the oppressive dominion of claims to absolute truth (1988: 20). Both Vattimo and the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty identify hermeneutics with a cultural milieu or set of attitudes. For these two thinkers, hermeneutics is the philosophy appropriate for a time that has abandoned metaphysical foundations, a priori methods, and absolute truths. Rorty thus defines hermeneutics as “an expression of hope that the cultural space left behind by the demise of epistemology will not be filled – that our culture should become one in which the demand for constraint and confrontation is no

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A major impetus for bringing hermeneutics into dialogue with analytic philosophy has come from comparisons between Gadamer and the work of Donald Davidson. For a recent collection of papers that includes numerous contributions to this important ongoing dialogue between analytic philosophy and hermeneutics, see Malpas 2011. The proliferation of scholarly interest in the philosophical study of hermeneutics may be discerned from the recent appearance of substantial companions such as Malpas and Gander 2015 and Keane and Lawn 2016. Warnke considers the role of hermeneutics in feminism in Warnke 2015: 644–59. See also Fernandes Botts 2015: 498–518.

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longer felt” (Rorty 1979: 315).18 On Rorty’s analysis, hermeneutics stands in stark opposition to epistemology, the foundationalist attempt to constrain and confront mental representations or propositions with the objects they purport to be about (163). Hermeneutics, on this account, replaces epistemology with conversation. Instead of seeking objective truth and correspondence between mind and world, Rorty’s pragmatist hermeneutics encourages conversation between interlocutors that changes minds and views through the continual invention of novel descriptions, a project he calls “edification” (318, 360, 378).19 Rorty’s conversational and edifying philosophy takes inspiration from Gadamer’s dialogical hermeneutics, and Vattimo develops his postmodern hermeneutics on the basis of Gadamer’s critique of the encroachment of scientific method beyond its legitimate domain. While these relaxed and pluralistic definitions of hermeneutics have been influential, and Rorty’s reading in particular was formative for the AngloAmerican reception of Gadamer, other thinkers have steered hermeneutics in different directions. The analytic philosopher John McDowell, for instance, has integrated Gadamerian ideas into his epistemological project of validating the answerability of human reason to the world. Essential to McDowell’s account of the conceptually mediated human relation to reality is the idea of second nature: “human beings are intelligibly initiated into this stretch of the space of reasons by ethical upbringing, which instills the appropriate shape into their lives. The resulting habits of thought and action are second nature” (McDowell 1994: 84). Drawing explicitly on Gadamer’s hermeneutics, McDowell construes this achieved initiation into conceptual space in terms of Bildung and tradition as mediums that enable our openness to the world. Another, perhaps less explicit way McDowell follows Gadamer is by building his own constructive account in dialectical conversation with the history of philosophy, particularly with Aristotle’s ethics and the German idealism of Kant and Hegel.20 It is also worth noting that McDowell, unlike Vattimo and Rorty, interprets Gadamer in a

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See also Rorty’s distinction between hermeneutics as a method as opposed to an attitude in Rorty 1980: 39. This conception of hermeneutics is in contrast to the traditionally Diltheyan definition of hermeneutics articulated by Charles Taylor (1980: 25–6), to whom Rorty is responding. Taylor has for many decades translated the concepts and themes of the German hermeneutic tradition into the idiom of Anglo-American philosophy. Note that after 1980, Rorty no longer identifies his project with “hermeneutics.” As he rather flippantly suggests in a 2003 interview: “‘Hermeneutic philosophy’ is as vague and unfruitful a notion as ‘analytic philosophy.’ Both terms signify little more than dislike of each for the other” (Prado 2003: 228). See McDowell’s important comment that he attempts “to stand on the shoulders of the giant, Kant” as well as the response to Kant by Hegel (McDowell 1994: 111). For McDowell’s appropriation of Aristotle, see esp. Lecture IV of McDowell 1994.

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realist register according to which language, tradition, and Bildung direct human reason toward an intelligible openness to the world (McDowell 2009: 146–9). In this way, McDowell pushes hermeneutics in an epistemological and realist direction. Recent contributions by Günter Figal suggest a further development that also runs against the currents of the “postmodern” approaches of Vattimo and Rorty. As may be discerned from the title of one of his major works, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy, Figal’s hermeneutics stresses not simply the unfettered openness of interpretation championed by Vattimo or Rorty but, rather, the correlation of our hermeneutical experience to what is objective (das Gegenständliche) (Figal 2010: 1; George 2009, 2010). By this, Figal does not mean that hermeneutical experience is to be guided by the norms and methods of the natural (or social) sciences that purport to lead to objective knowledge, however. Instead, as the etymology of both the English “objectivity” and especially the German “Gegenständlichkeit” suggest, Figal means that hermeneutical experience is oriented toward and by “something that one himself is not,” by “something that stands over against [entgegen steht]” us (2010: 2). For Figal, the impetus and abiding focus of hermeneutical experience is something objective, something exterior, that appears as something that both demands and promises to be understood. Figal thinks that what is objective in this eminent sense, such as an artwork worthy of the name, is inexhaustible in such demand and promise. Accordingly, life that is led hermeneutically takes shape as an unending effort to relate to, adjust to, and deal with the displacements brought about through our encounters with what is not our own. For Figal, hermeneutical experience is interminably open, not because anything goes but because we belong to an objective world that is thus inexhaustibly effulgent in meaning.

31 FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1945 Constructivism and Materialism

an n v. m u r p h y In an opinion piece for the New York Times written shortly after the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, Thomas Edsall diagnoses early twentyfirst-century global politics with reference to “post-materialist” values championed in the decades immediately following the Second World War. Edsall (2017) argues that the Brexit vote in Britain, the invigoration of anti-immigrant parties across Europe, and the ascendancy of right-wing populism in America can be attributed to a ubiquitous and damaging “post-materialism.” Edsall’s claim is that resentment surrounding economic inequity has sparked a resurgence of right-wing, class-based politics. On his reading, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s drew attention away from economic and material inequalities and drew focus instead to myriad social and identitarian concerns. But the daily realities of economic hardship work against the liberal preoccupation with matters of self-expression and tolerance that have been the mainstay of liberal politics for decades. Edsall believes that where day-to-day economic and material inequities take center-stage as an object of concern, social and cultural liberalism suffers. Making a similar claim in reference to contemporary feminism, Amanda Hess has argued that Trump’s “win suggested that Americans were more comfortable with misogyny than many had thought, but it also burst the bubble of cheery pop feminism, which had achieved its huge popularity at the expense of class consciousness and racial solidarity” (Hess 2017). Hess’s claim is that popular feminism’s negligence of class consciousness and racial solidarity – and more broadly its negligence of the concrete concerns that frame political commitment – has precipitated its undermining. These analyses by Edsall and Hess are contemporary articulations of a criticism that has met certain strands of feminist theory since its inception: namely that mainstream feminists’ abiding ignorance and/or neglect of racial and class differences have undermined not only the efficacy of their theories but also their ability to speak to the concrete and material conditions that motivate individuals to hold the political convictions that they do. 416

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In “Black women: shaping feminist theory,” bell hooks indicts the racism that has informed feminist theory in the West. The beginning of hooks’s essay addresses the hubris of Betty Friedan’s analysis in The Feminine Mystique (1963). It is Friedan’s presumption that she speaks for all women that is of the most concern to hooks. Read as a mid-twentieth-century American housewife’s lament for all that has been sacrificed in the service of marriage and motherhood, Friedan’s work in The Feminine Mystique failed to recognize the limits of its analyses. As hooks notes: “Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure-class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc.” (hooks 2000: 131). The class and racial privilege that inflects Friedan’s analysis motivates her to think about gender without thinking about race and class, but hooks cautions: “White women who dominate feminist discourse, who for the most part make and articulate feminist theory, have little or no understanding of white supremacy as a racial politic, or the psychological impact of class, of their political status within a racist, sexist, capitalist state” (2000: 133); hooks urges a shift in lens that allows for the recognition of the material differences in women’s lives. This shift in lens would also force a contestation of modern feminism’s presumptive slogan: “all women are oppressed.” This ideology of common oppression is contested by a variety of materialist feminisms that are concerned in varying ways with concrete economic inequities that are inflected in different ways in different women’s lives. Taking race and class seriously mandates the recognition that all women are not equally oppressed. Further still, taking race and class seriously mandates the recognition of the highly variable and unequal mechanisms of oppression that bear down on different subjects. For hooks, a materialist feminism is one that understands the differences between women and does not seek to subsume these differences beneath an ideology of common oppression. The division between materialism and culturalism is axiomatic in feminist theory. The nomenclature that attends this distinction has varied over time, but since the Second World War the distinction between a feminist agenda founded in response to concrete inequities and one motivated instead by a more cultural or symbolic politics has driven the main debates in feminist theory and charted the course of its evolution. This chapter traces the evolution of post-war feminist philosophy in reference to this distinction. Without endorsing the division itself or arguing for its integrity – indeed, all of the philosophers considered here are to some degree critical of the distinction between matter and culture – it is possible to trace the evolution of materialism from Marxist

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feminist theory through to the corporeal feminism of the 1990s and finally to contemporary feminist philosophies of vulnerability. The materialist lens is a productive one through which to approach the evolutionary arc of feminist philosophy in the wake of the Second World War. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND FRENCH FEMINISM

A retelling of the history of feminist philosophy in the post-war years typically begins with reference to Simone de Beauvoir, whose magnum opus The Second Sex (1949) both provoked and inspired many of the canonical texts in Continental feminism. Reference to this work nearly always cites Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born a woman but rather becomes one” (2009: 283). Prescient with regard to the advent and eventual dominance of social constructivism that accompanied feminism’s second wave, Beauvoir’s nascent constructivism – her insistence that women’s character was a function of her situation and not her essence (biological, metaphysical, or otherwise) – forms the bedrock of most accounts of Beauvoir’s legacy in feminist philosophy. Her existentialist commitments to the idea that subjectivity was a becoming both anticipated and generated later feminist accounts that championed the idea that gender identity is a cultural construct and not a static metaphysical truism. Less often acknowledged has been Beauvoir’s fidelity to Marxism, and particularly her Marxist materialism. In her essay “Beauvoir and the Marxism question,” feminist philosopher Sonia Kruks (2017) reminds readers of the importance of Beauvoir’s Marxism in shaping her feminist commitments. Beauvoir affirms socialism as a regulative ideal across all of her work; it represented, for her, the political system that stood the best chance of realizing the existentialist ideal of freedom for all. Beauvoir’s Marxist commitments are borne out with particular force in her criticisms of the exploitative and oppressive inequities that capitalism both justifies and demands, no less than in her conviction that colonialism was a particularly insidious form of capitalism. More broadly, Beauvoir inherited from Marxism a preoccupation with the material conditions that constituted situations of oppression. Kruks notes that Beauvoir’s Marxism was so deeply embedded in her philosophical worldview that she took it for granted and was shocked at the hostile response to The Second Sex on the part of communists. Kruks also suggests that the Anglophone (and particularly American) hostility to Marxism in the wake of the Second World War motivated a selective reading of The Second Sex that downplayed or entirely ignored its Marxist underpinnings; this in spite of the fact that the text clearly ends with the claim that women would attain liberation when the Marxist ideal of material equity had been realized.

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Beauvoir’s conviction that woman is subordinated as the Other of man was taken up by the generation of “French feminists” who followed in her wake. Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Michèle Le Dœuff are united in their affirmation of Beauvoir’s description of woman as the Other: “She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, which he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (Beauvoir 2009 [1949]: 6.) While each of these thinkers affirms the veracity of Beauvoir’s claim that woman is the Other, they disagree with her conviction that women’s subordination could be remedied by espousing a Marxist or socialist politics wherein women’s liberation would result from economic or material parity between the sexes. The later generation of French feminists was more interested in the symbolic violence that was enacted in the reduction of women to the other, and in the attendant denigration of those figures that are associated with femininity, such as matter, the body, flesh, emotion, care, and maternity (to name a few in an incomplete enumeration). Where Beauvoir occasionally suggests that women must fight for equality, the French feminists who followed in her wake instead argued that sexism will not be overcome without a valorization of sexual difference, and that this valorization would occur in the realms of culture and aesthetics. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Luce Irigaray argues that the problem of sexual difference is at least in part a problem of representation. If women are thought of as men’s equal, or conversely as their opposite, they are in either case only understood in relation to the masculine other. Irigaray’s claim is that women have yet to be thought or represented in their sexed specificity. The issue with this symbolic erasure is in Irigaray’s eyes a matter for ethics. Until women are thought of in their specificity and difference, there can be no true relationship between the sexes – no ethic of sexual difference. For, as long as women are understood in a relation of either subordination or equality with men, their sexed specificity remains veiled. Irigaray’s corpus is emblematic of French feminism more generally in that it is concerned with women’s specific relationship to the body and to language, relationships she feels are yet to be truly represented or even rendered intelligible. Two threads of Irigaray’s project are particularly germane to a discussion of the relationship between materialism and feminism: first, Irigaray’s attention to the conflation of femininity, materiality, and elementality, and second, her Marxist-materialist analysis of the exchange of women as commodities. While Irigaray’s larger preoccupation is with the ethical and political consequence of the failure of Western cultural institutions to adequately represent and recognize women, this focus is bound to her interest in the bond between the feminine, the maternal, the natural, and the material – figures that are

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subordinated and subjected to erasure in the Western philosophical canon on her account. In her engagements with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel, Irigaray explores the exploitative ontologies that nominate certain figures as intelligible and real even as others are made to serve as the invisible and unacknowledged ground of this intelligibility. In her engagement with Heidegger, for instance, Irigaray argues that Heidegger’s description of being as a gift obscures the fact that “prior to the gift of appropriation, there is the gift of she who offers herself for this move” – a given materiality that is at once intimate with yet distant from the representation of Being that it enables (Irigaray 1999: 136). As a feminist, it is the coding of matter and nature as feminine – and their collective invisibility and appropriation – that is of most interest to Irigaray. In her essay “Women on the market” from This Sex Which Is Not One (1985), Irigaray poses the question as to why men are not exchanged among women as women are among men. She concludes that “it is because women’s bodies – through their use, consumption, and circulation – provide for the condition of making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown ‘infrastructure’ of the elaboration of that social life and culture” (Irigaray 1985: 172). The exchange and circulation of women requires the splitting of women – by virtue of their commodification – into two bodies: her “natural” body and her socially valued, exchangeable body, which is a mimetic expression of masculine values (180). Irigaray is particularly interested in the exchange of women as brides, virgins, and prostitutes, and in the centrality of this exchange to the establishment and maintenance of the cultural order. These Irigarayan arguments are typical of the tradition of French feminism insofar as these thinkers aim to reveal not only the symbolic and cultural stakes of the subordination of women but also the consequence of the entrenched association of women with matter and nature, an association that subordinates women and renders them available for exploitation. CORPOREAL FEMINISM AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

Drawing on the poststructuralist philosophers who rose to prominence in France in the 1960s – particularly Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault (see May, this volume) – poststructuralist feminists narrowed the broader materialist lens of Marxism to a more localized focus on the body. The 1990s saw the publication of a number of important books on feminist theories of the body in Anglophone feminism, including Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993), Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1994), and Moira Gatens’s Imaginary Bodies (1996). These texts contributed to the movement of

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“corporeal feminism,” which explored the significance of sexed and gendered embodiment, utilizing resources from the phenomenological and existential traditions (see the chapters by Carman and Crowell, this volume). Corporeal feminism can be understood principally as a critique of Cartesian dualism and its attendant polarization of mind and body, reason and emotion. It is important that, while the philosophers in the tradition of corporeal feminism were concerned with the valorization of sexed and gendered narratives of embodiment, they collectively reject any recourse to sexual essentialism. In this regard corporeal feminism is a constructivist feminism, chiefly concerned with probing the cultural and historical situatedness of particular bodies and the impact of social mores on embodied experience. This feminist tradition is marked by a thoroughgoing refusal of the idea of a natural or essential sex that exists apart from language or culture. Hence corporeal feminism is widely understood as a constructivist strand of feminist philosophy that endorses an understanding of both sex and gender as cultural constructs, over and against their conception as “natural.” As Donna-Dale Marcano has noted, the ascendance of social constructivism in philosophical discourse on identity bore very different consequences for feminist theory and race theory. In “The difference that difference makes” (2010), Marcano persuasively argues that the feminist embrace of social constructivism was widely understood as enabling and opening various possibilities for the theorization of sex and gender. Social constructivism was seen as expanding and not limiting the possibilities for understanding the diversity of gendered experiences. Because it carried with it the implicit denunciation of metaphysical and natural essentialism, constructivism liberated sex and gender by acknowledging the multitude of ways in which they are historically and culturally instantiated and brought to life. The effect of constructivism on race theory, however, was quite different on Marcano’s account: “The discourse on the social construction of race” motivates “a discourse of poverty where the same strategies . . . result in impotence, conceptual barrenness, or a paucity of options” (Marcano 2010: 57). If the embrace of social constructivism liberated sex and gender from insidious metaphysical baggage, Marcano’s claim is that this same liberation from essentialism played out differently in race theory. There, social constructivism motivated the claim that race did not exist. In short, Marcano’s suggestion is that the rejection of essentialism was expansionist in regard to gender and eliminativist in regard to race. In the former case, the embrace of constructivism motivated the liberation and expansion of possibilities for gender; in the latter, it resulted in the indictment of the reality of race itself. In “Toward a phenomenology of race,” Linda Alcoff notes this irony:

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Thus, for all our critical innovations in understanding the vagaries of racist domination and the conceptual apparatus that yields racism, too many today remain stuck in the modernist paradox that race is determinant of a great deal of social reality, even while our scientists, policy-makers and philosophers would have us deny its existence. (Alcoff 1999: 16)

Among the most influential work on the social construction of gender has been Judith Butler’s performative account. Butler’s work rose to prominence with the publication of Gender Trouble in 1990. Drawing inspiration from Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, Butler’s account reads gender as the cumulative effect of performative acts iterated over time to produce the illusion of a coherent and stable sexed and gendered subject. Sex is materialized as bodily gestures sediment to produce the illusion of an abiding self. Butler’s account foregrounds the role of iteration and repetition in the construction of sexed and gendered identity. As gesture, act, and expression are iterated in time, they sediment to produce the retroactive effect of a stable sexed identity. Implicit in this account is a critique of both the metaphysics of substance and the sex/gender distinction. As metaphysical categories, “matter” and “substance” themselves materialize as the effect of iterative performances. This critique of the metaphysics of substance necessarily entails a critique of the sex/gender distinction, a distinction that loosely holds that sex is “natural” or biological while gender is culturally variable. Butler famously rejects this distinction. Sex is not a natural or metaphysical truism, overlaid by various and changing cultural interpretations of gender; instead, sex is itself the dramatic effect of specific culturally and historically located performances. In Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler argues that sex itself is materialized through the stylized repetition of gendered norms. The role of normative or compulsory heterosexuality in dictating the cultural standards of intelligibility for gendered performances plays a central role in Butler’s performative account. This account reveals that there is no true fidelity to “nature” or necessity for those gendered performances that fall in line with the norms endorsed by compulsory heterosexuality. Indeed, their privileged status is itself revealed to be a construct. The fact that heterosexuality is understood as “compulsory” gestures toward another important dimension of Butler’s work, namely, her attentiveness to the threat of violence faced by those whose gender is deemed unfaithful, unacceptable, or unintelligible. Indeed, Butler stresses that gender is consistently performed under duress; the threat of punishment haunts those whose genders upset expectation. Butler’s performative account recognizes the ontological machinations at work in the recognition and privileging of particular genders even as others are abjected and rendered

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unintelligible. This mechanism of abjection is described by Butler as a species of normative violence that interacts with material violence in meaningful ways. NORMATIVE VIOLENCE AND RECOGNITION

Normative violence has been a thematic touchstone across Butler’s corpus, though it has assumed different forms over time. While her early work concerns the sexed body and its relation to gender, her later work broadens to consider the category of the human. Butler claims that there is a constitutive and ontological availability to recognition (or the lack thereof ) that defines a human life. She theorizes this availability in terms of a constitutive vulnerability that defines the human, a vulnerability that is at once normative and corporeal, symbolic and material. Availability to misrecognition, or to the complete denial of recognition, is connected to the availability of all subjects to normative violence, or the violence that social norms enact as they confer recognition and power on some but not all. Here norms appear as violent to the degree that they operate to mobilize various paradigms of (mis)recognition. Necessarily, these paradigms are to some degree paradigms of inclusion and exclusion, nominating some identities as intelligible while relegating others to the margins. This normative violence is linked to the possibility of concrete, material violence to the extent that social recognition in turn entails concrete protection and privilege. Despite their intertwining, it is clear that normative and material violence are not related by any simple causal or analogical narrative. On Butler’s account, they are co-constitutive but irreducible to each other; neither is perfectly adequate to account for the other. What is clear is that Butler believes that addressing concrete and material inequities involves thinking through the exclusionary mechanism of recognition and the role of ontology in these exclusions. As Butler explains in an interview: To conceive of bodies differently seems to me part of the conceptual and philosophical struggle that feminism involves, and it can relate to questions of survival as well. The abjection of different kinds of bodies, their inadmissibility to codes of intelligibility, does make itself known in politics and policy, and to live as such a body in the world is to live in the shadowy regions of ontology. I’m enraged by the ontological claims that codes of legitimacy make on bodies in the world, and I try, when I can, to imagine against that. (Butler 1998: 277)

The tension between the recognition conferred through and by ontological categories and the necessary redistribution of material resources lies at the center of Nancy Fraser’s analysis in Justice Interruptus (1997). As a critical theorist working in the Marxist tradition, Fraser argues that philosophical discussions of recognition have become unhinged from considerations of material inequity.

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“In these ‘postsocialist’ conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization. Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle” (Fraser 1997: 11). Contesting the “postsocialist” presumptions of many theories of recognition, Fraser returns focus to the fact that struggles for recognition occur in a climate of exaggerated material inequality. She develops an identitarian taxonomy wherein race and gender are described as “paradigmatic bivalent collectivities,” meaning gendered and raced groups “suffer injustices that are traceable to both political economy and culture simultaneously” (19). It follows that addressing racism and sexism will involve the bivalent strategy of both recognition and redistribution. But this is not so easy, as Fraser notes, because strategies of redistribution aim at minimizing differences between groups (differences marked as inequities) whereas recognition aims at valorizing differences. Hence the ends of recognition and redistribution pull against each other, with one aiming at the celebration of difference and the other at its diminution. In the context of this analysis, however, Fraser argues: Sexuality in this conception is a mode of social differentiation whose roots do not lie in the political economy because homosexuals are distributed throughout the entire class structure of capitalist society, occupy no distinct position in the division of labor, and do not constitute an exploited class. Rather, their mode of collectivity is that of a despised sexuality, rooted in the cultural-valuational structure of society. From this perspective the injustice they suffer is quintessentially a matter of recognition. (1997: 18)

This description of homosexuality understands homophobia as an injustice that is largely cultural or symbolic, rooted in social patterns of representation and interpretation (1997: 14). To render homophobia as “quintessentially a matter of recognition” presents a dilemma, as Butler (1997) notes in “Merely cultural,” her rebuttal of Fraser’s analysis. Here Butler suggests that Fraser ignores the economic and material edges of homophobia, particularly the exclusion of lesbians and gays from the state-sanctioned notion of the family, an exclusion that manifests itself in economic, all-too-material terms, terms that are never “merely cultural” (Butler 1997: 41).

9/ 11 A N D NE W F E M I N I S T P H I L O S O P H I E S OF VULNERABILITY

The events of September 11, 2001 changed the landscape of feminist theory and motivated an amplified interest in the themes of violence and vulnerability. In

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the early twenty-first century, a number of feminists, including Debra Bergoffen, Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Rosalyn Diprose, and Kelly Oliver published material that critiques the individualism and autonomy of the late modern subject through an appeal to figures such as vulnerability, generosity, witnessing, and dispossession. Bergoffen argued for a new conception of politics that favors vulnerability over autonomy as the basis for personhood in international human rights law (Bergoffen 2001). Diprose considered the various ways in which political liberalism and other contractarian political models neglect a mutual availability, a “corporeal generosity,” which constitutes the subject (Diprose 2002). Similarly, in Women as Weapons of War, Oliver (2008) argued that ethics should be reframed to foreground the fundamental interdependence and mutual vulnerability of all human beings. And Butler inquired: “What politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself?” (2004: 29). Considerations of embodiment could surely be credited with governing the evolution of feminist theory in some sense. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, the debate over essentialism and social constructionism took center-stage in feminist theory. As a consequence, the nature/culture binary was the prevailing object of concern. If critical engagement with the nature/culture binary informed discourse on the social construction of the body for the last decades of the twentieth century, after 9/11 the body is figured in light of a different binary, that of vulnerability and aggression. The focus on the body in feminist philosophy has never diminished, but the “body” being theorized has changed. The events of 9/11 forced a reckoning with how the experiential realities of vulnerability might motivate retributively charged acts of aggression and violence. This dynamic was observed at the level of both the body proper and the body politic (or nation-state). A critical feminist response was to critique these instances of retributive violence via a critical ontology of vulnerability that highlighted the necessary and intractable ways in which all beings are vulnerable to each other. Hence, while feminist theorists continue to embrace the importance of claims to bodily integrity, they also acknowledge that there must be another aspiration that sits alongside these claims to autonomy and selfdetermination. Claims to autonomy and integrity must be coincident with the recognition that we are radically dependent on others for the formation and persistence of our social selves. As Butler notes in Precarious Life (2004): The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. (Butler 2004: 26)

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In this sense, the resurrection of the theme of vulnerability in recent feminist theory marks a departure from the manner in which that motif has been deployed in the past, where women’s exaggerated vulnerability to violence and oppression took center-stage. Indeed, the “feminist contentions” of the 1990s were grounded in debates concerning which type of theory would best address women as subjects vulnerable to all manner of violence: symbolic, linguistic, sexual, psychical, and concrete. In this context, post-9/11 theorizing of vulnerability is remarkable not least because it emerges in a tradition of feminist thinking that has at times taken the ideal of bodily integrity to be an almost sacrosanct and inviolable political aim. Feminists have always taken the address and amelioration of women’s embodied vulnerability to various types of violence as one of their guiding aims. This concern is evident in the rhetoric of “wholeness” and integrity that informs feminist discourses on recovery from rape and sexual assault (Cahill 2001). Hence the contemporary interest in dispossession and vulnerability in feminist philosophy signals an important shift in feminist thinking on the matter. In their introduction to Feminist Philosophies of Life (2016), Hasana Sharp and Chloë Taylor argue that the consideration of vulnerability should expand to include non-human forms of life – other animals in particular. Noting that incarnation and the requisite vulnerability and interdependence that accompany it are hardly specific to human being, they urge recognition of the dangers that come when discourses on vulnerability revolve in too tight an orbit around the human alone. This consideration of vulnerability, both human and non-human, has motivated a recent resurgence of interest in materialism. Partly in response to the dominion of social constructivism over the latter decades of the twentieth century – and hence to the worry that both matter and reality had receded from view – the emerging school of “new feminist materialists” are engaged in a project of renaturalizing feminist theory through an investigation of ontological and metaphysical claims about nature that were too quickly left behind. The work of Karen Barad (2007) and Elizabeth Grosz (2017) in particular has inspired a new generation of feminists who are engaging anew in projects that seek to give voice to new elaborations of nature and life.

32 PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE to d d may

We might call the philosophical period in France ranging from the 1962 publication of Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy to Michel Foucault’s death in 1984 “the epoch of difference.” That period saw the publication of Deleuze’s 1968 Difference and Repetition, Jacques Derrida’s major 1967 and then 1972 works with the appearance of différance and related concepts, Emmanuel Levinas’s 1978 Otherwise than Being (Totality and Infinity was published in 1961, but its influence developed later), and Foucault’s work from the 1966 The Order of Things through the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality. This period also saw related works by Jean-François Lyotard (1988 [1983]), Jean Baudrillard (1994 [1981]), and perhaps the most well known of Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, 1983’s The Inoperative Community. Although the treatments of difference in these works are extraordinarily diverse, it is remarkable how deeply the major thinkers (with the possible exception of Foucault, whose relation to difference is more indirect) are concerned with the idea of difference and its role in constructing a philosophical position. And although I have, a bit arbitrarily, marked 1984 as the end of this “epoch,” its influence continues well beyond that date. One might wonder where the concern with difference arises. Why did this philosophical period find itself so taken with the concept and so concerned to articulate an approach adequate to conceiving it (which should be distinguished from merely categorizing it, an approach Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas all reject for similar reasons)? We might point to two independent but converging sources for the motivation to think difference, one philosophical and one political. The philosophical motivation stems most directly from the work of Martin Heidegger and, after Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, Nietzsche himself. Among Heidegger’s most influential interventions is his positing of the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings. “The Being of beings,” he writes in Being and Time, “is not itself a being. The first philosophical step in understanding the problem of Being consists in . . . not 427

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determining beings as beings by tracing them back in their origins to another being – as if Being had the character of a possible being” (Heidegger 1996 [1927]). For Heidegger, the history of Western philosophy is largely a history of the forgetting of Being. Instead of seeking to grasp Being, philosophy has become content to think beings, or better, it thinks Being in terms of beings. There is, in his view, an implicit approach to Being in Western philosophy, but this approach reduces Being to beings and so forgets to ask the question of Being itself, of Being as distinct from particular beings. By positing the ontological difference – that Being cannot be reduced to beings – Heidegger hopes to return thought to the question of Being that it has forgotten. To do so, however, requires that we think beyond the beings that are presented to us to something deeper, something that makes beings possible in the first place. Such a thought will need to critically deconstruct (as we will see) the categories bequeathed to us by Western thought, since those are the categories – one might also say the identities – through which Being has been forgotten. Nietzsche, in his turn, was largely rediscovered in France through Deleuze’s book. In general, it might be said without fear of contradiction that Nietzsche is an elusive thinker. His work, as history has shown, can be enlisted for varying and even incompatible purposes. The Nietzsche who was taken up in France during this period was the Nietzsche of the attack on what has come to be called the “metaphysical” tradition, that is, the philosophical tradition inasmuch as it privileges a strong subject/object distinction in which the subject occupies a certain pride of place as a knower. Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a thinker of forces rather than subjects opened the way to various “anti-metaphysical” appropriations of his thought, among them Derrida’s deconstructions of the idea of truth, as in Spurs, and Foucault’s reworking of the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals into his most influential book, Discipline and Punish. The political source for thinking difference stems from the experience of the Second World War, and in particular from the Holocaust. One approach to this experience would be to say that Nazism and fascism were both totalitarian in a particular way: they sought to eliminate difference in favor of identity. To be sure, there were particular identities that were to be favored. But nevertheless, the refusal to allow for differences, the attempt to create a single identity of whatever kind, is both an ethical offense against others and an ontological failure to recognize the constitutive role of differences in the structure of the world. Philosophy, then, in resisting totalitarianism, needs to resist the reduction to identity that underlay these totalitarian movements. There is an intersection between these philosophical and political motivations. On the one hand, the political motivations for resisting totalitarian thought are obvious, and the ways in which Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s

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thought were brought to bear suggested to the philosophers of difference a way to construct approaches to accomplish that. On the other hand, the focus on difference as a central concept in these forerunners (as well as others) was itself partly motivated by a search for an alternative to philosophical approaches that seemed to have contributed to the rise of totalitarian thought in the first place. In this sense, Heidegger and Nietzsche might be considered odd choices as sources of philosophical motivation, the former being an anti-Semite who was initially in league with the Nazis and the latter being appropriated by the Nazis as one of their master thinkers. However, regarding Heidegger, even his most critical heirs think that his involvement with Nazism is a betrayal (or at least a complication) rather than a proper expression of his thought;1 and with Nietzsche it should be borne in mind that the Nazi appropriation of his thought is, to put it mildly, controversial. With this background in mind, and before we turn to the specific treatments of difference, we should ask in a general way what binds them together. What, if anything, is common to the diverse approaches to difference that allows them to be gathered under a single philosophical umbrella? The broad idea might be put this way. In the philosophical tradition, particularly in the project of metaphysical foundationalism – that is, the project of giving secure foundations to knowledge, a project that perhaps found its culmination in the early twentieth-century work of Edmund Husserl – there is a privileging of identities. So what, then, are identities? Identities are things that can be identified, conceptualized in a categorical way. We might say that an identity has two characteristics: first, it is what it is and not something else; and second, what it is is something that can be understood through linguistic categories. Both characteristics are necessary if foundationalism has a hope of succeeding. Without the first, a philosophical view cannot fully capture what is out there, because what it is capturing is only part of something. Without the second, the language of capture falls short – it misses its object. (And here we can see how the subject/ object distinction works to combine the two: an object is an object for a subject that seeks to understand it through the categories of the subject’s language.) We might understand philosophies of difference as sharing a common commitment to the rejection of identities as foundational. For philosophies of difference, things are not quite what they are, at least in the sense of not quite having identities; and what it is that they are not quite cannot be categorized linguistically. This is why, for instance, Derrida says of différance that “it is neither a word nor a concept” (1973 [1967]: 130). Or, to put the point another way,

1

For example, see both Derrida 1989 [1987] and Jean-François Lyotard 1990 [1988].

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identities are grounded rather than grounding. Identities are the product of something more fundamental than any identity. What that more fundamental something is varies among the philosophical views we will canvass here, but we might bring them under the general rubric of difference. Difference, in some form or another, lies beneath or within identity, shaping it in a way that cannot be brought under the sway of linguistic categorization. We will look at the three most influential philosophies of difference – Deleuze’s, Derrida’s, and Levinas’s – before turning to the thought of Foucault, whose relation to philosophies of difference is a complex one. Finally, we will briefly canvass some more recent French philosophical views in order to see the continuing influence of the idea of difference. O NT O L O G I C A L DI F F E R E N C E : D E L E U Z E

In his major early philosophical statement – and what some, myself included, consider to be his most important work – Difference and Repetition, Deleuze insists that “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing” (1994 [1968]: 57). In order to make sense of this statement, we need to answer three questions. First, what is this “everything” behind which there is difference? Second, what is this difference that is behind everything? And finally, in what sense is difference “behind” everything? The answer to the first question is simple: the everything Deleuze is referring to here are identities, that is, particular things that are what they are and are not what they are not. So difference is behind identities. The second question is more difficult. What is this difference of which he speaks? One thing it cannot be is something that can be understood through a category. If it were, then it would be an identity and therefore not behind all identities. In order to get a feel for his answer, let me offer an example, that of the infant brain. The infant brain is undeveloped, but undeveloped in a particular way. It is not undeveloped in that there is a particular “personality” lying in wait that will emerge through the natural maturation of the brain. That is not how brains develop. Instead, they develop through the reinforcement of certain synaptic connections, connections that become sturdier as they are reinforced. As those connections are reinforced, often through habit, the myelin sheaths around them strengthen, and, to put the point overly simply, that is how you become you. This development implies two things. First, as just mentioned, there is no “you” lying in wait in your brain. The you that emerges could have been very different. But this is also not because there are many different “yous” there and your brain development picks one out. There are no “yous” there before the development itself. After all, where in the brain would they be?

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On the other hand, the infant brain is not a blank slate either. It cannot be developed into just anything. Try as one might, no habituation will mold the infant human mind into that of a seagull. In fact, my human mind could not have been molded into the personality of many other (currently existing) humans. So what are we to call the infant brain, which is not an identity, nor a set of potential identities merely awaiting a choice of habituation to bring one of them out, nor alternatively a blank slate? It is, Deleuze would argue, a field of difference (or differences). Over time, this field will be formed into a particular identity. However, and Deleuze insists on this, that formation does not eliminate the field of difference. The human brain, even when it is formed into a particular identity – a particular personality – carries with it its field of difference. With proper habituation, I might still become someone else. It is crucial to note, however, that the someone “elses” I might become after I have formed an identity are different from the “someones” I would have been capable of becoming before being habituated as an infant. Otherwise put, identities emerge out of the field of difference but, once formed, they affect that field of difference in their turn. There is not simply a field of difference that gives rise to an identity and then disappears. Nor is the field of difference a static one that remains unchanged as it lies coiled within the identity to which it gives rise. Rather, there is a dynamic relation between the identity and the field of difference that gives rise to it. Whatever something is, it can become something else. We do not know what else it can become, precisely because the field of difference is not an identity. But because that field is not a blank slate, we know it cannot become just anything; and because the field is inseparable from the identity to which it gives rise, it is structured and molded by that identity. What is true for infant brains is, in Deleuze’s view, true more generally. “Being,” he writes, “is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself” (Deleuze 1994 [1968]: 36). Difference gives rise to identities that contain and help structure the difference that gives rise to them. In Deleuze’s terms from Difference and Repetition, difference is virtual and the identities to which it gives rise are actual. And here we have the answer to our third question, in what sense difference is “behind” everything. It is the source of all identity, but a source that neither effaces itself before the identities to which it gives rise nor remains unchanged by those identities. To borrow a term from Deleuze’s major book on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, difference is “expressive.” Deleuze’s ontological view can thus be seen as a sort of process philosophy or as a type of vitalism (as long as we remove the biological sense of the latter term). These would not be mistaken views, and Deleuze himself did not reject them. What is more salient here, however, and this brings Deleuze close to Nietzsche,

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is that his is an ontological view in which the promise of creativity is never lost. There is always more than what appears, and beyond that, we can never know what that “more” might be.2 This means that living is – or at least can be – an experiment in creativity. We cannot exhaust the virtual, the field of difference, and yet we can always investigate in our living what we might become. Taking his cue from Spinoza, Deleuze writes, “We do not even know of what a body is capable” (1990 [1968]: 226.)

L I N G U I S T I C D I F F E R E N C E : DE R R I D A

Derrida is perhaps best known as the creative disseminator of the concept and practice of “deconstruction,” a concept he borrows from Heidegger’s Destruktion of Western metaphysics and uses for similar, although distinct, purposes. Among the philosophical terms that are misunderstood in contemporary parlance, deconstruction must rank near the top. It has nothing to do with destruction, nor is it simply a matter of taking something apart in an “analytic” sense. Rather, it is a calling attention to the way “our” linguistic world works, a way that underlies the Western philosophical tradition (which is why I put the term “our” in scare quotes) and so is woven into the fabric of the Western conceptual world. The kind of “calling attention” that deconstruction is can be characterized broadly as a showing, through a rigorous reading of various philosophical texts, that the attempt to find or establish transparent clarity of linguistic meaning involves an operation that is necessarily self-defeating. At a first go, we can say that philosophy attempts to give us access to the world directly through language, but deconstruction shows us that this attempt ultimately stymies itself. It does so not because words fail to reach the world but, instead, because of the structure of language itself. If we recall the twofold requirement for foundationalism given above – that things are what they are and not something else, and that what they are can be captured by linguistic categories – Derrida’s focus could be said to be primarily on the second, particularly in his early works. Later, in discussions of justice, hospitality, gift-giving, and democracy, he will extend deconstruction to the first requirement. (We will only have time to offer a quick word about those, and they are based on the linguistic approach Derrida develops earlier.) To begin to invoke Derrida’s terms here, philosophy seeks to render the world in its “full presence”; however, because of the structure of language, this 2

I discuss this idea at greater length in May 2005.

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presence necessarily involves an absence that is also constitutive of the presence, an absence that philosophy seeks to keep at bay but that insists upon returning. Deconstruction is the record of this interplay of presence and absence, an interplay that goes by different names across Derrida’s texts, one of which is différance. To understand deconstruction, then, requires us to understand the operation of différance across the philosophical tradition. Although Derrida bases his deconstructive conclusion on readings of specific philosophers, such as Husserl, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Plato, and others, I will try to offer a more general view here of the common operation he finds in play. For a foundationalist philosophy to work – a philosophy that gives us identities just as they are – the linguistic categories through which the identities are rendered must be in direct touch with the world. We might say that meaning must bring the world directly to us. Otherwise put, the mediation of language must not get in the way of our contact with the world. Linguistic meaning must shed its exterior clothing in order to bring us into immediate contact with that of which it speaks. As Derrida points out, however, linguistic meaning cannot shed its exterior clothing. This is the reason he insists on the importance of “writing” as a model for language in works such as 1967’s Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. If writing were simply the translation of thought into publicly recognizable symbols, then it would be derivative from that thought. But writing – or at least the public and repeatable character that we recognize in writing – does not only translate thought; it also helps constitute it. We should be clear here. Meaning is not reducible to writing; it is not reducible to the public character of symbols. There is an intention animating what one says when one speaks. What one means, then, is the product of an interaction (which Derrida sometimes refers to as an “economy”) between intention and public symbols, such that neither intention nor symbols can be separated from the other in spoken words. What is “present” to the speaker (the intention) and what is “absent” (the public character of language that allows it to be understood) are woven together in spoken speech. Each refers to the other, and meaning is a product of this referential feedback loop, this différance: Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be “present,” appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of a relation to a future element. (Derrida 1973[1967]: 142–3)

This differential characteristic of signification, and so of meaning, prevents the possibility of foundationalism, because the language in which identities are identified always can never be reduced to the intention to articulate them. In other words, one is never fully in control of what one seeks to mean. In fact, the

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very seeking to mean itself is caught up in the economy of différance. This lack of control over our own meaning undermines the possibility of foundationalism, which Derrida sees as contemporaneous with the history of Western philosophy. In his deconstruction of Husserl’s foundationalist ambitions in Speech and Phenomena, Derrida writes: “because it is just such a philosophy – which is, in fact, the philosophy and history of the West – which has so constituted and established the very concept of signs, the sign is from its origin and to the core of its sense marked by a will to derivation and effacement” (Derrida 1973 [1967]: 51) Deconstruction seeks to shatter the illusion that a signifier’s sheer derivation from and complete self-effacement before the signified is possible. We should note that this undermining of foundationalism is different from that of Deleuze. For Deleuze, there is something – difference – that underlies every identity and constitutes it through actualization. This is an ontological thesis, and one that also gives a certain primacy to difference. Derrida’s view is linguistic, but it also does not give primacy to difference in the way Deleuze does. Derrida’s différance is not Deleuze’s difference but, instead, the interplay between presence and absence – or, if we use Deleuzian terms, between identity and difference. Derridean presence is what is identical to itself; absence is what cannot be reduced to presence. Such absence is what, in foundationalist thought, presence seeks to ward off but that is always partially constitutive of it. Différance, then, is not simply Deleuze’s difference (as it might appear when Deleuze’s ontological orientation gets translated into a linguistic register); it has an altogether different structure. In his later work, Derrida carries deconstruction to areas outside the history of Western metaphysics. In Rogues, for instance, he seeks to show that to keep the concept of democracy alive without reducing it to one or another inadequate form, it must be conceived always as a “democracy-to-come,” a political arrangement that is anticipated and worked toward but never one that entirely comes to presence. Likewise, in The Politics of Friendship, he argues that the friend is never entirely distinct from the enemy.3 These discussions, and others like them, assume the same Derrida’s deconstructive view of language articulated in the earlier works, but seek to give it wider currency in the contemporary social and political arena. In this endeavor, Derrida periodically refers to another thinker whom he earlier deconstructed: Emmanuel Levinas.4

3 4

See Derrida 2005a [2003]; 1997 [1995]. Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas appears in “Violence and metaphysics: an essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Derrida 1978 [1967].

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E T H I C A L D I F F E R E N C E : E MM A N U E L L E V I N A S

Among the thinkers of his generation, Levinas stands out as the most rigorously ethical thinker, in the traditional sense: He is ceaselessly concerned with the role that ethics plays in our lives. It may be a bit misleading to call him an ethical thinker in contemporary parlance, however, and more precise to call him a “metaethical” thinker. For, his concern is not so much with the obligations we have toward others as with how we are constituted in such a way as to experience obligation in the first place. Levinas’s thought, particularly in his most famous work, Totality and Infinity (1961), is oriented through a critique of Heidegger’s thinking of Being. In Levinas’s view, the idea of a thought of Being is already mistaken because it assumes a certain enclosure that the ethical experience – the experience of the other – shows to be misplaced. (This guiding idea remains in the very title of his later Otherwise than Being.) What interests Levinas is the fact that the experience of the other is not simply an experience of something different from or outside of me. Rather, that experience of the other is also partially constitutive of who I am. I am not an enclosed self for whom the other is over there; I am, instead, a self riven by the other, internally incapable of closing myself off to the other. “Responsibility” (or the ability to respond to an other or before an other person), Levinas states in one of his interviews, “in fact is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if [subjectivity] already existed in itself, before the ethical relationship [to the other]. Subjectivity is not for itself; it is, once again, initially for another” (Levinas 1985: 96). Moreover, the other person exists in me (and even as me) in such a way that I cannot completely reduce him or her to any of the categories through which I account for my experience. The difference between being able to account for something meaningfully and the ethical experience of alterity (or what eludes all such accounts) is indicated in very the title of Totality and Infinity. “The idea of totality and the idea of infinity differ precisely in that the first is purely theoretical, while the second is moral [or ethical].”5 Totality brings things under a category; it comprehends them, makes sense of them in terms of what we already know. Infinity, by contrast, concerns that which always escapes such theoretical capture. To seek to reduce infinity to totality is, for Levinas, precisely the nature of violence. Failing to respect the other as other, such violence renders the other as though it were self. This attempted reduction of other to self, moreover, is paradoxical, since the experience of the other as other is partially constitutive of the self. 5

Levinas 1969 [1961]: 83. (Here Levinas does not distinguish “ethical” and “moral.”)

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How does Levinas think such a self-constituting experience of the infinite other occurs? In perhaps his most well-known claim, Levinas writes that this experience occurs through the “face” of the other: The face of the other in proximity, which is more than representation, is an unrepresentable trace, the way of the infinite. It is not because among beings there exists an ego, a particular being that is pursuing its ends, that being takes on signification and becomes a universe. It is because in an approach, there is inscribed or written the trace of infinity. (Levinas 1981[1974]: 116)

This idea, although formulated abstractly, should find some phenomenological resonance. It is difficult to commit violence to another whose face one is looking at. There is something about the face of another that is ethically disarming, which is why it is easier to act callously toward another when one is not looking at them, and why, in military training, one of the key goals is to train soldiers to overcome this natural tendency not to harm another who is facing one. Levinas suggests that this is because the face of another person points beyond itself, toward their world in its difference from our own, and so toward difference (or what Levinas calls “alterity,” otherness) itself. Levinas’s philosophical view, although initially articulated before both Deleuze’s and Derrida’s approaches to difference were developed, has aspects in common with them. As with Derrida, Levinas articulates a structure that is defined not solely by absence but, rather, by a play of presence and absence, self and other. In Levinas’s case this play is characteristic of the structure of oneself, whereas for Derrida’s early view it is a characteristic of linguistic meaning, but as Derrida later widens his own view it comes closer to that of Levinas. In consonance with Deleuze, Levinas intervenes at what Deleuze might call the ontological level. (Levinas rejects the idea of ontology, but only because he defines ontology in terms of being and being in terms of identity.) Although for Deleuze the self is an unfolding of difference while for Levinas it is an interplay of difference and identity, for both thinkers there is something about oneself (and for Deleuze about being more generally) that resists categorization or reduction to terms that allow it to be fully identified (a view both share with the later Heidegger, an influence Levinas especially does not like to admit).6

MICHEL FOUCAULT

The relation of Michel Foucault to these philosophers of difference (with whom he is often associated) is a complicated one. One of the reasons for this 6

On Levinas’s conceptual debts to Heidegger, see e.g. Thomson 2009a.

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is that, in some sense, Foucault is not a philosopher. If one reads his work from the perspective of traditional disciplinary boundaries, he appears to be a historian. He seems primarily concerned to recount the historical emergence of certain phenomena, such as “unreason” in the History of Madness (1961), the “modern soul” in Discipline and Punish (1975), or “sexuality” in the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1976). Why, then, is he so often considered a philosopher, and why consider him specifically in an essay on philosophies of difference? In answer to the first question, the critical histories Foucault undertakes, whether they are the early archaeologies, the mid-career genealogies, or the later ethical works, are dedicated to unsettling our ways of thinking about ourselves and our world.7 They are meant to unsettle our thinking in a specific way, by showing that what appear to be natural or inescapable categories that can ground our thought are actually contingent historical emergences. In this way, Foucault has an affinity with the other deconstructive thinkers of difference we have already considered here, but with an important difference. Although Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas seek to undermine identity as a permanent or grounding concept, Foucault is interested in undermining specific identities. Moreover, this undermining is done not by positing something deeper than identity (as with Deleuze), or by showing the role of difference in constituting identity (as with Derrida), or by weaving the place of other into the fabric of the self (as with Levinas) but, instead, by showing the historical character of what seem to be permanent identities. If philosophy pretends to offer us a ground for our thinking, then displaying the historical character of its grounding concepts challenges that pretension. Implicit in the answer to the first question is the answer to the second. If Foucault is not a philosopher of difference because he is not a philosopher in the traditional sense, his work nevertheless, alongside that of his French contemporaries, serves to challenge the necessity of particular identities by revealing their historical contingency, thereby opening up the conceptual space for thinking and ultimately acting differently. In an interview, he once said, There’s an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn’t be better. My optimism would consist rather in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints.8 7 8

On the philosophical motivations for Foucault’s methodological shift from an archaeological to a genealogical method, see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982. Michel Foucault, “So is it important to think?” in Foucault 2000: 458.

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In order to see this historical approach at work, let us briefly consider his most famous work, Discipline and Punish. The subtitle of Discipline and Punish is The Birth of the Prison. However, it is not the prison as such that interests Foucault. Rather, it is the prison as the birthplace of “discipline” as a process of “normalization.” Earlier punishment, particular in France, occurred often by means of torture (Foucault uses the French term supplice). Those convicted of criminal activity were physically abused, often mercilessly, both as a retributive measure and as a lesson about the power of the sovereign. There were many problems associated with torture, however, problems that were exacerbated through the emergence of early precapitalist economic systems, for which it was more important to prevent smaller property crimes than crimes of violence. In response to this and other factors (Foucault always opposed reducing history to Marxist class conflict), a new form of punishment was eventually devised. Foucault shows how his new form of punishment borrowed from various sources – monasteries, hospitals, even the Prussian military – and was the result not of a concerted plan but rather of historical contingencies. (Foucault opposed his histories to all those histories that sought to display the human trajectory as a movement of progress from worse to better or even to display any necessary movement underlying history.) This new form of punishment is what he calls “discipline.” Discipline, in contrast to torture, was a rehabilitative project rather than a retributive one. It sought to mold those who were subject to punishment in such a way as to make them function more adequately in their social world. Otherwise put, it sought to make them more “normal.” This required manipulating their bodies in ways that would induce the appropriate habits, monitoring and surveilling them to ensure those habits were developed, examining them to assess their progress, and ultimately inculcating them in such a way as to ensure that they monitored themselves. Moreover, it required new forms of knowledge, in particular forms of knowledge that would set proper norms for behavior and analyze the ways in which people might deviate from those norms. All this was the project of normalization. Psychology and its related human sciences find their roots – particularly as they concern the normal and the abnormal – in the penal project of discipline, before being spread out to the population more generally through schools, social work, parole officers, human resource departments, and so on. Here we can see Foucault’s famous concept of “power/knowledge” at work. Power/knowledge is not, as one might be tempted to think, a simple reduction of knowledge to relations of power. That is an idea Foucault explicitly rejected. For Foucault, power/knowledge is not merely ideology in the traditional Marxist sense, where claims of knowledge serve only to hide the real social relations in

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play. Instead, power/knowledge refers to the idea that knowledge arises within practices that are shaped by power relations and, in turn, that knowledge shapes the way power operates in those practices. For Foucault, then, power (what he sometimes calls “modern power”) is not simply a matter of suppression; it is also a matter of creation. People are created to be the kinds of persons they are within the context of practices that mold them, partly through the kinds of knowledge that are created about them. These creations, even when they appear to reflect fundamental “anthropological constraints,” are in fact historically contingent. We can be otherwise than the identities we currently inhabit (a point we saw articulated earlier in a more ontological vein by Deleuze). LATER DEVELOPMENTS: NANCY, BADIOU, RANCIÈRE

Although the heyday of philosophies of difference had ended by the mid-1980s, its influence continued in France as well as in those areas of philosophy influenced by the thought of Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, and Foucault. Of course, these philosophers (with the exception of Foucault, who died in 1984) continued to write. Moreover, those who were their philosophical heirs and interlocutors after the “epoch of difference” show the influence of this period in their thought. We will look briefly at three important examples here: Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière. Nancy’s early work is, in fact, contemporaneous with that of the “epoch of difference.” His first book, on Hegel, was published in 1973, six years after the appearance of Derrida’s three early major works, Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology. The influence of Derrida on his philosophical views is manifest. He operates with a method that could broadly be called deconstructive, showing the intertwining of what appear to be exclusive concepts in grounding the realities upon which he is reflecting. For instance, in speaking of the nature of community in The Inoperative Community, Nancy articulates his idea that “community” is neither the coming together of separate individuals nor a fusion into a single being but, instead, a sharing (partage in French, which has the connotation both of sharing in and sharing out) that is reducible to neither the individual nor the group. In community, then, “singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others; other for one another, and other, infinitely other for the Subject of their fusion, which is engulfed in the sharing” (Nancy 1991 [1985–86]: 25). This description of community as an emergent group that shapes its constitutive members – in a dynamic feedback loop in which both the identity of the group and its members both defy full comprehension – displays a now familiar refusal of categorizable identities in

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favor of a movement of thought that, like much of Nancy’s work, has clear affinities with Derridean deconstruction. Badiou and Rancière stand more clearly outside of the camp of philosophers of difference, although Rancière has acknowledged a debt to Foucault. But their work too, in different ways, often focuses on the appearance of marginalized groups or populations. For his part, Badiou adapts mathematical models to frame his thought. For instance, Being and Event (from 1988), his most famous work, is steeped in set theory. To put the matter schematically, the state attempts to carve out a collection of identities (subsets) from the infinite multiplicity of the elements that compose the social world, such that every element would be included in the state in the form of a “re-presentation.” For set theoretical reasons, however, Badiou thinks that such a carving out of identities will always leave something out: there will always be marginalized populations. When those populations make themselves appear in the state that has not recognized them, a political “event” has occurred. (Badiou often uses the example of undocumented workers demonstrating for recognition by a society or a state.) That event shows something that is beyond the identities recognized by the state. Rancière is focused more on achieving equality than on the mere appearance of marginalized groups in an event (although Badiou himself insists that such appearances in a political event imply equality). In his major political text, Disagreement, Rancière writes: political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. (Ranciére 1999[1995]: 30)

For Rancière, political orders – what he often calls “the police” – are hierarchical; they function on the basis of the presupposition of inequality. When a group that has been presumed less than equal, whether it be undocumented workers, marginalized racial groups, women, LGBTQ, or whoever, collectively act in such a way as to imply its equality, that is “politics” as Rancière conceives of it. Like Badiou, Rancière focuses on the political insistence of a group that has been left out of full participation in the political (or “police”) order. But while Badiou focuses on appearance, and thus on the undermining of a particular identity by something that has been left outside of it, Rancière’s concern is more with an equality that continues to be effectively denied by the order in which one finds oneself. This might seem to be less of a matter of challenging

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identities (as with the other philosophers of difference), but Rancière insists that collective action on the basis of equality occurs not in the name of creating an alternative identity but, instead, in the name of a “disidentification.” As he writes, “The essence of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it with the controversial figures of division” (Rancière 1995 [1992]: 32–3). The philosophical approaches of Nancy, Badiou, and Rancière, then, while not drawing centrally on concepts of difference like the other philosophies of difference examined in this chapter, nevertheless clearly inherit the legacy of those philosophies and see their concerns reflected in their own work.

section six CONTINENTAL MORAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

33 THE CONCEPT OF AUTONOMY IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL b r i an o ’ c o n n o r

An interest in the meaning and actuality of autonomy is fundamental to the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Across its history, from the 1930s to the present, members of the Frankfurt School have construed autonomy variously, and sometimes simultaneously, as an ideological delusion, as a lost possibility, as desirable yet utopian, and as the realizable objective of emancipating social theory. The complex variety of ways in which these characterizations have been reworked, revised, and abandoned have contributed more than anything else to the development of Frankfurt School theory. That development has seen autonomy move from a position of ambivalent significance to one where it now holds a fully positive value. It would be parochial to think that the arrival at this positive view of autonomy can be explained exclusively as a dynamic process generated by Frankfurt School thinkers themselves. The idea of autonomy has been substantially developed by other theorists – notably within feminism and twentiethcentury liberalism – whose interests have impacted upon political and social theory generally. Nevertheless, as we shall see, revisions within the Frankfurt School’s notion of autonomy are ostensibly motivated by reactions to its own problematic conceptual legacy. This chapter will outline those developments with reference to the works of the School’s key theorists, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) and Axel Honneth (b. 1949). FOUNDATIONAL THESES

In the 1930s, Horkheimer, in his role as director of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, set out, in a number of papers, the scope and methodological innovations he hoped would define the character of what he labeled “critical theory.” He resiles from the orthodox Marxist suspicion of philosophical and speculative styles of social interpretation. A new approach, influenced by Marx’s Hegelian conception of history and society (in which supposedly isolated social 445

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phenomena are understood to be determined by the fundamental interests of society itself ) is proposed. This new approach rejects theories based on the notion that social phenomena are – as Horkheimer puts it in “The present situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an Institute for Social Research” (1931) – “projections of the autonomous person” (Horkheimer 1993: 2). Kant’s idea of “the closed unity of the rational subject” is identified as the source of this key error (2). This charge contains the essence of Horkheimer’s various claims against the philosophical conception of autonomy in this period. First of all, for Horkheimer the autonomous subject is not to be understood as a basic fact. It is, rather, the product of social forces. Second, since this subject is produced by those forces, autonomy is limited to the purpose of reproducing society. In the essay “The problem of truth” (1935), for example, Horkheimer observes that because autonomy “is completely subordinated to the effort to hold together mechanically a dissolving order,” it has nothing to contribute to the possibility of individual self-realization (178). Third, Horkheimer does, however, hint that autonomy in some non-technical sense is an enduring good. No account of what that kind of autonomy might involve is offered, nor any explanation of how some better autonomy could be free of the very social influences critical theory sets out to reveal. But Horkheimer effectively acknowledges that the critique of society has something to do with emancipation which, at the level of individual experience, involves a concern for what he calls autonomy (in implied preference to freedom or liberty). Horkheimer positively contrasts the quality of autonomy, again in a nontechnical sense, with a fashionable philosophical irrationalism. This irrationalism demanded some sort of premodern submission to authority, a submission conceived, perversely, as the highest freedom, indeed as some kind of supreme exercise of autonomy. In “The rationalism debate in contemporary philosophy” (1934), Horkheimer criticizes the philosophical “glorification of the dutyconscious but simultaneously autonomous person” (222). In this discussion he is anxious to expose the tendencies of conservative thinkers to reduce freedom to “service” and “obedience” (222). While he shares their view that the bourgeois subject is an overblown representation of freedom, he departs from the solution the conservatives offered because it seems merely to validate dependence, thereby voiding autonomy of its very meaning. Marcuse’s work of this period, like Horkheimer’s, invokes the notion of autonomy to oppose the irrationalism of what Marcuse interprets as reactionary ideology. In “The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state” (1934), Marcuse claims that in “the new Weltanschauung [or worldview], mythical, prehistorical nature has the function of serving as the real adversary of responsible, autonomous, rational practice” (Marcuse 1972: 6). Unlike

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Horkheimer, though, Marcuse is prepared to offer qualified support to the Kantian model of autonomy. One route to freedom from the overbearing state, Marcuse suggests, is offered by “existentialism (here in agreement with Kant),” which has “celebrated the autonomous self-giving of duty as the real dignity of man” (38). The central value of autonomy is found in its insistence that freedom involves “self-authorization” rather than the coercive authority of the collective (38–9). The Kantian model, nonetheless, is limited by its endorsement of rational self-determination only. This limitation is to be opposed by a more holistic view of the actual experience of freedom. In “The concept of essence” (1936), Marcuse explains that “when man is conceived to be free only as a rational being, whole dimensions of existence become ‘inessential,’ of no bearing on man’s essence” (80). He claims, controversially, that among Kant’s supposed inessentials is “being master or servant,” and hence that the Kantian perspective is oblivious to the actual social conditions within which supposedly autonomous individuals live (80). More conventionally – the thought is found among the earliest, romantically minded critics of Kant – Marcuse suggests that autonomy needs to include a broader conception of the individual “as the creator of a better and happier life” and not simply as a rational agent (81). This line of thinking is extended in “On hedonism” (1938), in which Marcuse notes the limitations of the rationalist model in undergirding the possibilities of happiness (Marcuse 1972). That model declares that pleasure is heteronomous – that is, not consistent with rationally based freedom – thereby leading to a dualized conception of human beings, in which we act either according to inner reason, and are thereby autonomous, or according to pleasure, thereby somehow committing ourselves to a kind of nature-driven determinism. During the 1930s, the persecutory policies of the Nazi regime forced the principal figures associated with the Institute for Social Research to choose exile. Horkheimer managed to reconstitute a version of the Institute in the United States, eventually returning to Germany, together with Adorno, several years after the end of the war. The phenomena of fascism and anti-Semitism became prominent in its research agenda during those years of exile. It is not obvious, though, that the wide-ranging and often original investigations of these historically pressing experiences of exile radically affected the fundamental concepts of the School at that time. In various ways, those exilic phenomena were, on the contrary, explained as either the direct or indirect product of capitalism’s autonomy enfeebling influences. The ambivalent view of autonomy in place since the inception of critical theory – though evidently weighing more heavily on the side of criticism rather than endorsement – took systematic form in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the monumental work of the Frankfurt School, first published privately in

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1944 and then formally in 1947. Its authors, Horkheimer and Adorno, maintain that the very freedom celebrated by autonomy – freedom to act for oneself – is the freedom required by bourgeois society. At the same time, it is through that freedom alone that we gain our sense of freedom. The very consciousness of freedom within society is itself a product of society. This is the petitio principii (that is, the question-begging fallacy) of social freedom: “In the autonomy and uniqueness of the individual, the resistance to the blind, repressive power of the irrational whole was crystallized. But that resistance was made historically possible only by the blindness and irrationality of the autonomous and unique individual” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1946]: xvi, 200.) Curiously little account of possible resistance is offered, however, leaving readers to conclude that autonomy is a thoroughly compromised ideal. Indeed, Max Weber’s theory of the disenchantment of nature through instrumental rationalization is applied by Horkheimer and Adorno to the very notion of autonomy itself (see also Young, this volume). Instrumental rationality is interpreted as the key enabling feature of modern societies. Autonomy, Horkheimer and Adorno contend, also rests on that form of rationality. In this way, autonomy is aimed against our expressive and untrammeled capacities and is geared instead toward a socially required self-regulation. It is thereby antagonistic to its consciously intended ends – freedom – because it is merely the exercise of constraint through the instrumental manipulation of our own natural being. In this line of interpretation, Horkheimer and Adorno take a narrowly historical approach, viewing the alleged reality of autonomy strictly in its context and not with regards to its possibilities. Autonomy is explained as nothing more than a function of the rationality of the social totality, and the social totality is understood as a closed system which tightly determines the norms of individuals within it. Dialectic of Enlightenment pushes the contextualist reading of autonomy to its extreme, leaving little sense that autonomy might be a possibility that could be understood independently of existing social norms. Horkheimer’s text from this period, Eclipse of Reason (1947), laments the weakening of autonomy by social forces, but it quietly recedes from a fully contextualist approach. There is little by way of a positive theory of what autonomy could mean. Nevertheless, Horkheimer makes the claim that “Socrates . . . was the true herald of the abstract idea of individuality, the first to affirm explicitly the autonomy of the individual . . . the universal was now conceived as an inner, almost selfauthenticating truth, lodged in man’s spirit” (Horkheimer 1974: 91). What is not explained is whether or how a Socratic standpoint could be a possibility for human beings in the age of the overbearing social totality. Somehow, though, it is not, it seems, fantastical or naïve to consider autonomy an important ideal.

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Horkheimer claims, for instance, that “at this very moment everything depends upon the right use of man’s autonomy” without any particular consideration of the so-called petitio principii of social freedom (110). Autonomy could not perhaps be abandoned, but no viable account seemed to be either available or permissible within the commitments of critical theory at this time. UTOPIAN ALTERNATIVES

An unlikely source for innovation was identified by Marcuse in the Freudian theory of ego formation. Freudian theory is more likely to be seen as hostile to the classical notion of autonomy. It exposes the repressive influence of the ego in maintaining the self-control that is central to the idea of rational selfdetermination. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, effectively exhaust the very notion of autonomy through their contextualist approach, Marcuse, by contrast, construes autonomy as a human capacity which has some kind of conceivable reality that is independent of social arrangements and historical processes. In a preface (1966) published in a later edition of Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse acknowledges the entanglement of autonomy within the web of capitalism and modern rationalization but also posits the possibility of a liberation that owes nothing to those forces. There is, in other words, a way past the petitio principii. Marcuse suggests that the desire for resistance from societally generated needs was founded in “the ‘asocial’ autonomous Eros” and is not therefore a product of society itself (Marcuse 1966: xiv). Eros and Civilization explores the processes which suborn freedom to what is nothing more than a socially determined version of autonomy. Thanks to Freud, Marcuse notes, “the strongest ideological fortifications of modern culture – namely, the notion of the autonomous individual” – could be revealed as a socially determined construction (57). Understanding that construction, however, also offers the possibility of its reversal, that is, of liberation. A challenging feature of Marcuse’s position is the connection it makes between liberation and what he calls elsewhere “the dangerous autonomy of the individual under the Pleasure Principle” (Marcuse 2011: 120). This notion of autonomy has the philosophical advantage of identifying a source of a kind of ineradicable freedom: the organism’s origins in that pleasure principle. But it also places the concept within a utopian sphere where it is barely recognizable. The attractions of autonomy in the conventional sense – no matter how ideological that sense might be shown to be – consist in its concrete view of the capacity of individuals to make choices that enhance their scope for action in the world. The freedom associated with the pleasure principle, by comparison, might seem to push those concrete considerations far from view.

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That psychoanalytically explained image of autonomy is curtailed in Marcuse’s 1964 work, One-Dimensional Man, where a concept of autonomy more familiar from the liberal humanist tradition is emphasized. As in Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man holds that the apparatus of production and the all-consuming imperatives of work overwhelm freedom. Without those societal pressures, he maintains, the “individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own” (Marcuse 1991 [1964]: 5). Liberation from these conditions is to be found in radical politics (less, here, in psychoanalytic psychology). With a changed model of production in place, lives no longer distorted by false needs and competition would become possible. Contrary to the capitalist thesis that freedom is threatened by state centralization, Marcuse’s position is that “such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible” (5) by returning us to a space in which experience we make for ourselves and on our own terms could be imagined. For Marcuse: “The attainment of autonomy . . . demands repression of the heteronomous needs and satisfactions which organize life in this society” (250). The transformation of society itself would not have purely structural implications. It would also involve a new experience of autonomy, thanks to release from those behavioral norms, embedded in personality, that are required by capitalism and its attendant institutions. POST-WAR CONSIDERATIONS

During the 1960s, Adorno took a renewed interest in the question of autonomy. In Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno follows Marcuse in identifying autonomy as the product of repression, in which the ego exerts “absolute rule over one’s inner nature” (Adorno 1973 [1966]: 250). The Kantian notion of reason over pleasure as freedom’s proper motivation is the familiar target of that criticism. Adorno reiterates the standing view of the Frankfurt School that in the age of an all-intrusive social system this means, in effect, that autonomy is illusory. The freedom we associate with autonomy is mediated by society and in that sense not a possession of individuals. That is, it is not “true” freedom. We could, Adorno believes, “see through the autonomy of subjectivity” by bringing about “awareness of its [autonomy’s] own mediated nature” (39). Yet Adorno, by this point, was also interested in defending the possibility of autonomy, indeed in recommending it. This affirmative approach appears surprising in light of the skepticism about real freedom or liberal autonomy that was energetically expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment and indeed in his own Negative Dialectics. What Adorno effectively does, however, is reframe the

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context of the challenge. This marks an important, albeit unexplained, shift in the focus of the work of the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer in particular had considered the meaning and prospects of autonomy specifically within a notion of capitalist life, conceived as ferociously systematic and experientially intrusive. In a world conceived in that way, autonomy is necessarily eliminated. There could be no moral space into which individuals might withdraw to evaluate the norms of what was required of them as social actors. This is because those norms had effectively predetermined their options in thinking about what is natural, necessary, and good. In “Education after Auschwitz” (1966), however, Adorno places the issue of autonomous self-evaluation in a different context. Here Adorno investigates the question of autonomy with reference to that blind collective conformism that produced the conditions for Nazi violence. Both capitalism and rationalization play some part in the distinctive profile of Nazi agents and sympathizers – such as their “coldness” in the face of suffering (Adorno 1998: 201) – but Adorno does not reduce the interpretation of the conditions for Auschwitz to either of those historical trends. Instead, Adorno draws on the resources of the humanist tradition and, indeed, on some of Kant’s less stringently rationalist claims in arguing for a historically relevant version of autonomy. In the midst of a German society which, in Adorno’s view, acknowledged the atrocities of Auschwitz but had yet to think about how it might avoid something similar in the future, he writes: “The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating” (195). Autonomy is construed by Adorno both as resistance to those everyday expectations to which we lazily succumb and as a process of self-vigilance in which we monitor our unthinking tendencies to act on prejudice. He identifies autonomy as “maturity” (Adorno 1999: 24), invoking Kant’s famous claim that the greatest obstacle to Enlightenment is humanity’s “self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant 1991 [1784]: 54). Adorno does not positively specify what we must do. It is enough that we acquire the practices of resistance and self-vigilance. It would not, though, be easy to understand these claims were Adorno’s essay a study of freedom within systematic capitalism. In “Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno appears to adopt the perspective that overarching social norms – capitalism, racism, and collectivism in particular – are profoundly influential but not entirely so. Reforms in thinking and in the socialization process, which need not be utopian in scope, can produce the right conditions for autonomy. Broadly

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speaking, that relatively moderate perspective is found in the work of both Habermas and Honneth. INTERSUBJECTIVE RATIONALITY AS AUTONOMY

The theme of autonomy is a central concern of Habermas’s critical theory. His conception of the possibility and meaning of autonomy differs in significant ways from the more or less standard view of his Frankfurt School predecessors. First, like Adorno in his reflections in the wake of Auschwitz, Habermas is not committed to the position that the conditions for autonomy have been virtually annihilated by the social totality. Habermas interprets earlier ambivalence toward the notion of autonomy – the concurrent thoughts about its desirability and its capitalist function – as an unwarranted contradiction. Such theorists, he claims in Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976), had “allowed themselves to be seduced . . . into developing a left counterpart to the once-popular theory of totalitarian domination” while at the same time holding “fast to the concept of the autonomous ego” (Habermas 1979: 72). Habermas jettisons the seemingly seductive pessimism. A second difference (and one entailed by the first) from the previous generation of the Frankfurt School is that Habermas reverses the Weberian thesis, becoming more receptive to the possibility of a form of rationality that is not purely instrumental-manipulative. Third, Habermas develops his various conceptualizations of autonomy within the parameters of a theory of language. He interprets the generation before him as operating through a philosophy of consciousness. The motivation for Habermas’s interest in language come from his commitment to what he sees as the intersubjective foundation of social processes. By contrast, the philosophy of consciousness – he explains in Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 – presupposes an individualized “subject that represents objects and toils with them” (Habermas 1984: 390). Linguistic philosophy turns toward “intersubjective understanding or communication,” in which we can explain “the cognitive instrumental aspect of reason . . . as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality” (390). It would be mistaken to think that Habermas does not appreciate that the circumstances of modern society may inhibit the development of autonomy. He maintains, nevertheless, that the conditions for its full realization can be identified in certain rational ideals that underpin communication. Adopting a number of elements of G. H. Mead’s theory of symbolic interaction, Habermas writes, in the second volume of Theory of Communicative Action:

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On the one hand, these persons raised under idealized conditions learn to orient themselves within a universalistic framework, that is, to act autonomously. On the other hand, they learn to use this autonomy, which makes them equal to every other morally acting subject, to develop themselves in their subjectivity and singularity. (Habermas 1989: 97)

Autonomous individuals, equipped in this way, have the capacity to “reach beyond all existing conventions” and to bring into question those social roles to which they are normally obligated (97). Self-realization is achieved through intersubjective action where as linguistic agents we stabilize, in notional or real communication with others, the recognizable “identity of the ego” (98). In that communication we exercise “the abstract ability to satisfy the requirements of consistency” (98). In speaking about autonomy as orientation toward a universal rather than selfish or opportunistic point of view, Habermas is clearly adopting a Kantian thesis. But he is also to some extent guided by the theory of the hierarchy of moral competences outlined by the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. This hierarchy describes the possible development of an individual who advances from the unreflecting acceptance of moral conventions to a post-conventional or autonomous phase. The autonomous attitude, Habermas explains in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, “jolts the intuitive certainties that flow into the social world from the lifeworld” (Habermas 1990b: 161). Conformity is no longer an option. Moral justification becomes problematic once that uncertainty has occurred. But autonomy cannot mean in this situation – as it did for Adorno – that action itself becomes impaired. (Indeed, Habermas likely has Adorno in mind when he suggests that “intellectualization” may inhibit autonomous action.)1 Rather, autonomy motivates the effort to find a normative basis for moral action that is no longer rooted in the fabric of the lifeworld. It produces a search for “principled autonomous action” (1990b: 161). The validity of moral norms is again to be established by intersubjective processes of discourse in which rationality rather than the givens of the lifeworld ground those norms. That process is “an idealized form of reciprocity” in which there is “a cooperative search for truth on the part of a potentially unlimited communication community” (163). This process of reciprocity rests on patterns of recognition; individuals engaging in communicative action recognize each other’s autonomy.

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“Even if the passage to the postconventional level of moral judgment has been successful, an inadequate motivational anchoring can restrict one’s ability to act autonomously. One especially striking manifestation of such a discrepancy between judgment and action is intellectualization, which uses an elaborate process of making moral judgments about action conflicts as a defense against latent instinctual conflicts” (Habermas 1990b: 193–4).

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Habermas expresses this reciprocity of recognition, in Postmetaphysical Thinking (1988), as the recognition of the other as “an accountable actor” who can take a position on what he calls our “speech-act offers” (1992b: 190). This involves a willingness in principle to respond to the force of the better reason. Hence, in Justification and Application (1991), he writes: “Only a will that is open to determination by what all could will in common, and thus by moral insight, is autonomous” (Habermas 1993: 42). Habermas infers from the notion of reciprocity that autonomous persons have placed on them “a special case of accountability” precisely because the norms proposed in their communicative action aim at achieving universal agreement (1990b: 162). On that basis, accountability is to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of autonomous – principle guided – action. These claims represent a decisive move from the general pessimism of Habermas’s predecessors, for whom reason itself was implicated in the domination of nature. Habermas has tried to show that the conditions of rationality remain evident “in the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as such” (163). Whether this is the only way of interpreting the dynamics of argumentation is an ongoing matter of debate within critical theory. Habermas also considered the implications of this intersubjective process for political autonomy. In a rational society, he claims, the justification of the law can be understood as acts of autonomous self-determination worked out through cooperative exchanges. Interestingly, however, Habermas wants to be able to show how a cooperative society of autonomous actors must accommodate what he refers to as private autonomy. Such private autonomy stems in part from the notion of accountability and contestability we have seen Habermas inscribe into autonomy itself. There are spaces which “can also be described,” as Habermas puts it in Between Facts and Norms (1992), “as liberation from the obligations of what I call ‘communicative freedom’” (1998: 119). Private autonomy is a space within which individuals do not – in contrast with autonomous political action – have to offer “publicly acceptable reasons” for their preferred actions (120). It is notable, though, that Habermas refers to this freedom as any kind of “autonomy,” given the systematically developed connections he otherwise makes between autonomy, rationality, and intersubjectively grounded norms. AUTONOMY AS RECOGNITION

Habermas’s idea that autonomy depends on interaction and recognition has been adopted and developed by Honneth. Honneth’s account of autonomy might be understood as Hegelian and psychoanalytic – object relations school – elaborations of a number of theses already adumbrated by Habermas. But these

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are elaborations that unsettle Habermas’s claims for the priority of communicative rationality within the reciprocal process of autonomy. In “Decentered autonomy: the subject after the Fall” (1993), Honneth takes as a starting point for a new conception of autonomy the consequences of a number of critical attacks on the classical notion of the self. These include claims about the unconscious drives and the linguistic nature of the subject, two dimensions of the self that are irreducible to an individual’s conscious constructions. Without the kind of transparency and self-possession required by the classical notion, autonomy, it is often argued, can no longer be conceived. It is worth recalling that Marcuse offered an expanded notion of autonomy precisely by endorsing the psychoanalytic account of the structure of the self. Honneth, by contrast, wants “to adapt the idea of individual autonomy to the limiting conditions of language and the unconscious” (Honneth 2007: 183). Like Habermas, Honneth interprets our capacity for individual experience and agency through a theory of intersubjectivity, a theory within which autonomy will be reconceived, not abandoned (183). This reconception, however, involves a “decentering” of the subject who exercises this autonomy. By autonomy, Honneth specifies that he is interested in “the empirical ability of concrete subjects to determine their lives wholly free and without constraint” (185). It is, as Adorno (like Kant) had also emphasized, a kind of maturity. Individuals who are autonomous in this way know their real needs and what is entailed by their actions. Honneth follows Habermas in adopting Mead’s notion of individualization through intersubjectivity. A notable innovation, though, is Honneth’s interest in D. W. Winnicott’s object relations notion of development. Winnicott is credited with the thesis that the care-giver provides the conditions in which developing children “can be alone with themselves without fear,” and also that “the individual articulation of needs is dependent on the scope of an intersubjective language” (an idea Habermas had found instead in Mead) (189). With these conditions in place, Honneth replaces the classical attributes of autonomy – namely, self-transparency, integrity, and deontological certainty – with the intersubjective practices of expressing “needs through language,” “a narrative coherence of life,” and “moral sensitivity to context,” respectively (188). In The Struggle for Recognition (1992), Honneth deepens this incorporation of Winnicott’s work within critical theory by proposing Winnicott’s view as an account of “the conditions for . . . self-realization in general” (Honneth 1995: 194). Winnicott explains, Honneth believes, the process in which individuality and independence along with ongoing mutual love emerge from an original “state of undifferentiated oneness” of care-giver and child (98). This claim contributes to the intersubjective theory of autonomy in that it reveals that

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the “relation-to-self” (103–4) required for autonomy is a developmental consequence of reciprocal love. A further and more decisive influence on Honneth’s intersubjective theory of autonomy, however, is Hegel’s idea of recognition: Fully realized reciprocal recognition can explain the constitution of individuals and their experiences, while the absence of recognition underpins a range of deficient experiences. Hegel wants to show, Honneth claims, that “the route by which subjects gain greater autonomy is also supposed to be the path to greater knowledge of their mutual dependence” (23). Honneth examines, as Hegel had, the supposed pathologies that follow from a purely individual moral standpoint rather than conceiving of the norms exercised in freedom as rooted in the lifeworld of mutual recognition. This is a decisive point of difference between the intersubjective theories of Habermas and Honneth. In the preface to the collection, The I in We (2010), Honneth explains that his interest in Hegel’s theory of recognition could help us to understand, among other things, the “relationship between socialization and individuation” (Honneth 2012: vii). Autonomy and the self-understanding it requires, Honneth goes on to argue, is gained through a process of recognition by others of ourselves as “beings whose needs, beliefs and abilities are worth being realized” (41). Such recognition would seem to preclude, however, the exercise of autonomous acts that defy what others are willing to recognize as a legitimate form of self-realization. This provocative preclusion is perhaps due to the theory’s commitment to institutional life as the exclusive space for autonomy. The Hegelian notion of recognition advanced by Honneth combines the lessons of the struggle for recognition in the dialectic of master and slave with the patterns of mutuality that sustain the autonomy-enabling institutions of the ethical life (described in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). Conceived in this way, autonomy involves, as Honneth puts it in Pathologies of Individual Freedom (2001), “an effortless mutual acknowledgement of certain aspects of the other’s personality, connected to the prevailing mode of social interaction” (Honneth 2010: 50). How that “prevailing mode” could validate unanticipated expressions of self-realization is not developed. Politics plays a central role in what those modes might be. As Honneth argues in Freedom’s Right (2011), there are implications for the social order where institutions inhibit the possibilities of individuals (Honneth 2014: 15). Certain kinds of arrangements alone can enable “self-determination” consistent with individual autonomy (35). Honneth maintains that the state, with its special interest in justice, may exercise its redistributive “authority” to develop autonomy enabling institutions (2012: 43).

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CONCLUSION

The shifting Frankfurt School conceptions of autonomy that we have traced might be understood as alternative responses to several important variables. Social structures are conceived, on the one hand, as intrusive and systematizing and therefore as limiting the scope for individual self-realization. On the other hand, social structures are conceived alternatively as potential spaces for institutionally grounded autonomy. Rationality, similarly, is either instrumentally manipulative and self-defeating when activated within so-called autonomous decision-making, or a defensible form of rationality is always already implied in effective acts of communication and recognition. The broad philosophical history of the Frankfurt School, we have seen, can be encapsulated in its various efforts to negotiate these alternatives.

34 EMERGING ETHICS dav i d m . p e n˜ a - g u z ma´ n an d c y n t h i a w i l l e t t

The end of the Second World War saw the rise of a new strand of political conservatism rooted in a technocratic ideology.1 This ideology, exemplified by McCarthyism in the United States, perceived any serious social, political, or ethical critique of the established order as a grave danger to the status quo. The academy was not exempt from the effects of McCarthy-era repression. According to the philosopher John McCumber, the philosophical profession was particularly hard-hit by McCarthyism since many professional philosophers working in fields such as political economy, critical social theory, Marxism, and even some branches of ethics lost their academic positions. This purge of radicals from American universities impacted the kinds of research that were pursued and the kinds of questions that were posed (McCumber 2001; 2016). In ethics, the crackdown on left-leaning intellectuals shifted research paradigms away from concrete problems and made a largely apolitical interest in “metatheory” the dominant approach to moral philosophy. Starting with the Civil Rights era in the mid-1950s, a series of social and countercultural movements responded to the conservatism of the forties and early fifties by calling for deep social and political reform. These movements shook up the political landscape of social life by demanding that research in the academy become socially and politically relevant. In the field of ethics, this created a turn toward “applied ethics” whose principal consequence was to infuse life into what was becoming an excessively scholastic endeavor increasingly bogged down by abstract “metatheoretical” concerns about language (Fox and Swazey 2008). One of these movements was the animal liberation movement, which started in the early seventies as a critique of humans’ treatment of non-human animals in contexts such as laboratory research and factory farming. This movement was a catalyst for the creation of the new field of “animal ethics,” which began as the application of classical ethical frameworks to ethical

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See also chapters by Young and Friis, this volume.

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controversies involving non-human animals. Eventually, however, the concrete application of these classical frameworks to animals challenged core elements of the inherited moral theories themselves and called for the development of new approaches to ethical and moral reflection. In what follows, we will investigate five of the most important animal ethics frameworks (utilitarianism, rights-based discourse, capabilities approach, response and care ethics, and evolutionary ethics) while considering, along the way, how insights from animal ethics have intersected, and continue to intersect, with questions of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. U T I LI T A R I A N I S M

The first school of animal ethics, founded arguably almost single-handedly by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, draws heavily on the principles of utilitarianism as developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Singer’s 1975 manifesto, Animal Liberation, argued that “speciesism” – a neologism Singer coined to capture the ways in which human beings “allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species” (Singer 2009: 9) – is no less a prejudice than racism or sexism, and has led to the abuse and violation of animals in ethically unjustifiable ways. This basic idea launched a worldwide social movement that challenged our treatment of non-human animals and problematized the entrenched attitudes that lead us to imprison animals, do research on them, and kill them for human consumption. Singer remarks that Western attitudes, rooted as they are in the principles of “Judaism and Greek antiquity” (185), have historically reduced animals to the status of machines. In reality, however, animals are sentient creatures capable of experiencing pain and suffering, which Singer argues is the basis of morality. In making this claim, Singer turns to Jeremy Bentham’s progressive moral insights, which draw an analogy between the inhumane treatment of slaves in the British Empire and the treatment of animals in Victorian Europe. Just as “the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of tormentor,” so too “the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate” (7). Bentham’s position is that the question of whether an animal, any less than a human infant, can reason or speak cannot be the basis of their moral worth or the sole reason for their humane treatment. As he famously put it: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” (7). By grounding moral theory in the capacity for suffering, Singer hopes to show that “the ethical

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principle on which human equality rests requires us to extend equal consideration to animals too” (1). The capacity for suffering sufficiently proves that non-humans have interests, and that these interests deserve consideration in the utilitarian calculus of the greater average utility. Because they suffer, in other words, animals and their interests must be taken into consideration when discerning whether an act or a rule for action is ethical. On his view, ethical judgments should be guided by a single overriding concern: the minimization of suffering. Singer does clarify that this principle of equal consideration does not require that animals receive equal treatment. It only requires that their interests receive equal consideration. The ease with which Bentham draws an analogy between human slaves and non-human animals portended profound challenges for classical utilitarianism already in the nineteenth century, as it raised vital questions about who could count as “human” and whether the utility calculus should take stock of the interests of non-human entities. More recently, similar challenges to the utilitarian philosophy have emerged in light of new social movements that, like the animal rights movement, bring into question deeply held assumptions that we tend to take for granted. The disabilities activist and lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson, for example, has exposed the moral failures of any theory that would allow cognitively impaired humans to be treated as of lesser moral status (Johnson 2003). Singer, for his part, does not deny that an approach that maximizes overall average happiness might allow parents of infants born with severe disabilities to make a decision to terminate their lives. Because of its focus on pain-minimization, utilitarianism – whether applied only to some humans, or only to all humans, or even to all sentient beings in the universe – meets its internal limit at the level of killing. The utilitarian framework is equipped to make ethical judgments about suffering by weighing the competing interests of the morally relevant beings, but it is not equipped to make ethical judgments about the killing of such beings and about whether such killing is justified or not. Since killing is arguably the elimination of all interest, acts of killing fall outside the utility calculus. As Singer himself recognizes in the opening chapter of Animal Liberation: “So far I have said a lot about inflicting suffering on animals, but nothing about killing them. This omission has been deliberate . . . The wrongness of killing a being is more complicated. I have kept, and shall continue to keep, the question of killing in the background” (2009: 17). Multiple scholars have criticized Singer’s strand of utilitarianism precisely on these grounds, arguing that it fails to adequately consider the possibility that more sentient creatures – including human and non-human animals – may have a fundamental right to life; and that they may possess this right regardless of any calculation of the greatest good for the greatest number. Those critics have

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suggested that in order to capture what Singer refers to as “the wrongness of killing,” we need a notion of rights (and an adjunct account of who counts as a rights-holder and who does not) that utilitarianism itself cannot generate. RIGHTS-BASED DISCOURSE

Some philosophers argue that the non-human animals may deserve not only a humane public policy that respects their interests as sentient creatures but also legal recognition as bearers of certain fundamental rights. The most notable proponent of this position, the American philosopher Tom Regan, argues that animals, or at least those with sufficient cognitive capacities, share with humans more than just an interest in their own welfare. They share with humans the fact that they are “subjects of a life,” which is to say that they have the sort of subjectivity needed to be a bearer of rights. Humans are subjects of a life because we “want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death – all make a difference to the quality of our life” (Regan 2004). And the same holds for non-human animals. Like us, they are subjects of a life that can go better or worse depending on various circumstances. If we really look at how an animal moves through the world, it is impossible not to notice that, as Regan famously put it, “there is somebody there.” And this somebody, as somebody, has certain fundamental rights that our legal institutions have not recognized. Regan thus calls for an expansion of “rights discourse” to include non-human animals under the category of “rightsholders,” which is to say, to recognize that animals are in fact someone rather than something. Following the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Regan argues that any creature who is the subject of a life should be treated as an end rather than solely as a means to an end. Human practices that treat animals as though “their value were reducible to their usefulness of others” fail to respect their fundamental dignity and violate their rights. The call to include animals within the domain of liberal subjects echoes the demands of other social movements to expand not only who counts as a rightsbearer but also what we mean by the concept of “right.” Over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various social groups have fought for basic liberal rights that were denied to them on account of arbitrary distinctions such as race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Some of these groups were criminalized, pathologized, and treated as subhuman animals in an effort to keep them from claiming and securing equal rights (Collins 2002; Butler 2011; Alexander 2012).

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Although the rights-based approach to animal ethics has made similar pleas for the expansion of legal rights to non-human animals, most of the rights that the early advocates of this approach fought for were essentially negative rights: freedom from cruelty, freedom from violence, right to live (i.e. freedom from unjustified killing), and the like. Negative rights emerged through liberal political philosophies and are today called “first generation rights.” In the last two centuries, however, there has been increasing interest in the notion of positive rights. Positive rights are more robust legal protections that secure not only an individual’s “freedom from” but also their “freedom to” (see e.g. Berlin 1969). These protections, also termed “second generation rights,” arose in response to labor activism and progressive era demands for universal public education and health care. More recent examples of positive rights include the “right to access” for the disabled, which incorporates not only freedom from external constraints but also freedom to pursue one’s own conception of life in public and private space. Meanwhile, anti-colonial and environmental movements are challenging even further the concept of “right,” arguing in some cases for radical expansions of earlier formulations of the first and second generations of rights discourse. Of central importance is the broader quest of anti-colonial and indigenous movements for what are often called “third generation rights,” which include rights tied to cultural and linguistic traditions (Downs 1992; Whitt et al. 2003). Still more recent examples include the decisions by the governments of Bolivia and Ecuador to grant nature inalienable rights (Vidal 2011; Lalander 2014). A particularly good case for extending negative and positive rights to nonhuman animals is made by the Canadian political theorists Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, who in Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (2011) use the framework of citizenship to strengthen the case for animal rights. Animals, they argue, are not just subjects of a life as Regan argues. They are also political subjects who form different kinds of communities, some of which exist in almost complete isolation from human communities and some of which exist alongside and sometimes even inside them. Different kinds of animals, therefore, deserve different kinds of rights depending on the relationship their communities have with human communities. Domesticated animals, for instance, are members of human communities and should be recognized as full co-citizens of our mixed-species communities. This means that they have many rights, such as the right to be represented in our political institutions and the right “to have their interests included in determining the public goods of the community” (Kymlicka and Donaldson 2011: 58). Wild animals that do not live in such close proximity to human societies do not deserve to be treated as cocitizens. But they do deserve to be recognized as “sovereign nonhuman

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nations,” meaning that we must deal with them according to “fair terms of intercommunity interaction” as this is spelled out in extant domestic and international law frameworks (58). Finally, “liminal animals,” which are creatures that are not quite wild but not quite domesticated either (such as pigeons, crows, raccoons, and city rats), occupy an in-between space and should be treated as “denizens,” residents lacking the full rights and responsibilities of citizens but having more rights and responsibilities than wild creatures. THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

While Kymlicka and Donaldson expand rights discourse to include positive rights based on their group identities, others argue that rights discourse does not go far enough to address the material and social needs of creatures whose exercise of individual autonomy depends upon external resources for flourishing. While these concerns will be eventually directed to non-human species, they originally arose in the context of political debates about development and represent an effort to move away from the classical governmental formula according to which “development” means “GNP” (the strictly economic measure of “gross national product”). According to Amartya Sen, development should be understood in terms of broader flourishing and so in terms of the extent to which individual citizens of a country are capable of living a good and satisfying life (rather than in terms of the amount of general or average wealth that exists in the country). Whereas the rights-based approach responds to this challenge by giving people rights, the capability approach notes that this is not enough because sometimes people – due to fortune or material circumstance – may be incapable of exercising their rights. Many rights thus are merely abstract for many people. What is needed, according to the capabilities approach, is to ensure that people are in a position to actually exercise their rights, which requires enhancing their general capabilities (Sen 1992; 2001). Perhaps the most famous proponent of this approach is Martha Nussbaum, who has used this theoretical apparatus to argue that justice requires enhancing the concrete capabilities of individuals. Nussbaum created an open-ended, revisable list of ten capabilities – including life, bodily health, bodily integrity, imagination, play, affiliation, and control over their environment – that political structures should secure for every individual up to a certain threshold (Nussbaum 1999; 2011). In Frontiers of Justice (2009), she gives special attention to the relevant capabilities of three particularly vulnerable communities: non-citizens, the disabled, and non-human animals. In contrast with a utilitarian focus on sentience,

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in a capabilities approach, all animals are entitled to continue their lives, whether or not they have such a conscious interest, unless and until pain and decrepitude make death no longer a harm. This entitlement is less robust when we are dealing with insects and other nonsentient or minimally sentient forms of life. The gratuitous killing of such animals is still wrong. ( 2009: 393)

Her approach, in contrast with a liberal rights discourse, also supports an entitlement “to opportunities to form attachments and to engage in characteristic forms of bonding and interrelationships” (398). Arguably, one of the limits of the capabilities approach is that, even though it struggles to get out of the straitjacket of autonomy imposed by classical liberalism and its rights discourse, the language of capabilities is still evocative of a certain strand of individualism, a strand focused on the individual vis-à-vis his or her capacities. Like the capabilities approach, care ethics and response ethics focus on enhancing entitlements protections for vulnerable populations. Unlike the capabilities approach, however, care and response ethics move away from the focus on individuals and their various capacities by relocating the individual in a network of relationships with other individuals and, to varying degrees, shifting core definitions of the person from autonomy to vulnerability (see also Murphy, this volume). Because of this altered focus on relationships and vulnerability rather than on individuals and autonomy, these approaches are often understood under the rubric of “relational ethics.” CARE AND RESPONSE ETHICS

Care ethics is born out of feminist critiques of liberal autonomy. It exposes as a problem the devalorization of traits and relationships typically deemed “feminine” under conditions of male domination – traits such as sentimentality, inwardness, sensitivity, and relationships of mutual dependence and care (Gilligan 1982; Kittay 2013; Noddings 2013; Held 2016). The idea behind care ethics is that the ethical frameworks of European modernity – including utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and rights discourse (or deontology) – overvalue an abstract, disembodied, and decontextualized notion of reason while neglecting the non-cognitive aspects of life, especially our material and embodied relations with others. As subjects, we are always enmeshed in a web of intersubjective relations from which we never escape, and it is these relations that should become the focus of ethical reflection. Since the 1990s, care ethics has moved from its birthplace in feminist theory to other regions of the academy, especially the fields of disability studies (Kittay and Carlson 2010; Kittay 2013) and animal ethics (Donovan and Adams 2007). A good example of the uptake of the care ethics tradition in the latter is Lori

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Gruen’s Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals (2015). According to Gruen, the aim of ethical agents should be to cultivate a certain kind of empathy that is likely to result in assisting and aiding others in need. Gruen calls this “entangled empathy,” which she defines as a type of caring perception focused on attending to another’s experience of wellbeing. An experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others and are called upon to be responsive and responsible in these relationships by attending to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and sensitivities. (2015: 3)

The individual and collective cultivation of empathic entanglement helps us care for others by attending to their unique and specific needs. It also moves us away from ethical frameworks that require the application of contextindependent principles and norms (26). More than anything, its benefit is that it puts us in a position to react ethically to the real-world challenges posed by our relational existence and complex social reality (63). Underlying this care ethics rooted in empathy is the notion that we are capable of understanding other subjects and their point of view in life, that we can tap into their subjective standpoint and, in some meaningful sense, relate to it. Response ethics breaks from care ethics on this point. Rather than focusing on, or presupposing, a capacity for the empathic understanding of another, response ethics instead highlights their radical alterity. This framework emerged in the writings of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophical work may represent the most radical challenge to modern moral theory to date. By beginning from the question of “otherness” (What is my responsibility to the Other as Other?), Levinas leaves behind the concepts of activity and autonomy upon which classical ethical philosophy rests, adopting in their stead those of passivity and heteronomy (see also May, this volume). For him, as for some of his intellectual progeny such as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the American queer theorist Judith Butler, the critical task of ethics is precisely to avoid the violence of overdetermining the Other by defining her – be it as a sentient being, as an autonomous rights-bearer, as an agent endowed with capacities, as a dependent, or as someone who is “like me” in various respects. To define the Other is already a breach of the first principle of ethical life: do no violence unto others. To define is to violate because the act of defining traps difference in sameness. Response ethics encourages us to respect the radical differences that exist between I and Thou, between self and other – be it a gendered “Other,” a queer “Other,” an animal “Other,” or some other “Other” – as primary and irreducible. (See Liakos and George, this volume.) For some, this orientation

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leads to a Foucault-inspired anti-normative stance that rejects all norms; for others, it leads from an ethics anchored not in abstract rules and principle but in our duty to discharge our responsibilities to a radically other Other. The latter approach is exemplified in Kelly Oliver’s use of a Levinasian-Derridean framework in Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (2009). Yet, questions remain: How should we respond to beings whose inner life seems to escape our grasp and whose “outlook” on the world remains mysterious and inaccessible to us? What is my responsibility toward another being whom I cannot begin to conceptualize or comprehend? And, in their presence, what should my response be? EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

In spite of all their differences, the previous four approaches to animal ethics – utilitarianism, rights discourse, capabilities theory, and care and response ethics – share one thing in common: their origins. They all originate in either philosophy or the social sciences. Neither is born directly out of the natural and behavioral sciences, even if at times some of them enter into dialogue with them. Utilitarianism and rights discourse, for instance, emerge from philosophical debates dating at least to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the foundations of moral duty, whereas care and response ethics grow largely out of twentieth-century developments in feminist theory and poststructuralist philosophy, respectively. The capabilities approach, for its part, first gained traction in the 1980s in debates amongst economists concerning the nature, meaning, and value of “development.” Under a certain reading, each of these approaches adopts a top-down methodology, whereby theoretical frameworks are first worked out by philosophers and social scientists interested in human ethics (at the top) and only subsequently applied to animals (at the bottom). The fifth school of animal ethics we will consider, evolutionary ethics, inverts this operation. Rather than beginning from a theoretical framework built for humans and then bringing it to bear on “the animal question,” evolutionary ethics begins from the animal question and only then broaches the question of ethical theory. Found primarily in the work of natural and behavioral scientists (especially ethologists and primatologists), the evolutionary approach is bottomup insofar as it starts from the empirical investigation of the cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and psychological capacities of non-human animals and then uses discoveries about the species-typical and individual-specific abilities of various animals to think through the problem of their moral standing. Thus, rather than articulating a set of theoretical or philosophical commitments to guide our understanding of the lives of non-human animals, it allows empirical

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insights into the lives of these animals to serve as the guide for our theoretical and philosophical commitments. Admittedly, the term “evolutionary ethics” is very broad. For us, this term encompasses a whole set of research programs in the sciences, especially in evolutionary theory, that call into question received wisdom about humans’ place in the natural order and make us reconsider our relationships to other animals. This includes everything from what is typically referred to as “naturalist ethics” (i.e. evolutionary accounts of the origins of the moral sentiments) to purely scientific research on the evolution of life on earth that, in rejecting metaphysical and theological notions of human exceptionalism, impact how we think about both humans and the animals they share the planet with (e.g. theories of divergent and, more recently, convergent evolution). Without assuming that this distinction is absolute, we can differentiate between two approaches within evolutionary ethics: the continuist approach and the non-parallelistic approach. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s claim in The Descent of Man that there is a fundamental continuity between humans and the other animals, the continuist approach maintains that there is no ontologically rigid or pre-given gap between species. Although there are plenty of differences between members of different species, these are not differences between incommensurate kinds. The works of figures such as Frans de Waal, Marc Bekoff, G. A. Bradshaw, and Barbara Smuts are exemplary of the continuist approach, which aims to establish the importance of treating non-human animals ethically by highlighting parallels between them and humans – parallels at the level of neuroanatomy, cognitive function, sociality, and so on. Given that non-human animals possess many capacities that scientists and philosophers have historically thought to be exclusively human – such as practical reason, language, affective attunement, empathy, a sense of shame, the capacity for wonder, a sense of the future, a concept of death, altruism, and a sense of fairness as reciprocity (Willett 2014; de Waal 2010; Smuts 1985; Bradshaw 2009; Bekoff 2007), it is incumbent upon ethical theory to reconsider its historically anthropocentric self-understanding so as to accommodate the human–animal continuum. This ontological continuum accounts for the pivotal role that affect attunement can play in what Willett terms “interspecies ethics,” which takes a third approach (in contrast with care ethics and response ethics) to relational ethics. Affect attunement is a holistic, intuitive form of communication that stands in sharp contrast to the more abstract and analytical modes of expression privileged by orthodox communication theory and classical philosophies of language. The term was first introduced by Daniel Stern to explain the unsuspected degree of communication that takes place between preverbal infants and their care-givers

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(Stern 2000; 2009). These dyads often communicate and negotiate their relationship through what Stern categorized as distinct kinds of “pre-reflective feelings,” which register degrees of pain or pleasure and levels of intensity of experience associated with degrees of arousal. Animals express layers of these feelings, sometimes called “affects,” in non-verbal interactions. For example, the affect of shame can express itself in both humans and chimps as avoidance of eye contact (de Waal and Suchak 2010; Willett and Suchak 2018). The communication of affects can operate across diverse sensory modalities, as when one creature responds with sound to another creature that has signaled an affect through movement or gesture. In these cases, the animals engage in multimodal styles of communication. “Multimodal” refers to the simultaneous use of more than one modality in communication (vocal or other sources of sound, visual through facial expression, gestural, olfactory, etc.). The capacity for cross-modal correspondence (to use Stern’s term) signals a degree of mutual understanding that sheer imitation cannot accomplish. It suggests that animals are capable of tuning in to one another’s emotional states without necessarily expressing emotional agreement or harmony. In fact, an organism may respond to another by expressing affective disagreement (as in cases or irritation or anger) or by expressing a non-complementary affect (as in cases when an organism responds with anger to another organism’s shame). Here, the aim of affective communication is not to mimic or repeat the sentiment of another so much as to alter the other organism’s mindset. Animals synchronize through multiple sensory modalities to forge social fields where cooperation, competition, and predation are at stake. At the most basic layer of these social fields, felt relationships can be pleasant or painful and intense or mild. At more complex layers, animals may grieve, feel shame, enjoy humor and play, or express wonder. While it is not clear how far these capacities for attunement extend, their existence does point toward possibilities for communication and ethical interaction within and across species. If the continuist approach to evolutionary ethics pivots on the search for similarities between species, the non-parallelistic approach thrives precisely by looking for differences. “Non-parallelism” refers to a way of thinking about evolution, which in our view is only now in the process of taking form, that is not interested in making the ethical status of non-human animals contingent on the extent to which they approximate humans in various regards. Its principal interest is the opposite: to force ethical theory to face the fact that there are radical differences between humans and other species and that this, critically, does not mean that those other species are ethically insignificant. If anything, the radical uniqueness of different species should lead us to rethink the presumed objectivity of human thought, for it points to the possibility that there

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may be forms of life whose complexity and sophistication human beings may not even be able to comprehend because of the limitations of their human, all too human, cognition. Indeed, there may be forms of life with capacities, capabilities, and functions so different from our own that we may not have the power to even imagine them and their significance; and these forms of life deserve ethical respect not in spite of their differences but precisely because of them (Derrida 2008; Willett 2014). In the same way that response ethics calls upon us to relate to the other as Other, the non-parallelistic branch of evolutionary ethics suspends the requirement that animals be like us before they enter our sphere of moral concern. Consider, as examples of this non-parallelistic approach, emerging trends in cetacean and cephalopod research. In The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (2014), Canadian marine biologists Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell argue that while cetaceans share important commonalities with humans – not the least important of which is that they are capable of culture – they also are very different in noteworthy ways. For instance, whereas in human communities “culture” is customarily associated with dialects and linguistic traditions, in whale communities one of the principal vectors for the expression of culture is physical movement (Whitehead and Rendell 2014: 31). Whales, furthermore, have a kind of subjectivity in which acoustics, musicality, and sociality are intricately interwoven; and many live in societies that have a strongly matrilineal structure (126). Indeed, these animals are so intensely social that they may force us to revamp the very meaning of biological individuality. Pods of whales are more than additions of whale individuals. They may be “mega-organisms” with a consciousness of their own. Compare this with the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith’s analysis of octopus consciousness in Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016). On the one hand, octopuses are perfect examples of convergent evolution because they have evolved features surprisingly similar to those of human beings in spite of having evolutionarily split away from us a very long time ago. Cognitively, they are also quite impressive. They engage in complex play behavior and have the ability to recognize and discriminate between individual humans. Yet, in spite of these parallels, octopuses are also fundamentally unlike us. They are as close to an alien as we are likely to encounter on Planet Earth. Their body/mind matrix is so unique that we may not understand anything about them until we develop a fundamentally new “theory of mind.” In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016), the primatologist Frans de Waal argues that over time we have become less anthropocentric precisely because science is teaching us that there is a lot we do not know about non-human animals. Historically, we have been in the habit

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of looking for ways in which animals resemble us, which has had the unfortunate consequence of making us miss the many ways in which they are different – thus making us, in a sense, incapable of appreciating the extent to which difference itself rather than sameness is the true law of the animal world. As de Waal observes: “There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial” (2016: 15). Throughout the book, de Waal draws attention to the many ways in which animals relate to themselves and others, solve simple and complex problems, and navigate treacherous natural and social environments in ways that make sense to them even as their approach to relationality, problem-solving, and milieu navigation may not make sense from a specifically human point of view. What has historically kept scientists from appreciating the awe-inspiring capacities of other animals is precisely that they have expected non-human animals to act and behave as they expect humans to act and behave. One could say that, by and large, scientists have failed to take the time to sit back, observe, and appreciate the gap between human expectation and animal reality. Some of the most important breakthroughs in the study of animals – as de Waal suggests, using the example of the discovery of the echo-location capacities of bats – come about when humans actively struggle to suspend their anthropocentric habits and let themselves speculate about how deep differences in the animal kingdom run (21–2). CONCLUSION

Animal ethics is only one of many fields of ethical inquiry that emerged after the Second World War. And the five approaches to it that we showcased above do not exhaust it. Other approaches to animal ethics not discussed above include those rooted in the tradition of virtue ethics that highlight the value of vegetarianism and veganism and other pro-sustainability practices (Rachels 2011), those informed by Afrikaner philosophy and the concept of ubuntu (Coetzee and Roux 2004), those motivated by Scottish sentimentalist thought (Driver 2011), and others whose theoretical roots can be traced to various environmental philosophies such as ecofeminism (Miles and Shiva 1993), indigenous thought (Whyte 2017), deep ecology (Naess 1973; Devall 1988), and phenomenology (Brown and Toadvine 2003; Thomson 2004b). Plus, there are likely others that are only now in the process of taking form, and that will push the animal ethics literature in novel and unexpected directions.

35 LEO STRAUSS: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY cat h e r i n e z uc k e rt an d m i c ha e l z uc ke rt

Leo Strauss was one of the German émigrés who brought twentieth-century Continental philosophy to America when they fled Hitler in the 1930s. He spent most of his American career at two universities: the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. Although he had written several books in Europe prior to his arrival in America, his American writings brought him the most notice. His best-known book was Natural Right and History (1953), but he wrote many other notable works, including Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) and The City and Man (1964). All of his works fit under the broad rubric of political philosophy. Indeed, Strauss went so far as to claim that political philosophy, properly understood, was itself “first philosophy” (1964: 20). To understand what he meant by that novel and puzzling claim, however, requires us to work our way toward it by considering, first, why he thought that the crisis of our time – or of the West – was a crisis of and for political philosophy; second, why he argued that a return to premodern thought was the proper response to that crisis; and finally, in what sense he understood political philosophy to be first philosophy. We will thus take these issues in order in the sections that follow. THE CRISIS OF OUR TIME

Strauss famously called for a “return to the ancients,” but as he explained in the opening words of his most important work on classical philosophy: “It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest . . . toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West” (1964: 1, emphasis omitted). For Strauss, that crisis was twofold, both theoretical or philosophic, on the one hand, and practical or political, on the other. The practical crisis is easiest to describe. Like those other famous Jewish émigrés who had studied with Martin Heidegger in Germany – Hannah 471

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Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse – Strauss came of age in Weimar Germany. That generation had undergone the experience of the First World War, the economically devastating period between the wars, the political instability and weakness of Weimar, the rise of the Nazi regime, and the Holocaust. In the wake of that history, Strauss thought, it was no longer possible to believe in progress. The Second World War turned out much better than the first, but Strauss still saw signs of crisis. There were the new atomic weapons, which opened the possibility of the destruction of human civilization, if not the human race (1989e: 22–3). Moreover, these new weapons existed in the context of the Cold War, one party to which Strauss believed posed a greater threat to human freedom than any previously faced (2000 [1961]: 177–212). Strauss understood this multidimensional political crisis to be a crisis of and for political philosophy, as he made clear in his 1948 book On Tyranny. Tyranny is “a danger coeval with political life,” a danger already clearly and comprehensively analyzed “by the first [classical] political scientists,” in this case Xenophon. There is, to be sure, “an essential difference between the tyranny analyzed by the classics and that of our age” (2000 [1961]: 22–3), a difference which derives from the presence of ideology and technology – both offshoots of modern political philosophy – in the modern versions of tyranny. Departing greatly from classical political philosophy, modern thinkers had transformed philosophy in such a way as to make it immediately useful to and usable in political life. As a result of this infusion of philosophy, political life became ideological. Technology was an offshoot of the modern science of nature, which had as its goal “the relief of man’s estate,” as Francis Bacon put it, a practical goal closely related to the goal of more strictly political versions of modern philosophy. Modern philosophy not only stood behind the development and danger of modern tyranny, however; it had also reached its own crisis. And the philosophical crisis exacerbated the political: “When we were brought face to face with . . . a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past,” Strauss observed, “our political science failed to recognize it” (2000 [1961]: 23). Political scientists “failed to grasp tyranny as what it really is” because modern philosophers, believing in a fact/value dichotomy, had convinced political scientists that “‘value judgments’ are inadmissible in scientific considerations, and to call a regime tyrannical clearly amounts to pronouncing a ‘value judgment’” (23). This failure of modern social science was but one manifestation of the larger intellectual crisis of modernity, however. That crisis was the ultimate fruit of the two strongest intellectual powers of our age: science and history. Science had led to positivism, one leading axiom of which is the fact/value dichotomy. The scientific understanding of nature also led to an essentially historical

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understanding of human existence – or “historicism,” a doctrine that affirmed the historical determination and limitation of thought. Putting the two together produced relativism, the denial that reason could supply valid or true guidance for human life (e.g. Strauss 1989e: 24). Historicism, as Strauss understood it, was more radical than positivism, for it finds science itself to rest on non-rational commitments that are themselves “values” (1989g: 23). Science thus has no more authority than many other ways of viewing the world, so that its fact/ value dichotomy dissolves, to be replaced by a far more deep-reaching relativism, since historicism denies there is any “view from nowhere” that can view objectively or adjudicate between the competing “worldviews” that have and will appear in the course of human history. The twin powers of positivism and historicism thus constituted threats to both sides of political philosophy, for Strauss. On the one side, positivism disbarred its followers from understanding politics properly, since politics is an engaged and value-affirming pursuit; one cannot understand politics by standing outside of it in a theoretical attitude (1989e: 25). At the same time, positivism leaves us with an inability to make rational judgments or even have genuinely rational discussion of what is to be done (25). For the grand ends of political action are grasped as mere value judgments, and since all meaningful thinking about means depends on thinking about ends, the modern crisis becomes a thoroughgoing crisis of rationalism (19). One result is a general loss of bearings that produces fecklessness and drift in action and judgment. Another is the apparently opposite phenomenon of “a kind of decisionism . . . In the face of the groundlessness of moral and political choice, what counts is ‘commitment,’ the decision itself, not the substance of what is decided for” (Zuckert and Zuckert 2006: 35). Neither result, Strauss thought, made for healthy politics. Positivism and historicism also represented a major crisis of philosophy. In the first instance, this was a crisis of political philosophy, because political philosophy as a tradition of thought from Socrates to, say, Hegel, had constituted an attempt to articulate the true nature of political phenomena like justice and to discover the true form of the best (if not always realizable) political regime. But the modern crisis led to the abandonment of the quest for the nature of the political and the best political order. Strauss concluded darkly that “today, political philosophy is in a state of decay and perhaps of putrefaction” (1989g: 12). It is often said today that Strauss’s diagnosis of the situation of political philosophy is no longer correct, at least not since the 1971 publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Yet, Strauss might find some of the best evidence for his claim about the precariousness of political philosophy in the age of positivism and historicism in the work that has dominated the intellectual scene since his death in 1973. The leading political philosophers are emphatically

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non-foundationalist and rest their analyses and commendations on things like the public political culture – that is, pure conventionalism – or on the ability of each to redescribe the political world – or the denial there is a political world “wie es eigentlich ist” (i.e. as it truly, properly, or authentically is).1 The intellectual crisis of modernity, however, extends beyond the realm of political philosophy to philosophy as such. Political philosophy first comes to sight as a branch of philosophy, which Strauss describes as the “quest for wisdom, [as the] quest for universal knowledge, for knowledge of the whole . . . [This quest] for knowledge of ‘all things’ means [the] quest for knowledge of God, the world, and man – or rather [the] quest for knowledge of the natures of all things: the natures in their totality are ‘the whole’” (1989g: 4). Strauss explains these true “natures” of things that modern philosophy has lost sight of as follows: “Nature” means here the character of a thing . . . and the thing, or kind of thing, is taken not to have been made by gods or men . . . [T]here are things which are “by nature,” without having “grown” and even without having come into being in any way. They are said to be “by nature” because they have not been made and because they are the “first things,” out of which or through which all other natural things have come into being. (1989b: 161–2)

Philosophy originally was the search for these metaphysical “first things.” But historicism (as in Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics) denies the very thing, nature, which had been the core of philosophy hitherto.2 Philosophy as we have known it has thus come to an end, as the most thoughtful of the postmodernists proclaim. So, Heidegger calls for something new, “thinking,” to replace philosophy or metaphysics, thereby replacing all permanencies, all notions of eternity, with historicity (cf. Young, this volume). As Strauss put it: Modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity. For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay. (1989g: 57)

In pronouncing eternity the deepest human desire, Strauss clearly has in mind the discussion of eros in Plato’s Symposium, but he is remarkably reticent in explaining just why he maintains this Platonic thesis, for he frequently states doubts about the Platonic “metaphysics” taken to underlie the Platonic doctrine of eternity (but see Strauss 1953: 88–90). If Strauss is correct that modern 1 2

Consider John Rawls, Political Liberalism and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. See also chapters by Gaus and Van Schoelandt and by Rossi, this volume. For the details of Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics as an “ontotheological” quest to secure these eternal “first things,” see Thomson 2005: 7–43; 2011: 7–39.

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historicism represents an estrangement from our “deepest desire,” however, then the historicist thesis challenges not merely the possibility of unchanging “objective” knowledge but also the existential core of humanity. Of course, to say that humanity’s deepest desire is for eternity does not in itself imply there is any valid way to satisfy that desire. Strauss’s philosophic work should thus be seen as a quest for the eternal, not as an a priori affirmation of it. This quest took most visible form in his attempt to “return to the ancients,” which he affirmed to be “both necessary and tentative or experimental” (Strauss 1964: 11). Even though many of his readers have taken him to be dogmatic and unduly certain in his embrace of premodern and non-historicist doctrines, this tentativeness remained an abiding feature of his thinking. RETURN

For the sakes of both politics and philosophy, Strauss unleashed an almost relentless series of attacks against both positivism and historicism. His critiques of positivism contain both familiar and unique themes. He put much weight, for example, on the inability to describe many political and moral phenomena in value-free ways, and relished revealing the various work-arounds one finds in the literature as concealed “value” statements. His most powerful arguments, however, appealed to the phenomenological case for the inescapable reliance of science on prescientific awareness, and so made the case for rejecting the positivists’ scientistic commitment to science as the measure of all truth. In combating historicism, he drew a distinction between what we might call “garden-variety historicism” and what he called “radical historicism” (Strauss 1988b [1959]; 1953: 9–34). Garden-variety historicism finds support in the quasiempirical observation of a close relation between the general intellectual climate of an age and its most advanced philosophical products, a match leading to the claim that an age sets a horizon within which thinkers are confined in their thinking. Strauss responded to this claim with one of his most characteristic arguments: writers in the past intentionally deployed a kind of rhetoric that made their thought appear to be in harmony with the leading and authoritative opinions of their time and place in order to protect themselves and their students from persecution. This apparent agreement between a philosopher and his times could, therefore, merely be the exoteric garb in which a very different, more esoteric teaching was clothed. This possibility led Strauss to ask whether the received understandings of the major texts within the philosophic tradition were adequate. His effort to reinterpret past texts in light of his rediscovery of this phenomenon of exoteric writing has been one of the chief sources of the controversy concerning his work.

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Strauss thought that garden-variety historicism was vulnerable to the now standard objection that, while denying that there are any trans-historical truths, historicism was claiming to be just such a trans-historical truth. But Strauss did not think that all historicist thought was vulnerable to this objection. Instead, he exempted the very greatest of the historical thinkers, Hegel and Heidegger, from this self-contradiction. Strauss thought Hegel’s system fell to other considerations, however, so Heidegger remained the promulgator of radical historicism to be taken most seriously. Indeed, Heideggerian historicism “compels us . . . to realize the need for unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy” (Strauss 1953: 31). In emphasizing the theme of crisis, Strauss shared much with other Continental thinkers such as Heidegger and Arendt. But he differed from most of these others in that he saw the crisis not as one of philosophy or rationalism altogether but, rather, as a crisis of modern rationalism more narrowly. Instead of seeking an altogether new beginning, as the likes of Heidegger and Arendt did, then, Strauss promoted the less radical response of a return. A return to what, however? Although Strauss is most often identified with classical philosophy, his idea of a return to the “premodern” was broader. For, as Strauss saw it, the premodern in the West had two wings, epitomized in the two defining cities of Western civilization: Jerusalem and Athens. In order to understand Strauss’s notion of return we must keep in mind what he took to be the three main alternatives: the biblical orientation, classical or Socratic rationalism, and modernity. One of the most striking features of his thinking was his strenuous effort to keep these three intellectual and existential alternatives separate and distinct. He denied the possibility of a synthesis of the classical philosophic and the biblical, as allegedly effectuated by Thomas Aquinas and many others in the Christian West. He also rejected the claim – promoted strenuously by Hegel and others – that modernity is at bottom “secularized biblical faith” (Strauss 1989d: 82). Strauss explicitly addressed that secularization thesis in one of his lesser known essays, “The three waves of modernity” (originally a public talk dating from the early to mid-1960s). One can see in modernity the “hope [not] for life in heaven, but to establish heaven on earth by purely human means” (1989d: 82). But, he objects, this hope is too general and ambiguous to establish the secularization thesis. He thus seeks to sharpen the inquiry by providing a more precise definition of what we might mean by “secularization”: “the preservation of thoughts, feelings, or habits of biblical origin after the loss or atrophy of biblical faith.” Strauss then seeks to identify the “thoughts, feelings, or habits” of the biblical orientation in order to compare them with the “thoughts, feelings, and habits” characteristic of the ancient and

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modern philosophic orientations (83). Here he concludes that “in the crucial respect there is agreement between classical philosophy and the Bible . . . despite the profound difference and even antagonism between Athens and Jerusalem” (86). Athens and Jerusalem are more like each other, then, than either is akin to modernity. Strauss’s grasp of these three different orientations can be encapsulated in a one-sentence characterization: according to the classics, “[m]an is the measure of all things”; according to the biblical understanding, “man is created in the image of God”; and according to the moderns, “man is the master of all things” (85–6). In appropriating Protagoras’ famous formula, Strauss did not necessarily understand it as the Greek sophist himself did. For Strauss, “[m]an is the measure of all things” is equivalent to “man is the microcosm” (1989d: 85). For, “the human soul is the only part of the whole which is open to the whole and therefore more akin to the whole than anything else is” (1989g: 39). This whole to which the human soul is most akin and most open to is itself “mysterious” (1989g: 38). Nonetheless, as open to the whole, humanity is itself part of this whole and so “has a place within the whole” (1989d: 85). As the classics understood it, Strauss reminds us, each being has a nature and a specific perfection belonging to that specific nature. Nature thus supplies the standard by which to measure all beings, including the human being. As the being by nature open to the whole, human perfection consists in the cultivation or perfecting of that openness, that is, in living as the rational and social animal. At its peak the perfection of humanity is philosophy, understood as the quest for knowledge of the whole. On this view, philosophy is a way of life rather than a set of doctrines, because the mysterious character of the whole means that the questions, or the main alternatives, are always more evident than any of the various answers thinking human beings may arrive at. Although philosophy is perforce bold or courageous to break with common (scientistic) opinion, it is also moderate in face of the limitations of its achievements (1989g: 39). Strauss thus summarizes the ancient position in the insight that “virtue is essentially moderation,” or respecting the limitations of this human situation (1989d: 86). One important manifestation of those limitations in human political life is the role of chance; chance cannot be conquered. Even less nature: Since nature sets the standard and is, therefore, good, nature is to be perfected but not conquered. The biblical perspective shares much with this classical view, despite their great differences. Above all, both the Bible and the classics share the idea that man “has a place within the whole” – in the biblical case, within “the divinely established order” (1989d: 85–6). Just as moderation is virtue for the classics, so for the believer virtue is obedience – in both cases, a recognition of the limits to human striving.

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These biblical and classical views thus contrast sharply with modernity’s Faustian character: “unrest, infinite striving, dissatisfaction with everything finite, finished, complete, ‘classic’” (1989d: 94). For Strauss, Machiavelli initiated modernity when he proposed the wholly new project of the conquest of fortune, Machiavelli’s own translation or reinterpretation of the classical notion of nature. Here nature is not good but, rather, a blind or indifferent force to be overcome for the sake of bettering the human condition. The implications of the modern turn away from or against nature became more visible in the work of Machiavelli’s successors, who brought out into the open the project of this conquest of nature, of the use of science to relieve man’s estate (Bacon), of knowledge for the sake of power (Hobbes), of nature as supplying merely “the almost worthless raw materials” that only human labor or negation of the given can make useful for human existence (Locke). Modern philosophy begins with that turn against nature and then concludes with radical historicism, the complete denial of nature. According to Strauss, the early moderns, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, dwelt in an untenable halfway house, retaining nature but only as a negative reference point. Rousseau saw the problem: the early modern philosophers sought to take their bearings by nature but did not succeed in reaching nature. In pushing closer to nature, Rousseau was led to the more radical discovery of history, since nature cannot account for the human in human being. The ultimate result of the discovery of history was the apparent triumph of historicism, which incorporates Heidegger’s turn against rationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, Heidegger’s pronouncement that under the new historical dispensation (Gestell), all that was previously thought to be nature, even humanity, becomes mere “standing reserve,” raw material waiting to be exploited and transformed (Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”; see also Young, this volume). Strauss has his own view of how this happened, however. Instead of placing mankind within a whole in which the species has a specific place, modern philosophers posited man as “the master of all things.” Man’s mastery within modernity is not merely technological (although that is of capital importance); it is cognitive as well. In classical philosophy, humanity was conceived as receptive to the whole, as fitted to it. As Strauss put it: “By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand [the world] as created or as uncreated, [it] is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind” (1989f: 319). The moderns, by contrast, do not consider the human mind to be at home in the world. Beginning with Descartes’s universal doubt and moving on to Kant’s philosophy of the mind’s responsibility for the world appearing to us as world, and from there to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the moderns attribute

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to the human mind ever more credit for constructing the world. Our connection to the whole is not so much a matter of natural, if mysterious, access, but rather of “knowing what we make.” Given Strauss’s analysis of the crisis of later modernity, his resolve to seek a return to the premodern does not surprise (1989c: 272). But to which wing of premodernity, the classical or biblical? Or, why not an amalgam of the two? Strauss argues that such an amalgam is impossible, because the Bible and philosophy commend above all ways of life, not doctrines (297). If philosophy were merely a set of doctrines, Strauss conceded, a synthesis would be possible, but that is not the character of philosophy, nor is it the way of the believer. The way of life of the believers is loving obedience; the way of life of the philosopher is the quest for autonomous insight. As ways of life, the two are incommensurable, indeed antagonistic: No one can live as both a philosopher in the Socratic sense and a believer. So how, then, should one live? Strauss proposes a complex answer to this question that has led to a major disagreement among his readers. As is evident in his own life, he opts for philosophy and reason. Yet at least one line of his argument appears to render this choice problematic. Understanding philosophy as the quest for knowledge of the whole, rather than as the achievement of such knowledge, Strauss insists that philosophy is incapable of refuting revelation: “[T]he right way of life cannot be established metaphysically except by a completed metaphysics”; yet, there can be no completed metaphysics (on that Strauss agrees with Heidegger). So “the right way of life remains questionable” (1989c: 297–8). For Strauss, nonetheless, philosophy cannot present an account of the world such that there is no room for a revealing God; philosophy cannot, therefore, refute the possibility of such a God and of His revelation. To be a philosopher, then, is to have in effect chosen against the revealing God without adequate reason. The philosopher, as much as the believer, seems required to proceed on the basis of an act of faith. This is particularly problematical for the philosopher, as opposed to the believer, for philosophy is the enterprise of not taking things on faith. Philosophy might appear to be strictly impossible, and at bottom no different, just less candid, than the life based on faith. Strauss explains, however, why philosophy cannot possibly lead up to the insight that another way of life apart from this philosophic one is the right one. Philosophy is [the] quest for knowledge regarding the whole. Being essentially quest and being not able ever to become [achieved] wisdom, as distinguished from philosophy, the problems are always more evident than the solutions. All solutions are questionable . . . But the very uncertainty of all solutions, the very ignorance regarding the most important things, makes [the] quest for knowledge the most important thing, and therefore a life devoted to it, the right way of life. (297–8)

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Strauss’s theme of return led him to classical political philosophy. But is classical political philosophy a monolith? In some of his most important statements, Strauss presented a kind of composite picture, as though the differences between Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics signify little. Perhaps these differences pale when classical philosophy is seen as an alternative to the biblical orientation, or to modern political philosophy. Nonetheless, Strauss is clear that there are important differences within the tradition of classical political philosophy. In Natural Right and History, he presents the classical position at first as a composite, but then later elucidates three alternative views of natural right according to philosophers in that tradition: Socratic-Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic (with subcategories of these as well). And in his most thematic treatment of the classical thinkers, The City and Man, Strauss focuses on texts by Aristotle (Ethics and Politics), Plato (Republic), and Thucydides (Peloponnesian War) in order to examine the variety of types of political inquiry prevalent within the classical tradition. Here Strauss treats Aristotle as the founder of political science, Socrates as the founder of political philosophy (followed in that kind of inquiry by Plato), and Thucydides as a prime representative, if not the founder, of political history. For our purposes, the most important distinction is that between political philosophy and political science. For it is in the context of drawing this distinction that Strauss makes his provocative claim that “political philosophy” is “the first philosophy,” or as he boldly puts it, “the core of philosophy” (1964: 20). Here the notion of “first philosophy” is systematically ambiguous: Strauss carefully restricts his claim to Socratic-Platonic philosophy, which is the philosophy with which he identifies himself. There are of course other ways to understand “first philosophy,” for example chronologically. Strauss accepts preSocratic philosophy as first philosophy in this historical sense, and recognizes that political philosophy is not a major part of this philosophy; instead, the preSocratics seek the archai, the “beginnings” or “the ‘principles’ of all things.” Politics certainly cannot be that (Strauss 1953: 82). Strauss also distinguishes “first philosophy” in the Socratic sense from “first philosophy” in Aristotle’s sense. For Aristotle, the inquiry into politics is but “one discipline, and by no means the most fundamental or the highest discipline, among a number of disciplines” (Strauss 1964: 21). For Aristotle “first philosophy” is not politics but rather what has come to be called metaphysics, an inquiry into being as such and the highest being. Heidegger, it may be recalled, had convinced Strauss of “the need for unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises whose validity is

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presupposed by philosophy” (Strauss 1953: 31). But Strauss also learned from Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl that philosophy or science must be understood as a modification of the “prescientific awareness” (Strauss 1953: 81–4; 1983: 31, 35; 1989a: 136–7). To reconsider the “elementary premises” of philosophy, Strauss pursued a more strictly historical strategy than Heidegger had in Being and Time. Strauss attempted first to recover the essentials of the prescientific awareness and then to identify the specific “modification” of it that produced philosophy: “To grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic, one has to go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy” (1953: 79). But how to do that? The likely answer from most today would be “to engage in extensive . . . anthropological studies” (80). Strauss rejected that path back to the prescientific, in part because he pronounced such studies to be “necessarily hypothetical,” although what he meant by this is not entirely clear. He might have thought that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find peoples entirely unaffected by the postscientific world in which all of us now live. He may have considered the enterprise of undertaking this inquiry into the prescientific origins of philosophy on the basis of anthropology to be problematic because anthropology is already a science decisively shaped by the emergence of philosophy (or science), and hence shaped by an acceptance of the premises he was attempting to investigate. In any case, Strauss instead proposed to draw from “[t]he information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins . . . [as] supplemented by consideration of the most elementary premises of the Bible” in order to reconstruct “the essential character of ‘the natural world’” (1953: 80). Strauss’s procedure immediately raises two difficulties: first, the philosophers too had made the turn to science and that may be as problematic as the use of anthropological studies. A possible response to this objection is that, for the early philosophers, the break with the prescientific was still fresh and vividly grasped, in a way that it cannot be for any present-day inquiries (1988b: 75). The second evident problem with Strauss’s strategy is his apparent assumption that there is one universal prescientific awareness, at least in its “essential character.” That seems to be an empirical claim that calls for some sort of further empirical inquiry, one that neither Strauss himself nor anyone following Strauss’s path has undertaken (but see Rosen 2002: 135–58). Strauss’s path back to the natural or prescientific awareness led him back to the time when “the idea of nature is unknown,” for “[t]he discovery of nature is the work of philosophy” (1953: 81). Philosophy (or science) and the idea of nature come on the scene together (82). The first appearance in the written records of the concept of nature occurs, according to Strauss, in Homer’s Odyssey, where it appears just once. It occurs in the context of the story of

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Circe, who had transformed many of Odysseus’ crew into swine. The word for nature (physis) is put into the mouth of the god Hermes: Apparently seeking to shield Odysseus from the fate that befell his men, Hermes shows Odysseus the “nature” of a plant called moly. As Strauss explains: “‘Nature’ means here the character of a thing, or of a kind of thing, the way in which a thing or a kind of thing looks and acts, and the thing, or the kind of thing, is taken not to have been made by gods or men” (1989b: 161). The context in the Odyssey is revealing, moreover; the nature of moly is to preserve (or restore) the character of things. Moly, or nature, is the guarantor of the this-thing-being of things. For Strauss, this Homeric passage points to the natural understanding that precedes philosophy: Nature is the “way of things” not traceable to men or gods. Prior to the discovery of nature, all things were said to have a way or a custom, without any further distinction “between customs or ways which are always and everywhere the same and customs or ways which differ from tribe to tribe” (1953: 82). Before philosophy, Strauss suggests, the crucial distinction is not between the natural and the artificial or conventional but, instead, between “our way” and “the way of others.” “Our way” is the “comprehensive understanding of world” that includes a code of living and divinities understood as the source or ground of the code. The prescientific, as Strauss recaptures it, is emphatically moral, religious, and political – that is, constitutive of and for communities of human beings. The first philosophers lost that connection to the prescientific. For, they inferred from the discovery of nature the distinction between nature and convention, then relegated the political, moral, and religious to the sphere of convention, which they rated much lower in the scale of being than the natural. That, in turn, led them to first philosophy in the sense of the archai or the primitive elements out of which the natural things are composed. Hence the quest for the elements – air, water, and so on – and the more abstract inquiries into being as such found in Parmenides and Heraclitus (Strauss 1964: 19). Strauss described the Socratic turn as a “return” to “common sense,” because Socrates raises about each thing the “what is” questions (Strauss 1964: 19). These questions allow Socrates to become the founder of “political philosophy,” which Strauss understood not merely as the effort by philosophy to extend itself into yet another sphere of being (along with, for example, art or minerals). “The ‘what is’ questions point . . . to the fact that the whole consists of parts which are heterogeneous, not merely sensibly . . . but noetically: to understand the whole means to understand the ‘What’ of each of these parts, of these classes of beings, and how they are linked with one another” (1964: 19). This is commonsensical in that it is a turn to the phenomena with a full appreciation of the way such inquiry is grounded on the prescientific awareness of “ways” of life, itself an inchoate version of the idea of nature.

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Strauss differed from almost the entire philosophic establishment – going as far back as to Aristotle – on the meaning of the Socratic Turn. Most take it to represent the decision by Socrates to limit his inquiries solely to moral and political questions, such as “what is courage?” or “what is justice?” Strauss, however, understands the Socratic turn to be not a limitation of the topics of inquiry but a new approach to all things (1953: 124). A new approach to Plato’s philosophy thus follows from Strauss’s novel understanding of Socrates. Most Plato scholars distinguish an early “Socratic phase,” in which Plato limits himself to the moral and political questions Socrates is said to have pursued, from a later period or periods, in which Plato goes beyond Socrates to investigate the trans-human topics of cosmology and ontology. But Strauss sees much more continuity between Socrates and Plato, and so refuses to organize his thinking about Plato around the periodization so common in the literature. Socrates appreciated better than the pre-Socratics, and perhaps better than Aristotle (see Zuckert and Zuckert 2014: 164–6), the relation of philosophy to the pre-philosophic. The “natural” awareness is of “the ways,” emphatically including the human ways. Since the emphasis on these human ways is emphatically about “our way” – that is, the constitution or defining way of a given people – prescientific thought is fundamentally moral and political, because it concerns the questions of how I should live and of how we should live. But philosophy does not merely stand in continuity with the prescientific, it also necessarily constitutes a break with these ways, and emphatically with “our way.” By applying the notion of nature to “our way,” we seek a universal: what is the right way for all human beings. We no longer take for granted the validity of our way. Being guided by the dual compasses of this prescientific awareness and of nature, philosophy necessarily remains political and necessarily stands in tension with the political. As guided by the prescientific, philosophy never rightly degenerates into positivism, which denies and, unsuccessfully, attempts to escape its dependence on the prescientific. As guided by nature, it never rightly degenerates into historicism, for the constituting concept of philosophy is precisely the trans-historical nature historicism attempts to deny. In raising the “what is” question as an inquiry into the trans-historical character of all beings, including human beings in their political existence, philosophy also necessarily transcends any given political order – and so threatens it as a political order, producing the pervasive tension between philosophy and politics that Strauss often emphasized. Socratic philosophy is in its nature political philosophy, by taking what is first for us as its starting points, but it must also become political philosophy in a more public sense, because of that tension in which it stands to political life. “From this point of view the adjective ‘political’ in the expression ‘political philosophy’ designates

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not so much a subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view . . . ‘political philosophy’ means primarily not the philosophic treatment of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy” (Strauss 1988a [1959]: 93). Herein lies another meaning of political philosophy as first philosophy for Strauss: it is “the political introduction to philosophy – the attempt to lead the qualified citizens . . . to the philosophic life” (1988a [1959]: 93–4). Strauss’s argument for esotericism in the presentation of philosophy – as a protection both to the philosopher who is endangered by challenging the “way” of his city by looking at it in the light of nature, and for the city, which is in danger in its constitutive commitments when interrogated in the light of nature – is another aspect of the understanding of political philosophy in its relation to political life. In the end, then, Strauss’s claim that political philosophy is first philosophy constitutes as radical a reconceptualization of the nature of philosophy as those proposed earlier by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

36 CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY s i m o n ha i lwo o d

Philosophical engagement with environmental issues has developed, deepened, and broadened through the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, alongside the increase in public concern for these issues. Environmental philosophy no longer seems quite the faddish or niche enterprise it might have appeared to be when it first began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. It is relatively hard now to find philosophers willing to declare that, although important, environmental issues are not philosophically important, such that philosophers qua philosophers have nothing of interest to say about them. On the contrary, most Anglophone philosophy departments have at least some environmental ethics or philosophy provision at the undergraduate level and many also have staff publishing in the area. General philosophy journals regularly publish work on environmental issues, and a range of more specialist environmental ethics and philosophy journals have appeared in recent decades. I want to suggest that it is a mistake to see these developments only as part of a wider trend of increased attention by professional philosophers to “applied philosophy” or “applied ethics” (including medical ethics, business ethics, professional ethics, and so on). No doubt it is part of that, but much of what is distinctive, interesting, and important about environmental philosophy, and indeed its wide-ranging diversity, cannot be understood on the model of taking philosophy as otherwise already complete unto itself and “applying” that to environmental questions. There are several reasons why it is better to think of much of the interesting work in environmental philosophy as a kind of critical philosophy. First, it has been motivated by a sense of ecological crisis that throws into question mainstream assumptions in ways that what is usually thought of as applied philosophy generally does not. Secondly, the straightforward application of existing mainstream philosophy results in what from the perspective of influential strands in environmental philosophy is a “shallow” environmentalism. Moreover, phrases like “applied philosophy,” especially “applied ethics,” suggest an “extensionism” that (as we will see) many 485

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environmental philosophers have found problematic. Finally, different strands of environmental philosophy are often opposed to each other in a more fundamental sense than is generally the case in applied philosophy. In the following I briefly illustrate each of these themes in turn. As motivated by a sense of ecological crisis that implicates thought and culture in general, much environmental philosophy does not concern a set of relatively confined, albeit important, issues and problems (medical, business, media, and so on) to the clarification and solution of which philosophers might contribute. Much of it has not proceeded on the assumption that things in general are more or less in order but there are a few problems here and there about which philosophy can have interesting things to say. Rather, it has proceeded from the view that serious and intensifying environmental problems suggest there are deep problems with social and personal life in general and the traditional forms of thought that underpin them, at least insofar as these encompass relations between humanity and its anthropogenic environment and wider terrestrial nature. What are these problems? They include the many kinds of destructive environmental consequences of modern social practices and expanding human populations, such as anthropogenic climate change, atmospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, soil erosion, large-scale loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and mass extinction. Many environmental philosophers thus take the work of the various environmental sciences on these issues as a point of departure or evidence that something is wrong with many of the commonly accepted ways of thinking about humanity’s place in the wider world. It is about “applying” the ecological crisis to philosophy at least as much as the other way around. A major crux here has been the contrast between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric perspectives, where “anthropocentric” roughly means that what makes a principle or course of action right is that it is conducive to human interests. Underlying this is often what Richard Routley (1973) called the “sole value assumption”: that only humans have ultimate value or are ends in themselves. Non-anthropocentrism is the denial of this and in one form or other is the mainstream position in environmental philosophy, motivated by the thought that the contrasting anthropocentrism is the default assumption in much of the rest of culture and its underlying philosophical traditions. One debate then concerns the adequacy of a purely anthropocentric perspective on environmental issues. Certainly, once the fact of human dependency, including that of future generations of humans, on natural environmental processes and entities, and the ecological principle that “everything is connected” are accepted, then radical principles and policies might be justified. Climate change is a case in point here and there is a rapidly expanding literature on the ethical

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and other issues raised by what Stephen Gardiner (2006) calls the “perfect moral storm” that is the climate change situation. One important tradition of environmental thinking that bears on such matters is that of stewardship: each generation of humanity should regard itself as the stewards of the environment and preserve it in good order for future generations.1 Also important are issues of environmental justice, both diachronic – we do our descendants a serious injustice by bequeathing them a degraded environment – and synchronic: the current distribution of environmental benefits and harms clearly raises issues of justice. These matters can be, and have been, debated within the frame of anthropocentrism. But one might also take the stewardship tradition in its original theological guise to straddle the anthropocentric/nonanthropocentric contrast, roughly: God has created the world and humanity as its protector, both for humanity’s own sake and for that of the other created beings. To adapt one of Locke’s provisos on acquired property rights, humanity should leave enough and as good for others, both human and non-human, in their unavoidable transactions with the rest of the world. It is not clear though how far this escapes anthropocentrism or how adequate a strongly anthropocentric perspective can be when it comes to articulating the issues raised by our environmental situation and the proper normative responses to them. Thus, in a much-discussed article for the journal Science, the historian Lynn White Jr. argued that Judeo-Christian theology has left Western thought, including natural scientific thought, with a presumption of dominion over an inferior natural world, and that “[e]specially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (White 1967: 1,205). Indeed: Since both science and technology are blessed words in our contemporary vocabulary, some may be happy at the notions, first, that viewed historically, modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and, second, that modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology – hitherto quite separate activities – joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt. (1,206)

Such claims about the role of theological doctrine are contested, of course, and there are lively ecotheological defenses of more benign stewardship readings of the Bible. White himself pointed, albeit not very optimistically, toward resources within historical Christianity: “Since the roots of our trouble are so 1

See e.g. John Passmore’s 1974 analysis of the stewardship tradition as, for him, a properly anthropocentric tradition.

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largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not . . . The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists” (1,207). Whatever one makes of White’s specific claims about the spiritual roots and dimension of the ecological crisis in his remarkable essay, the general thrust – that prevalent modes of thinking underpin the attitudes and practices that drive the ecological crisis – has been taken up in various ways by environmental philosophy. This makes it critical rather than merely applied philosophy. Not critical in the sense of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, though there is a robust strand of environmental thought that takes its bearings from that source (e.g. Bìro 2005; Vogel 2015; see also Young, this volume). More influential in the development of environmental philosophy, however, has been the position labeled by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess as “deep ecology” (Naess 1973). The main emphasis of deep ecology is the need for transformation in light of critique of the assumptions of modern consumerist society from a range of spiritual perspectives, including Buddhist, Jain, and Native American, as well as various philosophical traditions, such as Spinozist metaphysical monism. Deep ecology sees all living beings as intrinsically valuable, whatever their instrumental importance to humanity. This is to be understood holistically, however, in terms of the interrelationship of interdependent organisms within complex ecosystems: living nature as a whole is to be respected and individuals within it understood in terms of how they are constituted as interrelated parts of this whole. Deep ecology thus has an “ecocentric” orientation. The term “deep” refers to its claimed depth of interrogation of the reality of humanity’s place within complex systems, free of any pretense of mastery and ownership of the whole, and of its probing of the significance to human society of accepting this reality (e.g. Devall and Sessions 1985). Another strand of critical environmental thought that has developed over recent decades is that of eco-phenomenology. Taking its cue from Husserl and his followers (especially Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas) that we should “return to the things themselves” – or what is given in basic experience – this approach tends to criticize scientific naturalism as the dominant view of nature. The basic problem is taken to be that, having abstracted away from the world as experienced, scientific naturalism produces a model of reality that forgets its own roots in experience and thereby supplants experienced reality. Despite its obvious utility in many contexts, especially in enabling technology, there are no grounds for taking the perspective of scientific naturalism to be epistemologically or metaphysically privileged in general over the lifeworld of primary experience, where responses of respect, awe, and wonder with regard to nature are rooted.

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Once this latter is supplanted by (or reduced to) the natural scientific model of reality, then it is difficult to reinsert normative grounds for anything other than an anthropocentric mastery perspective in which human subjects look out onto non-human objects as mere things to be exploited. This line of thought is unpacked and defended in various ways depending largely on which of the great phenomenologists are taken as the point of departure. Heidegger’s account of “technological enframing” has been highly influential, as has Merleau-Ponty on embodied perception (see e.g. Evernden 1993 [1985]; Brown and Toadvine 2003; Thomson 2004b). There is an affinity between much of this work with the critical “deep” questioning of deep ecology (Devall and Sessions 1985). Also important has been the development of feminist environmental thought. The critical potential of this is exemplified by the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood, centered on the critique of a series of interrelated dualisms permeating (mostly Western) thought and culture that need to be overcome to resolve the ecological crisis.2 “Dualism” here means a distinction solidified into a dichotomy in which the elements are “hyper-separated” (viewed as utterly – or excessively – distinct and independent) and related hierarchically with the lower, subordinate element homogenized (the particularities of different tokens overlooked) and backgrounded (ignored or dismissed as insignificant) or viewed as merely instrumental to the interests of the higher, “master” element. Dualisms include those of mind/body, reason/emotion, the West/the Rest. What marks the approach as “eco-feminist” is the centrality of dualisms of male/female and humanity (or culture)/nature understood as constituting interrelated patterns of domination. The master perspective, the site of (narrowly instrumental) reason, is a traditionally patriarchal one presenting itself as the human perspective, and either ignores nature (as the mere backdrop to its exploits) or looks down upon it as a separate realm significant only as a bundle of resources and (at least implicitly) denigrated as a site of primitive, unreasoning bodily feeling, and absence of culture. Characterizing environmental philosophy as applied philosophy risks confining it to the “shallow” side of a contrast with positions that seek the kind of “depth” associated explicitly with deep ecology and (at least implicitly) also sought by those who, like Lynn White Jr. (and Heidegger), point to the need for a spiritual solution to the ecological crisis, or consider the crisis in ecophenomenological or eco-feminist terms, for example. Indeed, Naess coined the phrase “deep ecology” in a paper contrasting it with a “shallow environmentalism” based on an (inconsistent) anthropocentric project aimed at 2

Plumwood 1993; 2002. Other important eco-feminist work includes that of Carolyn Merchant (1980) and Karen Warren (2000).

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combatting pollution and resource depletion for the sake of “the health and affluence of people in developed countries” (Naess 1973: 95). Naess rejects any ranking of beings in terms of relative value: from the “ecological point of view” all beings have the right to live and unfold in their own way (“biospheric egalitarianism”). Of course, even a philosophy inclined to criticize alternatives as environmentally shallow, anthropocentric business-as-usual will take something from previous philosophy. For example, as already noted, several deep ecologists have taken Spinoza’s monism3 as the appropriate metaphysical underpinning for their approach: all beings, including humanity, are but aspects of a single unfolding reality. There are no ontological boundaries “except at a superficial level of perception,” says Naess, who rejects the picture of “man in environment in favour of a relational, total field image: Organisms as knots in a biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations” (95). The term deep ecology is also intended to suggest scientific ecology’s contemporary validation of the old claim that “everything is connected to everything else.” But the main movement in such thinking is probably better characterized as spiritual or phenomenological rather than scientific or even, in any conventional sense, moral. Genuine awareness of human inseparability from the whole requires a transformation in outlook which rejects human exceptionalism and overlordship. Such awareness is understood in terms of a self-realization that involves intuitive grasp of an ecocentric perspective, in turn understood as a matter of “expanding the self” to identify with “others” – including non-human others (see also the chapters by Katz and by May, this volume). The more we do this the more we realize our (real, ecologically embedded) selves. These claims about the self feature in Naess’s own version of deep ecology: “Ecosophy T.” In identifying with others, one expands one’s true ecological Self, capitalized to contrast it with the “narrow” self viewed independently of ecological identifications. This picture of the Self as the totality of its identifications is often associated with deep ecology as such, though Naess originally intended it as only his own version, not an official doctrine.4 Nor does the expanded Self or any radically holist doctrine appear on the eight-point platform Naess drew up with George Sessions to clarify the deep ecology “programme” (Naess 1986). This platform, which was apparently intended to focus something like an overlapping consensus amongst those moved by the non-anthropocentric implications of ecology (without necessary commitment to mysticism or strong

3 4

For an alternative, Leibnizian, underpinning of deep ecological themes see Phemister 2016. The “T” in Ecosophy T stands for Tvergasten, a mountain hut where he wrote much of his work; it expresses Naess’s view that it is for each person to work out their own ecologically informed philosophy (ecosophy).

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metaphysical holism), can be reduced to three basic principles: protect wilderness and biodiversity; control the human population; live simply so as to “tread lightly on the Earth.” Like much critical environmental thought, the approaches mentioned so far were deeply inspired by the pioneering work of earlier conservationists and nature writers. Particularly influential has been the work of conservationist, ecologist, and wilderness defender Aldo Leopold, best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (first published posthumously in 1949), in which he propounds an ecocentric “land ethic.” Working for the US Forestry Service led Leopold to appreciate the ecological importance of the predators he was required to hunt to protect livestock, and to advocate wilderness protection in national forests facing large-scale road-building and burgeoning recreational demands. Rather than a mere space for hunting and recreation, “wilderness” should be reconceived as biotic community the health of which requires predators. A Sand County Almanac contains many ideas and phrases that have resonated through subsequent environmental thought and profoundly influenced the work of some important later twentieth-century environmental philosophers (e.g. Callicott 1989). In a chapter called “Thinking like a mountain,” Leopold explains the notion of trophic cascade through an account of the ecosystemic consequences of killing a wolf. The chapter on the land ethic defends the principle that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1987 [1949]: 204). This “community” is not strictly limited to living beings, however, for “the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” For Leopold, this ecological communitarianism “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (204). Also of great importance was the work of biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson, especially her book Silent Spring (1962), generally taken to be a major spur to the development of grassroots environmental movements. Silent Spring focuses on the often unforeseen detrimental consequences for ecosystems of synthetic pesticides (in her term “biocides”) such as DDT, the effects of which are rarely limited to targeted pests. It criticizes short-sighted and indiscriminate technologically enabled interventions within the natural world, driven by metaphors of war, as generally damaging to that world (for example through bio-accumulation and leaving ecosystems vulnerable to unanticipated invasive species); and damaging also to a humanity whose continuity with the affected natural systems is underappreciated.

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One reason for the impact of Silent Spring is that it obviously appeals to anthropocentric (and shallow) imperatives as well as more critical nonanthropocentric considerations. Still, and certainly when it is focused on the non-anthropocentric, it remains misleading to characterize environmental philosophy as applied ethics because in environmental contexts this suggests the mere extension of already well-established ethical ideas to previously overlooked issues and entities. In contrast, much environmental thought has been critical of such “extensionism.” For Plumwood, for example, insofar as dualism remains in play, it will be difficult not only to summon the humility required to admit and sustain attention on humanity’s dependence on wider ecological reality. It will also be a struggle to articulate and live what, for her, is an appropriate ethical relation to nature: That is, an ethic focused on the particularities of the non-human in its otherness, recognizing the continuities and interrelatedness with humanity without placing the non-human within a normative framework that privileges humanity as the center with all other beings owed consideration only to the extent they exemplify the favored human feature (whether rationality, sentience, or something else) (Plumwood 2002: 97ff ). In fact, a range of environmental philosophers have rejected attempts to ground the “moral considerability” of non-human beings by extending classic moral theories, as in well-known work on animal rights and welfare by Tom Regan and Peter Singer (see Peña-Guzmán and Willett, this volume). Even if better than nothing, this still affords non-humans a status as second-class or defective humans (see e.g. Rodman 1977; Goodpaster 1978). Some environmental philosophers have looked to virtue as the appropriate ethical concept with which to address ethical issues raised by the ecological crisis. Here too though the tendency has been to retool traditional virtues, such as temperance and humility, or formulate new ones, such as “respect for nature,” rather than simply “apply” to the issues a virtue ethic held to be already adequate for the purpose (see e.g. Hursthouse 2007; Jamieson 2007). A related major focus in environmental ethics has been an attempt to formulate accounts of the value of natural entities as intrinsic, inherent, or at any rate not merely instrumental, and to clarify the axiological and metaethical commitments of such a position. An influential point of departure for this work were intuitions in papers such as Richard Routley’s (1973) presentation of his “last man” argument – that the last living human’s final act should not be to destroy the rest of the natural world, even though this would not be detrimental to human interests – designed to show the untenability of the sole value assumption. There have been debates about the axiological and ontological status of such value (intrinsic or relational, objective or subjective; e.g. Callicott 1986; Elliot 1992) and work analyzing the differences between these notions as

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they figure, not always very consistently, within environmental philosophy (e.g. O’Neill 1992; Green 1996). An important question of course is which non-human natural entities should be taken to be non-instrumentally valuable; in particular, should it be biological individuals or larger wholes: ecosystems, species, biodiversity, and other things not in themselves alive. Important also are metaphysical debates about the reality of any such supposed entities and a range of related conceptual and empirical issues. (For example, should one be a realist about species? What is going to count as an ecosystem? Can ecosystems be individuated sufficiently precisely to be appropriate bearers of value in their own right?) Holmes Rolston’s ecocentric theory, which has a nested structure giving different kinds of value to parts and wholes, has been influential and exemplifies problems in this area. For Rolston, the value of natural entities is objective (independent of human valuers) and has a variety of different forms and bases. The value of plants and other non-sentient living beings is grounded in their teleological organization; their being self-maintaining, goal-directed systems (Rolston 2012: 100). Species are valuable as “dynamic life forms preserved in historic lines that persist genetically over millions of years” (129); their destruction involves “a kind of superkilling” (135). Ecosystems lack interests and have “no brain, no genome, no skin, no self-identification, no telos, no unified program”; yet, ecosystems have “projective value” in that they generate the complex order and interdependence that is life in all its diversity (Rolston 2003: 148–9). An ecosystem is valuable as the goose that lays the valuable golden eggs – diverse, interdependent species (150). But again, does the goose really exist over and above the eggs? And if so, where does it begin and end? Moreover, does not valuing ecosystems and species in these ways involve genetic fallacies? What is the relation between these kinds of value and what is required of us ethically? If we value biological individuals as, in the words of another influential environmental ethicist, “teleological centres of life” (Taylor 1986), then does this not commit us to caring similarly about the “interests” automobiles have in being well-oiled? Debates about these issues are ongoing. The differing strands and tendencies of environmental philosophy are often critical of each other in a deeper sense than in most debates within applied philosophy. In this respect it is perhaps more like political philosophy. Deep ecology has been much criticized, for example. It is certainly possible, of course, to have an environmental philosophy focused on radical change and critique without the baggage associated (sometimes unfairly) with deep ecology. The explicitly rival position of “social ecology,” centered on the work of Murray Bookchin, for instance, aims to replace the ecocentric focus of deep ecology with an account and critique of the historical socio-economic factors (including

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hierarchical political structures and capitalism) implicated in the environmental crisis (Bookchin 1982). It is also sharply critical of deep ecology’s alleged misanthropic anti-humanism. This latter objection seems particularly misplaced. The ideas properly associated with deep ecology are only contingently related, if at all, to a radically negative evaluation of humanity as such as a plague or cancer or the like. Non-anthropocentrism as such entails no such claim even when it is unpacked in ecocentric and egalitarian terms. To think it does is to commit what former deep ecologist Warwick Fox calls the “fallacy of misplaced misanthropy” (Fox 1990: 19–20). As many have pointed out, however, including Fox, the egalitarianism does pose problems, for example by obscuring apparently important ethical distinctions: if all forms of life are equally valuable and this is meant to inform our ethics (say by grounding an equal right to life), then it will be difficult to explain ethical differences between killing a rhubarb plant, an elephant, and a human (Fox 1984). If it is not supposed to inform our ethics, then it is unclear what it is for. It also seems better to have a critical environmental philosophy that is not committed to claims about the (expanding) Self that seem either simply mysterious or to turn on an equivocation between two senses of “identify with another.” In one sense, this means something like standing up for, or standing in solidarity with, some being or cause. This looks important as a way of expressing concern or respect for vulnerable others, especially in a time of environmental crisis. In another sense, however, it means something like becoming identical with, especially through acquiring the same interests as the other, or coming to realize that one always already did have those same interests. This second sense looks like an impossibility: for example, physiological and other differences rule out my having the same interests as a black widow spider. But it is this sense that seems to be involved in the expanded Self account: my Self is the totality of my identifications. On the other hand, it seems entirely possible that having taken myself to be “identical” with, say, a rainforest in this way, I will come to equate its interests with my own, leaving at best an enlightened form of egoism with little to distinguish it substantively from the shallowest forms of environmentalism. It would be unhelpful to argue that these observations ignore a properly radical holism, which holds that boundaries between such things are real only at a superficial level of perception. For the differences between myself and a spider, or between humanity and non-human life in general, seem fundamental to our environmental situation. Nor is this point threatened by ecological science. We might accept that everything is connected to everything else without that committing us to thinking that everything is Really, or Ultimately, One. Most of these difficulties with the expanding Self and strongly holist elements of at

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least Naess’s own original version of deep ecology have been pointed out by Val Plumwood among others (2002: 196ff ). The emphasis – in much of what has now come to look like “traditional” environmental ethics – on developing accounts of the intrinsic value of nature, or natural entities and processes, as present paradigmatically in wilderness for example, has also provoked strong counter-currents, if not a backlash, within environmental philosophy. These have taken various forms, some of which can be brought under the heading of “postnaturalism.” One strand of postnaturalism takes its cue from the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s (1990) claim that the massive scale of human impact on the world, such as through climate change, means that we are living through the “end of nature.” The argument then is that valuing and preserving nature as such (independent of humanity) no longer makes sense. Another strand emphasizes the historically contingent, socially constructed status of concepts of nature and wilderness and criticizes the ideological character of wilderness preservation, for example in concealing the presence and labor of indigenous peoples (e.g. Cronon 1995). A third strand suggests attention be focused on problems internal to our anthropogenic, artifactual, and technological environment rather than protection of intrinsically valuable nature. Steven Vogel, for example, urges us to “think like a mall” instead of like Leopold’s mountain (Vogel 2015). More than one of these strands are sometimes present within the same argument, though not always very coherently. The first and third are strongly present in current debates about “the Anthropocene,” where the central thought is that the scale of human impact requires a relabeling of the current geological epoch from “Holocene” to “Anthropocene”: The New Age of Humanity (see e.g. Crutzen 2002; Ellis 2011). The claims involved are frequently unconvincing, however, turning on crude, oversimplified understandings of the concepts involved. There is often a failure to distinguish different senses of nature in play and a tendency to presuppose that non-human nature or wilderness must be “pure” or literally untouched by human activity (see e.g. Hailwood 2015). Another form of objection to “traditional” environmental ethics comes under the heading of “environmental pragmatism.” Environmental philosophers inspired by the tradition of philosophical pragmatism have complained that environmental ethics and philosophy will continue to have little practical effect or relevance if its attention remains fixed on formulating more or less radically non-anthropocentric perspectives, and debating the finer points of the associated axiologies, independently of any particular concrete problems. Instead, it should focus on such problems and on ground shared with

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anthropocentric considerations (for example, maintaining biodiversity in a particular place can be justified in terms of relevant human interests just as easily, if not more easily, than in terms of its intrinsic value or significance from an ecocentric perspective) in order to underwrite progressive policies and programs of action (see e.g. Norton 1991; Light and Katz 1996; Minteer 2012). It should be noted that such positions can still often count as forms of critical environmental philosophy. Despite the reservations about “mainstream” environmental philosophy, the resulting controversies are largely “in-house” controversies; critics of traditional environmentalism are still often sharply critical of the non-environmental mainstream for its neglect of our environmental situation. Vogel’s postnaturalism, for example, has a critical theoretic and early Marxian focus on our alienation from our anthropogenic environment and lack of genuinely democratic control over it. Environmental pragmatist Ben Minteer draws upon John Dewey’s conception of “natural piety” in order to distance his pragmatism from crass instrumentalism and consumerism (Minteer 2012). Bryan Norton’s earlier distinction between considered, ecologically informed preferences and the felt preferences of mainstream consumer culture does similar work (Norton 1984). The appropriate depth and shade of green is contested; that there should be some such depth and shade generally is not.

37 PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY jan k y r r e b e r g f r i i s

INTRODUCTION

Philosophy of technology only came into existence as a specialist branch of professional philosophy during the 1970s, although the philosophical literature during the years between 1945 and the 1970s voices an increasing preoccupation with technology. Just as the First World War led to a wave of disillusionment among intellectuals as well as the common man, so did the Second World War. This disillusionment manifested itself as pessimism, which became characteristic of several influential philosophers during the two first decades after the war. We find it echoed, for instance, in Gabriel Marcel’s The Decline of Wisdom (1954), where Marcel describes the “horror and anxiety” he felt walking through “the ruins of Vienna in 1946, or more recently in Caen, Rouen or Würzburg” (21). But the 1970s, with growing social prosperity, industrial growth, and better technologies, changed that sentiment. The development of a professional philosophy of technology has, after the 1960s, developed along two different yet familiar trajectories: one into an analytical philosophy of technology and science, the other into a Continental (or more broadly humanities-oriented) philosophy of technology (see also Thomson, this volume). 19 45 T O T H E 19 6 0 S – “ G E N T LE M E N : Y O U A R E M A D! ”

Three months into 1946, Lewis saw fit to call attention to the apocalyptic consequences of a nuclear war. He saw human self-interest disguised in the robes of creativity, with politicians believing in the necessity of increased nuclear capabilities, which they found to be the best suitable means to progress and prosperity. Mumford wrote: We in America are living among madmen . . . [T]he madmen have taken it upon themselves to lead us by gradual stages to that final act of madness which will corrupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, possibly put an end to all life on the planet itself . . . Treat the bomb for what it actually is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws of life. (Mumford 1946: 5)

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After a visit to Japan in 1960, Robert Oppenheimer – “the father of the atomic bomb” – wrote about the days of August 1945: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita . . . ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”1 Even H. G. Wells, who had written about the bliss of scientific and technological progress before the war, had a different opinion in 1945. He thought that we were now nearing the end of civilization, the end of humanity as well as of all life on earth (Wells 1946). The years of the Cold War, from 1946 to the end of the 1980s, presented a threat that was very much on all people’s minds – the Cold War’s arms race. By 1954, the USA and the Soviet Union both had nuclear capabilities. On March 1, 1954, the USA blew up a hydrogen bomb in what is known as the Castle Bravo test at the Bikini Atoll. The explosion yielded 14.8 megatons, which equals the explosive power of 14.8 million tons of TNT. In 1961, the Soviets detonated a hydrogen bomb with the energy of 58 megatons. In comparison, the Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 exploded with only 20 kilotons of TNT. William Barrett wrote in Irrational Man (1958) that “the physicist is able to detonate a bomb that alters – and can indeed put an end to – the life of ordinary mankind” (Barrett 1990 [1958]: 7). In some quarters – especially among the skeptical and pessimistic academia and intelligentsia of the USA and Europe – technology in the hands of humanity did not necessarily equal prosperity or progress at all. According to Lewis Mumford (1971; 1974), there are two basic forms of technology: polytechnics and monotechnics. Polytechnics are thought to be basic to human thought and prior in history, and were used to aid humanity’s aspirations for the multi-spectrum fulfillment of human potentiality, whereas monotechnics are the narrower technologies, and the mentality behind them, that exploit natural resources through cold reasoning and calculation, science and power – a logic that channels human aspirations into economic and material progress aided by military superiority (1974). It is particularly this last constellation – the interaction of politics, science, technology, and humankind – that worried the more critically voiced after the war. Mumford’s aim was to make people aware of this potential for madness and so to point to a need for transformation of humanity, a transformation toward that which is most fully and essentially human, namely, humanity’s interpretative thinking.

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Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) famously said this while visiting Japan in September 1960.

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Martin Heidegger, like Mumford, had lived through two world wars. Also like Mumford, Heidegger’s philosophical focus was on the essence of human being, namely, our being essentially a self-interpreting being thrown into the world. Heidegger had joined the Nazi party early in the 1930s – an episode in his life of which he later published very little. But in 1938, he published his essay “The age of the world picture” (Heidegger 1977b), in which he outlines five characteristic transformations of the modern world, which he sees as brought about by the quantitative natural sciences, technology, the loss of gods, the attempt at universal cultural formation for everyone, and the conversion of the realm of art to that of aesthetic experience (Lin Ma 2007; Thomson 2011). Like Mumford, Heidegger distinguishes between forms of technology. Heidegger did not reject any use of technologies; instead, what he tried to do was situate and contextualize modern technology within a broad ontological-metaphysical and historical framework (Mitcham 1994), showing an abiding interest, for example, in the growing transformation of nuclear and other advanced technologies on human culture and spirituality. Heidegger differed from earlier philosophers of technology by emphasizing the human contribution to technology, arguing that technologies are not neutral but instead tend to push the historical development in a particular, nihilistic direction (Feenberg 1999). Heidegger’s main work on technology is “The question concerning technology [Die Frage nach der Technik],” first published in 1962 (Heidegger 1962b; 1977b). Here Heidegger addresses several questions and so distinguishes different senses of technology. First, what is technology? Technology is essentially a distinctive way of understanding and disclosing all entities, one that treats all things as meaningless resources awaiting optimization (see Young, this volume). Second, how should we characterize this technological mode of revealing, which challenges all things to become merely resources to be optimized? Heidegger calls this technological mode of revealing “enframing” or Ge-stell. As a totalizing mode of revealing, enframing is a way of seeing (or mindset) that undermines or denies the validity of other ways of seeing things. In so doing, Ge-stell conceals the creativity that remains inherent in all human disclosure. By presenting its own distinctive manner of revealing things simply as the way things are, enframing conceals itself as a distinctive historical mode of revealing. Enframing thereby conceals the fact that, historically, technology was originally construction, art and craft (technê), a creative disclosure that serves the “bringing-forth” of things and of truth, rather than merely imposing its monolithic framework of efficient optimization on all things (Thomson 2005). What Heidegger thus shows is that humanity’s historical way of disclosing all things is fundamentally transformed by modern technology. Modern

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technology forces things to show themselves merely as energies of nature, thereby making those energies available for human use. This monolithic mode of disclosure contrasts starkly with that of earlier technologies, which originally served a broader and more creative bringing forth of things (Her-vor-bringen), including those of poetry and the other arts. By contrast, the technological mode of revealing is a challenging-forth (Herausforderung) that works to efficiently optimize all things, as for example when a river is seen merely in terms of water energy that can become electricity, be transported over huge distances, accessed by various people for myriad purposes, and stored up for further use. In this technological mode of revealing, in other words, the river becomes merely a commodity of commerce which can be stored, ordered, purchased, and delivered to customers all over the country. The broader nature or being of the river becomes hidden in the electrical current; we no longer see nature when we turn on the lamps in the evening. Here, as Heidegger puts it, nature is no longer here even as an “object” (Gegenstand) anymore; instead, it has become mere resource, stock, or standing reserve (Bestand).2 Likewise, humans too have become mere stock or human resources (Menschenmaterial) and so can, for instance, be ordered for medical purposes (organs) or for their expertise. Contemporary technology is thus this particular ontological “enframing” (Ge-stell), in which being becomes an available standing reserve, and the broader meaning of being gets reduced to its efficient application or use. In Ge-stell, the technological mode of revealing all things as mere Bestand or resources, human subjects and objects both get increasingly reduced to mere resources. This late modern mode of technological enframing thus follows historically after (and radicalizes) modern “subjectivism” (or technicity), in which technology was still concerned with the way “beings are experienced by humanity as ‘posed’ to, by and for humanity . . . and thus conceivably subject to his control.”3 In Gelassenheit (1955), translated as Discourse on Thinking (Heidegger 1959), Heidegger voices his concern for this turn toward the organization, calculation, planning, and automation. He thinks that “we must observe the loss of man’s autochthony with which our age is threatened. And ask: What really is happening in our age?” (Heidegger 1976b). As defining symptoms, Heidegger points to the scientific mindset accompanying technological innovation, development, and application. What worries him is the overflowing optimism among natural scientists, their scientistic confidence that modern natural science is the only way forward. For Heidegger, this mindset of the natural scientist – with its emphasis on calculative thought – is a real threat to the future of 2 3

See Heidegger 1977b; Lin Ma 2007; Schiølin 2015; see also Young, this volume. See Heidegger 1976b; 1981, and below; see also Thomson 2005: chapter 2; 2011: chapter 2.

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humanity. For it shows that calculative rationality is eclipsing all other modes of thinking, of creative disclosure more broadly and fundamentally conceived. The danger is that we “forget to ponder. Because we forget to ask: What is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature?” (1976b). In other words, we need to understand technological enframing in terms of its history, tracing its complex historical emergence (out of metaphysics [see Thomson 2005]) and so come to see enframing as one historical mode of revealing among others, a very useful but also partial and dangerous mode of revealing which tends to displace and eclipse all other ways of understanding what things are. If we do not take that historical step-back (and so contextualize enframing historically), Heidegger thinks we lose sight of ourselves as essentially the creative disclosers of these multiple, historical modes of revealing. Such disclosive (or meditative) thinking keeps us connected to the “earth” historically because it is what connects us to being, that seemingly inexhaustible source of the meaningfulness of all that is, which can never be brought completely under our control or reduced to any single framework for understanding it (see Thomson 2011). Thus, in his last interview with Der Spiegel – given in 1966 but only published on May 30, 1976, five days after his death – Heidegger continues to worry that “technicity increasingly dislodges humanity and uproots us from the earth . . . We don’t need atomic bombs at all – the uprooting of humanity is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones.” Heidegger refers to the French poet René Char, who in a recent conversation had told him “that the uprooting of humanity that is now taking place is the end (of everything human), unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power” (Heidegger 1976b), that is, their power to creatively disclose, to show us the being of things otherwise than as mere technological resources to be efficiently optimized. Herbert Marcuse shared much of Heidegger’s view of technology as an increasingly monolithic historical mode of revealing all things. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse writes about technology as the modern-day form of “human experience itself” and (according to Andrew Feenberg) as “the principal way in which the world is revealed” (Feenberg 2005: 6). Marcuse’s concept of technology is more akin to Heidegger’s concept of modern “technicity” (as opposed to late modern enframing), which (as we saw) characterizes the manner in which Being presents itself when it is constituted by the experience of objects to be submitted to the control of human subjects. For Marcuse, too, “technology” is much more that any device, tool, weapon or machine: “It signifies a way of thinking and a style of practice, indeed, a quasi-transcendental structuring of reality as an object of technical control” (6).

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Marcuse also thinks we need to change this way of technicity, but where Heidegger pointed upward toward poetry and art, Marcuse points downward to our basic practices. Marcuse believes that authentic human existence remains possible despite our increasingly more inauthentic technological society, because he thinks technology can be transformed (2005: 6). Technology can be more than the analytic and calculating rationality that continues to dominate the innovation and utilization of technologies; it can be applied to help generate the highest possibilities for humans within society as a whole. This, however, is not possible as long as we continue to pursue a capitalist economy. The present world is politically and economically organized around technology and science, which together form the three pillars of growth. Marcuse did not offer an elaboration of what is meant by “new technology”; Feenberg thinks Marcuse “lacked the theoretical means to articulate his new position coherently and persuasively” (6). Nevertheless, as Marcuse himself wrote: Scientific management and scientific division of labor vastly increased the productivity of the economic, political, and cultural enterprise. Result: the higher standard of living. At the same time and on the same ground, this rational enterprise produced a pattern of mind and behavior that justified and absolved even the most destructive and oppressive features of the enterprise. Scientific-technical rationality and manipulation are welded together into new forms of social control. (Marcuse 1964: 149)

Marcuse clearly believed that capitalism was in the process of making technology so efficient that the (increasingly alienated) labor that had previously been directed into securing the basic necessities of survival could now be redirected into creative explorations and liberating transformations of the meaning of human life (see the chapters by O’Connor and by Young, this volume). Jacques Ellul, a contemporary of Marcuse, wrote The Technological Society, published in English in 1964. Ellul’s concept of “technique,” like Heidegger’s “technicity” and Ge-stell, goes beyond any ordinary notion of technology as something that is restricted to specific machines or tools. Ellul’s technique designates a fragmented technological society where lives, decisions, economy, science, life, and death are modified by the efficiency of technological-scientific thinking. For Ellul, as Erwin Marquit writes, technologies generate specific environments that people have to occupy whether they want it or not – nature tends to fade into the background. Technology becomes the autonomous bearer of its own values, beliefs, and idea, producing some values while destroying others. Yet technological progress is neither good nor bad, according to Marquit. The heart of the matter is that what constitutes progress or regress depends on one’s perspective; but all in all, technological progress creates more problems than it solves and it remains impossible to predict which of its effects will be favorable or pernicious (Marquit 1995).

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19 6 0 S T O 2 015 : I N T R O DU C T I O N T O A N A L Y T I C A L, E T H I C A L, AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

There has been an increasing number of publications within the emerging field of philosophy of technology from the 1960s to 2015. A large number of anthologies have been published, book series have been launched, as well as several journals focusing on the more specific and specialized areas of technology within philosophy. In 2009 (revised in 2013), A Companion to a Philosophy of Technology was published. This first authoritative reference source in the philosophy of technology covers ninety-eight topics, under such major subheadings as history of technology – which includes technologies in various countries on different continents; here, for instance, technology and war are linked and shown to have an intimate relation throughout human history, shaping the way we think, act, and interact. Other major divisions include: technology and science, encompassing engineering, the social construction of technology, cybernetics, and much more; technology and philosophy, including such topics as cyborgs, technological artifacts, technological pragmatism, rationality, imaging, and sociotechnical systems; technology and the environment, addressing the Precautionary Principle, global warming, environmental science and technology; technology and politics, on topics like the idea of progress, technology and power, and gender and technology. Still other major divisions address: technology and ethics, on agriculture ethics, biomedical engineering ethics, computer ethics, religion and technology; technology and the future, on prosperity and risk, nanotechnology, transportation, the future of humanity (Friis, Pedersen, and Hendricks 2009/13). ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

Analytical philosophy of technology emerged in the 1960s. In 1927, Friedrich Dessauer (1881–1963) published Philosophie der Technik (Philosophy of Technology), the same year as Heidegger published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Dessauer’s philosophy is interesting as a proto-analytical philosophy of technology. He approaches technologies from the perspective of the engineer, showing a keen interest in the design and constructive aspects of technical work (Berg Olsen (Friis) and Pedersen 2008: 17). Analytical philosophy of technology typically focuses on technology as practice, as design, as goal oriented, and on its distinctive methods and procedures. It is thus in line with contemporaneous analytical philosophy with its distinctive emphasis on language, definitions of concepts, formalizations, scientific knowledge, and empirical facts. Still, in the 1960s, technology was not an area that created any particular excitement among the theoretically inclined analytical philosophers (Franssen 2015).

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A change of mood was introduced by Mario Bunge in two papers, the first published in 1966 and the next in 1979, where Bunge proposed an understanding of a philosophy of technology that diverges in tone and content from the post-war philosophy of Heidegger, Mumford, and Marcuse. In Bunge’s view, technology is applied science. But technology is different from science because science is descriptive of nature: it measures, intervenes, tests nature as it is, that is, as nature is discovered to be through observation and experiment. Technology, on the other hand, involves innovation and construction; it is about constructing ideas; future-oriented, it is about that which “is to be.” Bunge emphasizes that technologies are about doing or actions that somehow must be based on theory: “there must be some knowledge before it [technology] can be applied, unless it happens to be a skill or knowhow rather than conceptual knowledge” (Bunge 1966). Bunge focuses on what the area of philosophy of technology should aim to investigate and how. “We must search for philosophy among the ideas of technology – in technological research and in the planning of research and development” (Bunge 1979: 172). Bunge wanted a philosophy of technology that should be concerned with the distinctive characteristics that technological knowledge and scientific knowledge share, such as the difference between natural objects and artifacts; what distinguishes technological forecasts from natural ones; the important task of identifying heuristic principles; as well as the values and ethics of technology – all these should become research areas for the philosophy of technology. In his view, “the technologist partitions reality into resources, artifacts, and the rest – the set of useless things”; but he thought that the conceptual relations between technology and the other phenomena of modern culture should also become an item of investigation (172). Bunge’s 1966 paper “Technology as applied science” proved important for the development of an analytical philosophy of technology because of its thorough concern with method (Franssen 2013). There are two types of theory in technology. There are substantive theories, which deal with or provide knowledge about the object of action (e.g. in MRI technology), and there are operative theories, which are about what kind of action (e.g. how to make an MRI scanner). Substantive theories are applied scientific theories. Operative theories do not follow from simply applying scientific theories but are produced by the engineer doing more creative research on how to realize the potential of the technology. Yet, as Bunge claims, even these operative theories require applying scientific methods and the hypothetical deductive method as well as modeling, and idealizations; they use scientific concepts and apply scientific abstractions, modifying theories by implementing scientific data through predictive and retrodictive measures (2013).

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Several topics have become central to the contemporary body of analytical philosophy of technology, all with specific relevance to the engineering sciences. Hence we find topics like “design,” “artifacts,” and “ethics” at the core of the analytical project. Design is essential to the development of any technological artifact. Important ideas and theories inspiring the design process come from areas like society and the sciences. Knowledge about the physical processes of materials defines their applicability and rigor; however, this knowledge is often generated by the engineers themselves. Apart from the scientific side of design, there are other important aspects to consider. Franssen (2015) distinguishes between the methodological approach, where design is seen in terms of decision-making, and the metaphysical, which focuses on the ontological status or defining characteristics of technical artifacts. The distinctive or ontological status of artifacts is a topic frequently discussed by analytical philosophers of technology, often classified as a metaphysical issue. Here, for example, there are a vast number of publications on artificial intelligence, a general issue which includes such major subtopics as computational theory of mind, Turing machines, the Chinese Room argument, computability and complexity, functionalism, the philosophy of computer science, the Turing Test, the Church-Turing thesis, and multiple realizabilities. For Franssen, design demands creativity and embodies rationality. Design is action structured by rational choices and therefore subject to rational scrutinizing about how best to act under certain circumstances (Franssen 2015). In approaching design, philosophers of technology are dealing with bounded rationality of action and of how to decide between given options. Creativity in design, on the other hand, is all about generating such options. The work that has been done in this area up to 2015 has been described in numerous publications by philosophers such as P. A. Kroes, A. Meijers, M. Franssen, and L. L. Bucciarelli. Designing artifacts is the theme that is most in line with engineering practices. Artifacts are man-made purposeful objects. According to Kroes and Meijers’s (2006) theory about “the dual nature of technical artifacts,” an adequate description of artifacts should contain a reference to them both as material objects and as objects of intentions, since a number of people will be engaged with them, from designers to users, an issue which led to discussions about whether the notion of function hinges on intentionality or not. E T H I C S A N D T E C H N O LO GY

Ethics is the area of research that has experienced the most surprising development. Ethics did not become a major focus for philosophers of technology before the late twentieth century. Considering the impact that technologies

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have had on nature, human relationships, society, science, energy, and all wars, especially after 1945, it is rather surprising that technological innovation and development took so long to be considered from ethical standpoints. Some of the fundamental problems concern the ethical nature of technology itself (an issue we saw anticipated earlier by Heidegger, Marcuse, and others, whose approaches were nevertheless not primarily ethical), the human– technology relation, AI and ethics, the Internet and ethics, and so forth. These issues are still discussed today; however, as new technologies appear, new problems are spotted and addressed by technological ethicists. The fundamental issue that continues being addressed is the question of whether technologies are neutral or not (as Heidegger thought). Are technologies capable of possessing ethical qualities, given that they are nothing but creations of practical tools of various kinds? Or, on the other hand, does technology somehow carry the intentions and ethical commitments of the creators who decide its capabilities and functionalities? Are not normative commitments embedded, whether intentionally or not, into the design process, where such ethical decisions often become “black-boxed” and so largely invisible to users? If so, who bears the responsibility and the cost of such ethical decisions? How can they best be addressed? Another of Heidegger’s early students, the philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–93), writes in “Toward a philosophy of technology” that humanity is involved in all the . . . objects of technology, as these singly and jointly remake the worldly frame of his life, in both the narrower and the wider of its senses: that of the artificial frame of civilization in which social man leads his life proximately, and that of the natural terrestrial environment in which this artifact is embedded and on which it ultimately depends. (Jonas 2014: 219)

Nowadays, the large issue of the ethics of technology has been divided into several subtopics, such as technology and politics. Technological ethics can be discussed as a social activity, as engineering ethics, as cognitive activity, as methodology and epistemology, or as a cultural phenomenon (Franssen, Lokhorst, and van de Poel. 2015). Philosophy of information and computer ethics is one of the more recent developments, with Oxford Professor Luciano Floridi as this area’s leading thinker, and the latest developments documented in The Philosophy of Information (2011) and The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (2014). Ethics of technology has become divided between, on the one hand, such ethical issues and theories as those involved in arguments “for or against” the development of new technologies; for instance, did the scientists in the Manhattan Project follow or contravene ethical obligations in the way they

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produced the nuclear bomb? As that suggests, the tendency now is to move away from the abstract discussions typical of the early philosophers of technology and toward discussions of specific technologies and their actual developments. On the other hand, the second main division concerns the application of technologies to ethics rather than the other way around. Such issues include the ways that our changing technologies transform our ethical views. How has ethics changed its character and approach as the technological power of humanity has changed? How can we best understand and evaluate such technologically driven transformations of ethics itself?4 According to Franssen, the larger tendency visible in all these discussions is to move away from determinism and instead view technological development as a result of human choices. And the question of whether technologies are valueneutral or value-laden remains a persistent theme. The debate began within computer ethics with Bechtel in 1985 as well as Snapper, followed up by Dennett, Floridi, and Sanders. The value-neutral stance claims that technologies are neutral means to an end, and that it is up to us, the users of the technology, to decide if we will use it for good or bad ends. One proponent of this view is Joseph C. Pitt’s Thinking about Technology: Foundations of the Philosophy of Technology (2000). In the analytic philosophical tradition, the view that technologies are theory-laden has little to do with Heidegger’s idea that technology itself reflects a normatively laden way of understanding what it means for anything to be. Instead, it has to do with a view of the nature of the actual innovation and manufacture of technologies – which is a goal-oriented design process reflecting and embodying norm-laden decisions (Franssen 2015). Technologies often have specific functions and can only be used optimally for certain well-defined purposes. As Franssen concludes, “the conceptual connection between technological artifacts, functions, and goals make it hard to maintain that technology is value-neutral.” A number of topics and problem areas have surfaced as a result of the recent development of a technological ethics. Besides technological value-ladenness, other topics of discussion here include responsibility (first voiced by Jonas in 1984), design, technological risks, engineering ethics, as well as cultural and political approaches. These discussions of design, engineering ethics, and technological risk were primarily concentrated within analytical approaches to the philosophy of technology, but not exclusively so, since, as we saw in the case of Jonas, responsibility, risk, and the ethics of design are topics also shared by more Continental philosophers of technology, who tend to be oriented less toward 4

A brilliant examination of these issues can be found in Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (2016).

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science and engineering and more toward the humanities and social sciences generally, and who have, accordingly, been more willing to address larger cultural and political issues arising from or intersecting with the philosophy of technology. These political and cultural perspectives on technology often build on the general philosophy and moral philosophy typical of the first half of the twentieth century. The political perspectives tend to focus on technology as something that embodies specific relations of power between people. What technology is or should be is seen as determined by these power relations (as e.g. in Foucault). Indeed, technology, understood as a cultural phenomenon, has some influence on how we perceive the world. These political perspective on technology go back beyond Heidegger and Marcuse to Marx, for whom technology was perceived as one major factor determining both the economic structure and social structures of a given society. In the 1980s, a similar view was put forward by the philosopher Langdon Winner. In his famous “Do artifacts have politics?” (1980), Winner describes how African-Americans from the less wealthy areas of New York City used to take the Long Island bus to the Jones Beach on Long Island. This bus traffic, however, was perceived as a nuisance by Robert Moses, who successfully managed to persuade politicians to allow him to construct and build overpasses on all the highways leading out to the Jones Beach. The result was that buses could not pass under them. Winner showed how the implementation of technology through political and economic power relations could be – and was indeed – used to control transportation patterns of people in order to segregate race and social class. These bridges are political, due to the particular normativity behind the way they were designed. Other prominent philosophers writing about the political and social normativity embodied and embedded in technological design include Andrew Feenberg (1999) and Richard Sclove (1995). A different approach to ethics is visible in the recent work of a group of phenomenologists, some of whom come from a Heideggerian orientation while others are more inclined to reorient Husserlian phenomenology in light of American pragmatism. Seeking to move beyond what they take to be the overly pessimistic perspective on technology that emerges from Heidegger’s phenomenological understanding of the way technology is transforming humanity’s ontological understanding of what is and what matters, this group call themselves “post-phenomenologists.” The leading figure behind this new orientation in the philosophy of technology is Don Ihde, but the approach has been developed further by Peter-Paul Verbeek, Evan Selinger, Robert Rosenberger, Cathrine Hasse, and Shannon Vallor. These philosophers of technology have given voice to the need to return to virtue ethics and its wisdom in order

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to regain a more sane, reflective, and stable perspective on the ever-increasing number of emerging technologies. The works of Verbeek (2005) and Ihde and Selinger (2003) have had an especially significant impact on the growing international “post-phenomenological” community. HUMANITIES PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

There is between the 1950s and 1960s a buildup – philosophically speaking – to a modern version of philosophy of technology that subsequently matured into its Continental expression. During this decade, a rebellion within philosophy of science began – an anti-positivist rebellion led by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn’s ideas on science as discontinuous change introduced notions like paradigms, scientific revolutions, and the importance of history, and thereby became the exemplary representation of a new understanding of science that was “relativistic” in essence. Here science began to be perceived as a human practice among others and not only as the most objective theoretical endeavor. In the 1970s, alongside philosophers like Jonas, a theory of scientific knowledge emerged, which included such influential sociological perspectives as “social constructivism” and “actor network theory.” The focus here was on science as a social practice, with a viewing knowledge as something that results less from pristine motives and methods than from messier negotiations and constructions. In the 1980s onward, a philosophy of technology thus emerged (as Ihde remarks) that was post-Heideggerian, post-Ellul, and post-Marxian. In philosophy of technology, this influence led to what Achterhuis has described as an “empirical turn” – or the turn toward the concrete and the constructed. Achterhuis writes that “technological artifacts (were now) analyzed (in) their concrete development and formation, a process in which many different actors become implicated” (Achterhuis 2001: 6–8). Technologies (in the plural) and not Technology (in its alleged essence) were the focus of attention of the growing number of Continental philosophers of technology. Technologies should be studied in their particularities; Ihde describes them as “material cultures within a lifeworld” (Ihde 2009: 22). There is no scientific knowledge without technologies. Instead, science now came to be seen as something technologically embodied and embedded – as an interlocking set of scientific practice immersed in and dispersed throughout various practices, activities, communities, and theories. Ihde (2009) highlights the importance of feminist philosophies during the 1980s and 1990s as essential for this larger change of perspective on science activity. Feminist philosophers of science and technology accomplished this through critique of traditional philosophy of science theories, for instance by

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identifying male biases and thereby making the male-dominated philosophy of science community recognize science as a profoundly gendered cultural practice. The theory of science that emerged was enlarged by incorporating a number of science interpreters from the Continental school, from sociology and anthropology, and from a feminist philosophy that drew ecumenically on thinkers from both the analytical and the Continental schools. Even philosophers from traditional philosophy of natural sciences began to acknowledge cultural notions and fallibility of scientific knowledge as additions to their own outlooks. In American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn, Achterhuis identifies six American philosophers, without any of whom the development of contemporary Continental philosophy of technology would not have happened: Donna Haraway, Langdon Winner, Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Feenberg, and Don Ihde. Four of these six thinkers – Borgmann, Dreyfus, Feenberg, and Ihde – worked from within the phenomenological traditions of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Donna Haraway is a biologist and philosopher, a prolific thinker most famous for writing The Cyborg Manifesto (1985), subtitled Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. As Haraway states in her Manifesto: “This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (1985: 1). (On feminist materialism, see Murphy, this volume.) Winner (who we came across earlier) was born in 1944; trained as a political scientist, he is known for his articles and books on science, technology, and society. In 1980, he published his famous paper “Do artifacts have politics?” Albert Borgmann was born in 1937 in Germany. His Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984), written from a Heideggerian viewpoint, made important contributions to the emerging ethical discussion of technology’s nihilistic impact and how we can best respond by cultivating focal practice, like communal meals, in order to resist technology’s more deleterious effects. Hubert Dreyfus was born 1929. He is a phenomenologist and existentialist, and he became famous for his work on Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet, and computers. In 1979, he published the controversial book What Computers Can’t Do. Dreyfus’s prescient insights have helped inspire many philosophers of technology to careful study of Heidegger’s philosophy. (See Wrathall and Loden, this volume.) Andrew Feenberg was born in 1943 and works in philosophy of technology, Continental philosophy, critique of technology, and science and technology studies. He has written on Heidegger and Marcuse, who was his professor at the University of California, San Diego (see Thomson 2000). In 1981, Feenberg published his first book, Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory. The basis of Feenberg’s critical

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theory of technology is a concept of dialectical technological rationality which Feenberg has termed instrumentalization theory, a social critique of technology developed out of a critical reading of Heidegger and Ellul. As we saw earlier, Ihde is the founder of an increasingly influential school within the philosophy of technology called postphenomenology. Born in 1934, in 1979 Ihde wrote the first North American monograph on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis (Durbin 2006). Ihde has authored twenty-two books on philosophy of technology, defining and outlining his position by drawing on the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and on American pragmatism in order to investigate “human–technology relations,” while distancing his more optimistic approach from what he controversially identifies as Heidegger’s dystopic view of technology.

POSTPHENOMENOLOGY

Even though postphenomenologists are inspired by the weight given to experience and concreteness within the phenomenological tradition, they find the abstract methodology of Husserl too restrictive epistemologically and the technological disillusionment of Heidegger too emotively charged. For them what is important is the empirical analysis of actual technologies (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015). This movement is a couple of decades old but increasing its adherents in America, Asia, and Europe.5 The general question that postphenomenologists want to answer through their investigations is: How can we best understand the role of technologies in people’s lives and experiences? To come up with a convincing answer, postphenomenologists have found it necessary to merge three approaches: a critique of phenomenology, science and technology studies, and American pragmatism. The critique of phenomenology is first and foremost directed against Heidegger’s abstract and generalizing – often called a romantic – approach and description of the human–technology relation as one in which humans are alienated from themselves and their world by their dependency on technologies. Following Ihde, Rosenberger and Verbeek state that the Heideggerian analysis of technology lost touch with the actual experiences people have with the role technologies have in their own lives (2015; but cf. Thomson 2005, as well as the work of Dreyfus and Borgmann mentioned earlier). An empirically focused methodology grounded in anthropology and sociology became a 5

It was primarily the work of Ihde, especially his books from 1990 and 1993, that spurred the growth of this particular method and ontology of philosophical investigation (see Ihde 1990; 1993; 1998; 2009; 2010a; 2010b; 2012; 2015; 2016).

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model for postphenomenological empirical research, but was not able to answer the philosophical question of the role of technologies in human existence. The integration of science and technology in postphenomenology tries to better understand the relations between humans and their world (2015). The methodological idea that postphenomenology and science and technology share is mediation: technologies are mediators between the world and the experiencing human. This is another step back from the phenomenological approach, which claims that human experience is directly involved in real existence while the data of science are mediated by technology and theory. Instead, postphenomenologists see science and technology as an activity that no less immediately shapes humans’ relations to the world. Postphenomenology does not see phenomenology as a method to describe the world, but as an understanding of the relations between human beings and their world. In fact, this study of human– world relations is what all major phenomenological thinkers have been doing, by conceptualizing it in terms of consciousness (Husserl), perception (Merleau-Ponty), being-in-the-world (Heidegger). (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015: 11)

Postphenomenology’s other merger was with American pragmatism. Here the most influential exponent of an American pragmatism of technology (drawing especially on Dewey) is Larry Hickman. The aspect of pragmatism that most influenced the formation of postphenomenology is its phenomenology-like attention to materiality and concrete practices. As a result, postphenomenology always starts from the concreteness of practical actions and material artifacts, with the view that whenever we are using technologies we are dealing with mediations. Humans, moreover, are always dealing with technologies, whether interpreting them, organizing according to them, or communicating through them. As Rosenberger and Verbeek conclude: “Technologies . . . are not opposed to human existence; they are its very medium” (Rosenberger amd Verbeek 2015: 13).

38 PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION AND THE “EDUCATION OF REASON” Post-Foundational Approaches through Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault

m i c ha e l a . p e t e r s an d j e f f s t i c k n e y “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”(Walter Benjamin, 1968)

I N T R O DU C T I O N: S U R V E Y I N G T H E F I E L D

In the post-war era, Philosophy of Education (hereafter “PoE”) underwent a search for its identity and credentials, responding – like most fields in the humanities – to the challenges of logical positivism and attendant demands for scientific rigor and verification of truth claims. At the risk of omitting or typecasting colleagues, a panoramic sweep reveals PoE’s affiliations and rivalries between several concurrent movements of late twentieth-century thought: Anglo liberal-analytic philosophy championed by Oakeshott’s (1989) defense of the liberal arts over vocational education, with R. S. Peters’s (1965) and Hirst’s (1965) emphasis on conceptual analyses that drew (often incorrectly) on Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin; moral philosophy and citizenship education, with secular forms rooted in Rawls’s liberal Theory of Justice (1971), Kohlberg’s (1984) Kantian and Piagetian stage-theory (Boyd 2004), and Gilligan’s care ethic (Noddings 1984); opposition to communitarianism (Feinberg 1995) and Macintyre’s return to Aristotle and character development (Carr 2006; 2008; Kristjánsson 2006); the rich legacy of Dewey’s pragmatism and the Progressive movement in American education (Scheffler 1978; Bredo 1989; Stengel 2009) gracefully partnered by Emerson (Saito 2006); the Frankfurt School and its Hegelian and Marxian-Gramscian progeny (Bowles and Gintis 1979) in Critical Theory (McLaren 2000; 2007; Giroux 2003; Apple 2004a; 2004b; ThayerBacon 2006) with Bakhtin (Sidorkin 1999a; 1999b), Freire (1970; 1998), bell hooks (1994), and Vygotsky (Bakhurst 1991; Popkewitz 1999a); Heideggerian phenomenology (Vandenberg 1971) and ontological education (Thomson 513

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2002; 2004; Peters 2002), with Levinasian respect for Otherness (Standish 1992; 2002; 2012); Wittgenstein’s reintroduction as a “pedagogical philosopher” (Marshall and Smeyers 1995; Peters and Marshall 1999; Peters, Burbules and Smeyers 2008/2010), as an elementary and Cambridge educator (Savickey 1999; Stickney 2005; cf. Medina 2002), as a Cartesian rationalist (Luntley 2003; 2007; 2008), as refiguring the child (Maruyama 1998; Peters 2001), as a therapeutic philosopher (Smeyers, Smith, and Standish 2007) distinguishing what can be meaningfully said (Smeyers 1993; Smith and Burbules 2005), and as Cavell (1979) powerfully reads Wittgenstein’s many “scenes of instruction” through Heidegger, Emerson, and Thoreau (Standish 2008; 2012); Nietzschean revaluations (Marshall, Smeyers, and Peters 2001) and French neo-Nietzschean postmodernism or post-structuralism, drawing on Foucault (Marshall 1985; Ball 1990; 2006; Fendler 1998; 2010; Popkewitz 1998; Olssen 2006; Peters 2007); Derrida (Trifonas 2000; Trifonas and Peters 2004), Lyotard (Peters 1995; Burbules 2000), Bourdieu (et al., 1965), Baudrillard (Norris 2006), and Rancière (1991; Biesta 2010; Masschelein and Simons 2011); overtures to cosmopolitanism (Papastephanou 2005; Todd 2009; Hansen 2010); critiques of racial and social justice (Williams 1992; Applebaum 2003) and feminism and Queer Theory with eclectic, emancipatory appropriations of Continental thinkers (Gore 1992; Fendler 1998; Boler 1999; Ruitenberg 2010; Mayo 2011) and reinterpretations of the male-centric canon (Martin 1985). Reviewing this snapshot, authorities differ on which “schools” contributed significantly (see Waks 2008; Peters, Tesar, and Locke 2013). In Phillips and Siegel’s (2015) entry for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, they acknowledge that such diversity makes it “impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry.” Not disparaging their significant contributions, we note that Phillips and Siegel nevertheless take a narrow liberal perspective to advance an account of education as the embrace of universal standards of rationality: making critical thinking the fundamental aim of education (Siegel 1985; 1988; cf. Phillips 2014). Their position, which led them into polemics in the 1990s with postmodern feminist philosophers like Butler (Siegel 1998), is a version of epistemological foundationalism concerning justified belief. They defy Kuhnian and postmodern relativism by adhering to the traditional notion of rationality as a product of Enlightenment epistemology, based on a reason-giving justificationist account and an absolute notion of truth (Siegel 1997; 2006), while casting doubt on the anti-foundationalism of both Dewey’s pragmatism and work of the later Wittgenstein. Our caricature of these luminary philosophers of education demonstrates the central difficulty Benjamin alludes to in his “Theses on the philosophy of history” (see Imai 2003): how the historical narrative of a discipline can be so

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easily biased toward one’s own philosophical prejudgments and commitments. One of the problems with history from a liberal perspective is that every event or succession is knowingly or otherwise tied to liberal political values and metaphysics concerning the nature of self and society as the progress of reason (see Popkewitz 1999b). Finding our way After Postmodernism (see Blake 1998; Cooper 1998), the present genealogical account chronicles attempts to disentangle “reason” from this legacy in liberal-Enlightenment traditions, featuring philosophers of education who drew on Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault: different thinkers who together and in remarkably similar ways advanced nonfoundationalist accounts of knowledge, ultimately paving the way for forms of post-foundationalism (Smeyers and Peters 2006) based on “the primacy of practice” (Smeyers and Burbules 2005). Making the “linguistic turn”1 (Rorty 1967) – with blends of DeweyWittgenstein and Heidegger-Nietzsche-Foucault – has meant reconstituting subjects: not as autonomous rational selves (Taylor 2004) but rather as beings initiated into collective, second-nature practices, disciplines and discourses that condition how they see or regard things, breaking down the subject–object dualism inherited from Descartes (see Mulhall 2001; Smeyers 2008). Together these “untimely” thinkers also inaugurated the cultural turn and associated turns to practice and space that presently characterize the social sciences, as found in postpositivism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism – four compassing but very different intellectual movements still dominating the early twentyfirst century thought. J O H N D E W E Y : A M E R I C A N L IB E R A LI S M, P R A G MA T I S M, AND NEO-PRAGMATISM

The name Dewey is synonymous with philosophy of education, especially after his revival in the work of Richard Rorty. Education for Dewey (1934; 1966), like art, was not auxiliary but paramount as a philosophical concern. Dewey (d. 1952) barely makes it into the period we discuss. Often taken as the voice of progressive education and liberalism, Dewey’s democratic approach to schooling helped bring about a child-centered approach to education based on a theory of experience (learning-by-doing) and the cultivation of problemsolving skills to help reinvent democracy as a distinctive American way of life. While sensing the impracticality of Dewey’s conception of participatory democracy, Rorty (1998: 18) takes the Deweyan meaning of “democracy” as 1

Basically, the claim that all knowledge is dependent upon its expression or context in language: all thought is language-dependent, and everything perceived is mediated by language.

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a “shorthand for a new conception of what it is to be human – a conception which has no room for obedience to a non-human authority, and in which nothing save freely achieved consensus among human beings has any authority at all.” Post-war fears of Orwellian totalitarianism reignited interest in democratic, anti-authoritarian, and non-scholastic forms of education (Power and Lapsley 1992; Bridges 1997). Dewey’s political philosophy demonstrates a new awareness of social-historical contexts, and can be read as a reevaluation of the individualism of the classical liberal tradition. If the individual is to be regarded as socially-historically embedded, then we might consider rationality and reason in relation to its historical and dynamic contexts, especially its contemporary development within the “epoch of digital reason” and environmental awareness (Peters and Jandrić 2016) as the basis of both education and scientific communication. Dewey existed in the golden age of American liberalism, when it made good historical sense to claim that social change, naturalized as evolutionary growth, led to “progress.” His democratic social philosophy – with education at the center – seemed an unquestioned, natural part of the “progressive” American way of life (see Ryan 1997; cf. Rorty 1996). Dewey’s “theory of inquiry” (as he liked to call it) was based on a kind of “instrumental rationality,” which was for him “an affair of the relation of means and consequences,” not of fixed first principles but rather as an interpretation of the basic category of logical forms that characterize all reasoning. Education aims to prepare students for a future we can only glimpse through “foresight towards ends” – terms used repeatedly in Democracy and Education (1966) and applied to learning in Experience and Education (1938) through an environmental (etiological) concept of teaching “by means of indirection.” “The trouble with education is not the absence of situations in which the causal relation is exemplified in the relation of means and consequences. Failure to utilize the situations so as to lead the learner on to grasp the relation in given cases of experience is, however, only too common” (Dewey 1938: 104–5). Based on this instrumental conception of rationality and embracing Peirce’s fallibilism in the sciences, Dewey preferred the term “warranted assertability” to “truth,” avoiding metaphysical claims to absolute knowledge and certainty. For Dewey, distinctions between the natural and social sciences blur, as both draw on similar methods of inquiry in testing hypotheses by weighing evidence for their utility in social life.2 Garrison (1999: 291) illustrates Dewey’s non-foundationalism and deep social-contextualism: “For Dewey, all meanings are consequences of

2

Distinctions between philosophy and the arts and sciences also dissolve, as seen later with Quine’s “naturalizing” of epistemology.

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shared social action, and all objects, all truths, including the formal laws of logic themselves, are the fallible and contingent objectives of inquiry.” Rorty (1996) paraphrases Dewey, clarifying that “to call a statement ‘true’ is no more than to say that it is good to steer our practice by.” Garrison (2017) notes the similarity between Dewey’s statement (2003: LW1, 141; cf. LW12, 52–3): “To fail to understand is to fail to come into agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action at cross purposes,” and the later Wittgenstein’s notion of “agreement in action” as opposed to opinions (1956: vi, §39). While there are differences in style and method, and in their conceptions of practical knowledge, Dewey and Wittgenstein share the same anti-foundationalism that Rorty (1979, 5; cf. Peters 1997) later conveys by emphasizing a view of philosophy (also embraced by Heidegger) that is “therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to supply him with a new philosophical program.” Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (1960 [1929]) and Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969) might be read as parallel projects emphasizing “epistemic contextualism” (Eodice 1990; Hobbs 2008). Education in this post-foundational light is a form of initiation or growth into practices, modes of inquiry, and customs that have become for us second-nature: joining conventional ways acting with animalistic reactions (Smeyers 1993; 1995; 2008; Mulhal 1990). Wittgenstein’s cases of early training illumine the stage-setting and scaffolding supporting the intricate weave of gradually changing language-games that grammatically govern what we hold or count with certainty as true-or-false (Wittgenstein 1968 [hereafter referenced as PI], §237). Tacitly, we are taught to play out various “agreements in judgment” (PI, §§241–2, PI, 218), leading us to share the ungrounded-ground that gives temporary foundation at particular historical-cultural junctures, forming a shifting riverbed or “system of bedrock propositions” that guide the flow of life (Wittgenstein 1969: §98). This “linguistic turn” was an unassailable and wholesale sea-change in twentieth-century philosophy, including PoE; the challenge was to avoid “isles-of-language” readings of Wittgenstein’s imagery, leveraging “solidarity” without conceding relativism (Rorty 1989; 1991; Stickney 2008a). Although popular among educators, Dewey’s philosophy went into decline among philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century largely under the shadow of logical positivism, to be revived and refashioned by Rorty, Putnam, Brandom, Quine and others after Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). Divisions appear between neo-pragmatists as to whether Rorty’s notion of truth as “solidarity” has to be “answerable to the world” (see McDowell and Putnam, in Medina and Woods 2005). Following Dewey, James, and Peirce,

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the neo-pragmatists agreed in rejecting the view that all knowledge rests ultimately on a foundation of non-inferential knowledge or justified belief. They also adopted an anti-representationalist view of meaning, rejecting the dogmatic empiricist idea that meaning springs from a correspondence relation to the world and that facts accurately depict objective reality and stand opposed to normative values (Putnam 2002). Dewey is thus seen as overcoming the dualisms between nature and reason, drawing on Hegel (Garrison 2006), and as being more in sympathy with Continental philosophy than the Angloanalytic school, even working alongside Heidegger in seeing art as worlddisclosing and communicative (Margolis 1998). Major works in PoE built on this neo-pragmatist fusion, addressed the relationship between pragmatism and postmodernism (Hickman 1998), constructivism (Hickman, Neibert and Reich 2009), and contemporary European thinkers like Bauman, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Levinas, and Rorty (Garrison 2012). Most of this neo-pragmatist bridge-work (see Stone 1999) only emerged, however, after an extensive engagement with a very different phase of linguistic, analytic philosophy. Wresting Ludwig Wittgenstein from R.S. Peters’ Liberal-Analytical Philosophy of Education During the 1960s–1970s, R. S. Peters was the undisputed champion of “analytic philosophy in education” ([hereafter APE] Archambault 1965). Peters worked with Paul Hirst and developed a group of talented thinkers who completed their Ph.D.s under his watch, including R. K. Elliott, David Cooper, John White, Patricia White, and Robert Dearden. This “London School” was highly influential in establishing analytical philosophy of education in the UK. Analytic work also appeared in North America, with Paul Komisar, B. O. White, and Israel Scheffler. Scheffler studied with Nelson Goodman and taught philosophy of science and education at Harvard University (1952–92). He was one of the first to recognize the gains of an analytical philosophy of education (Scheffler 1954), publishing a series of influential texts including The Language of Education (1965), Philosophy and Education: Modern Readings (1966), and Conditions of Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology and Education (1978). As philosophers of education, both Peters and Scheffler argued that philosophers had the metalinguistic task of clarifying our educational language. With the exception of a few like Ieuan Lloyd in Wales (influenced by Swansea Wittgensteinians), and C. F. B. Macmillan (1995) in the US, APE was committed not to carefully interpreting Wittgenstein but to creating a second-order foundational discipline of conceptual analysis. Analytic philosophy under this description became seen not as an investigation of the world but rather as a step

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removed – a meta-activity that seeks agreement to resolve conceptual confusions arising from our use of concepts. It is a view that does find some echoes in Wittgenstein – as in his early Tractatus (1961 [1922], §§4.112, 5.6; 6.5.22; 7): “what can be said can be said clearly,” and “that we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence”; as well as his later goal in the Investigations of giving an overview or survey of our actual usage of language in order to resolve problems that arise from the misuse of words (PI, §§18, 108, 109, 119, 122). But APE quickly became doctrinaire and ideologically dangerous because it was associated with the view that this remains the only true description of philosophy – going against Wittgenstein (PI, §§124–6, 132) by assigning itself the task of regulating language and defining our conceptual schema. This view of philosophy as clarification holds some place in the later Wittgenstein’s thought, but nothing like the obsession with a magical method and “linguistic hygiene” that characterized the R. S. Peters of the London School depictions. Hirst and Peters (1970) misinterpreted Wittgenstein in seeking necessary but insufficient conditions for defining what counts as a “game,” going against central lessons in the Investigations (PI, §§67–85) in trying to distinguish “teaching” from “indoctrinating” or from “telling.” Green’s “A topology of the teaching concept” (1968: 29) dissolved the nagging problem by calling for greater acceptance of blurry boundaries between “cousined” activities bearing family resemblances (conditioning, training, advertising, proselytizing, indoctrinating, teaching, etc.). Much of the work appearing in the 1980s–1990s was devoted to reshaping the conversation, addressing problems of interpretation in earlier attempts at employing Wittgenstein and bringing the influences of Continental philosophy and culture into consideration. James Marshall (1985) reopened inquiry into the role of authoritarianism within rule-following, and later shifted this conversation (1995) by bringing Foucault’s games of truth into relation with Wittgenstein’s language games. The Marshall and Smeyers collection (1995) was, in part, building on earlier work (see Smeyers 1993) while drawing newer voices such as Michael Peters and Paul Standish. Standish (1992) published Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Limits of Language. Peters (1995) brought Foucault and Lyotard into conversation with Wittgenstein, marking a turn away from what he characterized as the “pithy Wittgensteinianism” of those obsessed with rule-following (see Cerbone, this volume), and later posed the question of post-analytical philosophy of education as a choice between Rorty or Lyotard (Peters 1997). Peters and Marshall (1999), with Burbules, read Wittgenstein as a philosopher of the Austrian counter-Enlightenment, against the background of Viennese modernism. This reading emphasized its sympathy with many of the main concerns of French poststructuralism and was developed as an expressed intention to deconstruct the appropriation of his “method” by the London School.

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Peters, Smeyers, and Burbules collaborated again on Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher (2008), and a Special Edition of Educational Philosophy and Theory (2008) entitled “Wittgenstein’s Legacy for Education.”3 These works included Burbules’s (2008) investigation of tacit teaching and further development of Smeyers and Burbules’s (2005) thinking in terms of education as “initiation into practices.” Following Macmillan, the 2008 collaboration also traced the “pedagogical turn” of Wittgenstein’s thinking during the period from 1920 to 1926 (see Medina 2002) and suggested learning and initiation into practices are fundamental to understanding his philosophy. Wittgenstein was thereby cast as a “pedagogical philosopher,” building from a broader approach called “philosophy-as-pedagogy” that was influenced by Janik and Toulmin, Cavell, and the postmodern reading developed in Peters and Marshall (1999) that focuses on anti-representational and post-foundational rejections of truth as correspondence to reality. This move was accompanied by a general suspicion of transcendental viewpoints and arguments (as a generalization of what Lyotard referred to as metanarratives), and a clearer focus on questions of subjectivity that go back to Kierkegaard and were taken up afresh by Foucault. In philosophy and PoE the linguistic turn represented a move away from monological, epistemology-centered philosophy and forms of foundationalism and representationalism (Taylor 1995; Kazepides 2010). Its popularization in philosophy led to the slow decline of conceptual analysis in PoE. Where Rorty chose Oakeshott and Gadamer as the narrative and hermeneutic way forward for philosophy as “cultural studies,” we choose Foucault, who, unlike Dewey, Peters, and Rorty himself, wants to put the history of liberalism and liberal culture under a form of philosophical-historical or genealogical analyses.

M I C H E L F O U C A U L T , GO V E R N M E N T A L I T Y A N D NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATION

Foucault’s early, more epistemological period of writing originally gained less attention in PoE than his genealogical inquiries into penal and medical institutions (bio-power) of the middle period; Discipline and Punish (1975) and The Birth of the Clinic (1989) had profound impact (see also May, this volume). Among the early adopters, James Marshall (1985) wrote Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education (1996), offering insight into authoritarianism and Foucault’s own involvement with education reforms in France, as well as working 3

See also the debate between Luntley (2008) and Stickney (2008b) over the role of training.

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through differences between the Kantian, rational autonomous individual and the Foucaultian subject immersed in discourses and power relations (Marshall 2001; cf. Wain 2007). Stephan Ball (1990) opened inquiries into myriad forms of disciplinary, panoptic supervision in educational institutions. Michael Power (1997) challenged accountability rhetoric and regimes of inspection: “rituals of verification” for securing “quality assurance” that have devastated polytechnical institutes and continue to wreak havoc elsewhere. Following Foucault’s interest in arbitrary but defining dividing practices, Linda Graham (2009) looked into the desirability of streaming and segregation in schools. Ian Hunter’s (1994) survey of education reforms in Australia shows that instead of finding standardized solutions envisioned by reformers, policy interpretations multiply into localized, improvised forms of governance. Illustrating this process, Foucault redirects attention from individual reformers, clarifying rules, to myriad agents messily undergoing correctives within institutions as the locus of change (Foucault 2003: 236; cf. 1994a: 316). Education is central within what Foucault (1977b: 297) calls the “great carceral continuum” that constitutes contemporary, disciplined society. Modern schooling is thus understood as emerging within the context of a wider shift in the nature of power – a shift that involves the intensification and deepening of social control precisely as this control becomes less visible and more sophisticated. Thus, for Foucault, the post-Enlightenment world is characterized not so much by the increased civilization and progress that have crystallized in its selfimage as by an ever-widening (yet always anonymous) range of processes, techniques, and technologies designed to ensure a regularized, efficient, and docile social whole. The nature of power may have changed dramatically – from, say, its despotic, premodern expression – but its reach has never been greater. Infiltrated by this carceral continuum (Foucault 1977b: 302–3), education is no longer to be taken as fundamentally or intrinsically enlightening and uplifting but, instead, as central within the new technologies of discipline and social control that emerge after the Enlightenment. The classroom (just like the workshop, barracks, or prison) becomes “subject to a whole micro-penality of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency)” (1977b: 178). The bind is that Foucault’s image of modernity as increasingly swept up in an insidious form of disciplinary rationality leaves us with impossibly little wiggle room by which we may come to free ourselves of our disciplinary constitution (see also Young, this volume). Pictures of panoptic subjectivization in Discipline and Punish are flawed in granting too much normalizing, indoctrinating power

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to seemingly “monolithic discourses” in education (Taylor 1986). Although “power is always present” (Foucault 1994b: 291), pedagogical institutions abound in opportunities for power reversal: whether in teaching students or initiating teachers into reforms. The process is corrupt, Foucault explains, if the one who knows more infantilizes, overly constrains, or dominates the learner in the process of transmission (1994b: 298–9). Through Foucault’s later concept of governmentality, a new picture dawns on various scenes of instruction: “Free individuals who establish a certain consensus, and who find themselves within a certain network of practices or power and constraining institutions” (Foucault 1994c: 297). Education illustrates the general concept of a constraining and enabling nexus or block of power relations, relationships of communication, and objective capacities (1994c: 338–89). Governmentality illustrates various modes by which people are made, and make themselves, subjects (Foucault 2006; Wain 2007). Intellectuals (including students) within educational institutions can resist normalizing effects by opening these discursive formations and practices to problematization (Foucault 1994d): revealing “how and why certain things (behavior, phenomena, processes) became a problem” (Foucault 2001: 170); how at certain historical moments behaviors became characterized as “mad” or “criminal,” whereas at others they are conceived more benignly or neglected. In common accounts of Madness and Civilization (1965), Foucault is described as tracing the history of a Western rationality that would separate itself from its primary other, namely madness, so as to exclude it from modern culture. On the standard accounts of this work, Foucault was diagramming for us the workings of an insidious and unbeatable form of power which had over the course of the past few hundred years come to structure modern society, modern knowledge, modern law, and even modern subjectivity itself. The relations between binary pairs like madness and reason, or power and freedom, constitute the very problematic of modernity itself. On what basis, for instance, do administrators judge some forms of curricula to be “unsound,” crazy or abusive (Stickney 2009a; 2009b; 2012)? Foucault’s critical-limit attitude calls for a “breach of self evidence”; he wants “to show that things ‘weren’t all as necessary as that’; it wasn’t a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill” or that certain practices in education suddenly became “normal” or “insane” in the 1960s (Foucault 2003: 249). Along these lines, Besley (2009) interrogated the power-knowledge construct that normalizes (as taken-for-granted) adults’ suitability to counsel youth, also raising issues around who can tell us the truth (Foucault 2001) or request confessions (Besley 2007); and Ball (2009) troubled “common sense” around lifelong learning as a legitimate goal of education. Ian Hacking’s student James

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Wong investigated taxonomic and quasi-scientific discourses around braincompatible classrooms (Wong 2009). Surveying the subject’s relation to pedagogical power-knowledge is a question neither of verifying accuracy or warranting utility, nor of dismissing epistemological concerns, falling into the morass of postmodern relativism. Mark Olssen’s (2006) comprehensive investigation sets the record straight on Foucault materialism; Foucault’s view that things are discursively constituted does not make him a linguistic idealist. Instead of the rightness of forms of knowledge, Foucault’s problem (already in 1976) is rather “what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth?” (Foucault 1980: 93). The focus becomes “statutory sets of conditions” or rules “governing the appearance of statements” (Foucault 1994e: 309). Shifting attention from rightness to “epistemic rules” (Foucault 1990: 12), political relations, and subjectifying effects “does not mean,” however, “that truth is just a game” (Foucault 1994b: 297). Genealogy does not “vindicate a lyrical right to ignorance or non-knowledge” in averring positivistic questions of veracity or pragmatic ones of warranted assertability (Foucault 1980: 83–4). By “games of truth,” Foucault means “not the discovery of true things but the rules according to which what a subject can say about certain things depends on the question of true and false” (Foucault 1994f: 460). From a Foucaultian perspective, similar to Rorty’s notion of “solidarity,” rules determining the “soundness” or “rightness” of pedagogic practice do not exist outside of discourses and the power relations that sustain them. Within the “politics of truth,” we make certain discourses “function as true,” and this resulting “regime of truth” provides enabling mechanisms (or rules) for distinguishing and sanctioning true-and-false statements or according status to those charged with saying what counts as true (Foucault 1994d: 131). Educational rules exist in connection with such broad-based, historical a priori conditions of possibility and with other discursive “positivities” made available through interrelated disciplines (Foucault 1994e: 327; cf. 2002: 143).4 CONCLUSION

Foucault demonstrates that the history of liberal education is not so much the “education of reason” (Peters 1965; 1983; Dearden, Hirst and Peters 1972) based on unchanging notions of rationality and truth (as Siegel and Phillips portray it). It is, rather, a problematic history of liberal modernity that rejects the easy 4

See Taylor (1995) on the Kantian argument-form in Heidegger and Wittgenstein, using a priori, linguistic conditions as “the given” (PI, 226).

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equation of reason, emancipation, and progress through education in order to argue that modern forms of power-knowledge have served to create new forms of domination (Olssen 2007). This is an account of liberal modernity that calls into question the very “education of reason” assumed so lightly by Dewey and R. S. Peters and made the centerpiece of liberal education by Siegel and Phillips. Foucault argued that: “American liberalism is not just an economic and political choice formed and formulated by those who govern and in the governmental milieu”; rather, it is a “whole way of being and thinking. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed.” Foucault continues: I think this is why American liberalism currently is not just, or not just so much as a political alternative, but let’s say as a sort of many-sided, ambiguous, global claim with a foothold in both the Right and the Left. It is also a method of thought, a grid of economic and social analysis . . . Liberalism must be a general style of thought, analysis, and imagination. (2009: 218; cf. 192–3)

Liberalism, like its modern free-market theocratic variant, neo-liberalism, is a “specific economic discourse or philosophy which has become dominant and effective in world economic relations” (Olssen and Peters 2005: 314), a marketbased, rational-choice theory endorsing, for instance, the US Charter School movement and the franchising of colleges in partnership with banks (Frontline, 2016). Our purpose in surveying post-war PoE, offering a critique of liberal Reason through a Foucaultian “critical history of the present,” is not to illumine the correct way of escaping this enthrallment in liberal-Enlightenment images of the autonomous self and of absolute truth but, rather, to unsettle established ground in order to open spaces of possibility for alternatives. As Foucault said: The work of an intellectual is not to mold the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions starting from this re-problematization. (1996: 462)

Our concern is not with which contemporary discourses in PoE are more right, just, or real in their respective truth claims about learning and schooling (see Besley and Peters 2007). Problematization is not ideology critique, as though freeing colleagues who suffer from false consciousness (Owen 2003). Veridical discourses about learning and opposing philosophies of education are of interest not because they are right or progressive, from some neutral perspective, but because educators hold them, correctly or not, to be “instrumental and reliable forms of knowledge in our society” (Gordon 1994: xvii). What matters is how educators adopt various comportments with respect to them (Rose 1999: 9),

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constituting their professional selves and teaching practices in relation to these games of truth as historical events partitioning what can be said and done (Foucault 1994a: 315). Instead of lamenting the poverty of our epistemic situation, after the linguistic turn, Rorty invites escape from metaphysical pictures long holding us captive (Wittgenstein 1968: PI, §115; Maruyama 2006b). With Dewey, Rorty sees education as neither inducing nor educing truth: most often at the primary and secondary level it establishes what elders regard as true and then promotes more critical inquiry later in post-secondary education (Rorty 1999: 118). As Dewey and Wittgenstein would concur, what matters most in the end is not the veracity of truth claims but the quality of practices in which we embed ourselves and grow as a form of life. Not mocking liberal ideals or wanting to sound cavalier in disregarding the growing need for critical and politically astute fact-checking, education often thrives on the path Rorty left us (2006): “Take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself.”

section seven CONTINENTAL AESTHETICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

39 THE BEARING OF FILM ON PHILOSOPHY r o b e rt b . p i p p i n

I

The ways in which serious thought about film and philosophical reflection might intersect are various, and those dimensions have been much explored in the twentieth century, especially with the establishment of the academic study of film in the seventies and eighties.1 At that intersection, there are various philosophical questions that can be raised, primarily but not exclusively, about filmed fictional realist narratives, or “movies.” There are related questions about photography and other types of recordings of movement or figuration: documentaries, art videos, and non-representational avant-garde films, for example. But both Hollywood (or commercially produced narrative films) and art cinema, considered as new art forms, have drawn the most attention. The most natural philosophical attention to film or movies has been as a subdivision of aesthetics, or philosophy of art. There is the obvious question of what kind of art object a filmed narrative is and so how it compares with plays, paintings, and so forth, a question that now must include not just celluloid recording but digital recording and projection, and narratives made for television. (So “film” is now often used to refer to any and all such technologies, not just celluloid recording.) This is sometimes called the problem of film “ontology.” There is also the question of the specific character of the cinematic experience, whether the ways in which we understand what is happening are connected to our cognitive processing of events in general, and if so, how? In what ways is our relation to what we see and understand connected to what we see and understand in the real world? If there is that connection, how is the

1

There are several good surveys of these developments, up to and including the current divisions. See especially Wartenberg 2015; the first chapter of Wartenberg 2007, “Can philosophy be screened?” (1–14); and the introductory remarks in Sinnerbrink 2011: 1–11. There are also a number of readers and anthologies (see Sinnerbrik’s list, 2011: 208). More than anything else, changes in the technology of film viewing have made possible a studied attention to film never before possible without great expense and investment of time.

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connection made and maintained? This is also relevant to our emotional involvement. Why do we care about fictional characters as much as we do, recoiling in fright or weeping in sympathy with what befalls them, but in no way that prompts us to do anything about their fates, fictional as they are. I will discuss in a moment the question of our understanding these narratives as shown to us, displayed, made for an audience. This raises the question of the “narrator” of the film. (Who is showing us what?) Is there an “implied narrator” in the film world? (And what is a film world?) Is the narrator primarily the director, the so-called “auteur,” or is the whole apparatus for the production and distribution of the film, and the performers, the collective “agent” responsible for the product? Can that agent be said to have “intentions”? But thanks largely to the work of the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, and, from a different tradition, the French philosopher Giles Deleuze, a distinct intersection has evolved, one that in some circles is now designated “filmphilosophy.” (There is an online journal with that name.) This “style” of philosophizing,” one could call it, sometimes occurs within film studies (as in the work of D. N. Rodowick) or in philosophy departments, a fact which raises another issue too large for an economical discussion: the relation between “film theory” and “film philosophy,” as practiced in the two departments. The idea I want to explore briefly here is one that has gained currency in recent years, and about which more and more is being published: that films can be considered a form of philosophical reflection itself, given a capacious enough understanding of philosophy, one not limited to the marshaling of arguments in support of explicit theses. Moreover, the strongest claim is not that film might inspire a viewer to pose philosophical questions or that film can serve as examples of philosophical problems (like moral dilemmas, for example), or that they pose “thought experiments” that prompt philosophy (although films can certainly do all of these things very effectively and we might want to know what is distinctive about cinematic means for doing so) but that film, some films anyway, can have philosophical work to do. It is not easy to give a formulaic account of just what in the work “demands” such closer and, for want of a better word, “aesthetic” attending, the kind we would direct at so-called “high art,” and then what a “philosophical” version of that attending consists in. At least it is hard to point to anything beyond this abstract appeal to “questions raised by the work” that are not questions about plot details, but are like: “Why are we so often looking from below at figures in shadows in some noir?” Or “What does it mean that Gary Cooper’s character throws his marshal’s badge to the ground in obvious disgust at the end of High Noon?” Or “Why does the director ‘twin’ Grace Kelly’s wedding ring with that badge”? Or “Why is Hitchcock so apparently

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indifferent to the obvious artificiality, the blatant, even comic phoniness of the back projection techniques he uses frequently in Marnie?” It is even more difficult to present a general account of when those questions are “distinctly philosophical” in character. And it is certainly a controversial claim. Many academics who think and write about film, and a great many philosophers of all kinds, would vigorously dispute this view. It is also a far more complex issue than it might at first seem. One of philosophy’s chief topics is itself and the endlessly contested question of what philosophy is. Asking this sort of question about film puts us at the center of such centuries-old disputes. It is a more familiar idea among philosophers who occupy themselves with historical figures in the tradition who had something close to this “complementary” view about philosophy and the arts, primarily but not exclusively philosophy and literature. These would include Hegel’s treatment of Sophocles or Diderot in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard’s use of Don Giovanni, Schopenhauer’s theory of the philosophical significance of music, Nietzsche’s reflections on Greek tragedy and an “aesthetic justification of existence,” or Heidegger’s appeal to Hölderlin. In the case of Hegel, for example, art in general, together with religion and philosophy, is treated as part of a collective attempt at self-knowledge over time, and is viewed not as a competitor with religion or philosophy but as a different and indispensable way (a sensible and affective way according to Hegel) of pursuing such a goal. The notion is also not foreign to philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, concerned with, as it is put, how we came to be in the grip of a picture of, say, the mind’s relation to the world, or our relation to each other, and how we might be “shown” how to escape that picture. (This is especially so with Cavell’s work, concerned as he is with various dimensions of skepticism and given his view that film is “the moving image of skepticism” [Cavell 1981: 188–9]).2 The central question in Heidegger’s work, the meaning of being, since a question about meaning in the existential not linguistic sense, is understandably a question that might be informed by how such a meaning might be “disclosed,” as Heidegger sometimes puts it, in a work of art. But, as noted, that notion of “philosophic work” in film remains controversial. If it is to have some currency, we need a clearer idea of what might distinguish a “philosophical reading” of a film, and how such a reading might contribute something to philosophy itself. To begin, consider the simplest issues that arise when we watch a film. Issues like the following.

2

See also the chapters by Cerbone and Mulhall, this volume.

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The basic question is: what must we do in order to understand what we are shown?3 The question raised above might be formulated: even if the “cognitivists” in film theory are onto something about our simply “following” a movie (see Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Currie 1995), is there a way of working to understand a film that goes beyond working to understand the details of its plot? When, at what point, have we “understood a movie,” and might we be said to have learned something from having thus understood it? That is, is it possible that, in working to understand a movie better, we could just thereby understand better something of philosophical significance? Cavell has said that what serious thought about great film requires is “humane criticism dealing with whole films” (Cavell 1979b: 12) and he later calls such criticism “readings.” What are readings of films, and, our question, are there “philosophical” readings?4 One way, among many ways, of beginning to think about the issue can be suggested by the following two points. First, there is the issue of our mode of attending. We can consider the conditions that must obtain for a cinematic experience to be an aesthetic experience, an experience directed at a work of art. I mean only that when we are attending to a work as a work of art, we could not be doing so unless we knew that this is what we were doing. Not all filmed narratives are works of art. There are home movies, orientation videos, documentary records. But knowing what we are doing “in” doing it (not doing it and observing ourselves doing it) is difficult to account for philosophically. The situation is roughly similar to cases attended to by philosophers where, in general, we could not be doing what we were doing unless we were aware, in doing it, that we were doing it – marrying, promising, etc. So if we wander into a large building, and stand up and sit down when other people do, and even if we are indistinguishable in our conduct from everyone else, if we do not consider ourselves to be attending mass, we would not be. This involves no conscious application of the concept “mass” to what we are doing. It is in doing it, succeeding in doing it, or doing it competently, that we know we are attending mass. We are not monitoring ourselves constantly, but if we did not know that saying or doing this or that counts as participating in a mass, what we were doing would not count as participating.5

3 4

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I rely here on material I have also discussed in these terms (Pippin 2016; 2017). As Cavell writes: “I do not deny that there is a problem about the idea of ‘reading a movie.’ Is it greater, or other, than the problem about the idea of ‘reading a poem,’ when, of course, that is not the same as reciting the poem?” (Cavell 1979b: 9). This is actually not an uncommon predicament in movies, like the “marriage” between the Native American, Look, and Martin in John Ford’s The Searchers.

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Aesthetic experience is, again roughly, like this. It does not simply happen to one. It requires a particular mode of attending. It is conceptually articulable in more extensive exfoliations, but in that rough sense, when we go to a movie, we take ourselves to be doing just that, and we have an equally rough sense that a movie is an art work, a product of the human imagination, not a secret recording of various people dressed in the garb of the 1940s, if we are watching a film noir. Perhaps we even have that concept, noir, but it is not necessary to the point. It is important to stress constantly that this knowingwe-are-so-attending is nothing like a self-observation, an attending to ourselves as an object. It is a constituting aspect of aesthetic attending itself, not a separate noting of that fact. It is in attending this way that we are, in George Wilson’s terms, “imaginatively seeing” what we are seeing (Wilson 2011). Or, at least, this is how I understand his claim. We are not seeing actors on a big screen and imagining who they are. We see Ethan in The Searchers and we wonder what Ethan is doing and why. We do not see John Wayne and imagine, in a separate act, Ethan. And, since The Searchers is a work of art, we wonder what it means to be shown that he acts as he does. We can of course wonder why characters do what they do in the movie, what it means that they act as they do in the sense of asking what could have motivated that fictional character – why they would do something so self-destructive – and so forth, and not get very far. The work may have a narrow or limited ambition. By the ambition to be a work of great or “fine” art, I mean that the point of being shown such actions is defined by the way a question of some generality – typological, historical, moral, etc. – is broached, and sometimes that generality is of a philosophical sort. It is also not the case that attending aesthetically – knowing what we are doing when we are experiencing, attending to, the work – is something that need interfere with or compete with our direct emotional absorption in the plot, our anxious concern for some character. And we can begin seeing a movie on the assumption that its ambition is merely to entertain us or frighten us pleasurably (however that actually works). We attend to it in such a way, take ourselves to be on about such an experience, but someone can point out for us that there are elements in the movie that might be entertaining, but, our friend shows us, they also raise questions beyond cinematic pleasure itself, questions that cannot be explained by that function alone, and we can begin to attend to the movie in a different way, a way I want to follow Wilson in calling imaginative seeing, or, in the term used above, aesthetically attending. (The same sort of “parallel track attending” is possible in admiring the performance of Wayne, even as we follow and try to understand what Ethan is doing. The main point is the same. There are not two steps: seeing Wayne

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and imaging Ethan.)6 Then we can say that the imagination or attending in question is not limited to an emotional involvement in the events we see (imaginatively attending to the lives of characters and what might happen) but ranges over many elements. We try also to imagine why we are shown things just this way. When that happens, we begin to attend aesthetically, to see imaginatively. A philosophical answer might be the appropriate answer; that “the film” (however we designate the agency responsible for its making) presents this view of love as illusory (and can show us the “inevitable” illusion), and this other view as close to what romantic love actually amounts to (the presentation compels conviction, although how it does so is something that would require extensive discussion). Second, consider that films can be treated as very much like speech-acts addressed to an audience, which narrate some tale (the analogy is far from perfect, but serviceable in this context; it brings out the relation between seeing, and being shown what one sees), and we can sometimes (as suggested above) ask what the director – or the collective intelligence we can postulate behind the making of the film – meant by so narrating a tale.7 We want to know the point of showing us such a story at all, and showing it to us in just this way, with just this selection of shots, from which point of view at what point in the film, with just this selection of detail. In the same way that we could say that we understood perfectly some sentence said to us by someone, but that we cannot understand the point of his saying it now, here, in this context, given what we had been discussing, we can also say that we can understand some complex feature of a movie plot, but wonder what the point might have been in showing us this feature in such a way in that context. This allows us to put the point in an even broader way. Visualized fictional narratives, movies, can be said to have many functions, can be said to “do” or 6

7

This is no more mysterious than our concentrating on the promises being made in the marriage exchange, while aware that it is by saying them, in this context, with the right authority present, that we are thereby marrying. That is, it is not mysterious. I am adopting the so-called “fictional” or “as if” narrator position, an implication of which is that the attribution of intentions to such a narrator has nothing to do with what some historical individual, e.g. the director, actually had in mind. I am in agreement here with what Cavell says about an “artist’s intention” in his discussion of whether Fellini can be said “to have intended” a reference to the Philomel myth in La Strada (see Cavell 1976: 230–1). It also is important to understand something that Wilson, in the book just cited, stresses: this narrator should be conceived in cinematically minimalist terms. The agency of such a narrator “is merely minimal; e.g. generally invisible and inaudible to the spectator, uniformly effaced, and characteristically inexpressive” (Wilson 2011: 129). “Characteristically” is the key word here. Our attention can be explicitly directed to the fact of narration by the director, something quite prominent, say, at the beginning of Psycho, with its expansive, searching pan (from no point of view that could be occupied by anyone in the film), and an intrusive, “spying” descent through an open window. For a longer discussion of Wilson’s thesis, see Pippin 2013.

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accomplish various things. They please, for example, or they are painful to watch, but painful that is in some odd way pleasant as well. We can also say, in a straightforward, commonsense way, that some films can be a means of rendering ourselves intelligible to each other, rendering some feature of human life more intelligible than it otherwise would have been; all, if we are attending aesthetically, appropriately. This can be as simple as a clearer recognition that, say, some aspect of the implications of a violation of trust is as it is shown, and other than we might have thought. And this might be so in relation to that general issue, not limited to that representation of that violation at that time. This might require, in some cinematic presentation of this drama, a rich narrative about a decision to trust in a situation of great uncertainty8 and this narrative might be able to show us what is “generally” involved in such a decision, and what “follows” from the violation, what “backshadowing” effects it has, what it portends for the future, all in a way that a philosophical example in a discursive account could not do very well. Now, if the question is what the director (or, again, the collective intelligence we can postulate behind the making of the film) meant by so narrating a tale, sometimes the answer will certainly be: he, or she, or they, meant only to be narrating the tale, because the tale is in itself entertaining, thrilling, hilarious. But some films can be said to attempt to illuminate something about human conduct that would otherwise remain poorly understood. The point or purpose of such narrating seems to be such an illumination – a vague word, but it gets us started. There is some point of view taken and not another; and so there is an implicit saying that some matter of significance, perhaps some philosophical or moral or political issue, is “like this,” thereby saying that it is “not like that.” And one other way of rendering intelligible or illuminating is to show that what we might have thought unproblematic or straightforward is not that at all, and is much harder to understand than we often take for granted. Coming to see that something is not as intelligible as we had thought can also be illuminating. (Bernard Williams once wrote that there can be a great difference between what we actually think about something and “what we merely think that we think” [Williams 1993: 7], and great literature or great film can make clear to us in a flash, sometimes to our discomfort, what we really think. In the same way, a film noir’s credibility and illuminating power might throw into doubt that we ever really know our own minds, and so can function as the agents that

8

Think of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), where the main character, Fontaine, must decide whether to trust a boy he does not know well at all if his escape plan is to work. He must trust not only the boy, but his own judgment, one based on a sense of a brief, epiphanic insight. We come to realize that in all this the question of faith, the meaning and implications of faith, are being raised.

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philosophical theory requires [see Pippin 2012b]; we might begin to entertain the idea that such theories require an idealization that comes close to being completely counterfactual.) Now this linkage of topics only gets us to the brink of an unmanageably large question. If at least part of what happens to us when we watch a film is that events and dialogues are not just present to us but are shown to us, and if the question that that fact raises – what is the point of showing us this narrative in this way? – does not in some cases seem fully answered by purposes like pleasure or entertainment, because something of a far more general, philosophical significance is intimated, some means of understanding something better, and all this occurs in an aesthetic register, in our attending aesthetically to what is shown, then that much larger question is obvious. This issue of its philosophical significance, with philosophy understood in some sort of traditional way, is, admittedly, quite a specific one, and those same issues can be considered in some other way. For one thing, movies, after they are made and when they are distributed, enter a complex social world, charged with issues of hierarchy, power, gender roles, social class, and many other fields of significance, and they can come to mean a variety of things (across historical times) never anticipated by the makers of the film. But one perspective, a sociohistorical one, need not exclude others, like a philosophical one, and the test for any perspective is the quality of the readings that result from looking at a film one way rather than another, or in addition to another. (This is one of the most difficult aspects of this issue. The question of a philosophical reading demands a kind of reading, and so a kind of writing, that is both true to the experience of watching the film and to the larger issues “screened.” Writing that does justice to the specificity of the film experience and to its philosophical stakes is not one that has any rules or even, as of yet, many paradigmatic examples. And that writing is the test of whether there is such a thing as film philosophy.) But such an approach faces the obvious problem just noted and it must be addressed at least briefly. How could such a visualized fictional narrative, concerning such particular fictional persons and particular fictional events, even or especially when marked out by an aspiration that is aesthetic, bear any general significance? Generality, we know, is a matter of form, and it is possible at least to imagine that the events we see are instances, perhaps highly typical and especially illuminating instances, of some general form of human relatedness. Shakespeare, for example, would not be able to portray so well, so credibly and powerfully, Othello’s jealousy, unless the origins and conditions and implications of jealousy itself were also somehow at issue, illuminated in however particular a case. (If that were not so, wherein would lie our interest in the display of a singular pathology?) But how might such a level of

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generality be intimated by a narrative with a very concrete, particular plot, and what would explain the illumination’s relation to some truth, not to mere psychological effectiveness? (A film after all can at the same time be powerfully compelling, can suggest an ambition to reach this level of generality, and, if the director is technically talented, can carry us along with this point of view, only for us on reflection to realize that the point of view we had been initially accepting is in fact infantile, cartoonish, pandering to the adolescent fantasies of its mostly male fans.) This example suggests a set of further examples that are recognizable philosophical questions, but do not seem to admit of anything like Socratic definitions, or necessary and sufficient conditions for their having the determinate meaning they do. Many involve so-called “thick” concepts that require a great deal of interpretative finesse to understand whether the concept is even applicable, and how we might know, in some complicated context or other, whether it is relevant at all. I mean moral issues like: Does this count as a violation of trust? Should that consequence have been foreseen? In this particular situation of wrong-doing, who (if anyone) is morally blameworthy and why? When rightly blaming someone, when is it wrong to keep blaming him or her? Who might seem to be, but finally not be, blamable? How does such seeming and distinguishing work? What does forgiveness require before it is reasonably granted? (Is it ever reasonably granted, or is it beyond reasons?) Who, under what conditions, is worthy of trust, and who is not? How would one decide that? What is an acceptable risk in exposing oneself to betrayal or manipulation? Can the same action be said to be at the same time both good and evil, noble and ignoble, loving and self-interested? Is the relation between such value contraries one not of opposition, but of gradations, as Nietzsche claimed (Nietzsche 2002 [1886]: §§24, 25)? What would that look like? In what ways might all such issues look different in different communities at different times? All of these cases must touch on what it is to trust, to blame, to forgive, and again the successful evocation of that generality is a matter of writing that is difficult to formalize. And there are issues raised by some films, questions we seem to confront in trying to understand the films, in what has come to be called moral psychology. How do people come to understand what they are doing, what act description, in some contestable context, is rightly self-ascribed, and what accounts for them getting it right, when very often we get it wrong? Why do they often wrongly, and sometimes culpably wrongly, understand what they are doing? Or, in other words, how is self-deceit possible? And again, a question that could be asked as a corollary to each of these: What does that phenomenon look like? What do we detect when we think we detect the presence of self-deceit, deliberate

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fraudulence, a lack of self-knowledge? How do we make ourselves intelligible to each other, especially when desire and self-interest make that very hard to do? How do we figure each other out, and why, in the most important situations of love, danger, and trust, do we often seem to be so bad at it? (Is there some general point being made by the fact that in so many of Hitchcock’s films, the wrong person is blamed or suspected of something?) What is romantic love; that is, does it exist, or it a dangerous fantasy? And do we know it when we see it? How important is it in a human life? What is the best, the most admirable, way to live with, to bear the burden of, the knowledge that we face eternal nonexistence, death? What distinguishes how we live, now, from how we used to live? Is how we live now a good way to live? What is objectionable about it? If a movie can, speaking very informally, “shed light” on such issues, then is there a limited but potentially important kind of illumination: primarily by means of filmed photographs moving in time? Such a “coming to understand” is not something formulatable in Socratic definitions and is closer to what Aristotle meant in his account of practical wisdom: knowledge but not something that can be taught and transmitted, the kind of knowledge that requires a wide range of experience. And as noted, its being a kind of knowledge that is Socratic amounts to a deeper knowledge of ignorance, a more nuanced state of confusion. The basic idea of the pertinence of drama to philosophy is as old as Aristotle’s claim in his Poetics that drama is “more philosophical” than history because of the generalities and probabilities suggested, and as relatively recent as Hegel’s notion of the “concrete universal,” an instance that best expresses its kind, revealing the kind’s essence much better than an abstract definition. (Wittgenstein on “perspicuous representation” is also relevant.) The question is how such generality can be intimated. One way such a level of generality can be suggested is by the relation of the films to other films, to films by other directors, referenced in a manner that suggests the general thematic purposiveness of that director’s overall project, and especially by reference to the filmmaker’s other films, directly suggesting again such a commonality and so generality of purpose. At some point such repetitions and similarities can suggest a sort of mythic universality.9 That is certainly true of Hitchcock’s films. There is something like a “Hitchcock world,” a set of problems repeatedly faced by his characters, many having to do with the painfulness and the dangers of our general failure to understand ourselves or each other very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand to

9

For a fuller discussion, see Pippin 2012a.

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direct our actions accordingly, all as recognizable as the formal cinematic markers of what is called, what he himself called, his “style.” With the issues set out like this, we can ask about that world, the claim to truth that its representation makes on us. For example, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, his 1958 film Vertigo, is about quite a distinct individual, a neurotic with vertigo caused by acrophobia, obsessed with a woman who is impersonating another woman. What could be more idiosyncratically unique than such a tale? Could anything of any general significance follow from answering the question: “What is the point of Vertigo?” – the point of showing us just this narration in just this way? I want to say that it has a great deal to do with, let us call it, a general, common struggle for mutual interpretability in a social world where that becomes increasingly difficult. The film, in a kind of hyper-exaggerated way, can be said to explore why it is a struggle; what kind of society makes such failure more likely, and why; how and especially why we so often manage to get in our own way in such attempts; what, mostly by implication, would count as success in such a struggle and how it might be achieved. Such a non-discursive treatment of aspects of human irrationality can be said to be attempting to show us the “nature” of these phenomena, what we need to understand in order to to understand systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding, self-opacity, selfdeceit, and other forms of limitation we are subject to when we try to learn what we need to know (but cannot) in cases of trust, love, and commitment.10 All of this, the perspective suggested above, certainly does not amount to a theory of film, or an intervention in academic film theory. Such academic “research” requires, understandably, for its inclusion in an institution dedicated to the creation of new knowledge, a structure that resembles the modern paradigm for such claims to know – modern natural science for the most part. One advances a theory about how movies – let us say, realist narrative fiction cinema – are understood, what effects they have on an audience, why some community at such a time would make and consume such things, what it means that they do, what effect on society at large their doing so produces. And then one finds instances to exemplify and support the theory, to show that the theory works in making sense of what would otherwise not be as explicable. Such a 10

So I disagree with Noël Carroll’s understanding of the philosophical importance of Vertigo. He argues that because the philosophy at issue is “not for the graduate seminar room of a research university,” it is philosophically revelatory, if it is, for its “target audience,” “the general public” (Carroll 2007b: 113). A good deal of the film’s philosophical revelation is certainly accessible to “the general public,” but a very great deal more depends on multiple viewings, extremely close attention, and some awareness of the philosophical tradition. A very great deal is also simply very difficult to understand, apart from sustained and careful attention, of the sort we would not associate with “the general public,” and much of it would indeed be a fit subject for a graduate research seminar, if the seminar were about the nature of the human struggle for mutual intelligibility.

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theory can be a Freudian or Lacanian one, or a feminist one, or a Marxist one, or a structuralist one, or, more and more frequently, one informed by cognitive science, and, given the point made previously, that not all films are “movies,” and given that many such theories actively resist any canonization of greater versus lesser films, the range of the objects studied can be quite wide. In fact, if it is to be a successful theory, it aspires to as wide a range of explicables as possible, from Hollywood gangster films, to Chinese silent films, to European art cinema, to Bollywood films, to experimental films. This accounts for the understandable recent move to “media studies” as the genre for which digital films are a species, analog films another species, movies a subspecies of that, and Hollywood movies a subspecies of that. (It has become especially popular recently, across a wide range of different theories – affect theory, cognitive science approaches, neuro-aesthetics, feminist criticism, psychoanalytic approaches, postmodernist art, post-Danto philosophical aesthetics – to consider the art work, film in this case, as in the first instance an occasion for an experience, suggesting that our attention should be devoted to understanding that experience. Deconstructive theory has also played a role in this by attempting to undermine the notion that the work has a meaning that is the proper subject for more or less adequate interpretation.) A concentration on a cinematic treatment of a complicated philosophical problem (or, said inversely, a philosophical reading of film) need not be considered a competitor to all this, but something simply different. Of course, there will inevitably be some disagreement. Some such approaches presuppose a relatively unproblematic access to something like “the movie,” and then proceed to ask what such an object would mean for some audience, or for women, or for men, or in what way it operates ideologically, or psychoanalytically, or what “code” it invokes. This is also possible and can be valuable. But there are movies that present us with a number of elements that are very hard to take in and process on a first viewing. Such a taking in and responding to a movie can be initially confusing and incomplete, with only a dim initial sense of how the elements might fit together. This is not restricted to following details of an intricate plot. We might be quite puzzled about the point of being shown this or that episode, character, or even by means of this or that camera position or camera movement. “The movie” is not something “given” for subsequent subjection to a categorical or a theoretical framework, any more than, in trying to understand an action, “what she did” or “what she was trying to do” are simply “given” empirically. Or a film like Psycho might seem to fit a conventional genre, a horror film, in a way that allows it to be taken as nothing but a work of craft meant to entertain by scaring, even though there are elements of the film, from Marion Crane’s visualizations of the results of her theft, to the

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kind of paintings Norman Bates has on his office walls, to the stuffed birds hovering about, to the treatment of marriage and its relation to other Hitchcock films that raise the same issue, to an unusually broad and philosophical conversation between Marion and Norman about “traps,” and being either caught in one, or stepping into one, that disrupt any putatively seamless horror movie experience. This is because, so my suggestion goes, such movies (by no means all movies or films) embody some conception of themselves, a distinct form, such that the parts are parts of one organic, purposive whole. Just in the way that a bodily movement in space can count as an action only by virtue of the selfunderstanding embodied in and expressed in it, an art work, including any ambitious movie, embodies a formal unity, a self-understanding that it is always working to realize. Such a formal unity (what I earlier called the “point” of making and showing the film) requires investigative work focused on the details of the film, both stylistic and substantive, covering as many details as possible. In fact, the movie, one has to say in an ontological mode, is the movie it is only by means of this emerging, internal self-conception, a dimension we can miss if we too quickly apply some apparent formal unity, like a genre designation, or a sociohistorical concept. In ambitious films – and such a category is by no means limited to “art cinema” – such a self-conception is unmistakably philosophical, and so what it asks of us is a kind of thought and writing that we are just beginning to explore.

40 AESTHETICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE AVANT-GARDE j o nat han sc o t t l e e

Despite the broad cultural impact of psychoanalysis in the post-war period, philosophers interested in the arts reflected remarkably little interest in psychoanalysis itself or in how psychoanalytic theories and concepts might illuminate the analysis and interpretation of works of art. In contrast, artists of the contemporaneous avant-gardes often made reference to concepts derived from the work of Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and (somewhat later) Jacques Lacan, although the precise relationship between these concepts and the artists’ works remains complex and often vague. This chapter, then, focuses on those few moments when philosophical aesthetics found itself in productive dialogue with psychoanalytic theory and sketches an arc of influence that remains fragmentary to this day.1 In the years between the First and Second World Wars, the relation between psychoanalysis and the arts was defined by two fundamental approaches. On the one hand, most notably in “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Freud himself developed a theoretical model according to which psychoanalytic insights can provide access to the largely unconscious intentions of the artist that are then realized in works of art (Freud 1908). On the other hand, the Surrealists incorporated Freudian concepts and models, in particular the theory of the “dream-work” from The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900: 4–5, 277–508), into their very methods of working. Where Freud had tried to illuminate the unconscious processes that result in works of art, André Breton explicitly used Freudian theoretical claims as early as “The manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) to find ways by which works of art might undermine the “absolute rationalism” of the day (Breton 1969: 9–14). “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself,” Breton wrote, “of reclaiming its rights,” thanks to “the

1

Just how fragmentary this history remains is reflected in the fact that psychoanalysis plays essentially no role in a reference book as important as The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (Gaut and Lopes 2013).

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discoveries of Sigmund Freud” (9–10).2 What Freud and Breton share, then, is the conviction that the interpretation of works of art is enriched by psychoanalytic approaches to unconscious intentions. The discipline of aesthetics was effectively revolutionized in 1946, with the publication of William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s era-defining essay “The intentional fallacy” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946). Pushing back against psycho-biographical approaches to criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley argued forcefully that the artist’s intentions (whether conscious or unconscious) are utterly irrelevant to the interpretation of the work of art. In the wake of this claim, aestheticians turned much of their attention to the inner workings of works of art and were much influenced by the “New Criticism” and by the rise of “formalism” in art criticism. In this context, psychoanalytic theory seemed to have no relevance whatsoever. Nevertheless, within the statements and practice of avant-garde artists of the period, psychoanalysis and its theoretical claims occasionally surfaced. As early as 1947, the painter Jackson Pollock described his working methods as follows: When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. The source of my painting is the unconscious. (Harrison and Wood 2003: 571)

Along similar lines, the composer John Cage described the task of the performer (and the composer) of music in his lecture of 1958, “Indeterminacy,” in the following terms: He must perform his function of giving form to the music in a way which is not consciously organized (and therefore not subject to analysis), either arbitrarily, feeling his way, following the dictates of his ego; or more or less unknowingly, by going inwards with reference to the structure of his mind to a point in dreams, following, as in automatic writing, the dictates of his subconscious mind; or to a point in the collective unconscious of Jungian psychoanalysis, following the inclinations of the species and doing something of more or less universal interest to human beings; or to the “deep sleep” of Indian mental practice – the Ground of Meister Eckhart – identifying there with no matter what eventuality. (Cage 1961: 35)

For both Pollock and Cage, the unconscious is not so much the basis of artistic intention as it is the context within which a non-egoic or non-self-centered 2

For a useful discussion of Freud and Breton, see Spector 1973: 147–56.

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practice of creation may flourish. Picking up on the related theme of “control,” the painter Robert Motherwell (himself trained as a philosopher) – while appearing at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in 1959 – suggested: Indeed, I would think that a life that is alive is a constant experiment under conditions that one is only partly able to control. Oppression in art, as in life, is when the conclusion to be reached is predetermined, by inner or outer a priori notions of how life or art ought to be . . . As Guillaume Apollinaire wrote before I was born, apropos the Cubist revolution in art, you can’t carry the corpse of your father around on your back forever. I presume that one of the functions of psychoanalysis, as of modern art, is to point that out, that one must respond to one’s own desires, wants, and felt necessities. (Motherwell 2007: 195)

Here too the unconscious opened up by psychoanalysis is a domain escaping the strictures of the past, of tradition, but also of the individual’s conscious desires. By the time of Motherwell’s reflections, the art world had turned away from the grand statements of Abstract Expressionism and had embraced Pop Art and Minimalism, movements in relation to which psychoanalytic preoccupations were somewhat ill-suited. Nevertheless, it was precisely in the mid-1960s that Herbert Marcuse brought his psychoanalytically inflected version of Marxist Critical Theory to bear on the role of the arts in contemporary repressive societies. At the end of One-Dimensional Man, he centered his argument on a single question: Thus the question once again must be faced: how can the administered individuals – who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarged scale – liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken? (Marcuse 1964: 250–1)

In 1964, this question seemed to Marcuse unanswerable, but both earlier and later in his career he maintained that it is in the “aesthetic dimension” of works of art that the possibility and the hope for an escape from societal repression is to be found. Thus, toward the end of The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse wrote: The accomplished work of art perpetuates the memory of the moment of gratification. And the work of art is beautiful to the degree to which it opposes its own order to that of reality – its non-repressive order where even the curse is still spoken in the name of Eros. It appears in the brief moments of fulfillment, tranquility – in the “beautiful moment” which arrests the incessant dynamic and disorder, the constant need to do all that which has to be done in order to continue living. The Beautiful belongs to the imagery of liberation . . . (Marcuse 1978: 64–5)

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Marcuse’s concern here was no longer the artist, and he showed little interest in psychoanalytic questions of the artist’s unconscious intentions. In effect, he shifted the attention of psychoanalysis from the creation of the work of art to its reception: The work of art evokes in its receiver “the memory of the moment of gratification,” and psychoanalytic theory can help the aesthetician/critic show how this memory unfolds a world of beauty that stands against the reality of repressive social and political regimes. That psychoanalytic theory might most effectively be turned toward the reception of works of art is perhaps best illustrated by two different ways in which the work of Jacques Lacan was incorporated into film theory in the late 1960s and 1970s by theorists writing for Cahiers du Cinéma and Screen. The first approach centers on the concept of “suture,” introduced by philosopher/psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller (later Lacan’s son-in-law and literary heir) as part of a broadly mathematized account of “the logic of the signifier” (Miller 1966). What is at stake here can be seen simply in the ineradicable separation of the subject of the statement from the subject of the enunciation, the lack of identity between the “I” of “I am Barbara’s son” and the “I” who utters that sentence. The concept of “suture” designates both this gap between the two subjects and the apparent but illusory identification of the two subjects, just as a suture can only stitch together the edges of a wound by leaving a scar. Miller’s psychoanalytic account was picked up by Jean-Pierre Oudart and applied to the way film functions as a discourse: the spectator caught up in the flow of images initially takes herself to be something like the subject of the enunciation, centering the terms of reference of the images, only to discover by the ceaseless flow of the images and their independent framing that she is actually constituted as part of that flow, just as the subject of the statement is constituted in the chain of signifiers that makes up the statement (Oudart 1977). Stephen Heath – whose elaboration of the role and importance of the concept of “suture” in cinema was of decisive importance in the 1970s – put this quite elegantly: “The subject makes the meanings the film makes for it, is the turn of the film” (Heath 1981: 88). This rather abstract theory is made concrete in the examples of the shot/reverse shot so emblematic of the mechanisms of traditional narrative cinema: Precisely because the shot/reverse shot doubly articulates space, as both filmic and imaginary, this sequence of images forces the recognition of a profound separation between the spectator and the world of the film, even as the spectator is constituted in relation to this separation (see Heath 1981: 95–8). A second approach to film theory, also grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis, also began with consideration of how the human subject is necessarily separated

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from itself by the way it is constituted in its relations with others. In his seminar of 1964, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan elaborated this claim in relation to the concept of the gaze, noting that “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (Lacan 1977: 72). The gaze is inseparable from desire – even in Freudian theory, scopophilia (sexual pleasure derived from looking) is one of the primary manifestations of desire – and this means (as Sartre famously suggested in 1943’s Being and Nothingness) that the subject constituted as an object in relation to the gaze of others is caught up in an erotic dialectic of mutual recognition and misrecognition. The implications of such a theory were picked up by feminist thinkers, and Laura Mulvey – a prominent British avant-garde filmmaker and theorist – articulated them most effectively in “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” first published in Screen in 1975. Mulvey’s argument hinges on a deep tension between the way the image of “woman” is constructed in narrative cinema and the way this construction tends to break the frame of the narrative. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female,” Mulvey writes. She elaborates: The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness . . . The presence of woman is an indispensible element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. (Mulvey 1975: 837)

These frozen moments reveal the psychoanalytic insights that “the meaning of woman is sexual difference” for men and that satisfaction of the male gaze “always threatens to evoke” castration anxiety. Mulvey goes on to argue that there are two fundamental modes of escape from castration anxiety for the male unconscious: the first – exemplified in the films of Alfred Hitchcock – involves a sadistic voyeurism, whereby the woman is demystified and usually punished; the second – typified by the films of Josef von Sternberg – achieves “a complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object” (Mulvey 1975: 840). Mulvey offered her analysis as a framework for avant-garde cinema’s assault on traditional narrative film, seeing in the destruction of phallocentric pleasure a “radical weapon” for feminist filmmaking (1975: 834–5). Just such a challenge to the conventions of narrative film can be found in the work of choreographer Yvonne Rainer, who turned to filmmaking in the early 1970s. Film About a Woman Who . . . (1974) opens with a scene of two couples watching a slideshow, with a woman’s voice-over:

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He thinks about making love, then about being in love, then about performing. Then he thinks about her: his very gaze seemed to transform her into a performer, a realized fantasy of herself. Sometimes it was almost as if she were saying “Look at me, look at me – a small price to pay for my love in return.” He finds himself agreeing. (Rainer 1976: 40)

Such an explicit reference to the male gaze makes it clear that this will be a theme of Rainer’s film, and one of the longest sequences later in the film details the slow and complete undressing of one of the women by the other couple. Yet this sequence is introduced with a surtitle that reads, “Who is the victim here?” – suggesting that the power of the male gaze has been appropriated by the female filmmaker, and the result is a scene that almost makes a spectacle of failing to make a spectacle of the woman’s body (1976: 57–9). Nevertheless, the sequence closes with a close-up shot of Rainer’s face to which are attached three clippings of newsprint that gradually reveal themselves to be excerpts from letters written by Angela Davis to George Jackson: “I’m still floating drunk full of you . . .” (60). Even as the woman actor is victimized by the camera’s attempt to make of her a spectacle, women more generally are victimized the moment they reveal their emotions, as the infamous treatment of Angela Davis should remind us (see Rich 1981: 10). Film About a Woman Who . . . is very much a film about women’s emotions as well, and immediately following the sequence just described Rainer reads in a voice-over a letter that just might be a scenario for the film-in-progress: This is the poetically licensed story of a woman who finds it difficult to reconcile certain external facts with her image of her own perfection. It is also the same woman’s story if we say she can’t reconcile these facts with her image of her own deformity. (1976: 61)

Emotions body forth indiscriminately as “perfection” and “deformity,” even as the “external facts” fail to resonate with either emotional response. Two remarkable sequences earlier in Rainer’s film illustrate precisely this kind of dissociation. Announced in an inter-title as “An Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps,” the first sequence tracks one of the film’s two couples as their relationship moves over the course of a couple of days from a night’s intense but troubled love-making to a morning’s brutal realization: “Somehow she had betrayed herself. She hadn’t wanted to be held . . . She had wanted to bash his fucking face in” (1976: 50). Such a denouement of an intimate relationship borders on the melodramatic, but Rainer undercuts this possibility by constructing the sequence as a parallel set of sequences in which images of the couple are inter-cut with numbered inter-titles that comment on and ultimately usurp the centrality of the cinematic images (46–51). The spectator who might be somewhat easily sutured into the flow of images of the couple is immediately

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de-centered by the flow of textual commentary, which itself drifts quickly from the bland – “She arrives home.” – to the brutally emotional: “‘Oh Christ,’ she thinks. ‘Now he’ll never screw me again.’” The effect of this final revelation is that the spectator has become something like the woman’s confidante, even though the spectator remains at a distance from every character and action in the film. Rainer’s strikingly multiple uses of the effect of suture are only enhanced by the way in which Film About a Woman Who . . . continually makes indeterminate just who is who and just what is going on in the apparent narrative of the film. While the spectator can quickly determine that the diegesis concerns at least one love triangle within the pair of couples introduced at the beginning of the film, the chronology and the details of the affair are never made clear. In the most celebrated sequence of the film, Rainer follows scenes of the other couple enjoying an “impossibly idyllic” beach vacation with a succession of forty stills from the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, accompanied by a voiceover describing the woman’s rage at the man and her nausea occasioned by the brutality of Hitchcock’s murder scene (1976: 53–5). The spectator of this sequence cannot help but be at a loss trying to suture the visual images into a coherent whole, much less trying to suture themselves into the voice-over’s account of the woman’s emotional experience. Narrative coherence, psychological intelligibility, and the stability of the relationship between the spectator and the film – all modes of conventional cinematic meaning-making – collapse in the careful network of Rainer’s film as sutured wound. While film theory was dominated by a paradigm largely derived from the work of these early Lacanian theorists until the late 1990s, philosophers generally kept their distance from psychoanalytically charged approaches to the arts. A notable exception to this, however, was to be found in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose brilliant and unexpected uses of Lacanian theory to expose the hidden functioning of popular culture served as an intellectual counterpoint to the final decade of the twentieth century. Master of a compelling and almost addictive prose style, Žižek found ways to make details derived from Lacan’s dense theoretical writings illuminate the workings of Hitchcock’s films, the perverse nostalgia that structures the genre of pornography, and the fetishistic split that makes democracy possible (Žižek 1991). While Žižek’s work inspired an astonishing secondary literature and encouraged a number of imitators, few of his followers were philosophers, and the discipline of aesthetics remained relatively untouched by his work. Even as Žižek was coming to prominence on the margins of aesthetics, British philosopher Richard Wollheim was bringing his life-long engagement with issues of mind and emotion to bear on the history of painting in his

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magisterial Painting as an Art (Wollheim 1987). While Wollheim had written broadly on the works and legacy of Freud, it was here that he considered how psychoanalytic themes might contribute to the work of aesthetics. Importantly, these themes emerge only at the level of what Wollheim called the “secondary meaning” of a painting: A painting’s secondary meaning derives from a special aspect of the creative process. It derives from what making it, from what the act of making a picture, means to the artist: what it means to the artist, note, not what it means tout court . . . if what the act means to him causes him to paint in such a way that a suitably sensitive and informed spectator will respond to this, then his painting has secondary meaning. (1987: 249)

The psychoanalytic turn in the account of secondary meaning comes in Wollheim’s suggestion that, because artists are necessarily also spectators in the making of their art, “any adequate account of secondary meaning should also take stock of how the activity of looking is conceived of by the artist, or what the use of the eyes now means to him” (286). Moving quickly from this, Wollheim argues that artists typically overestimate the value of vision in a manner that sexualizes visual perception and concludes from this that “when vision has become overestimated, it is experienced as a sexual activity that is at once singularly effective and singularly destructive” (287). As a prime example, Wollheim suggests that “one of the great themes of Picasso’s work is his attempt to deal with the malignity of the gaze,” and he argues that the artist effectively uses something like sublimation to tame the sexual dangers of the gaze. The insatiable artist’s eye turns his women models into works of art; in so doing he tames the ferocity of the sexual gaze by using it to create a work of art that is “about” other works of art, as in Picasso’s relentless reworkings of Manet and Velasquez (291–2). That Wollheim turns back to Picasso, while Žižek turns back to Hitchcock, reflects the fact that by the late 1980s aesthetics had effectively abandoned the possibility of an artistic avant-garde. Widely understood to be an essential concomitant of modernism, the avant-garde simply evaporated with the dawn of postmodernism (see, for example, Schechner 2010). Intriguingly, with the disappearance of an avant-garde, what little engagement aesthetics had had with psychoanalysis slipped away as well.3

3

There remains some interest among psychoanalysts in thinking about the arts, however, and some art historians have used psychoanalysis in important and illuminating ways. See for example Bryson 1986 and Spitz 1991, as well as the journal American Imago.

41 CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION b e n jam i n c r ow e

The twentieth-century “Continental” philosophical tradition – descended from the likes of Fichte, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – exhibits a surprising feature: Nearly every variety of Continental philosophy (including phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory) has been brought to bear on traditional questions in the philosophy of religion as well as on questions unique to the cultural milieu of the post-war world. Periodicals and monographs, professional organizations and ad hoc symposia alike bear witness to creative forays into the philosophy of religion that would have scandalized the nineteenth-century progenitors of this direction of thinking. This chapter primarily explores the contributions of four major figures, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), and Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) – figures who by no means exhaust the full range of Continental religious thought but who remain united by two common concerns. First, each interprets the fate of religion in our late modern era. Second, each boldly outlines a (postmodern) future for religion in an irrevocably disenchanted world. I first turn to Heidegger, the acknowledged maestro of Continental philosophy during the latter half of the twentieth century. Each of the other thinkers I examine adopts central insights from Heidegger. All four took seriously the continuing claim of the sacred on the contemporary world against the background of the relentless secularization of institutions and cultures, the ever-expanding dominance of naturalism and scientism, and the ubiquity of technical rationality. HEIDEGGER: DIVINITY AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD

Heidegger’s first forays into philosophy arose within the milieu of Roman Catholic educational institutions in southwestern Germany, and his most familiar philosophical contributions were first forged amidst efforts to think through religious life. Heidegger interacted with theologians of various stripes in the 1920s. In the dark decade of the 1930s, as Heidegger struggled with both a crisis 550

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in his own thinking and the unfolding crisis in his country – a crisis in which he notoriously and fatefully threw in his lot with the cultural politics of the Third Reich – Heidegger privately and publicly meditated on the fate of divinity in an increasingly technologized culture. Both during and after the catastrophe of the Second World War, Heidegger thought deeply about the nature and possibilities of religion in a darkening world. Heidegger’s thinking about religion after 1945 is set against the background of his account of the ontological history of late modernity. While already discernible in the late 1920s, the mature vision is disclosed in a remarkable series of post-war essays and addresses. The central thought expressed in these works holds that, beneath the events narrated by conventional history, we can find a deeper series of “happenings” in which Western humanity’s very framework and paradigm of intelligibility (which allows ordinary occurrences to show up as meaningful) get opened up and articulated. In our late modernity, things have standing only because they figure into a system of preference satisfaction, as mere resources to be optimized; to “be” increasingly means to occupy a place within a web of command and control procedures. As he puts it in an unpublished fragment from 1945–46, things lack “distance” from human projects (G75 299).1 As he elsewhere observes, “everything, already in advance and therefore in the consequence, is relentlessly turned into the material of self-asserting production” (G5 289/217). As we late moderns increasing force everything to fit into our preexisting ontological framework, things slip into “indifference” and “monotony [Einerlei].” The normative textures of meaning to which our predecessors were attuned and took their bearing have been replaced by the uniformity characteristic of items in a “stockpile” [Bestand] (G79 26). In the age dominated by this late modern worldview, everything both “human and divine” is forced to take its place in a global “domain of the orderable [Bestellbare]” (G79 31). Despite these dark characterizations, Heidegger insists that religion is scarcely absent from late modern culture. What is different is the way the religion is understood, the way it is taken up in our practices and intellectual discourse. In an essay from the late 1930s that foreshadows much of Heidegger’s later thinking, he writes: [The loss of the gods] does not mean the mere elimination of the gods, crude atheism . . . The loss of the gods is the condition of indecision about God and the gods . . . But loss of the gods is far from excluding religiosity. Rather, it is on its account that the relation to 1

Following standard practice, Heidegger’s works are cited parenthetically by volume of the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition). In cases where I have drawn on an English translation, the pagination of the latter is given following a “/”.

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the gods is transformed into religious experience [Erleben]. When this happens, the gods have fled. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psychological investigation of myth (G5 76/58).

Religion doesn’t disappear in late modernity. Instead, religion becomes an “experience” to be compartmentalized, manipulated, and enjoyed, or an “object” of positivist and historicist investigations.2 Put in terms of the “death of God,” one can say that, for Heidegger, God hasn’t gone anywhere. Instead, God has become a “threadbare mask” concealing the truth about the nihilistic culture of late modernity. Vestigial traces of the sacred are features of life in the present age, but they too belong to the “stockpile” of things at the disposal of anonymous systems of command and control. The “radiance of divinity” is replaced by a false luster of experiences on demand. Whether as just another subject-matter in the university catalogue of “(fill in the blank) studies,” or as just another glittering item found along the grocery store aisles of ready-made worldviews, the holy no longer maintains the status it once had. The Angelus bell, which Heidegger famously “heard” in the phenomenological “space” opened up by a Van Gogh painting, is now available as a smartphone app that users can conveniently reprogram to go off only at opportune times. Against the background of this wasting “desertification [Verwüstung]” of the real, Heidegger suggests that there may well be an opening for a return of the divine, albeit in ways unforeseen.3 The possibility of such a return requires an inconspicuous preparation, as he suggests in “What are poets for [in a desolate time]?” (G5 270/201). The “Letter on Humanism” likewise addresses the “homelessness” of the age in order to ponder the question of whether and how “God and the gods” can return (G9 338/258). What is required in order to open up the space for a “decision” on this issue is a preparatory, exploratory, and experimental mode of thinking that Heidegger likens to the “inconspicuous” laying of furrows in a field (G9 364/276). Just as a farmer breaks the soil in preparation for planting, so too Heidegger sees his task as breaking up the soil beneath the “land of metaphysics” to disclose a richer normative texture otherwise occluded by the “monotony” of the late modern understanding of being (G5 211/158). Heidegger draws his inspiration for this project from Hölderlin, the poet par excellence of the “desolate time,” who possessed an exemplary ability to “risk language,” that is, to stretch the boundaries of inherited conceptual frameworks. It was Heidegger’s reengagement with 2

3

Heidegger had grappled with intellectual discourse on religion in the winter 1920–21 lecture, taking Troeltsch’s philosophy of religion as a premier example of a view reflective of the objectifying and neutralizing paradigm of historicism. See Crowe 2006. See Wrathall and Lambeth 2011.

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Hölderlin in the 1930s that loosened his own tongue as he sought to move beyond the impasses both of his own thinking and of his age. Here, I will briefly characterize two such Hölderlinian gambits: the emergence of (1) the “holy [das Heilige]” and (2) the “godly ones [die Göttlichen]” in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger was interested in the “holy” quite early in his career; around 1917 Husserl had assigned Heidegger to write a review of Otto’s famous eponymous study. In a summer 1928 lecture, Heidegger indicates how the understanding of being as “overpowering [Übermacht],” as “holiness,” belongs to the structure he here calls “transcendence” but which readers of Being and Time know as being-in-the-world. We humans pre-reflectively inhabit domains of meaning that allow us to make sense of things practically and intellectually. “Understanding,” in the phrase “understanding of being,” does not denote an explicit intellectual comprehension of something, but rather the way in which a person is always already involved in some project that anchors a network of meaning-bestowing relations. “Holiness” operates at this ontological level by anchoring such an identity bestowing network in a particularly meaningful way. Heidegger returns to the “holy” in a review of the second volume of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen from 1929. In his analysis of the “world” of “mythical Dasein,” Heidegger describes the “holy” as a horizon that allows things to show up as either sacred or profane, a distinction almost unintelligible to most late moderns (G3 257–8/182). Religion, as a mode of being-in-the-world (rather than a worldview or institutional affiliation) attuned to the sacred and profane, is made possible by the horizon structure of the “holy.” During and immediately following the Second World War, Heidegger returns to the “holy.” In the “Letter on Humanism,” he asserts that the “holy” is “the essential sphere of the divinity” (G9 351/267) and that it is only “from the essence of the holy that the essence of divinity is to be thought” (G9 351/ 267). This remark encapsulates his earlier account of holiness as a way of understanding being that comprises the condition for religion. Heidegger hints that a return of the sacred amid the historical desertification of our reality requires reawakening this basic understanding of being as “holy,” and so meaningfully encountered as sacred or profane. Elsewhere Heidegger develops this basic suggestion. In a meditation on Hölderlin from 1943, he writes: This pure opening which first “imparts,” that is, grants, the open to every “space” and to every “temporal space [Zeitraum],” we call gaiety [or cheerful serenity, die Heitere] according to an old word from our mother tongue. At one and the same time, it is the clarity (claritas) in whose brightness everything clear rests, the grandeur (serenitas) in whose strength everything high stands, and the merriment (hilaritas) in whose play

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everything, set free, moves . . . It is the holy, “the highest” and the “holy” are the same for the poet: gaiety. (G4 18/37)4

Heidegger connects the etymology of “heiter” with the Latin caelum, the bright or clear sky.5 As an ontological horizon, the holy is like bright sky that allows things to appear in a certain light. Like the endless skies of the Western prairie, it bestows majesty and grandeur to what appears in its light. And, like the changeable weather, it eludes our control. The “holy” evokes a kind of liberation or opening up – the fresh air or wide-open spaces – like that experienced by Faust and his diffident companion Wagner on a bright Easter morning in Goethe’s famous retelling. For Heidegger, such an understanding of being is profoundly at odds with the monolithic reduction of all that is to a “stockpile” of resources on call for our efficient use. The “holy” is fundamentally not at our disposal, because it cannot be preserved intact when flattened out into the sameness of what is infinitely substitutable. By invoking the “holy,” Heidegger is thus, in his own way, embracing the role that he ascribes to poets in a “desolate time.”6 Picking up the semantic resonances between “wholeness,” “health,” and the “holy,” Heidegger observes how “the world is being emptied of what is whole and heals [heil-los]” (295/211). It is against this background that the interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetic vocation takes on the cast of both a program and a provocation, as Heidegger famously draws forth an answer to the question of what poets are for in a desolate time: Poets are mortals who gravely sing the wine-god and sense [spüren] the track [Spur] of the fugitive gods; they stay on the gods’ track, and so they blaze [spur] a path for their mortal relations, a path toward the turning point. But the aether, in which alone gods are gods, is their god-ness. The element of this aether, that in which the god-ness itself still essences, is the holy [das Heilige]. The element of the aether for the advent of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. Yet who is capable of tracing such tracks? Tracks are often inconspicuous, and they are always the legacy of instruction scarcely divined. To be a poet in a desolate time means: singing, to attend to the track of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet, at the time of the world’s night, utters the holy. (272/202, translation modified)

By boldly naming the “holy” in the aftermath of the “death of God,” Heidegger reminds us that the understanding of being that characterizes our age is

4

5 6

Cf. these remarks from “Hölderlin’s poetry a destiny,” composed in 1945–46: “The holy: the ‘element,’ the aether, the open, the bright [Heitere], that which clears and shelters for the upsurge and appearing of the Godhead; and this: the element of the coming of the sons of God, and this ‘brings’ the song. It lets appear: the highest God” (G75 364). Heidegger is on solid ground here; see Kluge 2002: 404. See also Thomson 2011: chapter 3.

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neither absolute nor, indeed, all-embracing. Heidegger is painting a sort of cultural trail marker along the “track” whence the sacred seems to have fled under the onslaught of late modern technologization. Such signposts harken back to his account of phenomenological concepts as “formal indications.” In addition to refraining from determining the phenomena in advance by furnishing a purely formal sketch of them, formal indications demand to be “fulfilled” in order to be properly grasped.7 To “blaze a trail” in this sense involves more than spelling out the conditions for a certain specification of being-in-theworld, but it actually requires an individual realization of these conditions. Much the same can be said of Heidegger’s references to the “divinities” or “godly ones [die Göttlichen].” Many expositions of Heidegger’s later thought tend either to bypass these mysterious figures or to translate them into safely naturalistic terms. As with the “holy,” so with the “godly ones” – both are intended by Heidegger as provocations to the prevailing philosophical approach meant to help lead us beyond it.8 As elements of the “fourfold [das Geviert],” the “godly ones” comprise part of the nexus of relations that forms the horizon for a distinct, post-metaphysical mode of being-in-the-world that Heidegger calls “dwelling.” As for what the latter might look like, Heidegger has this to say in one of his key post-war essays: Mortals dwell in that they await the godly ones as godly ones. In hope they hold up to the godly ones what is unhoped for. They wait for the hints of their arrival and do not overlook the signs of their absence. They do not make gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune, they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn. (G7 152, emphasis added)

It is difficult not to read this passage as another provocation in the face of the monolithic reduction of all things to a mere “stockpile.” To “dwell” is precisely to recognize that the “godly ones” are not at our disposal. This is what their absence signals; not that there are no “godly ones” but, instead, that these gods are not to be found in our ever-growing “stockpile.” But then who, or what, are they? Heidegger provides various articulations in a series of essays (G79 17; 180; 351). The “godly ones” are the elusive and irreducible ways in which the divine 7 8

On formal indication, see the account in Dahlstrom 2001. Other illuminating discussions can be found in Van Buren 1995 and Thomson 2013. My reading of “the godly ones” aligns to this extent with that outlined in Wrathall 2003. I would also refer here to Heidegger’s own criticism of reductive readings of myth as merely allegorical (G53 139/111; G7 253). Such readings entirely miss the significance of mythos, which, like poetry, discloses a world in Heidegger’s distinctive sense. Finally, it is surely significant that the only actual examples that Heidegger ever gives of the “godly ones” are “the godly in Greek culture [Griechentum], in prophetic Judaism [prophetisch-Jüdischen], [and] in the preaching of Jesus” (G7 185).

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is given.9 By characterizing them this way, Heidegger emphasizes that the divine, unlike some item in our “stockpile,” comes to us unawares, much like the “day of the Lord,” the presence of which in the lives of the earliest Christians Heidegger had explored deeply in the 1910s and 1920s.10 For Heidegger, religion after the “death of God” can never claim to be the allembracing cultural force that it once was.11 At the same time, this does not mean that religion is one “worldview” among others that one can adopt from time to time. Instead, to live religiously after the “death of God” requires openness that escapes the straitjacket of late modernity’s reductive understanding of being. In this respect, Heidegger shares with the next figure that I discuss (Marcel) the basic intuition that the humility demanded by religious life holds both challenges and promises for our age.

M A R C E L : P A R T I C I P A T I O N A N D O N T O L O GI C A L E X I G E N C E

Like Heidegger, Marcel (born in the same year, 1889) began his intellectual trajectory well before the Second World War.12 Also like Heidegger, Marcel emerged in the aftermath of that catastrophe as a thinker deeply concerned with the problems of the age who took seriously the possibilities of religious reorientation. In the name of a “philosophy of participation,” Marcel challenges a way of life characterized by alienation, deracination, neutrality, and the absence of value.13 At the beginning of his 1950 Gifford Lectures, published as The Mystery of Being, Marcel argues that the dilemma between idiosyncratic, personal subjectivity and absolutizing, objective thought is false (MB, 9). This is attested to by the revelatory experience that accompanies our encounters with great works of 9

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Heidegger had long puzzled over the phenomenological problem of the “givenness” of God. In a strictly Husserlian framework, God cannot be given with Evidenz and so eludes the grasp of phenomenology. Heidegger early on accepts this not as a foreclosure of the possibility of a phenomenology of religious life but as a challenge to be accepted. His 1920–21 series of lecture courses on Paul and Augustine, as well as loose notes on various religious thinkers from an earlier period, testify to Heidegger’s keen interest in exploring the unique, so to say, indirect, mode of God’s presence within the phenomenal horizon. For an excellent recent account of this key element of Heidegger’s understanding of religious life, see Wolfe 2013. Indeed, according to Heidegger, the way in which Christianity, in particular, came to be understood ontotheologically is what eventually yielded the late modern understanding of being. Regarding ontotheology, see Thomson 2005 and Thomson 2011. On Heidegger’s challenge to our tendency to view entities as indifferently available or uniformly characterizable, see also McManus 2012. As with Heidegger, Marcel’s Mystery of Being is cited parenthetically in the body of the text (as MB). My reading of Marcel here owes a great deal to the excellent essays collected in Schilip and Hahn 1984.

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art, encounters which remain both partly communicable and yet irreducibly individual. Analogously, there need be no insurmountable gap between philosophy – understood as rigorous, disciplined reflection – and the intimate reaches of personal existence. Philosophy can and must address itself to the “broken” condition of the late modern world. For Marcel, this is a world in which the only conceivable truths are “facts” extracted from reality through techniques, indifferently available to all, and which can in turn be manipulated, stored, and deployed. This is a world confronted with the spectacle of selfdestruction, of automation at the expense of “inner life,” of anonymous collectivization at the expense of community, and even of one’s actual personality being substituted by “the State’s official record of my activities” (MB, 28), where “the preposition ‘with’ . . . seems more and more to be losing its meaning” (MB, 28). Human beings are becoming mere functionaries in a vast administrative machine.14 Yet, there is something in us that still resists the totalizing grasp of technique (MB, 33). Marcel conceptualizes this point of resistance as a kind of “inner need,” an exigence for “transcendence,” where transcendence does not mean “going beyond” or somehow rising above the domain of experience but instead indicates a kind of fulfillment or completion. After all, Marcel insists, “there must exist a possibility of having an experience of the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists the word can have no meaning” (MB, 46). Marcel gives the example of “a kind of inner transformation that can take place within a personal relationship,” such as the gradual realization that another person has a unique existence of her own, leading to a willingness to sacrifice something of unconditional importance to oneself for her sake (MB, 48). What all examples of transcendence share is a kind of shift in the “center” or focal orientation of a person’s total experience of self, others, and world.15 For Marcel, philosophy is an engaged mode of reflection that calls the self into question and so opens it up. Philosophical reflection is not somehow “outside” of life as it is actually lived, but rather is the means by which life moves itself from one “center” to another (MB, 82). Far from requiring a “lack of interest” or disinterested non-involvement, such reflection turns upon an “exclamatory awareness of oneself,” an “indistinct sense of one’s total existence” deeply bound up with our sense of our own embodiment (MB, 92). To ask, “who am I?” in this mode implicates one’s personal being at the deepest 14 15

For another key characterization of late modernity in similar terms, see Marcel 1962. A transformational shift from egocentricity to other-centeredness would become extremely important to Emmanuel Levinas’s religious philosophy; see e.g. Levinas 1969; Thomson 2009a; and Katz, this volume.

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levels, a being that cannot simply be captured objectively and so simply put at our or others’ disposal (MB, 155–60). Rather than being merely a sequence of episodes that can be rattled off, a human life cannot be separated from the interest that we take in it. Thus, “the more definitely I am aiming at some purpose or other, the more vividly I am aware of being alive” (MB, 162). When “I am concentrating all my energies on something, I am living in the fullest fashion” (MB, 162), experiencing a “fullness of life” that we can differentiated from the “lapsed” state of routinization, flatness, and indifference that we so often find ourselves in in the late modern era. To apprehend my life as mine is at the very least to assume that it could have a meaning or point. The difference between Marcel and his atheist friends like Sartre is that the latter think it is up to me to give my life a point; this is Marcel’s understanding of the famous slogan that “existence precedes essence” or that, “by a fatal necessity, I pre-exist myself.” Whatever truth this view might contain, it ignores the crucial fact that our lives are always situated; some “essence” has always already been conferred upon us. Over against these erstwhile comrades in arms, Marcel embraces metaphysical humility, the recognition that, as an isolated individual, one is ultimately nothing (MB, 85–6). The issue turns upon disponsibilité or indisponsibilité. The latter is a kind of closedness, an incapacity to respond to a call upon oneself, a state of being “shut up in [oneself].” This incapacity is the outcome of the “ecceity of the ego,” of finding oneself to be a “personified here-and-now that has to defend itself actively against other personified heres-and-nows, the latter appearing to it essentially as just so many threats to what I have called its rights” (MB, 176). Indisponsibilité calls to mind the condition of Dostoevsky’s famous “Underground Man,” for whom freedom is inevitably perversity and love is a kind of humiliation. Overcoming this requires that life be oriented to something other than itself so that my “here-and-nowness,” formerly a kind of prison, is opened up into a shared “elsewhere” (MB, 178–80). Here, Marcel invokes “ontological exigence.” Ontological exigence, a key concept in Marcel’s mature thought, is an appeal that is “supra-empirical,” that is “sent out beyond the limits of experience, towards one who can only be described as an absolute Thou, a last and supreme resource for the troubled human spirit” (MB, 152). In other words, the prison of ecceity cannot be opened unless one reaches out beyond the confines of the “here-and-now” to an Other that can never be encompassed by it. For Marcel, this is the meaning of faith. To have faith is to place myself at the disposal of something, or to “pledge myself fundamentally, and this pledge affects not only what I have but also what I am” (MB2, 77). Marcel writes:

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To put it more precisely: if I believe in God and I am questioned or I question myself about this belief, I shall not be able to avoid the assertion that I am convinced of the existence of God. On the other hand, this translation, which is in itself inevitable, misses, I think, what is essential in the “belief” and is precisely its existential character. (MB2, 79)

One cannot, properly speaking, have faith in an object, for “one cannot have confidence except in a ‘toi,’ in a reality which is capable of functioning as ‘toi,’ of being invoked, of being something to which one can have recourse” (MB, 79). Thus, in the midst of a broken world – in which relationships are being reduced to anonymous collectivities and persons to mere functions – there is still the possibility of reorienting life in a way that restores its personal quality by opening it to another Person Who can never be reduced in the first place. RICOEUR: THE RECOVERY OF THE WORD

A student of Heidegger and Marcel (he was particularly close with the latter from 1935 until Marcel’s death in 1973), Paul Ricoeur was one of the most remarkable thinkers in the post-war Continental tradition, if only for the astonishing breadth of his contributions.16 Religion was for him a central concern. Educated in the only Protestant theology faculty in France, Ricoeur was a clergyman and, like Marcel, delivered a series of Gifford Lectures (in 1986). Ricoeur developed and expanded Heidegger’s program of hermeneutic phenomenology in ways that were both congruent with it and unprecedented. A nice point of entry for considering Ricoeur as a philosopher of religion in late modernity is his account of religious language. Ricoeur’s starting point is that religious experience is fundamentally linguistic, so that “the most appropriate place to interpret it on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression” (1995: 35 [hereafter FS]). Here Ricoeur harkens back to Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, in which the “factical lifeexperience” of primal Christianity can be accessed only through the way it is expressed. Ricoeur argues that religious language is meaningful in a distinct way, and that it therefore possesses a distinct claim to truth (understood broadly, after Heidegger, as meaningful disclosure). Religious language’s distinctive truth claim forces us to question the appropriateness of “the criteria of truth that are borrowed from other spheres of discourse, mainly the scientific one” (FS, 35). In this, Ricoeur aligns with the other great post-war theoretician of hermeneutics, Heidegger’s student Gadamer. Further, like the young Heidegger, who (in a way that Marcel would have surely approved) eschews the detached 16

Among a number of helpful discussions of the connection between Marcel and Ricoeur, particularly relevant for this chapter is Bourgeois 2006.

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“theoretical attitude” for a phenomenology that takes place within the “historical I,” Ricoeur denies the unquestioned primacy of positivist methodology in historical studies. Echoing Heidegger, Ricouer maintains that the focus should not be on second-order religious language (as in theology) but on “the most originary expressions of a community of faith (FS, 37). These expressions are forms of productive composition that bring about “distantiation”: “[a] work of discourse, as a work of art, is an autonomous object at a distance from the authorial intention, from its initial situation (its Sitz-im-Leben) and from its primitive audience” (FS, 38). In more explicitly Heideggerian terms, such discourse helps to disclose and maintain a meaningful world, the “world of the text” (FS, 41). Ricoeur elaborates the meaning of this effect (which Gadamer calls “transformation into structure” in Truth and Method) by describing how the act of composition disrupts the referential nature of the discourse. In the written text, ostension is unavailable as a means for fixing reference once and for all, as in oral discourse. For, there is no longer a shared situation that would make it possible to definitely settle issues regarding the reference of the work (FS, 41). While this is certainly a diminishment of meaning, it also enables a structure of reference that operates at “another, more fundamental level,” a “second order of reference” that points not to objects or events but to what “Husserl designated by the expression Lebenswelt, and which Heidegger calls being-in-the-world” (FS, 42), or, in Ricoeur’s informative gloss, a “global horizon” or “totality of meanings” (FS, 42). To understand a text, for Ricouer, is to “explicate the sort of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text” (FS, 43). What is to be understood is “a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities” (FS, 43).17 In the case of the biblical text (particularly that of the New Testament), this proposed world carries several designations: “a new world, a new covenant, the kingdom of God, a new birth” (FS, 44). This account of religious discourse helps to illuminate Ricoeur’s discussion elsewhere of the fate of religion in the desacralized world of late modernity. Ricoeur observes that “[h]uman beings no longer receive the meaning of their existence from their belonging to a cosmos itself saturated with meaning” (FS, 61). In a desacralized world, everything is instead merely a “utensil.” Like Marcel, Ricoeur highlights a widespread sense of disillusionment with the scientism and technologization that form part and parcel of desacralization. His point in doing so is to show that, once we see the underlying ideological

17

For a very helpful discussion of this aspect of literary composition, see especially John Wall 2005.

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nature of these cultural phenomena, we can say (echoing Heidegger) that “[m]odernity is neither a fact nor a destiny” (FS, 63). Indeed, the historical tradition that has given rise to desacralization turns out to harbor a kind of religiosity and religious discourse that can “accompany the decline of the sacred in a positive manner,” namely, a kerygmatic religiosity that is itself anti-sacral (FS, 62). Ricoeur traces this possibility back to the Hebrew Bible, and in particular to the elemental struggle between the prophets of ancient Israel and the Canaanite cults. He elsewhere references the way the prophets undermined the glib assurances that came from the covenantal ideology of the Davidic monarchy (FS, 174). Following the great Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad, Ricoeur argues that, in this moment, the word, rather than the natural world or the political order, becomes the sacred site (FS, 56). Rituals acquire historical significance and so no longer involve reenacting a theogonic event in order to revivify the natural world or empower the monarch. For Ricoeur, the kerygmatic discourse of the New Testament is the full flowering of this tradition. Discourse is deployed to startling effect. He highlights the parable (which takes the form of an extended analogy), the proverb, and the eschatological pronouncement. In each case, the discourse exhibits what Ricoeur calls, borrowing from Jaspers, the “logic of limit-situations.” Importantly, the limit-situation characteristic of these modes of discourse does not remove one from the everyday but rather initiates a transformed sense of its meaning, typified by the Christian injunction to be in the world but not of the world (a saying that Heidegger highlights in his 1920–21 lectures on Paul). Even the eschatological pronouncement is not “otherworldy,” despite its obvious and explicit reference to the “world to come.” Instead, the point of that pronouncement is to effect a reorientation here and now within this world. “Repent, for the kingdom of God has come near” (Matthew 4:17). Perhaps the paradigmatic instance of limit-discourse in the New Testament is the parable. Without exception, the parables refer to everyday, nonmythological experiences (the rhythms of agricultural life, domestic relationships, meals and celebratory occasions, etc.), but they have the function of heuristics designed to get the listener to see in a new way, or to open up to an often radical redescription of everyday practices, institutions, and concepts (FS, 57–8). (To take one famous example, the parable of the two sons undoes quite natural human attitudes about merit.) Proverbs, generically speaking, function as pithy maxims designed to help orient or guide a decision. However, as Ricoeur points out, many of the proverbs in the New Testament involve devices like hyperbole and paradox in a way that does not furnish rules of thumb for practice but instead affect dislocations. Some take the form “you have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .” In these instances, they function

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paradoxically to overturn what passed as proverbial wisdom. Other examples of the kind of dislocating intention that Ricoeur has in mind can be illustrated by the following, chosen more or less randomly: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26); “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are . . .” (1 Corinthians 27–8). Ricoeur’s gloss is apt: “Any project of making a continuous whole of one’s existence is ruined, for what could it mean to formulate a coherent project on the basis of a maxim such as ‘Lose your life to find it’?” (FS, 59). At the same time, these proverbs differ from other, similar sorts of aphoristic discourse in that their intent is not merely skeptical or ironic; in virtually each case, some kind of unforeseen reconciliation is promised or portrayed. Kerygmatic discourse is an emphatically religious discourse that simultaneously participates in the desacralization of the world. Yet, rather than replacing a sacral reality with the indifferent all-the-same (Einerlei) described by Heidegger, such discourse challenges the sacralization of power in the late modern form of technological control and explanatory completeness. Following Ricoeur, we can see any number of seemingly ineliminable features of late modern life as so many latter-day Baals, each called to account by the Word. Troubling features of modernity can thus be shown to be neither facts nor destinies. VATTIMO: POSTMODERNITY AS HISTORY OF SALVATION

The final figure is Gianni Vattimo, a philosopher first steeped in the neoThomism of Jacques Maritain but who soon, like Ricoeur, became captivated by the hermeneutic tradition emanating from Heidegger. It was only after several decades that Vattimo returned, in a sense, to his Roman Catholic roots. Appropriating and expanding Heidegger’s understanding of the “death of God” and the essence of technology, Vattimo took up, in works like After Christianity [AC], the question of religion in a nihilistic age.18 For Vattimo, the meaning of the “death of God” is that there is no longer any ultimate foundation that could secure any system of meaning once-and-for-all. Yet, the very same event that brought about the desacralization of the world likewise undermined the “total organization of society” through political ideology or technological ordering (AC, 3). The radical recognition of the finitude and contingency of human 18

For two substantial discussions of the religious aspect of Vattimo’s thought, see Depoortere 2008 and Guarino 2009.

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existence, which Vattimo finds powerfully witnessed to in the Bible, would seem to be eminently appropriate for our “postmodern” condition. The “death of God” involves the growing sense that there is no more “objective world order.” This realization in itself reflects the triumph of a kind of rationality, first articulated by the Greeks, over reality: “the ideal order . . . has become the de facto order of the rationalized world of modern technological society” (AC, 14). It is not that the idea of another “world” has lost credibility but, rather, that the otherworld that animated the imaginations of Western thinkers since the time of Plato has come to be the only world. Perhaps it is worth considering how (the United States excepted) the most educated, advanced, and economically privileged nations are also those that are most “godless,” whereas, for the “losers” in the game of globalization and technologization, the yearning for another world in its traditional forms is yet regnant. Following Heidegger, Vattimo contends that this situation demands a critical recollection of the history of being as metaphysics designed to disrupt “the claim of the order of beings to be held as the eternal and objective order of Being [sic],” or a “weakening” which he likens to a kenosis (emptying) that dethrones the objective world order and makes space for deep criticism. Invoking the Franciscan theologian of history Joachim of Fiore alongside the early German Romantics, Vattimo argues that secularization and desacralization may, paradoxically, harbor the advent of a “new religion.” Modernity and its crises can be seen as part of the “history of salvation [Heilsgeschichte],” rather than as merely the foreclosure of the possibility of such a history (AC, 41). Vattimo frames this point in terms of the medieval quadriga, that is, the view that multiple senses beyond the literal one are inherent in the biblical text, emphasizing a process of spiritualization (AC, 49).19 Spiritualization is another articulation of the phenomena of “weakening,” whereby the illusion of a stable, objective order that can simply be mirrored by human institutions is replaced by a sense of the real as a play of interpretations. As Vattimo puts it, the “weight” or seemingly unquestionable authority of what is supposedly ultimately real is reduced or lifted (AC, 50–1).

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Medieval exegetes typically included, over and above (1) the “literal” or “historical” sense, (2) the “allegorical” sense (whereby events and persons in the Hebrew Bible were read as “types” of Christ), (3) the “tropological” sense (whereby otherwise seemingly descriptive passages point to moral considerations, as when the daughters of Laban, viz., Leah and Rebecca, are read as references to the active and contemplative lives, respectively), and (4) the “anagogical” sense (whereby the text is meant to indicate the reality of the kingdom of Heaven, as in certain readings of passages about the design of the Tabernacle). Together, these were likened to a chariot driven by four horses (quadriga).

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Just as Heidegger and Marcel challenged the dominance of a seemingly inescapable sense of objectivity, while Ricoeur highlighted the possibilities inherent in the “distantiation” of religious discourse, so Vattimo sees weakening not just as the loss of meaning but rather as pointing toward a transfer of reality to a new level. Weakening thus harbors salvation, or “the lightening and weakening of the ‘heavy’ structures in which Being [sic] has manifested itself throughout human civilization” (AC, 53). When the world is spiritualized, it becomes newly possible for human beings as spirit to be at home in the world (AC, 54). Put in hermeneutical terms, weakening restores the productive nature of interpretation by severing the link between being true and being simply present (AC, 63). New senses of spiritual experience become possible in this way. From this point of view, the secularization that reigns triumphant in the postmodern world is not the foreclosure of a mythic Heilsgeschichte but rather an event within it – not so much a Fall but rather a redemptive kenosis. I N N O N C LU S I O NE M

This survey of post-war Continental philosophy of religion comes nowhere near exhausting its full range and depth. In a sense this is quite fitting, as one of the central themes in this tradition, bequeathed to it from Heidegger’s criticisms of the metaphysics of presence, is that final closure (conclusio) ever eludes finite, historical beings like us. Indeed, what all four of the figures examined in this chapter share is the sense that modernity is ultimately not a state of being closed (clausus) but, instead, holds the promise of an opening yet to come (aperturus). In risking language, Heidegger is not calling for nostalgia for the sacral universe of the ancient Greeks but rather pointing ahead to the ever-elusive presence of the divine even in a darkening world. Marcel calls on us late moderns to engage in a kind of reflection that enables a deep recentering of our sense of who we are by putting us at the disposal of an Other. For Ricoeur, we have yet to really come to terms with the extremity evoked by prophetic discourse, instead falling prey to the false sacralization of the status quo. Finally, Vattimo maintains that the very process that seemingly expelled God from the world has actually liberated both us and the divine for a new encounter beyond metaphysics.

Part III Bridge Builders, Border Crossers, Synthesizers, and Comparative Philosophy

section eight BRIDGE BUILDERS, BORDER CROSSERS, SYNTH ESIZERS

42 RETHINKING THE ANALYTIC/ CONTINENTAL DIVIDE iain d. thomson

THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF THE CATEGORIES THEMSELVES: PRELIMINARY CAUTIONS

Almost everyone who studies the philosophical issues surrounding “the analytic/Continental divide” now recognizes that the supposed dichotomy between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy is itself deeply problematic philosophically.1 I’ll drop the quotes before they become tedious, but I do want to insist that, as Bernard Williams (2006) famously pointed out, cross-classifying the main division within contemporary Western philosophy in the mixed, geographical-cum-methodological terms analytic and Continental is rather like trying to sort cars into two (would-be) mutually exclusive groups, those “with an automatic transmission,” on the one hand, and those “made in Germany,” on the other.2 The deeper point behind Williams’s humorous analogy is that the categories (“Continental” and “analytic”) are non-isomorphic and so disanalogous in a way that illegitimately conflates place of origin with method. On its face, “the analytic/Continental divide” seems implicitly committed to the view that philosophers’ place of geographical origin or location (and here there are only two options: “the Continent” or Britain, since “the Continent” is the British name for non-British Europe) determines the method or style of their

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Today the only exceptions to this rule seem to be extreme ideologues who identify exclusively with one or the other side of the divide, albeit without being able to explain convincingly (or sometimes even coherently) what qualifies one (other than the self-legislating sovereignty of the ideologue’s own pronouncements) for such exclusive membership (and hence also exclusion). As a result, such work tends not to be good enough philosophically to even merit mention. (“Let the dead bury the dead,” as Jesus said.) For a succinct and compelling deconstruction of the typical attempts to rationalize the divide, see Blattner 2013. Williams 2006: 201 (example slightly modified, see below). Quietly altering Williams’s joke, James Conant gives the amusing example of “classifying human beings into those that are vegetarian and those that are Romanian” (Conant 2016: 18). Williams himself is building (albeit critically) on Michael Dummett’s seminal (1993) work (see also note 2 below). There is also the rarely mentioned problem that this longstanding division of the philosophical field leaves non-Western approaches entirely out of account. See Guerrero et al., this volume.

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philosophizing (as either analytic or Continental). Analytic and Continental philosophy, on this view, would be like distinct accents that show where one’s philosophical formation took place (as if on one side or the other of the English Channel). This rather simplistic view seems to have been at least initially plausible to many philosophers. (That, at least, would be the most charitable explanation of how the analytic/Continental distinction became so widespread and influential within the profession, though we will dig deeper in what follows.) In point of historical fact, however, these would-be mutually exclusive categories have never successfully captured, reflected, or justified the existence of two wholly distinct groups of philosophers but, instead, cross-cut various philosophical communities (of which there are of course many more than two) in complicated ways, while leaving other (e.g. non-Western) approaches entirely out of account (see e.g. Van Norden 2017 and Guerrero et al., this volume). It has thus been commonplace since Dummett’s The Origins of Analytic Philosophy (1993) for philosophical historians of twentieth-century philosophy to point out that, rather than yielding any neat binary sorting, the categories analytic and Continental inevitably intersect in multiple ways – overlapping geographically, methodologically, topically, sometimes even stylistically – on any of the substantive ways philosophers have tried to draw the distinction.3 Now, if one goes back to our automobile analogy, the fact that those two categories overlap is so obvious that to deny it would suggest that one is in the grip of an outdated prejudice, and worse, a false belief that is currently being rendered increasingly ridiculous by history. (Imagine someone who still believed that “all German cars, and only German cars, come with a manual transmission.”) But how far can we take this analogy? Has the last century of philosophy similarly shown that the still widespread belief that there are two different approaches to philosophy (the analytic and the Continental) is “genuinely comical,” as influential philosophers like Williams (2006) and James Conant (2016: 56 note 2) suggest?

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Dummett (1993) famously observed that much (self-identified) “analytic” philosophy actually had its origins in Germany (and so on “the continent”), in the work of Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and others. Notice, however, that these German roots are not problematically German in (what I shall suggest is) the politically motivating sense of being connected to Nazism (or are at least not commonly recognized as being so connected, as in the case of Frege’s own virulent anti-Semitism, which Dummett notes). Nonetheless, as Williams and Conant point out, this did not stop Dummett himself from endorsing a stereotypical version of the divide which (in Williams’s summary) identifies analytic philosophy with “the ‘linguistic turn,’ the method of treating language as explanatorily prior to thought” (a view that, we should note, can be found in Heidegger and Derrida, among other paradigmatically “Continental” philosophers, but no longer among many leading analytic thinkers today). See Dummett 1993; Williams 2006: 201 note 4; Conant 2016; see also Critchley 2001.

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Some of us tend to see the existence (and stubborn persistence) of various Continental and analytic stereotypes less as comic than as tragic – or, better, as both comic and tragic, a compound tragicomedy of mutual misunderstanding and painful marginalization – a long history of missed opportunities for productive dialogue in the world(s) of English-speaking philosophy that is only slowly beginning to give way before a growing number of philosophical syntheses that draw freely on both traditions – as, most famously, in the work of Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and Raymond Geuss, as well as in the growing body of philosophers influenced or inspired by such path-breaking border crossers (see e.g. the chapters by Mulhall, Sachs, Beaney, Wrathall and Loden, this volume). Whether one views this history with bemusement, anger, pride, regret, or their various combinations, no one can credibly deny that its central stereotypes – which evolved over time but consistently opposed “the analytic” to “the Continental” and vice versa – have had a profound and lasting influence on the historical shape and development of the philosophical profession in the English-speaking world (and, indeed, well beyond) in the last eighty plus years.4 Today, however, many contemporary philosophers seem to agree with Conant’s judgment that we are in the midst of a diminution in philosophers’ longstanding tendency to believe in and adhere to some strict version of the analytic/Continental divide. Adding an interesting twist to that growing consensus, Conant suggests that this ongoing weakening of the analytic/Continental divide stems (albeit in part and inadvertently) from the history of analytic philosophy itself. In Conant’s view, the current breaking down of the divide stems in large part from analytic philosophers’ own reluctant recognition that they cannot provide any convincing criteria (let alone “necessary and sufficient conditions”) capable of conferring exclusive membership in one of the two (supposedly always opposed) “camps.”5 To make this case, Conant recounts a remarkable history whereby, from the time of the Second World War until the 1990s (at least), a long succession of important, self-identified “analytic” philosophers attempted to distinguish analytic and Continental philosophy via some philosophically principled and convincing dichotomy. G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, the early Wittgenstein, Moritz Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, the later Wittgenstein, and Michael Dummett – each of these leading “analytic” philosophers proposed and sought to defend criteria that would sort analytic and

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For a succinct overview, see e.g. Collins 1998: chapter 13. Amusingly, one can view Socrates’ failed search for concept definition (in terms close to what would later be called necessary and sufficient conditions) as the self- or auto-deconstruction of the analytic impulse in one of its founding forms.

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Continental philosophy into mutually exclusive memberships. Yet, all of them failed in their various attempts, Conant shows (by providing convincing counterexamples to each case), so that, in the end, these analytic philosophers failed – not only individually but also as a collective – to define “analytic” philosophy in distinction from “Continental.” This is a rather painfully ironic failure, moreover, for a community that had long centrally prided itself on its allegedly superior ability to clearly and precisely determine the legitimate and illegitimate meanings and uses of philosophical terms and concepts. But this twentieth-century parade of failed attempts by leading analytic philosophers to convincingly distinguish analytic and Continental philosophy is not just a glaring historical failure. For Conant, this collective failure also points us toward some of the most important lessons to be drawn from the historical study of analytic philosophy itself. Perhaps most importantly, this collective failure of (self-described) “analytic” philosophers to define “analytic philosophy” encourages us to think more critically about what it means to belong to a historical tradition of the kind that constitute the philosophical profession. One’s belonging to such a historical tradition is often strongly influenced by one’s place and time, of course, but one’s membership in such historical traditions also always remains partly voluntary (whether its members want to admit that or not), so that membership in such traditions, for Conant, has centrally to do with critically inheriting “a form of philosophical selfconsciousness,” which also means working to transform from within the philosophical traditions one takes oneself to belong to historically (Conant 2016: 55).6 Indeed, as Conant nicely illustrates, although the “analytic” tradition is only entering the second century of its already complex history, this tradition has been profoundly shaped not only by struggles with its external (“Continental”) other but also, and just as pervasively, by internal struggles among and between its own competing forms of historical self-consciousness, implicit and explicit struggles over just what it means to be an “analytic” philosopher.7 For that very reason, however, some philosophical historians more informed by the “Continental” traditions would go even further and reject Conant’s neoWittgensteinian appeal to the very idea of distinctive “forms of [philosophical] life” as a problematic, backdoor return of the now discredited idea of distinct 6

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Studying this almost eight-decade long succession of failed philosophical attempts to clearly and persuasively define the criteria for membership in analytic and Continental philosophy, Conant (2016) suggests, should teach contemporary philosophers that defending the distinction philosophically is not just a difficult Herculean labor but an impossibility. For Conant, the divide is thus better understood in terms of the meaning of group membership, for it broaches larger questions of group identity and of what it means to inherit a tradition riven by contradictory factions. See Conant 2016 and below.

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(even if no longer dichotomized) philosophical traditions. Such skeptics might instead agree with William Blattner, who concludes – from his own insightful consideration of the important exceptions to the most popular ways of drawing the analytic/Continental divide – that this divide is merely an arbitrary historical construct. In Blattner’s view: the so-called Continental-analytic division within philosophy is not a philosophical distinction; it’s a sociological one. It is the product of historical accident. It is unreasonable to cleave to it, and the insistence on remaining closed to work that is either presumptively “analytic” or presumptively “Continental” is irrational and unphilosophical . . . In light of this conclusion, I prefer to the extent possible not to use the terms “Continental philosophy” and “analytic philosophy.” They perpetuate the divisions of the past, divisions that it behooves us to overcome. (Blattner 2013)

Blattner (whose efforts here I for the most part only applaud) does not do this himself, but there are now many philosophers who like to appeal to the kinds of problems Blattner, Williams, and Conant document in order to conclude that “There is no such thing as Continental philosophy.” One problem with the claim that there is no such thing as Continental (or analytic) philosophy – especially when made by those of us who have achieved some measure of success in the philosophical profession – is that the claim risks degenerating into the same kind of move as the wealthy, white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, Anglo-male who claims that class, race, gender, sex, and ethnicity are of no philosophical importance: What he thereby seems to be confessing is that they are of no philosophical importance to him, not real for his philosophical considerations and concerns, suggesting that he has not been persistently excluded, marginalized, or ostracized for taking them seriously as important topics of philosophical discussion. Even if one is instead, like Blattner, nobly trying to bring about a future in which such alleged differences are no longer grounds for sociological exclusions within the profession (exclusions which do undeniably persist), the problem remains that such futures do not arise simply by choosing henceforth to ignore an established legacy of differences, however arbitrary their historical formation and unphilosophical their contemporary perpetuation might be (see also Sanchez, this volume). If, like Blattner, we genuinely want to move beyond the whole destructive legacy of the analytic/Continental divide, then perhaps we need not only to deconstruct the stereotypical prejudices that this philosophical divide relies on and reinforces (as Blattner and Conant do so convincingly). Perhaps we also need to take this deconstructive critique one step further, following up its first, negative, ground-clearing moment (which includes pointing out, with Blattner and Conant, that there are obvious counterexamples to every attempt to dichotomize philosophy into separate camps) by developing a second, positive

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moment of critique, in which that ground-clearing deconstruction of the divide gets beneath its historical formation in a way that discloses something of its deeper and more enduring motivations – thereby helping us to better understand the motivations for the divide and so some of the enduring obstacles to simply overcoming it.8 The hope that guides me here is that if, beneath the historical tensions and ideological obfuscations, we can discover some philosophical kernels of truth on both sides of the divide, then this may have the advantage of helping us to explain the central divide in the last century of philosophy (rather than trying to dismiss it as a philosophically empty, collective delusion), while nevertheless facilitating the important efforts (by Williams, Conant, Blattner, and many others) to help us move beyond the ongoing system of sociological exclusions to which this divide continues unfairly to give rise.

ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL STEREOTYPES

It is probably overly optimistic to imagine that any readers will not already be familiar with the Continental/analytic stereotypes in some form. But let us characterize these stereotypes at least briefly, so that we can move on to consider some underemphasized sources of the enduring tensions that these stereotypes reflect in distorted ways. We can get a quick sense for the dominant analytic and Continental stereotypes from the renowned Oxford ethicist R. M. Hare, who (in 1960) tellingly decried the “monstrous philosophical edifices” of German philosophy, which allegedly disguised mere “verbiage” (“ambiguities and evasions and rhetoric”) as “serious metaphysical inquiry.” Against the empty castles of words supposedly typical of German philosophy, Hare proudly set the “clarity, relevance, and brevity” of his own Anglo-analytic tradition of British philosophy.9 Hare’s frank judgment has the virtue of clearly setting Britain against Germany. To emphasize the significant underground influence of that Anglo-Teutonic tension (and so help explain how such a simplistic stereotype could have proved so divisive historically), I slightly modified Williams’s original analogy earlier. Williams himself famously compared the belief that one could sort philosophers into either “Continental” or “analytic” with a comical attempt to sort cars into 8

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On the importance of recognizing both the negative and positive moments of every deconstructive critique – the first in which longstanding obfuscations are cleared away, and the second in which we rediscover something long concealed by those obfuscations, something that helps us find a way forward – see Thomson 2005: 141–3. See Hare 1960, quoted by Dan Zahavi (2016). Zahavi provides striking examples of prejudice on both sides of the divide (80–93). See also Overgaard 2010. On the origins of this divide, see also Beaney 2013c.

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either “Japanese” or “front-wheel drive” (Williams 2006: 201). I shifted gears slightly, however, because I believe the fact that Continental philosophy was largely made in Germany (and in a Germany connected to Nazism, specifically) helps explain the resistance to any automatic transmission it has long faced among the Anglo-American, analytic “mainstream” of the English-speaking philosophical world. Those grown accustomed to swimming against (or at least across) the current of this mainstream often develop a subtle feel for some of its distinctive pulls and eddies, but if we want to understand the more subterranean sources of this current, it helps to begin by stating the obvious. Members of both analytic and Continental traditions agree, typically, that it is important to try to state the obvious in philosophy, not least because we tend to overlook the obvious otherwise – and many philosophical disagreements are based on unnoticed but conflicting presuppositions each side has taken to be “obvious.”10 This means that as participants in such disagreements, we can only avoid begging the deepest questions at stake between us, or just talking past one another in mutual incomprehension (as still happens too often), when we uncover and examine these supposedly obvious presuppositions. The attempt to do so usually means explicitly defining one’s terms at the outset, or even deconstructing the presuppositions built into the premises with which one is presented – including, as we have already seen, such seemingly obvious terms as “analytic” and “Continental.” Such extreme carefulness – a product, in part, of the hypercritical tendencies endemic to philosophical discourse – helps explain why philosophical writing often gives the appearance of moving backward as it gets under way (as if its practitioners were trying to gain traction on a slippery terrain). Outsiders quickly notice the ponderous pace of the philosophical papers published by the leading analytic journals, which too often begin with a meticulous definition of terms meant to ward off possible misunderstandings (a procedure meant to establish “clarity and rigor” that Williams compared, albeit unfavorably, to the natural scientists’ efforts to secure the validity of the results of their own methodological procedures).11 But a perhaps even more extreme example can be found in Jacques

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These are corollaries of the first principle of phenomenology, the law of proximity; see Thomson 2011: 199. As chapter 3 of that book suggests, stating the obvious is also a good description for the activity of poietic world-disclosure crucial to the struggle against the most nihilistic tendencies of our late modern world. See Williams 2006: 183, quoted in note 26, below. Such methods reflect a demand for transparent clarity and monosemic exactitude that is so widespread in analytic philosophy that, e.g., criticisms often take the (only innocuous seeming) form: “I am not sure I completely understood your claim that X.”

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Derrida’s rather comical affinity for announcing, around the hundredth page, “We are almost ready to begin.” Indeed, Husserl taught that to be a “phenomenologist” means to be a perpetual re-beginner, ready to start over each inquiry anew in the ongoing attempt to go deeper, to drill down ever further into what still remains unexamined or insufficiently understood in that complex phenomenological question, “What can the nature of own experiences teach us about the nature of our worlds?”12 As Husserl’s student Heidegger would later put it, to think is to be always “under way,” a perpetual learner, never simply finished in understanding and communicating what we think about “the question of being,” that is, the basic question of what it means to be (and all the perhaps surprising ways that matters). Heidegger taught that the attempt to answer such simple but profound philosophical questions is never finished once and for all, despite the fact that all of us pervasively and ineliminably finite beings run out of time (and in many more ways than just the most obvious one).13 Given such unavoidable limits here, perhaps, in the rest of this chapter, we can content ourselves with explicating just a few of the most obvious “implications of the implicit” (as Derrida nicely put it) in the traditional Continental/analytic divide. Adopting a historical and roughly genealogical approach will allow us to better understand where these stereotypes come from (in the next section); what, beneath the endless distortions of and exceptions to these stereotypes, remains true and revealing beneath them (in the section after that); and, finally, what the later chapters of the twentieth-century philosophical tradition have shown us that we both can and should do to continue to move beyond their most pernicious forms and effects (in the final section).

T H E G E R M A N GE R M S O F C O N T I N E N T A L P H I LO S O P H Y

Historically, the three most influential Continental philosophers – Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger – were “German” in ways that remain problematic 12

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As that formulation suggests, the phenomenological tradition begins with Kant, and with Husserl looks like a renegade form of neo-Kantianism. For a short primer on phenomenology in its relation to Kant and Hegel (cf. Smith, this volume), see Thomson 2009b. For Heidegger: “Philosophers not only don’t go forward, they don’t just tread in place either; rather, they go backward” (Heidegger 2010 [1944–45]: 14) – backward, that is, toward the heart of the matters themselves (“Zu den Sachen selbst” is Husserl’s enduring motto for the phenomenological movement). Such matters too often remain distorted by unnoticed but highly problematic presuppositions inherent in the contemporary frameworks we use to try to approach them, if we do not first work to understanding the basic philosophical decisions already tacitly embedded in those frameworks. (On why Heidegger thinks that the philosopher – and philosophical thinking itself – can never be finished, see, respectively, Thomson 2013 and 2015.)

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in the Anglo-American world. Besides the linguistic obstacles and interpretative difficulties caused by Hegel’s (allegedly “Teutonic”) fondness for abstraction in the service of grand metaphysical ambitions, Nietzsche’s seductive style and endlessly challenging views, and Heidegger’s jarring terminological idiosyncrasies and deliberately ambiguous poetic locutions, Nietzsche and Heidegger were both strongly associated with Nazism (Nietzsche as a problematic predecessor, Heidegger as an internal critic of the Nazi movement). Hegel, for his part, was linked first with the autocratic Prussian militarism that fed into Nazism, and then (thanks to Marx, the most influential student of Hegel’s philosophy) with the Communist governments against which the liberaldemocratic West defined itself in the second half of the twentieth century.14 These fraught political lineages, whether rightly or wrongly (or both, as I have argued elsewhere), helped motivate the resistance to their ideas among English-speakers, especially among those generations who lost so many millions of lives at the hands of Germany’s despicable “National Socialist Workers’ Party,” then waged a prolonged “Cold War” against “Communist” enemies, real and imagined.15 Such motives, however understandable in context, continue to fade along with the direct influence of those wartime generations, and from a scholarly perspective this is mostly a good thing. Since Tacitus, the scholarly ideal has been the unbiased history written sine ira et studio, “without hatred or zealousness.” While never easy to put into practice (Tacitus notoriously failed to achieve it himself ), that scholarly ideal has seemed almost impossibly idealistic when something as deserving of our ire as Nazism enters the story. A nonagenarian, emeritus professor and veteran of the Second World War who audited my classes once expressed this stubborn hermeneutic problem

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I remain philosophically distrustful of that trendy shibboleth, “neo-liberalism,” especially when it is used to assert without argument that liberal democracy is inextricably bound to – or even merely serves as an ideological apologia for – capitalism. For that is false; Mill can no more be reduced to Smith and Friedman than Marx can be reduced to Lenin and Stalin. Indeed, it is no more radical for those raised in Communist regimes (like Žižek) to defend the noble ideals of socialism against its worst historical-political manifestations than it is for those of us raised in the capitalist West to defend the noble ideals of liberal democracy against its neo-conservative (or free-market theocratic) distortions. Rather than continue to follow the ugly precedent those distorted political regimes established by rigidly separating and opposing their two supposedly irreconcilable systems, I would instead suggest that we should support any polymorphously perverse combinations that serve the cause of justice – including, most immediately, the robust welfare state currently under attack in the West. We should thus notice, to mention just one important example, that Rawls unintentionally supplied one of the strongest arguments for Marx, as Doppelt (1981) nicely showed. On both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s direct philosophical connections to Nazism, see Thomson 2005 and 2017.

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with impressively succinct candor: “I don’t read Nazis; I shoot ’em.” (Better dead than read, as it were.) With hardly more subtlety, one of Bertrand Russell’s widely read introductions to philosophy paired a brief and polemical dismissal of Heidegger’s “extremely obscure” philosophy with a heart-rending photograph of Nazi soldiers abusing Jewish civilians.16 Despite its more vexed connections to Nazism, Nietzsche’s philosophy only gained widespread acceptance in the English-speaking philosophical world after being de-Nazified assiduously, even excessively, by Walter Kaufmann in his famous (1950) book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.17 And, if we now tend to forget that Hegel’s philosophy was enthusiastically embraced in Britain (and, to a lesser extent, in the USA) before the World Wars, this is because that Hegelian legacy was

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The entirety of Russell’s entry on Heidegger reads: “Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic” (Russell 1989 [1959]: 303.) For an explanation of the real logic behind Heidegger’s extremely important phenomenological understanding of the “noth-ing,” see Thomson 2011: 82–106 and Thomson forthcoming. For critical appraisals of Nietzsche’s relation to Nazism, see e.g. Aschheim 1992; Golomb and Wistrich 2002. The current reading of Nietzsche as a thorough-going naturalist also helps make his philosophy more palatable to mainstream philosophers, but it requires interpreters to downplay the unnaturalizable elements of his core views on eternal recurrence and will-to-power. One of the leading proponents of this naturalization of Nietzsche, Brian Leiter, influentially suggests that although “analytic philosophy” dominated the Anglo-American world from roughly 1940 until 1970, philosophers have now lost faith that any distinctive method of analysis could be used to solve all meaningful philosophical problems. In Leiter’s view, the analytic legacy has now been split into two competing methodological schools, the (minority) Wittgensteinian quietists and (majority) Quinean naturalists. (See Leiter 2004: 1–3.) My sense, however, is that this division is overdrawn, philosophically if not sociologically, and that once one rejects the quietism of (some of ) the Wittgensteinians and the relativism of (some of ) the Quineans, one is left with methodological commitments to pragmatic holism that are very broadly shared. Leiter then argues that “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy have become philosophically empty categories, since there are no necessary or sufficient characteristics that would reliably allow us to sort philosophers into one group or the other. But that is just to say that the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy cannot be drawn using the method of conceptual analysis, one of those methods the collapse of which (on Leiter’s reading) signaled the end of analytic philosophy as a meaningful research program. The very fact that Leiter (like others, see below) falls back on this method of conceptual analysis in order to contest the meaningfulness of the Continental/analytic divide suggests that the method is not quite as dead as he thinks. Indeed, shorn of its positivistic commitments, the method of conceptual analysis is in fact so widely routinized into mainstream philosophical practice as to be nearly universal. Moreover, there are other ways of understanding the divide (from the other side, as it were), including (to mention two examples employed here) family resemblances (after Wittgenstein) and the genealogical method (used by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault) that would revealingly trace the complex, overlapping lineages of advisors and their students, schools of influence and exclusion, networks of hiring and citation, etc. I think these methods can in fact help us make sense of the still lingering effects of that longstanding division, which (unfortunately) cannot just be argued out of existence (for the very reasons on which Pettit and Heidegger “ironically” agree – see note 34 below).

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deliberately effaced by Russell’s cohort, who defined their new movement of “analytic philosophy” in opposition to the kind of “metaphysical” speculation allegedly practiced by the British Idealists and (according to Carnap’s influential misreading) by existential phenomenologists such as Heidegger.18 Substituting signposts for extended arguments, I am simplifying complex issues (which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere).19 My main point, however, is simply that some of the original resistance to Continental philosophy among Anglo-American philosophers was politically motivated. That obvious point is important because analytic resistance to Continental philosophy continues to take the form of opposition to any style that seems to be deliberately “obscure” (that is, any style in which the philosopher seems not even to be trying to write clearly), although only extremists still advance the old charge (most famously trumpeted by George Orwell and Karl Popper) that the function of such obscure styles is to conceal the “fascism” or “Nazism” hidden at their core. That allegation now seems paranoid at worst (especially when it is used to dismiss not just Nietzsche or Heidegger but also all those influenced – and thereby “contaminated,” as it were – by their “infectious” styles and ideas) and irrelevant at best (since the contemporary Continental practitioners of such “obscure” styles tend overwhelmingly to be political leftists, as even their critics grudgingly acknowledge).20 Nonetheless, the lingering suspicion of any apparent stylistic “obfuscation” continues to be the main rationale for analytic hostility to Continental philosophy in the English-speaking philosophical “mainstream,” while Continental resistance to analytic philosophy most often takes shape as a rejection of the allegedly “boring” obsession with always being correct, even at the cost of analyzing anything important to our everyday lives (a point to which

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On the immense historical importance of Carnap’s influential misunderstanding of Heidegger, see Friedman 2000; Thomson forthcoming. A recent scholar summarizes the “standard . . . creation narrative of analytic philosophy” as follows: “When G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell rebelled against the dominant idealistic philosophy that they had been taught at Cambridge – their rebellion gave rise to the first flush of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Moreover, their enthusiasm, vigour, and ingenuity, coupled with Russell’s sometimes dazzling rhetoric and polemical verve, gave the movement the momentum that would one day make it the dominant form of philosophy in the English-speaking world” (Lebens 2017: 1, 17). I appreciate Lebens’s acknowledgment here (pace Hare) that Continental philosophers have no monopoly on “rhetoric,” but must also note that the political tensions driving the ascendency of analytic philosophy pass unmentioned here (as they often do when analytic philosophers recount their history), as if these momentous developments could be explained entirely in terms of the immanent history of the philosophical field (most often, and most problematically, in terms of the innate superiority of analytic philosophy). See e.g. Thomson 2005: chapters 3 and 4; 2011: chapters 3 and 7. For more recent examples of such “paranoid” readings, see Wolin 2004; Faye 2009. Cf. Krell 1996. Left-wing fascism seems to be more of a problem for Marx than for Hegel, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, who all tended to swerve to the right.

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we will return).21 In order to move beyond such superficial and stereotypical reactions, a further exploration of the very different styles and organizations that have taken shape in and around the two traditions is in order.

THE KERNELS OF TRUTH BEHIND THE STEREOTYPES

Organizationally, the stereotypical difference between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions (insofar as these are indeed meaningful as recognizable historical categories) perhaps most closely resembles the difference between the natural sciences and the fine arts. Imitating the natural sciences’ division of intellectual labor, analytic philosophers attempt to distinguish different domains (epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ethics, applied ethics, aesthetics, etc.), and then break these domains down into clear and distinct issues (such as the nature of knowledge, of objectivity, consciousness, subjectivity, predication, representation, aesthetic experience, values, etc.), thereby seeking to make progress by clarifying and solving philosophical problems in a collective enterprise. This organizational imitation of the natural sciences is the most enduring legacy of the now defunct, early analytic program of “logical positivism,” and it still suggests the positivists’ scientistic insecurity that philosophical topics on which no clear progress has been made in hundreds or even thousands of years must be “pseudo-problems” – that is, fake or false problems (“non-problems” that are simply illformed and so lack some final right answer toward which philosophers should be able to converge), even if these “pseudo-problems” include such endlessly inspiring philosophical questions as “What is the meaning of life?” or “How should I live?” (questions with multiple right and wrong answers that change over time). One important question here, then, is: Does this would-be scientific organization that analytic philosophy has successfully imposed on the philosophical profession justify itself by generating “progress” in philosophy comparable to that achieved in the natural sciences? Whether or not it does (and many analytic philosophers themselves remain skeptical), this organization effectively stacks the professional decks against “Continental philosophy” by reducing it to a few marginalized “areas of specialization” on the professional job market (such as “nineteenth-century Continental philosophy” or “contemporary 21

I discuss the hostile, mirror-image stereotypes in terms of which proud “analytic” and “Continental” philosophers often try to frame one another’s work – as being either “boring” or “bullshit,” respectively (i.e., as either caring more about being correct than about analyzing anything important, or caring more about being interesting than about being true and correct) – in Thomson 2011: 213–14.

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Continental philosophy”).22 Moreover, those oddly-broad Continental “specializations” are ones that “prestigious” mainstream philosophy departments seem to believe they can happily and productively live without – to the great regret of many students, who are not so easily talked out of their enthusiastic interests in existentialism, phenomenology and hermeneutics, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, neo-Marxist political philosophy, deconstruction, postmodernism, and the other broad Continental philosophical movements, which tend to connect with the humanities and social sciences more than with the natural sciences. As one might thus expect, Continental philosophers remain suspicious of this ongoing division of the philosophical field into “areas of specialization” as part of an attempt to establish “normal scientific” routines that will enable philosophers finally to begin making progress by establishing and building on shared assumptions.23 This resistance is not just motivated by professional self-interest, however. Heidegger and others taught us to notice the philosophical presuppositions already built into such modern philosophical concepts as “consciousness,” “subjectivity,” “objectivity,” and “representation” (some of the central concepts in the analytic specializations mentioned above), seeking to show us that uncritically taking over such concepts from the modern philosophical tradition induces us unknowingly to beg some of the deepest and most important philosophical questions. (For example: Can the subject/object dichotomy ever adequately capture the underlying intertwinement of self and world revealed by the phenomenological tradition? Can the self be conceived as a “consciousness” or in terms of “subjectivity” without eliding fundamental aspects of our existence? Can the encounter with a work of art be reduced without significant remainder to an “aesthetic experience”? Or language to “representation”? Or what matters most to “values”? Heidegger influentially argues that the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “No.”)24 As a result, Continental philosophers tend to believe that philosophical “problems” and concepts have to be understood in 22 23

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For a nice, historically informed example of such skepticism, see Stroll 2001. I also thank Alan Richardson for an illuminating exchange on this point. Husserl and the Frankfurt School were interesting exceptions here, and rightly remind us of the impossibility of making exceptionless claims about “Continental philosophy” (see note 10 as well as the chapters by Smith and Young, this volume). Still, this general contrast reinforces that ideological asymmetry in which mainstream analytic “technical terminology” is treated as an innocent expedient to making progress while less broadly accepted Continental “jargon” gets taken as an impermissible failure to translate into terms readily understandable even by those who do not possess the requisite background. For reasons I am about to explain, however, I would prefer to see both traditions make more of an effort clearly to unpack their own guiding presuppositions, even if that means replacing straightforward “progress” with the aforementioned appearance of moving backward by delving carefully into one’s own guiding presuppositions. For a reconstruction of these arguments, see Thomson 2011: chapters 2–3.

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terms of the history that implicitly but pervasively shapes and connects them, which means that these problems and concepts cannot be treated in isolation – either from each other or from the “great philosophers” who most profoundly shaped our ways of thinking about them. With such a historical emphasis on the interconnected ideas that have been profoundly shaped, contested, and transformed by great thinkers (that being precisely what makes them “great”), Continental philosophy tends to be organized less like the natural sciences and more like the fine arts. For there too a highly diverse and often divergent community’s critical contestations and appreciations of great figures and historical movements similarly works to help inspire, shape, situate, and appraise new figures and emerging movements. This, moreover, does not mean that Continental philosophers simply reject the idea of “progress” in philosophy. It is just that the kinds of historical progress that self-identified “Continental” philosophers tend to believe in and pursue more often concern, for example, the enduring struggle for progress in the emancipatory justice of political institutions, or even progress in the philosopher’s own personal development (such as progressing through Kierkegaard’s famous “stages on life’s way”), where progress is typically conceived as an ongoing development to be continually pursued rather than some simple “maturity” attainable once and for all, let alone as the eventual attainment of some finally secure “system” of human knowledge (that metaphysical castle in the sky against which not just Russell and Carnap but also Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all so influentially rebelled).25 Stylistically, the difference between analytic and Continental traditions (again, in their stereotypical antipodes at least) most closely resembles the difference between mathematics and poetry. That this should be the case becomes less surprising, I think, once one recognizes that aptitudes for math and poetry are both proto-philosophical abilities, but ones distributed differentially and with some apparent incompatibility. Occasionally a great mathematical logician develops a poetic style (Lewis Carroll and Wittgenstein come first to mind), or a more poetic thinker puts mathematical results to highly creative use (as with Husserl and Badiou), but these are the exceptions. Great poetic stylists are not usually renowned for their math skills (which helps explain the widespread suspicion of Badiou’s understanding of set theory, when in fact it is not his grasp of the math but only his speculative application of it that is dubious), and great mathematicians and logicians have notoriously had a tin ear for poetry (some even suffer from an unfortunate tendency to take all rhetoric literally and then 25

Here it is revealing that the exceptions – like Husserl and Habermas – are widely viewed as the least “Continental” of the Continental philosophers.

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complain about such “imprecise” language).26 That the most plentiful allotments of mathematical and poetic gifts rarely come bundled together, however, does not mean that we cannot learn to appreciate the real contributions both can make to philosophy, whether on their own or, better, in various combinations. As the examples of Wittgenstein and Badiou suggest, major figures on both sides of the analytic/Continental divide have already begun to move beyond the stereotypical stylistic dichotomy traditionally separating them, and that divide itself seems to be gradually shrinking as the fertile territory in between grows more populous with various Continental-analytic hybrids. Indeed, thanks to such pioneering border crossers as Dreyfus, Taylor, Rorty, Cavell, and Geuss, there are already more species of analytically trained Continental hybrids than can readily be catalogued, and there also seems to be a growing interest in traditionally “analytic” topics and methods among those trained in more traditionally “Continental” programs, as shown by the recent popularity of “speculative realism” and related trends among the younger generation drawn to Continental thought.27 The border is getting crossed from both sides, helping to blur and one day, perhaps, erase it entirely (by displacing such divisions with others, perhaps). Nevertheless, the vitriol reinforcing the traditional divide still persists as a lack of mutual respect, one that seems to me to be rooted most stubbornly in that aforementioned Anglo-American suspicion of stylistic “obscurity,” although it is then mirrored in the various reaction-formations of those English-speaking philosophers professionally marginalized by such suspicions. (I have heard the important work of Dreyfus dismissed by the proudly “Continental” at SPEP in terms no less vitriolic and reactionary than those directed against Derrida by the proudly “analytic” at the APA.)28 Part of the problem (as Lyotard [1994] pointed out) is a kind of asymmetry of sympathy, and hence of hermeneutic charity; while poetic stylists often seem willing to see mathematical logic as an austere yet elegant form of poetry, mathematical logicians and natural scientists tend not to be so magnanimous, instead viewing poetry as imprecise or even 26

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On Badiou’s creative use of set theory, see Livingston 2011. Bernard Williams, who cultivated a rare combination of mathematical and poetical talents, poked fun at the “clinical literal-mindedness” at work among some of his peers: “In a way that will be familiar to any reader of analytic philosophy, and is only too familiar to those of us who perpetrate it, this style tries to remove in advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or the clinically literal-minded. This activity itself is often rather mournfully equated with the boasted clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy.” (Williams 2006: 183.) Unfortunately, this trend too often looks like an attempt by Continentally trained philosophers to reinvent analytic wheels, tackling problems long treated within analytic philosophy without paying any heed to that history. I discussed this in a much earlier version of this chapter; see Thomson 2012.

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empty wordplay, far removed from scientific standards of truth and so lacking in philosophical “seriousness.”29 Derrida liked to say that it is a very serious thing not to give seriousness the last word. But to many leading analysts, the poetic liberties taken by Continental philosophy make it look like “bullshit” (as Frankfurt [2005] provocatively put it), more interested in being interesting than in being true. To many proud Continentals, conversely, hyper-meticulous analytic philosophy looks “boring,” as if its practitioners cared more about being correct than about analyzing anything important to our actual lives. I have challenged these distorted, mirror-image stereotypes elsewhere, but as they suggest, the hostility continues to flow in both directions across the divide, reinforcing a post-war history riven by mutual ignorance and mistrust.30 Some proudly “analytic” philosophers, observing the popularity of Continental philosophy beyond the profession with a combination of envy and disdain, hew to their own version of the scientific null-hypothesis: Assume Continental philosophy is nonsense until proven otherwise. Unfortunately, such cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because this kind of hermeneutic stinginess inverts the principle of charity (articulated by Davidson and Gadamer), which instead tells us that in order to understand something different and initially strange, one needs preliminarily to assume that it makes sense (just as one would when first trying to understand Aristotle, Kant, and Lao-Tse, or Burge, Parfit, and McDowell). This does not mean that every trendy new philosopher from France should be treated with reverence or put on a pedestal alongside the established greats, but only that they should not be greeted with immediate revulsion either, simply because one finds their style jarring or the meaning of their words not readily clear, because that is precisely the first reaction a Continentally trained philosopher will have to Burge, McDowell, or Parfit. Nurturing our inherent curiosity, philosophers of all stripes are at our best when we actively cultivate the ability to appreciate the contributions made by those who possess talents and styles quite different from our own (be these talents more mathematical-logical or more poetic-literary), instead of retreating into gated communities whose members seem capable of only the most minimal displacements of their own narcissistic self-love. I shall thus conclude with a few words aimed at what I have suggested is the most stubborn source of that underlying resistance to Continental philosophy in the English-speaking world: Is there a legitimate philosophical reason why so

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On this asymmetry of hermeneutic charity, see Lyotard 1994 and note 23 above. See note 21 above. Cf. Guignon and Aho’s frank remark that: “The concreteness of these examples [in Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition] stands in stark contrast to what we saw as the sterility and abstractness of standard Anglophone philosophy” (2017: 170).

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many practitioners of the various Continental styles refuse to relinquish their poetic sensibilities in the face of widespread suspicion of such “self-indulgence” and “fuzzy thinking” from an analytic mainstream that prides itself on logical clarity and mathematical rigor? Why do Continental philosophers cling ever tighter to poetic styles in the face of such hostility? Is there some philosophical truth of poetry, and if so, is this something integral or extraneous to the true “core” of philosophical endeavor? D I F F E R E N T W A Y S O F MO V I N G F O R W A R D , T O G E T H E R

Western philosophers and poets have had an often adversarial history ever since Xenophanes and Heraclitus rejected the traditional authority of Homer and Hesiod as unethical and misleading, and then Plato notoriously sought to exclude any poetic inspiration not subordinated to philosophical guidance from the city that Plato built of words (and partly built – ironically but undeniably – poetically) in the Republic. But that famous anti-Platonist, Nietzsche, reversed Plato when he suggested that “there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished” (Nietzsche 1999 [1872]: 71). In one of Nietzsche’s many beautiful philosophical passages, the great philosophical stylist contends that philosophy is distinguished from scientific thinking precisely by the intuitive but “illogical” leaps of poetic imagination by which it proceeds: Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached. It is like seeing two mountain climbers standing before a wild mountain stream that is tossing boulders along its course: One of them light-footedly leaps over it, using the rocks to cross, even though behind and beneath him they hurtle into the depths. The other stands helpless; he must first build himself a firmament which will carry his heavy cautious steps. Occasionally this is not possible, and then there exists no god who can help him across. What then is it that brings philosophical thinking so quickly to its goal? Is it different from the thinking that calculates and measures only by the greater rapidity with which it transcends all space? No, its feet are propelled by an alien, illogical power – the power of creative imagination. Lifted by this power, philosophical thinking leaps from possibility to possibility, using each one as a temporary resting place. Occasionally it will grasp such a resting place even as it flies. Creative premonition will show it the place; imagination guesses from afar that here it will find a demonstrable resting place . . . Subsequent reflection comes with measuring devices and routinizing patterns and tries to replace analogy with equivalence and synchronicity with causality. But even if this should not work . . . [e]ven if all the footholds have crumbled by the time logic and empiric rigidity want to cross over . . . even after the total demolition of any scientific edifice, something remains. And in this remainder lies an impelling force which is the hope of future fruitfulness. (Nietzsche 1962[~1873]: 40–1)

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According to this young, romantic Nietzsche, “the power of creative imagination” is the heart that drives the perennial philosophical endeavor, and its spirit remains capable of inspiring us even when we cannot convincingly reconstruct the arguments that led to an important conclusion.31 Nietzsche thus suggests that not everything important can be reconstructed in arguments, indeed that great philosophers’ creative intuitions will often outstrip the arguments we can offer to support, clarify, and develop them. That certainly seems true of the great philosophers, whose deepest views continue to both inspire and resist our efforts to capture them fully in some clear and unequivocal reformulation.32 If we combine Nietzsche’s insight with our earlier observation that the most abundant poetic and logical gifts tend to come in separate packages, then we can see why the Continental tradition has taken shape as a scholarly community’s hermeneutic elucidation and logical development of the great philosophers’ deep, creative, and inspiring (but not always clear, well-argued, or thoroughly developed) views. In fact, the same basic bifurcation of roles – a complicated division of philosophical labor between the creative path-breakers and the consolidating refiners and developers – deeply shapes the analytic tradition too, despite its more scientific self-image. Nietzsche’s contrast between calculative and poetic thinking begins to anticipate Heidegger, yet neither philosopher sufficiently emphasized that – at least for those of us who are neither great poets nor mathematical logicians of the first rank – the two impulses often beat within a single heart, albeit with varying degrees of strength. Still, both thinkers did well to suggest that when these two forces occur in the right proportions – whether within the historical community or the individual – they generate the productive tension that continues to drive philosophy ever onward into the future.33 This potentially synergistic tension between depth and clarity, creativity and precision, clearly shapes both traditions and seems likely to come to matter even more in our shared future. For to be a philosopher in an age that aspires to democracy (something neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger wanted) increasingly requires that the guiding power of creative intuition find ways to answer the demand for logical clarification, for a democracy of public reasons rather than an aristocracy of private inspiration.

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Nietzsche is discussing Thales; for the full context, see Thomson 2003. Heidegger too celebrates this apparent inexhaustibility of the great philosophical teachings as the source of their enduring greatness, offering up a kind of thinker’s prayer: “May this and the other thinker’s teachings [Lehren] never lose what is venerable and mysterious educational [Belehrende], through which they surprise every new altercation that allows itself into their truth” (2010 [1944–45]: 41, translation modified). On the relation between Nietzsche and Heidegger here, see Thomson 2011: chapters 1 and 3, esp. 77 note 16.

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Whether or not the time of philosophical prophecy comes to an end, those who write like passive vehicles of divine providence will increasingly find themselves without a philosophical audience unless they can inspire those who prove capable of developing their insights critically, with clarity and care as well as creativity and commitment. At the same time, however, those professional philosophers whose writing is too neurotically cramped by the fear of error seem to find themselves writing for a vanishingly small camp. The future would thus seem to belong, in other words, to neither the traditional Continentals nor the analytics but, instead, to the synthetic philosophers, that is, those who strive to combine the virtues of both traditions in a multitude of ways, not only in terms of style but in terms of traditional concerns as well (a trend that can also be seen in the growing turn in the analytic mainstream toward areas long derided as mere “applied” philosophy). This is fitting. “Philosophy,” let us recall, means “love of wisdom.” The “love” here is philia (not the erotic love of eros or the universal benevolence of agape); philia (as in filial piety, filiation) suggests the love we owe to those from whom we are descended, like our love for our parents, grandparents, and other teachers – a love that is often fraught and always marked by ambivalences. Why should our love of wisdom be ambivalent, pulling us in two directions? The word for wisdom here, sophia, goes back to sophos, sage. For Socrates, the philosophical virtue par excellence was sophrosyne, originally a deeply mysterious virtue (it forms the absent center of Plato’s Charmides) which, after Aristotle, we tend to translate as moderation, self-control, prudence, or even temperance. But sophrosyne is best heard as bespeaking the ancient wisdom of the middle way – the heroic path of the virtuous mean between vicious extremes (Scylla and Charybdis, cowardice and rashness, asceticism and hedonism, stinginess and profligacy, analytic and Continental, logic and poetry, Apollo and Dionysus, and so on). We feel ambivalent about this path, I would suggest, precisely because philosophers are (like everyone else) constitutionally tempted to the extremes, where coherent answers are simpler and outspoken allies (smug in their onesided righteousness) are more plentiful. The philosophical ideal of the wellbalanced life of sagacity, central to the ancients (Eastern as well as Western), is thus needed once again to help guide philosophy into the future. For, contemporary Western culture is becoming ever more polarized into competing extremes, apparently dichotomous and irreconcilable positions. Instead of following suit, philosophers will need to find clear and creative ways to steer a balanced course between these dichotomized poles and the one-sided demagogues who defend them. This is where synthetic philosophy can lead the way. For, I mean synthetic not in the sense of artificial but, rather, both in a sense that encourages the bold

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combinatorial mélange of existing traditions, issues, and styles, and also in a neo-Hegelian sense of sublating dichotomous oppositions, appropriating the distinctive insights of the competing sides while eliminating their errors and exaggerations, and thereby creating new and more encompassing syntheses in which the old oppositions are transcended. The philosophical dichotomies already begging for such syntheses include not just the Continental/analytic divide (the transcendence of which I have been seeking to motivate here), but also such apparently irreconcilable oppositions as those between realism and idealism, absolutism and relativism, conservativism and liberalism, capitalism and communism, voluntarism and quietism, Nietzsche and Heidegger, individualism and communitarianism, theory and practice, East and West, nature and nurture, great thinkers and humble researchers, art and entertainment, elitism and egalitarianism, sudden revolution and progressive evolution, and so on (and on).34 In all such oppositions, adhering to one of the extreme positions facilitates the most dramatic rhetoric (at least until the adherent must retract or qualify their strongest claims), and adherents of such extreme positions face the simpler task of only having to defend their views from one side, as it were. In complex matters like those mentioned here, however, the truth is almost always to be found somewhere between the opposing extremes, rendering it unfit for the polemical purposes of demagogues on either side. At the same time, however, philosophers of all kinds will need to practice a generous hermeneutic charity and so recognize that such polarized debates continue so righteously only because, beneath the noise and distortions, each side has some important insights which they are right not to relinquish. It is 34

To take just one example, Philip Pettit writes: “My preferred account of the relationship between belief and practice may be described as ‘ethnocentric’ [by which Pettit means that philosophy should acknowledge that it begins entangled in a web of practices it cannot simply throw off or transform by force of rational will] . . . Ironically, this understanding of the relationship has many affinities with the point of view maintained by Martin Heidegger in his allegedly existentialist work.” Why is this ironic? Not because embracing “ethnocentrism” (cf. Liakos and George, this volume, on Gadamer’s provocative embrace of “prejudice”) leads Pettit to worry about the political significance of his philosophical proximity to Heidegger (it doesn’t seem to) but, instead, because Pettit presumes that the core of “existentialism” is faith in the unlimited power of philosophy to transform self and world. But here the “metaphilosophical” question (if there is such a thing) remains: When discussing the future of philosophy, why reduce “existentialism” to an untenable caricature (of Sartre) and then maintain one’s opposition to it even while acknowledging one’s “ironic” affinities with its leading thinker (Heidegger)? (Heidegger rejected the “existentialist” label in his “Letter on Humanism” mainly because he didn’t want to belong to a club that would allow Sartre to write its charter, which Heidegger goes on to rewrite in his own image in the same essay: see Heidegger 1998 [1955].) In fact, Pettit and Heidegger agree that the philosophy of the future will need to embrace a middle ground between the extremes of quietistic resignation and “logocentric” fantasies of unlimited voluntaristic transformation (see Pettit 2004: 318–21, 320 note 22). I too agree, and would suggest that this is one of the many false dichotomies that the synthetic philosophy of the future will need to sublate and transcend.

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precisely these insights that will need to be discerned, shorn of their ideological biases and one-sided distortions, and combined into new and broader syntheses, so that synthetic philosophy can help move us beyond that pathetic public spectacle of crowds of one-sided talking-heads, talking past one another. For this reason, I have tried to suggest that, although analytic philosophy has no monopoly on clarity, precision, and consequent depth – no more than Continental philosophy has cornered the market on historically discerning systematic interconnections or on interpretative risk-taking – these are all crucial philosophical virtues that need to be preserved and combined in creative new ways. The watchwords of the synthetic philosophy of the future might thus be creative precision, hermeneutic generosity, and passionate moderation. To find our way beyond the impasses of the present, then, let us thus practice the wisdom of the middle way, with which philosophy began.

43 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY s t e p h e n m u l ha l l

By the second half of the twentieth century, Heidegger’s philosophical project (originating in and reacting against his early phenomenological masterpiece Being and Time) had long established him as part of the living present of Continental European intellectual life, and Wittgenstein’s later philosophical investigations (importantly hinging on a critique of his massively influential early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) had become sufficiently well known to conjoin with the work of J. L. Austin to form an increasingly dominant movement in the Anglophone philosophical world known as “ordinary language philosophy.”1 On the face of it, however, these two towering figures and the philosophical schools they inspired not only differ significantly from each other; they each embody everything against which the other sets its face. For Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s faith in the philosophical efficacy of recalling ourselves to ordinary words in the everyday contexts of their use presents itself as recalling us from metaphysical uses of such words – more precisely, from the abuses or failures of sense suffered by words at the hands of generations of (according to Austin, wily, glib, scholastic and essentially unserious) metaphysicians. So the explicitly acknowledged violence that Being and Time does to the German language in order to recover and re-articulate the question of fundamental ontology – the question of the meaning of Being, of that which determines beings as beings, that on the basis of which beings are understood (BT, 2: 25–6) – might seem to reinforce what its willingness to take such an extraordinary question seriously already indicates: a wholehearted commitment to rhapsodize the grandeurs of the deep first opened to us by Plato. By contrast, when Heidegger envisages someone attempting to make light of his suggestion that the meaning of Being is occluded from us by pointing out that our everyday discourse is pervaded by inflections and cognates of the verb “to be” 1

Heidegger, Being and Time (hereafter BT, citations by section and page number); Wittgenstein 1922; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI).

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that we seem able to grasp without any difficulty, he retorts that “here we have an average kind of intelligibility, which merely demonstrates that this is unintelligible. It makes manifest that in any way of comporting oneself towards entities as entities . . . there lies a priori an enigma” (BT, 1: 23). To have philosophical faith in ordinary words might accordingly seem to reinforce the repression of that riddling obscurity, and to overlook the extent to which the realm of the everyday is pervaded by contemporary thoughtlessness and layer upon layer of prior metaphysical obfuscations. Such a portrait of mutually repellent philosophical orientations is, however, founded on the assumption that the concepts of “metaphysics” and “the ordinary” at work in both Heidegger and Wittgenstein are essentially simple or singular; and that assumption does not survive closer acquaintance with either Being and Time or the Philosophical Investigations. To begin with, although the early Heidegger explicitly distinguishes his phenomenological method from the history of post-Platonic metaphysics, he acknowledges that philosophical insight can only emerge through an actively critical engagement with that history which acknowledges a certain continuity with its point of origin in a Platonic advent of perplexity about Being. Moreover, that engagement’s deconstructive spirit is ultimately intended to return us to the things themselves, by which Heidegger means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself” (BT, 7: 58); and that “phenomenological” return to how things are via how they actually present themselves to us is to be effected through the realm of the ordinary, more precisely through an attentiveness to the human mode of Being in its average everyday state or condition – the everydayness that metaphysics has persistently passed over. “That which is ontically closest and well-known is ontologically the farthest and not known. Its . . . signification is constantly overlooked” (BT, 9: 69); compare Wittgenstein: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes)” (PI, 129). Likewise, whilst Wittgenstein does claim that metaphysical emptiness is a function of language’s idling or going on holiday, he never questions the motives of the metaphysician in the brusquely condescending manner to which Austin often resorts. On the contrary, he tells us that philosophical “problems . . . have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; they are as deeply rooted in us as the forms of our language, and their significance is as great as the importance of our language” (PI, 111). Wittgenstein further acknowledges a continuity between his own philosophical practice and that of his metaphysical predecessors, as when he admits that “we, in our investigations, are trying to understand the essence [Wesen] of language”; his preference for

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grammatical investigation is thus expressive not of a disdain for essence or Being, but rather for a more productive way of attending to it (for “Essence is expressed in grammar” [PI, 370]). And when he characterizes what we do as “bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use,” he implicitly acknowledges that we (Wittgensteinian philosophers) encounter ordinary words as always already outside the ordinary. If the Heimat of their everyday modes of use is something to which they have to be returned, it must be something from which they have already turned away, from which they are inveterately or incessantly exiled (presumably by us, their users). It is thus part of the ordinariness of words that they disdain that ordinariness, and aspire to metaphysical exceptionality or absoluteness, to the icy vacuum of the unconditioned. This is why Wittgenstein tells us that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI, 109); ordinary language is both what places us under a spell and what breaks it, a pharmakon.2 Hence the Wittgensteinian ordinary, just like that of Heidegger, is essentially to-be-recovered, hence split or doubled, between its actual state of lostness to itself and its eventual state of re-collection or re-membering (which, should it eventuate, remains no less vulnerable to future acts of self-dispersal or dismembering). Accessions of metaphysical forgetfulness or emptiness are thus not an external imposition upon the otherwise-untroubled everyday, but rather a necessary possibility of it – as is philosophy’s countervailing struggle to recover from each realization of it. Hence for Wittgenstein, as for Heidegger, philosophy is also itself doubled or split, between its impulse to turn away from the everyday and its impulse to return – between metaphysical constructions of the Being of beings and letting beings give expression to their essence as it really is and in a manner that befits it. It is at this level of generality that one can most clearly see the uncanny intimacy between phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy. It is, after all, Austin’s awareness that “when we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words . . . but at the realities we use words to talk about” that leads him briefly to consider that “it might be better to use, for this way of doing philosophy, some less misleading name than [e.g. ‘ordinary language’] – for instance, ‘linguistic phenomenology,’ only that is rather a mouthful.”3 This dual aspect of ordinary language is manifest in Austin’s famous parable of the donkeys:

2 3

See Derrida 1981: “Plato’s pharmacy.” “A plea for excuses,” in Austin 1979: 189; hereafter PP.

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You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim, and find to my horror that it is your donkey. I appear on your doorstep with the remains and say – what? “say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry, &c., I’ve shot your donkey by accident”? or “by mistake”? Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead – but as I do so, the beasts move, and to my horror yours falls. Again the scene on the doorstep – what do I say? “By mistake”? or “by accident?” (PP, 185)

Suppose we judge that we should say “by mistake” in the first case and “by accident” in the second; isn’t that just another way of saying that the first shooting was a mistake and the second an accident? In more Wittgensteinian terms, if the essential difference between mistakes and accidents finds expression in such grammatical distinctions, then grammatical investigations are investigations into the essence of things as much as of words, and ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about – that is, anything and everything. Taking Austin’s brief savoring of that less misleading name for his trade as a hint, Simon Glendinning’s book-length discussion of the phenomenological tradition characterizes it as invested in five interrelated theses which together bring out its internal relation to Wittgensteinian work done in the Anglophone philosophical world.4 On Glendinning’s account, this tradition seeks a return to the things themselves, which means looking again at the world without inherited intellectual blinkers, and providing descriptions of the relevant phenomena rather than explanations or analyses (given the emptiness of a sidewayson view of things), thereby eschewing theses. This last “thesis” highlights the fact that all five “theses” are advanced in the spirit of delineating a posture in which it turns out that there is no real, genuinely intelligible alternative to constituting one stance in a contested methodological space, and so don’t advance inherently debatable claims. For Glendinning, these theses realize two general features of phenomenology: its settled hostility to scientism – by which he means the modern assumption that philosophy should be conducted in the spirit and sometimes even in the light of the methods and achievements of the natural sciences; and its sense that a distinctive, spiritually crucial dimension of our philosophical heritage has been lost, and so must be recovered. If the phenomenologists’ hostility to explanation, analysis, and thesis-construction reflects the former feature, then the latter is reflected in its conviction that philosophy needs to return to things as they really are, for that implies that it has lost contact with reality, and has done so because of self-imposed restrictions on its field of 4

In the Name of Phenomenology (2007).

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view, call them false constructions or fantasies (with which reality is so often confused). In the remainder of this chapter, I want to take my orientation from Glendinning’s intuition that phenomenology (whether linguistic or otherwise) is driven by a sense of spiritual loss, and by his association of that sense of loss with a certain duplicity in our idea of the modern: For what he calls scientism might be thought of as one way of inheriting modernity, call it continuing the Enlightenment project; and what he characterizes as the phenomenological sense that philosophy requires a form of radical spiritual renewal or refounding might be thought of as one expression of the distinctively modernist impulse that is more familiar to us in the realms of art. And this way of envisioning the kinship between Heidegger and Wittgenstein lies at the heart of Stanley Cavell’s distinctively American way of inheriting the philosophical approaches they embody. S T A N L E Y C A V E L L’ S A M E R I C A N I N H E R I T A N C E O F W I T T G E N S T E I N A N D H E I D E GG E R

One determining condition of Cavell’s way of reading Heidegger is that it was preceded by a reading of Wittgenstein which was itself conditioned by a prior reading of Austin, more specifically by an encounter with Austin (when he visited the United States in the 1950s to lecture) that radically reshaped Cavell’s sense of what philosophy might be and how he might find a place in it. This encounter took place as Cavell was embarking on a thesis on the concept of human action, and he says that it “knocked me off my horse.”5 So it seems reasonable to speculate that what unseated him was the vision of human agency embodied in Austin’s philosophical practices, and more particularly in his famous essay “A plea for excuses.” That essay finds a new place for field-work in moral philosophy. Austin argues that any concern for what is right and wrong, good or bad in human conduct must first clarify what it is for an agent to perform an action; he then claims that the study of the ways in which we excuse our actions amounts to an examination of the various kinds of abnormality that action can exhibit, and that, as so often, the abnormal will throw light on the normal: It rapidly becomes plain that the breakdowns signalized by the various excuses are of radically different kinds, affecting different parts or stages of the machinery, which the excuses consequently pick out and sort out for us. Further, it emerges that not every slipup occurs with everything that can be called “an action”, that not every excuse is apt with every verb – very far indeed from it. (PP, 180) 5

Cavell 1979: xv; hereafter CR.

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Hence the study of excuses facilitates a perspicuous surview of the miscellany of human actions by classifying them according to the particular selection of breakdowns to which each is liable; and it also discloses a way of disposing of the metaphysical Problem of Freedom. An examination of all the ways in which an action might not be free (i.e. the various ways in which it is not right to say simply that “X did A”) suggests that freedom is not a single characteristic of all actions but the name of one dimension in which actions are assessed; and it further suggests that, if excuses are anything to go by, preoccupied as they are with ways of evading full or any responsibility for what we do, we might do better to recast the Problem of Freedom as the problems of determining responsibility – the ways in which we hold one another to account for, and contest one another’s accounts of, the things we do. Cavell summarizes the moral he draws from this essay as follows: Excuses are as essentially implicated in Austin’s view of human actions as slips and overdeterminations are in Freud’s. What does it betoken about human actions that the reticulated constellation of predicates of excuse is made for them – that they can be done unintentionally, unwillingly, involuntarily, insincerely, unthinkingly, inadvertently, heedlessly, carelessly, under duress, under the influence, out of contempt, out of pity, by mistake, by accident, and so on? . . . It betokens, we might say, the all but unending vulnerability of human action, its openness to the independence of the world and the preoccupation of the mind. [It] turns philosophy’s attention patiently and thoroughly to something philosophy would love to ignore – the fact that human life is constrained to the life of the human body . . . Who . . . would so dwell on excuses who did not surmise that the human necessity for action, and of action for motion, is apt to become unbearable – its consequences, upshots, effects, results and so forth . . . unsurveyable, the body a parchment of its displacements? . . . Excuses mark out the region of tragedy, the beyond of the excusable, the justifiable, the explainable. (Cavell 1994: 87)

On this reading, Austin’s vision of human action anticipates that implicit in Bernard Williams’ interpretation of moral luck: Both intention and consequence find their rightful place as significant dimensions of agency considered as above all embodied, and so worldly.6 Agents act; actions require a body to enact them; and bodies necessarily inhabit a world which their movements inevitably modify and are modified by. Being able not merely to justify but to excuse one’s actions not only acknowledges the originating pertinence of our wills; it also renders our vulnerability to what happens to happen – the wrong donkey’s death – bearable. For it ensures that what we actually do (or fail to) is not the sole determinant of our responsibilities as agents, by permitting a 6

See the title essay of Williams 1981b.

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distinction to be drawn between what we did and what we are answerable for – by contesting whether we did it at all (were we nudged?), or whether we really did it (was it accidental?), or whether that was really what we did (were we really doing something quite different?). However, human action is not just one topic in Austin’s work: His major project in the philosophy of language centers around the idea of performative utterances as modes of doing by saying (as when getting married or christening a ship or making a promise), and thereby generates a vision of all human utterances as acts of speech (at once locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary in their nature) – hence as forms of human action that are themselves vulnerable to the world’s independence and the preoccupations of the mind. And insofar as every topic Austin treats involves asking what we should say when, then the basic medium of his philosophizing suffers that same vulnerability. So when Austin finds his philosophical interlocutors using language infelicitously, he should – by his own lights – ask himself how such misfires or abuses might have come about in each specific case, and further ask himself how far these failures of responsibility betoken something more general about the conditions of our life with language – not a set of sheerly external accidents interrupting our otherwise serene everyday ways of speaking but, rather, expressions of a vulnerability that is internal to those ways. Cavell is unhappy to find that Austin doesn’t in general give the same careful attention to the specific forms and contexts of philosophical failures of speech that he gives to the failures of action that attract his attention in law and ethics – resorting rather to terms of abuse (“wily,” “insinuating,” “glib”) for which he doesn’t take specific responsibility in the ways such words (like any others) require. But he takes this to be Austin’s failure rather than a weakness inherent in his approach; and Cavell commits himself to demonstrating that a faithful inheritance of ordinary language philosophizing must show that such attentiveness to the human significance of philosophical failures of sense-making is both a requirement and a source of real insight. This Austinian background strongly shapes Cavell’s perception of the significance of philosophical skepticism for Wittgenstein. In a central stretch of The Claim of Reason, Cavell focuses on one familiar expression of such skepticism about the external world: He imagines the skeptic imagining a situation in which we claim to know with certainty of the existence of an object in front of us because we can see it, in response to which the skeptic raises a ground for doubt by pointing out that we do not in fact see all of it, since the back half of the object is hidden from our view. Cavell’s Wittgensteinian response targets both the ground for doubt and the claim to know. With respect to the former, he points out an ambiguity in the skeptic’s method for locating the part of the object that is hidden: For if that part is

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established by imagining a line drawn around the object whose plane is perpendicular to the perceiver’s line of vision (with the hidden part lying beyond that line), then although there will always be a part of the object that counts as its back half whatever the position from which we perceive it, it will not be the same part in each case. On the contrary, any part currently hidden from us will be something we can see simply by changing our position; so although the skeptic’s method for establishing the back half of an object never changes, and each application of it will always reveal some part of the object as currently being its back half, there is no particular part of the object that is invariably the back half, and so no part that we can never see. In order to think that this method establishes that stronger conclusion, one must be imagining objects and subjects as unchanging in their orientation to one another, as if we were incapable of changing our position with respect to objects that always presented the same face to us. Thus this sceptical picture is one in which all our objects are moons. In which the earth is our moon. In which, at any rate, our position with respect to significant objects is rooted, the great circles which establish their back and front halves fixed in relation to it, fixed in our concentration as we gaze at them . . . This suggests that what philosophers call “the senses” are . . . disconnected from the fact of their possession and use by a creature who must act. (CR, 202)

In other words, such expressions of skepticism about other minds presuppose a picture of ourselves as not essentially embodied and so worldly; hence they falsify the reality of the human condition and thereby occlude a potentially unbearable aspect of that condition – the world’s independence from us, the fact that we are not the fixed center of a universe every inhabitant of which is permanently turned toward us, constituted (as possessed of specific parts) in relation to our determining gaze. So much for the skeptic’s ground for doubt; what about the claim to knowledge that this ground supposedly undermines? If we found ourselves in a situation in which we confront an object – say, a jar of pencils on the desk at which we’re sitting – and the epistemic conditions were optimal, would we (should we, could we) say that we know that the jar is on the desk? We certainly wouldn’t say that we didn’t know it; we wouldn’t deny that it is true that there is a jar on the desk. But: “Because it is true” is not a reason or basis for saying anything, it does not constitute the point of your saying something; and . . . there must, in grammar, be reasons for what you say, or be point in your saying of something, if what you say is to be comprehensible. We can understand what the words mean apart from understanding why you say them; but apart from understanding the point of your saying them we cannot understand what you mean. (CR, 206)

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Saying that I know that there is a jar on the table is an assertion, and so a kind of speech-act; and like any other type of human action, not just anything people do will count as (will be) asserting something. Assertion is a way of telling someone something; but what is said must then be something that the hearer is in a position to understand, and which might be (reasonably thought to be) informative to the hearer. But how might any potential hearer of this assertion – presumably in the room with us, and so able to avail herself of those optimal epistemic conditions – reasonably be thought to stand in need of this information? Or am I just remarking on a fact about our shared situation? One can, of course, simply remark on something, but not just anything, any time, can comprehensibly be remarked upon. Given a particular context, I might intelligibly remark that the jar is on the desk, or that the book you are reading is in your hand; but it is crucial to the skeptic’s strategy that the context he is envisaging is not at all special or particular, but rather ordinary and familiar (with no distinguishing marks that might block the generalization of his looming skeptical doubts) – one might say, unremarkable. The skeptic is thus violating the conditions under which something might intelligibly be said. It’s not so much that his words lack meaning: They have a use, they can be said meaningfully, but that just means that we can imagine circumstances under which it would make sense to say them; but apart from such circumstances, the saying of them has no meaning. But why might any competent speaker act in such a way as to presuppose that speech outside or beyond its determining conditions might be intelligible? In philosophizing, we come to be dissatisfied with answers which depend upon our meaning something by an expression, as though what we meant by it were more or less arbitrary . . . It is as though we try to get the world to provide answers in a way which is independent of our responsibility for claiming something to be so . . . and we fix the world so that it can do this. We construct “parts” of objects which have no parts; “senses” which have no guiding function . . . and we take what we have fixed or constructed to be discoveries about the world, and take this fixation to reveal the human condition rather than our escape or denial of this condition through the rejection of the human conditions of knowledge and action and the substitution of fantasy. (CR, 215–16)

Previously, what the skeptic denied was that aspect of our embodied agency which discloses our decentered embeddedness in a world that is independent of our will and wishes; here, what he denies is that aspect of our embodied agency that makes us answerable for how we modify that world (granting the world a hyperbolic independence in order to occlude our responsibility for bringing it to words). Both are ways of denying the conditionedness of the human condition, one might say its finitude; but this second denial discloses a more specific wish to avoid being answerable to and for the commitments that all speech exacts.

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Such talk of responsibilities, obligations, and commitments implies some continuity between the sphere of ethics and the broader field of speech-acts or participation in language-games, as if it is part of the condition of our lives with language that every word we say (or fail to say, or refuse to say, or use infelicitously, or abuse) situates us within a distinctive dimension of moral evaluation – one that is not simply identical with the field that Austin’s work on excuses delineates but not simply discontinuous with it either (any more than speech-acts simply are actions like any other, or are simply unlike them). Cavell adverts to this dimension when discussing Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria, the grammatical articulations of our language-games: Wittgenstein’s insight . . . seems to be something like this: that all our knowledge, everything we assert or question . . . is governed . . . by criteria. Without the control of criteria in applying concepts, we would not know what counts as evidence for any claim, nor for what claims evidence is needed. And that suggests . . . that every surmise and each tested conviction depend upon the same structure or background of necessities and agreements that judgements of value do. I do not say that, according to Wittgenstein, statements of fact are judgements of value . . . [R]ather . . . both statements of fact and judgements of value rest upon the same capacities of human nature . . . only a creature that can judge of value can state a fact. (CR, 14–15) Judgement . . . in Wittgensteinian appeals to criteria comes up twice. [There is] the judgement’s predication, its saying something about something . . . [and] the judgement’s proclamation, its saying it out . . . Whether to speak has two aspects: determining whether you are willing to count something as something; and determining when, if ever, you wish, or can, enter your accounting into a particular occasion. Take . . . “He is in pain” . . . To proclaim it here and now you must be willing to call out . . . just that predicate on the basis of what you have so far gathered (. . . count that behaviour as a wince); and you must find it called for on just this occasion, i.e. find yourself willing to come before . . . those to whom you speak it (e.g. declare yourself in a position to inform or advise or alert someone of something. . .). (CR, 34–5)

Cavell here emphasizes the way in which the proclamatory aspect of judgment exposes the judger, requiring him to take a position and to take responsibility for it; but he also connects the articulation of our grammatical commitments with a reticulation of our cares and concerns, human investments of desire or interest: If we formulate the idea that valuing underwrites asserting as the idea that interest informs telling or talking generally, then we may say that the degree to which you talk of things, and talk in ways, that hold no interest for you, or listen to what you cannot imagine the talker’s caring about . . . is the degree to which you consign yourself to nonsensicality, stupefy yourself . . . I think of this consignment as a form not so much of dementia as of what amentia ought to mean, a form of mindlessness. It does not appear

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unthinkable that the bulk of an entire culture, call it the public discourse of the culture, the culture thinking aloud about itself, hence believing itself to be talking philosophy, should become ungovernably inane. (CR, 95)

On this way of understanding Wittgenstein’s vision of language, the practice of grammatical investigation is a case-by-case counter to a culture’s standing tendency toward amentia – toward a loss or repression of individual answerability for any and every thing we say to one another. It thereby makes the ordinary language philosopher into (or recalls her to her ancient calling of being) a critic of culture rather than a preserver of whatever condition that culture currently inhabits. In this respect, Cavell’s perception of Wittgenstein is at once enabled by and enabling of his commitment to Emerson as the founder of a distinctively American transcendental tradition of philosophical writing. For when Emerson talks of states of social life in which “every word they say chagrins us and we do not know where to begin to set them right,” what he describes as a universal conformity to usage that is the opposite of self-reliance is what Cavell wants to mean by “amentia”; and when Emerson pictures aversion to conformity as the way in which individual and society overcome their actual condition and attain their unattained but attainable higher state, his perfectionist aspirations precisely rhyme with Wittgenstein’s conception of the everyday as doubled or split, as always transitional (or as failing, here and now, to become what it is capable of being).7 But on Cavell’s view, amentia afflicts not only the general culture but that culture’s philosophical expressions; so by perceiving the need to practice philosophically in such a way as to counter such mindlessness in the culture’s ways of thinking about itself, the ordinary language philosopher thereby implies that his subject is in the condition of modernism. Here again, Cavell’s lifelong interest in the high modernist art of 1960s American painting and music – reflected in a number of the essays in his first book, and energized by his friendship with the art critic and historian Michael Fried – enables an insight into Wittgenstein. For, on Cavell’s account, it is not just that he (and Austin) find their fellowphilosophers to be talking to one another in ways that hold no interest for them or for anyone else. They also find themselves unable to rely upon the governing conventions bequeathed by the past of his practice (in Wittgenstein’s case, the practice of his earlier self, as well as his logical positivist successors) as productive of meaningful work, but equally unable to regard the interests or values that first established and maintained them as no longer worthy of investment. Hence each seeks a new set of conventions that more authentically 7

Cf. “Self-reliance,” in Emerson 1982.

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convey and enable those ancient cares and commitments, by radically criticizing contemporary philosophical practice (with its attempts to construct perfectly crystalline formal languages that expel value and desire) in the name of what that practice used to stand for and might once again embody, if a suitably radical renewal of it really can be effected. This connection between ordinary language, perfectionism, and modernism echoes Glendinning’s sense of the way phenomenology as a movement understands itself. But we have arrived at these connections via emphases in Austin and Wittgenstein that Cavell recognizes as more specifically Heideggerian in nature: in particular, the importance of acknowledging the inherently worldly nature of human being, and an intuition that human freedom is better understood in terms of responsibility or answerability, and more specifically in terms of the individual’s willingness (or unwillingness) to take responsibility for its ways of acting, and in particular of speaking. In Heidegger’s terminology, this concerns the mineness and the authenticity of the human mode of being. On Heidegger’s view, human beings are inherently social creatures. Human modes of existence will always involve specific kinds of relations to others, and it is through the realization of possible modes of existence that human beings establish a particular relation to themselves; hence, how one relates to oneself will inflect one’s relations to others, and vice versa. This mutual determination is evident in the way most of us inhabit the social world most of the time – an inauthentic mode of existence that Heidegger christens “das Man” (literally, “the one,” or the “they”). This mode of existence is not simply a matter of doing what everyone else does – queuing to see the new Hollywood blockbuster, or joining in the general condemnation of the government’s most recent ineptitudes; what matters is how we relate ourselves to the doing of it, as evinced in our response if asked why we are doing it. If we were to say something like “That’s what everyone’s doing,” or “That’s just what one does,” or “What else is there to see or think?,” then we are existing in the anonymous mode of “das Man.” For if I regard the way in which I live as merely a local instantiation of the way human living is done here and now, as if these ways of occupying myself were somehow the only conceivable ways of doing so, then I am living my life as if it were not my own – mine to own, to take responsibility for. To live this way is to disown my life, to deny my responsibility for it; it involves regarding the course of my existence as given, as somehow beyond question, rather than as the enactment of one possible way of living to which there are alternatives, and hence as something for which I am answerable. Anyone who inhabits the “das Man” mode of living thus manifests what Heidegger calls the mineness of human being by displaying its absence, by

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haunting her own life. And such an absence is particularly on display in certain modes of conversation that Heidegger calls “idle talk,” in which our tendency to prioritize the speedy circulation of what is said about something over slow attentiveness to the thing itself, and our hunger for novelty, together detach us from the reality of things and deprive us of the ability to distinguish (and sometimes of the very idea that there is a distinction) between a truthful articulation of reality and a facile reproduction of how things seem. This is Heidegger’s way of evoking the perfectionist sense of disorientation that Emerson calls conformity and Cavell re-names “amentia”; and for all three, such ungovernable inanity is recurrently encountered as much in philosophy’s reflective engagement with public discourse as in the discourse with which it engages. If such repressions of mineness constitute inauthenticity, then the authenticity of any human life is to be judged by the extent to which that life, which is necessarily the life of a particular individual, is genuinely expressive of her individuality. If how she thinks, speaks, and lives is rooted in her individual determination of what is worth doing and why, her life makes it manifest that she is, and serves to constitute her as, a distinct individual. If not, then her life makes it manifest that she is relating to herself as if there were no self for her to relate to; her existence embodies an aspiration to deny the ineluctable truth that it is hers, and hers alone, to live. And Cavell’s perfectionist, modernist interpretation of phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy presents both traditions as practices whose purpose is to uncover and overcome such denials, and thereby to renew not only philosophy, but the culture which engenders it and the lives of its individual inhabitants.

44 PHENOMENOLOGY MEETS PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LANGUAGE dav i d wo o d ru f f s m i t h

INTRODUCTION

This chapter appraises ways in which phenomenology interacted with philosophy of mind and philosophy of logic and language between 1945 and 2015. During this period, as the post-war phenomenological tradition engaged with and drew from evolving theories in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience, the phenomena of intentionality, meaning, and consciousness gained renewed salience. As a result of these particular engagements (especially with Fregean and possible world semantics, the information-processing model of mind, and the cognitive study of phenomenal intentionality), both intentional and phenomenal aspects of consciousness have come to the fore with renewed vigor, embracing “what it is like” to experience perception, thought, emotion, and action. In the spirit of David Armstrong’s “opinionated” introduction to the mind– body problem (Armstrong 1999), I’ll develop an “opinionated” interpretation of relations between phenomenology – primarily Husserlian – and analytic philosophy of mind, logic, and language during the 1945–2015 period. There is much more terrain worthy of assessment, but I’ll focus on select issues I see as most significant with an eye to the discipline of phenomenology itself. The story to follow affords a historical argument for the significance of that discipline for philosophy and for contemporary science. A terminological note: The term “phenomenology” has been used variously to mean: the discipline of phenomenology, namely, the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person perspective; the phenomenological tradition featuring Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty et al.; and, recently, the phenomenal character, or “phenomenology,” of a given experience. Unless otherwise indicated, I’ll take “phenomenology” to mean the discipline itself.

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David Woodruff Smith THE BACK STORY

In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Franz Brentano laid the foundations for the discipline of phenomenology. In later years Brentano distinguished “genetic” psychology from “descriptive” psychology: The former concerns causal origins of mental acts, while the latter concerns forms or essences of mental acts (in broadly Aristotelian terms). He also called descriptive psychology “phenomenology.” On Brentano’s analysis, two essential features of consciousness are its “directedness” toward some object and its secondary directedness toward itself in “inner consciousness.” These features remain central to phenomenology and philosophy of mind today. The first is what we now call intentionality, which involves the relation between the content and object of consciousness. The second pertains to the phenomenal character of consciousness, which ties into awareness of experience (whether “higher-order” or not). We shall take up these themes of phenomenology in due course as they arise in recent philosophy. In the 1870s, Gottlob Frege also developed a new conception of formal logic, replacing Aristotle’s theory of syllogism with what we now know as first-order logic (articulating a logic of quantifiers and predicates). To this form of logic Frege added a form of semantics in “On sense and reference [Über Sinn und Bedeutung]” (1997b [1892]). In the 1880s, meanwhile, Georg Cantor developed a mathematical theory of sets and a theory of transfinite numbers (measuring the cardinality of large sets or the different orders of infinity). And Riemann developed a theory of non-Euclidian geometry, altering the axioms of geometry and defining an alternative form of “space” (featuring curvatures defining distances). With the new logic and mathematics in view, Edmund Husserl conceived phenomenology as a new science of consciousness: not strictly empirical like psychology but informed by ideal structures of meaning. During the 1880s, Husserl studied the mathematics of calculus in light of these emerging developments in mathematics. Studying with Brentano in Vienna, Husserl turned to his conception of phenomenology. During the 1890s, Husserl wrote his monumental Logical Investigations (1900–1). In that work he developed this theory of intentionality as the foundation of a new science of phenomenology: the science of consciousness as we experience it from the first-person perspective. Around 1907, Husserl incorporated a “transcendental” perspective into his conception of phenomenology. He detailed this perspective in his Ideas i (1913), featuring his new methodology of epoché: “bracketing” the surrounding natural world in order to focus on one’s own consciousness of things in the world.

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Husserl’s later conception of phenomenology is quite familiar today. What is less familiar is the way in which his account of phenomenology in Ideas is founded on his prior vision, in the Logical Investigations, specifically, of how the categories of “pure logic” frame his analyses of structures of “pure consciousness” in Ideas and later works. Husserl’s development of phenomenology – as the science of the essence of consciousness – should thus be seen as a synthesis of an emergent conception of mathematical logic with a neo-Brentanian conception of phenomenology. Phenomenological and logical philosophy diverged rather sharply around 1950, as each became central respectively to “Continental” and “analytic” philosophy (see Thomson, this volume). Nonetheless, the present study traces some of the concrete philosophical links among theories in these two divergent traditions. We turn thus to developments in our designated era of 1945–2015, reflecting on interactions among phenomenology, logic cum philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.1 F R O M L O GI C A N D L A NG U A GE T O I NT E NT I O N A LI T Y IN PHENOMENOLOGY

When Husserl launched his conception of phenomenology in Logical Investigations (1900–1), he argued that phenomenology was not to be empirical “psychology” but rather, as it were, an objective and anti-psychologistic “logic” of the “phenomena” of intentional consciousness. His conception of phenomenology was framed by his conception of “pure logic”: correlating ideal forms of language, consciousness, meaning, and objects in the world. As Husserl’s conception of phenomenology developed in Ideas i (1913), however, the “logic” side of the “phenomena” seemed to have receded in favor of a neoKantian “transcendental idealism.” After a “transcendental turn,” it seemed, Husserl held that phenomenological reflection “brackets” the external world and leaves us with only the “pure phenomena” of consciousness: a realm of subjectivity, as if divorced from the objectivity of logic and even the very existence of a world beyond consciousness. In the 1960s, however, a re-reading of Husserl dug into the foundations of phenomenology vis-à-vis logic. Modern logic focuses on formal or symbolic languages, which in turn are abstractions from everyday language. Here we’ll focus on logical themes including reference, meaning, and truth – because that is where logical theory meets philosophy of language – with an eye to intentionality in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. 1

For more conceptual and historical detail, see Smith 2013.

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Dagfinn Føllesdal drew a close parallel between Frege’s logic of sense and reference (Sinn and Bedeutung) and Husserl’s phenomenology of content (or “noema) and a corresponding object of consciousness. Husserl’s theory of intentionality – that is, the directedness of consciousness toward some object – gives a central role to what Husserl called “noematic content,” or “noema,” in particular to “noematic sense [Sinn].” In logical theory, notably in Frege’s work (known to Husserl), an expression such as “the morning star” expresses a sense (Sinn) and thereby refers to a designated object (Bedeutung), the planet Venus in this case. Husserl held a similar view of the role of meaning or sense (Sinn) in language. For Husserl, an expression such as “the victor at Jena” expresses a linguistic meaning (or Bedeutung) that designates or “means” (meint, meinen) an appropriate object, namely Napoleon, where such an object actually exists. Similarly, for Husserl, an act of consciousness carries a sense (Sinn) that directs the act toward an appropriate object in the world if such an object exists. On this interpretation of Husserl’s theory of sense or meaning, then, just as meaning in language directs an expression toward an appropriate object in the world, so meaning in experience directs an act of consciousness toward an appropriate object in the world. Accordingly, this reading of Husserl’s theory of intentionality has been called a semantic model of intentionality.2 Unlike Frege, Husserl amplified the notion of an expression’s meaning in terms of a theory of the sense (Sinn) in an intentional act of consciousness. Thus, for Husserl, the linguistic meaning (Bedeutung) expressed by (say) the expression “the victor at Jena” is the intentional content or sense (Sinn) of the speaker’s underlying act of consciousness, wherein (say) the subject thinks or judges that the victor at Jena was vanquished at Waterloo. The object of the speaker’s act of consciousness, in so thinking, is “given” in consciousness via the sense . On Husserl’s model of intentionality, according to this reading, an act of consciousness is “directed” via a sense toward an appropriate object. In this way, for Husserl, linguistic reference via meaning is founded on intentional consciousness via sense. The structure of intentionality, on Husserl’s model, features the way an object of consciousness is given or presented in an intentional experience or act of consciousness. That mode of presentation forms what Husserl called the “noematic content” or “noema” of the act (borrowing the ancient Greek term for what is known or in mind). And the noema of an experience Husserl calls a “sense” (Sinn) or “noematic sense.” Frege had characterized Sinn in passing as

2

This model of intentionality as paralleling linguistic reference is set out succinctly in Føllesdal 1982 [1969] and elaborated in Smith and McIntyre 1971 and 1982.

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incorporating a “way of being given [Art des Gegebensein],” without elaborating and of course without developing a coordinated theory of intentionality.3 Føllesdal had written a dissertation on modal logic, where issues of reference and modality are central: notably, in the logic or semantics of sentences of the form “there is an individual x such that necessarily x is human” (quantifying into the modal context “necessarily —”) (Føllesdal 2004 [1961]). A new style of semantics for systems of modal logic had been developing in works of Jaakko Hintikka and other logicians in the 1950s onward, and Hintikka’s results in particular proved relevant to aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology. For, Hintikka applied his techniques to sentences ascribing intentional attitudes of belief and perception, sentences of forms such as “a believes that p,” “a sees that p,” and in particular “there is an individual x such that a sees [or believes] that x is F” (quantifying into the context “a sees that —”). This style of semantics was called possible-worlds semantics, and Hintikka-style possible-worlds semantics could be seen as reflecting phenomenological structures of perception and other intentional forms of consciousness. For example, suppose Alex is a dog-trainer who is working with her bearded collie in an agility exercise for herding sheep. We may describe her visual experience in a sentence of this form: “Alex sees a bearded collie racing past the finish line.”

In Hintikka’s logic of perception, we may reformulate this sentence as: (S) “There is an individual x such that Alex sees that x is a bearded collie racing past the finish line.”

Hintikka’s logic assigns to this sentence truth-conditions, specified as follows: (S) is true in a possible world W* if and only if in every perceptually possible world W compatible with what Alex sees in W*, the individual C that is visually before Alex in W* is such that in W C is a bearded collie racing past the finish line.

This semantical interpretation of the perception sentence (S) can be seen as reflecting a phenomenological interpretation of the intentionality of Alex’s visual experience, that is, in the world W*, which we may assume is the actual world in which Alex sees the collie racing. The crucial assumption in this formulation is what characterizes the perceptually possible situations or “worlds” given Alex’s visual experience in the situation or world W*. The actual world W* is what it is, a situation in which 3

See the essays in Dreyfus and Hall 1982, including Føllesdal 1982 [1969] on noema and McIntyre and Smith 1982 on linguistic meaning vis-à-vis intentional sense.

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a subject Alex is watching a scene of the appropriate type, presumably an agility exercise for sheepdogs. What then are the appropriate perceptually possible worlds relative to Alex’s visual experience in W*? If we turn to Husserl’s theory of “horizon,” we home in on the relevant type of “alternative” worlds: those that are compatible with “what Alex sees.” These worlds are visually appropriate situations as prescribed by the content of Alex’s visual experience. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenological analysis, notably in Ideas i, we may say the noematic sense of the experience explicitly prescribes that: The object of the experience is that particular individual presented before the subject on the occasion of the experience and that it is a bearded collie racing toward the finish line. This core sense in the experience “predelineates” a further horizon of meaning implicit in the content of the experience: a horizon of meaning comprising elements of sense compatible with the act’s explicit sense. For example, the individual racing along is a dog, not an interloping antelope; and it is participating in the agility exercise, not chasing a pickpocket whose scent the dog is tracking; and so forth. In other words, a wide range of relevant meaning constrains what counts as meaningfully appropriate to what the subject sees, that is, perceptually possible situations relative to what the subject sees given her background experience with agility exercises for dogs. By thus merging Hintikka’s modal-logical or possible-worlds model with Husserl’s model of noematic content given horizon, we come to understand the intentionality of the visual experience as a pattern of directedness toward a given object in a variety of relevantly similar situations or “worlds.” This range of perceptually possible situations is prescribed by the noematic sense of the experience against a horizon of sense that prescribes further relevant possibilities for the intended object. This “modal” structure can be seen as an explication of Husserl’s paradigm of a perceptual experience – wherein the subject sees suchand-such and therewith expects what the intended object might be like – as the subject moves around it to look more closely at aspects that cohere with what the subject sees.4 The logical side of phenomenology helps us to understand the rich structure of meaning in the intentionality of perception and other types of intentional acts of consciousness. Rather different features of mental activity have been the focus in philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition during our period of 1945–2015: leading from the physical basis of mind in brain-and-behavior through the brain’s information-processing and finally (back) to the subjective experience of

4

See Smith and McIntyre 1982 for a synthesis of these models of intentionality, meaning, and modality.

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consciousness – and thus to the phenomenal side of phenomenology. We turn now to those concerns of philosophy of mind in light of phenomenology. T H E E M E R G E NC E O F P H I LO S O P H Y O F M I N D V I S - À - V I S PHENOMENOLOGY

The metaphysics of mind and body has been central to philosophy at least since René Descartes’s epochal Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). The role of mind has been central to theory of knowledge from Descartes to Hume to Kant to Carnap. And elements of phenomenology are clearly present in Descartes’s cogito, in Hume’s account of impressions and ideas, in Kant’s notion of “phenomena,” and in Brentano’s doctrines of “intentional inexistence” and “inner consciousness”: All of this was very much in Husserl’s purview as he launched phenomenology proper. Yet “philosophy of mind” as a subfield in contemporary philosophy took shape primarily in the wake of Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book, The Concept of Mind (2002 [1949]), famously set in reaction to Cartesian mind–body dualism. Indeed, Ryle’s book may be seen as setting the agenda for what philosophers of mind would wrestle with for the next half century, even while leaving aside gospel Ryle. (See also Hellie, this volume.) Ryle argued that a “category mistake” lay at the heart of Descartes’s distinction between mind and body, a mistake leading to what Ryle dubbed “the myth of the ghost in the machine.” (On Ryle’s proximity to Heidegger here, see Wrathall and Loden, this volume.) The mistake, Ryle proposed, was to look for “mind” as something ghostly over and above our myriad “behaviors” – a mistake akin to looking for “the University” having once seen the buildings, the dons, and the students doing their things in Oxford. Ryle’s alternative approach was to pursue our concept of mind as evident in our everyday language about mental states or acts of will, emotion, sensation, and intellect. As we look here toward phenomenology vis-à-vis philosophy of mind, it is interesting to recall Ryle’s explicit take on consciousness as definitive of mental activity. Having distinguished “knowing how” from “knowing that,” Ryle turned to “selfknowledge” and therewith to “consciousness.” Since Descartes, Ryle found, philosophers have held that mental states and acts occur “consciously,” that is: with “awareness,” a “self-luminous” quality, and with a “self-intimating” character achieved through a sort of “double act of attention” (Ryle 2002 [1949]: 158–60), in which, it may seem, I attend to what I am seeing or thinking or willing and also to my so attending. Ryle might here have referenced Brentano, whom he had read, regarding consciousness as “directed” primarily toward some object and secondarily toward itself.

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But Ryle held that “consciousness, as so described, is a myth” (160). Accordingly, Ryle maintained: first, that we do usually know what we are about [in our mental states and acts], but that no phosphorescence-story is required to explain how we are apprised of it; second, that knowing what we are about does not entail an incessant actual monitoring or scrutiny of our doings and feelings, but only the propensity inter alia to avow them, when we are in the mood to do so; and, third, that the fact that we generally know what we are about does not entail our coming across any happenings of ghostly status. (Ryle 2002[1949]: 161)

For Ryle, then, consciousness is properly conceived as a form of self-knowledge that consists – insofar as “we know what we are about” – in knowing how to go about our doings and feelings “with the propensity to avow them,” that is, the disposition to say “what we are about” when “we are in the mood to do so.” I note Ryle’s term “monitoring”: For, decades later philosophers of mind would focus on higher-order “monitoring” as defining consciousness within a paradigm quite divorced from Cartesian dualism or any ghostly character of mind. Ryle has been read as developing a doctrine of “logical behaviorism” that entails an ontological reduction of mental activity to behavioral activity. Indeed, the quotation above seems to simply eliminate consciousness per se, or “selfconsciousness,” in favor of a disposition to say “what we are about”: as in declaring, “I am sad about the news,” “my hands feel so cold in the snow,” or “I am thinking about Ryle’s ostensible metaphysics.” But Ryle himself was avowedly articulating a “logical” analysis of “the concept of mind” as manifest in our everyday language. (See also Mulhall, this volume.) In this conceptual analysis, Ryle stopped short of a metaphysical reduction of mind to behavior. In fact, à propos Husserlian phenomenology, Ryle’s The Concept of Mind has been read as practicing a linguistic variant on Husserl’s phenomenological method of “bracketing” the question of the existence of what our concepts or meanings “intend.” Turning to the nature of mind, Ryle might say that our concept of mental activities links them to overt behaviors involving speech, averting a “ghostly status” for mental activities, and that this is all we are entitled to say about the extra-phenomenological or metaphysical character of our mental activities. Indeed, Ryle himself allowed that his program could be seen as a form of phenomenology. On this deflationist reading of Ryle, then, “consciousness” is properly conceived as securing “self-knowledge” merely in “the propensity to avow” what we are about in seeing or thinking or whatever, with no special “monitoring” of our activity required. “When we are in the mood” to avow what we are about,

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our avowing then amounts to reflection in the phenomenological attitude.5 Arguably, Ryle was right to appraise category mistakes, but wrong about which category was misbegotten. For, half a century later, the concept and status of consciousness would resume center-stage, in its own proper category, albeit not in a Cartesian “theater” of ghostly mentality. We shall return to the issue of categories below. In retrospect, Ryle’s response to the mind–body problem may have been prescient of the struggle in philosophy of mind through our period of 1945–2015. For it seems that the phenomenology of mental activities – articulating the lived, phenomenal character of our activities of seeing, thinking, willing, and so on – escapes the now-familiar sequence of theories of mind: from behaviorism to mind–brain identity theory to functionalism to artificial intelligence. As a result, consciousness remains the “hard problem” for a scientific theory of mind (cf. Chalmers 1996; see Hellie, this volume). Whether the “behaviors” manifesting our mental activities are broad bodily movements of our limbs, or our linguistic utterances, or behaviors of our neurons or systems of neurons, or abstract “functional” patterns of computation effected by our neural systems, or whatnot – in any case, these behaviors in themselves do not seem to define the phenomenological features or structures of our mental activities grounded therein. Shortly after Ryle’s study in the linguistic-conceptual analysis of mental states, philosophers turned to the explicit metaphysics of mind. In the midtwentieth century, as modern physics studied the universe as a physical system, materialism took charge and philosophy of mind as we know it was off and running. In the 1950s and 1960s, philosophers pressed the case for identifying mental states with brain states, or states of the central nervous system. J. J. C. Smart, D. M. Armstrong, and U. T. Place argued that mental activity is strictly identical with brain activity: Thus, the mind–body identity theory took hold. Especially relevant to our study here is David M. Armstrong’s monograph, A Materialist Theory of Mind (1993 [1968]), later updated with his own take on mind–body theories (Armstrong 1999). Interestingly, Armstrong addressed consciousness itself in terms appropriate to our present study: “I suggest that consciousness is no more than awareness (perception) of inner mental states by the person whose states they are” (1993 [1968]: 94). Sympathizing with Kant’s notion of “inner sense,” Armstrong elaborates a remarkably Brentanian model in which inner awareness is cast as the mind’s perceiving a particular mental activity, all realized within the central state of the nervous system, with brain 5

See Livingston 2005b; Thomasson 2005; 2007 on Ryle’s program of logical behaviorism as broadly phenomenological.

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activity causing external bodily movement. In effect, Armstrong is addressing Ryle’s analysis and arguing against Ryle’s conclusion (that consciousness is a myth), by turning inward to the brain’s neuronal activity as it monitors its own activities.6 Since the 1970s, materialism has been reformed, as it were, with the doctrine of functionalism. According to functionalism, a mental state is identified with the abstract function of a physical system such as a human brain: Mind is what the brain does, rather than what it is composed of, namely, lots of neuronal cells (composed of axons, dendrites, and so on). In part, this model reflected an unfolding perspective of computational theory. Accordingly, it has been held, mind is to brain as software is to hardware. On this view, what defines a mental state or activity – whether realized in a brain or in a digital computer – is the pattern of information flow or processing in the physical system, including the physical environment of the system: a mathematical pattern captured formally by algorithms, or “code” in computer parlance. Artificial intelligence theory, or AI, thus offers a computational form of functionalism, identifying mental activity with computational function (not least in today’s increasingly complex computer models, like those controlling driverless automobiles). (See Boden, this volume.) The same pattern of computation can be implemented in very different physical systems, whatever their composition, and that pattern defines the “intelligent” operations of the system: there lies mind, for AI.7 John Searle has long argued against “strong” or metaphysical AI – and, in effect, against any functionalist model of mind. Briefly, Searle argues that mental content – “propositional” intentional content – is not captured by any purely computational model of mind, since by definition computer programs define purely syntactic operations, whereas intentionality is effected by semantic content (or, to be more precise, by content akin to Frege’s notion of sense or Husserl’s notion of noematic content or sense). More broadly, Searle argues for a “biological naturalism” whereby the neural system in our bodies produces consciousness, as we each know from our own experience (however the biological processes work). For Searle, consciousness requires a “first-person ontology,” featuring intentionality and a subjective character as we experience only from a first-person perspective. The “third-person” properties of physical systems – whether realized in brains or in silicon-chip computers – do not involve the essentially first-person properties of consciousness and intentionality, Searle holds, and so the familiar varieties of materialism fail. On Searle’s 6 7

See the detailed discussion in Armstrong 1993 [1968]: 92ff. Classic presentations of functionalism are expounded in various essays in Chalmers 2002. Livingston (2005b) assays functionalist views, as they follow on Ryle’s logical behaviorism.

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account, consciousness is a perfectly “natural” phenomenon, but it has a bona fide subjective character not reducible to physical particles.8 A sophisticated form of functionalism, drawing on mathematical information theory, is Fred Dretske’s theory of mental representation as a flow of information. Mind and thus consciousness are modeled on the flow and processing of information between a person and her surrounding environment. Perception in particular is treated as a processing of information received from the object of perception, so the “representation” of the external object in the subject’s mind is defined in terms of the information carried (in a mathematical form) from the object into the subject. Dretske proposed to analyze meaning, including perceptual content, in terms of “information” (on its mathematical model). Of particular interest here is Dretske’s view on consciousness. For, Dretske developed a critique of higher-order theories of consciousness, which held that a mental state is rendered conscious in virtue of a higher-order monitoring of the state – whether through a kind of inner perception (as Armstrong proposed) or through a more conceptual awareness (as others have proposed). On Dretske’s “representational” approach, consciousness of something, notably in perception, is “transparent”: neither accompanied by nor requiring any sort of monitoring – rather as Ryle had argued. Instead, what makes a mental state conscious, on Dretske’s approach, is the way the mind receives and interacts with information from the environment: a thoroughly natural phenomenon, but still a matter of functional information-processing.9 Now, information-processing is a real and vital part of mental activity, effected somehow in neural processing. Moreover, conscious intentional experience surely involves processing of meaning, as Husserl’s theory of intentionality entails. But what is the lived phenomenological character of this informationprocessing in seeing, thinking, willing, and so on? Ned Block has long argued that, while mind is indeed what the brain does, the functionalist model fails to recognize a distinction crucial to the theory of consciousness. “Phenomenal consciousness,” Block observed, carries the properly phenomenal character of a mental state, including the “qualia” in sensory perception. But many underlying functions of the brain present no phenomenological character. Rather, their role is to provide, in particular, elements of memory and cognition that may be drawn into phenomenal experience. These non-phenomenal functional states of the mind-brain Block called “access 8 9

See Searle 2004 for his own recent perspective, drawing on his earlier arguments in Searle 1983 and 1992. See Dretske’s theory of consciousness in his mature lectures, Dretske 1995: 97–122, drawing on his information-theoretic model in Dretske 1981.

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consciousness.” But it would be better to say “states to which consciousness has access,” for those functional states are not themselves a proper part of consciousness – which is phenomenal!10 From logical behaviorism to mind–body identity theory to functionalism and artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind seemed to keep losing sight of the phenomenological character of mind: the stuff that dreams – and consciousness itself – are made of. For Ryle, that stuff is a ghostly whiff of nothingness. But for phenomenologists like Husserl, that stuff is the reality of consciousness, when we turn “to the things themselves,” or to what we actually experience, from the first-person perspective. Accordingly, as the twenty-first century arrived, philosophy of mind had rediscovered the phenomenological aspects of mind – a century after the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the classical phenomenologists. The new paradigm was a non-reductive physicalism, an ontology of mind that sought to make room for the phenomenological in a way that respects the neural basis of our consciousness.

THE RETURN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN PHILOSOPHY O F MI N D V I S - À - V I S P H E N O ME N O LO G Y

In the 1990s, consciousness became a focal point for naturalistic philosophy of mind – as neuroscience came to look for the “neural correlates” of consciousness (for example, in interactions among the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the cerebral cortex). Instead of looking primarily for a reduction of mind to brain cum behavior, the aim was to make room for conscious experience per se in a scientific theory of mind. In 1974, Thomas Nagel published “What is it like to be a bat?” He argued that the intrinsic character of conscious experience – “the subjective character of experience,” “the phenomenological features of experience” – is, if I may put it so, its own thing. “What it is like” for an organism – “how it is for the subject himself” – to see or feel or think is not captured by or reducible to the objective properties studied in physical systems or functional models. With Nagel’s essay, consciousness took its place in naturalistic philosophy of mind – and very gradually earned the status of the “hard problem” for a scientific theory of mind, in David Chalmers’s (1996) memorable charge.11

10 11

Cf. Block, “Concepts of consciousness,” in Chalmers 2002: 206–18. For a varied gathering of essays on mind, brain, and consciousness, in the analytic tradition, see Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere 1997 and Chalmers 2002; Nagel’s essay is reprinted and frequently cited in both of these volumes.

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Daniel Dennett had long studied aspects of mind, treating intentionality as a projection or “stance” toward people or organisms. But in Consciousness Explained (1991) he sought to get at consciousness itself in naturalistic terms joined with an AI perspective. Dennett was a student of Ryle’s, but Dennett moved the Rylean perspective from linguistic-conceptual analysis to that of natural science and computer science. In this vein, Dennett nods to phenomenology proper but shifts from a first-person perspective à la Husserl to a thirdperson perspective: from “auto-phenomenology” to “hetero-phenomenology.” For Dennett, we may ascribe “consciousness” – including sensory “qualia” – to organisms including ourselves, but the reality we describe is simply the brain’s production, as it were, of various self-narratives (“multiple drafts” about what the organism is “experiencing”). In Dennett’s rhetoric, the bête noir remains the “Cartesian theater” of supposedly ghostly inner phenomena. And Ryle’s “selfknowledge” becomes the brain’s evolving self-narrative: reporting about what it does, “when in the mood” to report, I suppose. To Dennett’s critics, his project was rather: consciousness explained away! Alternatively, several philosophers argued in the 1990s for the status of consciousness as genuinely real and irreducible, albeit natural or “naturalized”: John Searle (1992), Galen Strawson (1994), Fred Dretske (1995), David Chalmers (1996), and Charles Siewert (1998), argued so. I note these figures because each was approaching aspects of phenomenology within a broadly naturalist setting. Siewert in particular has addressed Brentano and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Siewert 2005; 2011). In the present context, however, I should like to note an earlier opening to phenomenology, an opening resonant with the categorical ontology detailed in Husserl’s Ideas i (2014 [1913]), in which Husserl’s category scheme frames his articulation of phenomenology as the new science of consciousness.12 Saul Kripke, in Naming and Necessity (1981 [1972]), considered an argument against the mind–body identity theory, an argument from the logic of reference. Suppose M is a particular mental state (a sharp pain) and B is a particular brain state (the physical correlate of M in the brain or nervous system). If M = B, then necessarily M = B: given the logic of the terms “M” and “B” as “rigid designators.” Basically, if “M” and “B” refer to the same particular state in the actual world, they refer rigidly to that same state in any logically possible world (according to the semantics of rigid designation across possible worlds for proper names like “M” and “B”). But the mind–body identity theory assumes it is a contingent fact of nature that M = B, a fact governed by a theory of mind–brain

12

See the interpretation detailed in Smith 2013 [1st edition 2007].

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correlation discovered through empirical research. Therefore, following Kripke’s logic of reference, the mind–brain identity theory cannot be true. Moreover, underlying Descartes’s long pattern of argumentation for mind– body dualism in the Meditations, we should see the assumption that it is logically possible that “I” might exist without this body, “my” body, and vice versa. For Descartes, clearly, it is not logically necessary that I = my body. Indeed, the malicious demon scenario is precisely designed to show how it is logically possible that I 6¼ my body. So Descartes’s intuitions about mind–body identity cohere with Kripke’s logic of reference. Looking toward Kripke’s challenge about identity, David Chalmers has argued accordingly that it is conceivable – and hence logically possible – that consciousness and brain process may come apart. For a given conscious experience has a subjective character of “what it is like,” but the presumed neural correlate of that mental state has no such character. Consequently, it is logically possible that the experience is not so correlated with any particular brain state. In effect, Chalmers opens the door to a dualism of properties that define the mental and the physical. Specifically, he presents a “two-dimensional” argument against reductive materialism: The phenomenal and the physical form two dimensions of consciousness, blocking reduction of the phenomenal to the physical. This line of argument does not lead to the Cartesian theory of a ghostly mental substance interacting with a machine-like corporeal substance in a human being. Rather, assuming that mind is somehow realized in nature in humans and animals, the point of this line of argument is to give consciousness its due in a naturalistic, scientific theory of mind.13 What Chalmers seeks in the conceivability argument, I propose, is better cast in terms of Hintikka’s notion of intentional possibility with a Husserlian twist (as recounted above). The content of an intentional act of consciousness rests (per Husserl) on a “horizon” of meaning that “predelineates” a range of intentionally possible situations or “worlds” compatible with the intentional content of the given experience. These situations are not simply “conceivable”; they are intentionally or semantically prescribed as perceptually possible situations given what one sees in a particular visual experience, that is, as doxastically or cognitively possible situations given what one believes in a certain experience of thinking that such-and-such, and so on. The question posed by the neoCartesian possibility that mind and body might come apart, then, is not simply one of logical possibility (what our language entails), nor simply one of conceptual possibility (what seems to make sense given our concept of mind). Rather,

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See Chalmers 1996 and Chalmers 2010, pp. 141ff, on the two-dimensional model.

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the appropriate type of possibility is phenomenological possibility: what the intentional content of various types of experience prescribes or allows. To adapt an example from Husserl: When I walk into my office, as I see my desk before me, it is not visually possible for me that my desk has twenty legs – or, say, that its legs are formed from petrified cobras. Such possibilities are not phenomenologically possible for me as I see and think about my desk. The neoCartesian question then becomes: What would it be for me to see or think about my desk as though I were myself disembodied? What sort of experiential possibilities might allow that I see and think about and lean upon my desk even if, so far as my experience goes, I am not actually or simply identical with this biological body? Are features of my experience and features of my biology (including actual brain function) presented differently in my experiences regarding my desk? Can these modes of presentation come apart within the phenomenology of my experience? An influential phenomenological analysis finds that I, my desk, my “lived body,” and my experience of my desk before me all take their place within a “phenomenal field” oriented with respect to my “lived body,” and so too do “I,” the subject of my experiences. This is the pattern elaborated by Merleau-Ponty following Husserl in a convincing portrait of everyday experience. What exactly are the links among intentional meaningcontents presenting “I,” “my body,” and “my desk? How might these contents allow presentations of consciousness and body to come apart? We are far from the ghost in the machine as we pose this question.14 What we may see taking shape in this neo-Cartesian line of argument is a fundamental distinction in categories between the properties of the mental and the properties of the physical. The distinction is not merely between concepts of mind and body, as reflected in our everyday or even scientific language. The “logic” of the situation is rather, in Husserl’s articulate ontology, a matter of the correlation between ideal types in the world and corresponding types in meaning, in language, and in experience. Specifically, acts of consciousness and their neural correlates may fall in type under different ontological categories. To identify the experienced intentional structure of an act of consciousness with the computational structure of neuronal activity underlying that form of consciousness – this identification of ideal types is a category-mistake, given something like a Husserlian system of categories.15

14

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See Carman, this volume, and Merleau–Ponty 2012 [1945], drawing upon Husserl’s notion of “lived body” as opposed to “physical body” – following interpretation in Smith 2013 [1st edition 2007] and recent work by Philip Walsh (2016) on “motivation” in Husserl. See the reconstruction of Husserl’s category scheme, and its role in phenomenology vis-à-vis philosophy of mind, in Smith 1995 and Smith 2013 [1st edition 2007].

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Briefly: Husserl distinguished “formal” and “material” categories. Formal categories include Individual, Number, Property or Relation, State of Affairs, etc. Material categories include, for Husserl, Consciousness (characterized by intentionality), Nature (characterized by spatiotemporal properties), and Geist (characterized by social or communal properties). Given these two overarching types of über categories, the formal and the material or substantive, we may hold that a particular event, under the formal category Individual, has substantive or “material” features, under the formal category Property/Relation. And so we may hold that the same individual concrete event has phenomenal properties of intentionality, falling under the material category Consciousness, and also physical properties of neural processing, falling under the material category Nature. Interestingly, these categories are both ontological categories. For Husserl, they are correlated with similarly distinguished conceptual categories of meaning (which would have interested Ryle). But in a categorial scheme like Husserl’s, the types of Consciousness and Brain are distinct in kind, yet may be instanced in the same concrete individual event. This Husserlian ontology cum phenomenology allows that one individual entity “I” may bear a plurality of different types of properties or relations: indeed, categorially distinct types of properties or relations including, respectively, the phenomenal and the physical. The difference between intentionality and information-processing is noteworthy here. I myself would treat these unique features of mind as formal structures, but that is a longer story.16 P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L A S P E C T S O F C O NS C I O U S N E S S I N RECENT PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

As we regard the final decade of the period 1945–2015, we find several approaches to precisely what makes a mental state or act conscious. Key proposals are designed to avoid the kind of self-monitoring that Ryle had eschewed: a sort of double-act of attention (or “intention”). As we noted earlier, David Armstrong argued for a perception-like “inner sense” that renders an experience conscious. When driving for some time, a driver may suddenly realize she has been driving along without recall of the few last miles. In that moment she is suddenly fully aware of driving around the sharp curve before her. For Armstrong, this latter state is a properly conscious state of perceptual and motor experience, and part of this state is an inner sense of what she is doing. On Armstrong’s theory, it is this form of inner “perception” that 16

See Smith 1995; 2013. Compare Yoshimi 2007 on “mathematizing phenomenology” and Yoshimi 2010 on Husserl on laws relating to mental and physical entities.

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makes the mental state conscious at that time. I presume the driver had not been previously driving unconsciously, or sleep-driving (as on the medication Ambien), but we shall need an analysis of different types of awareness to distinguish the earlier state from the self-monitoring state. At any rate, other philosophers have pursued the high-order monitoring approach to consciousness. In particular, David Rosenthal (2005) argues at length for a form of “higher-order thought” (as opposed to “higher-order perception”) that makes a mental state conscious. Such a form of self-monitoring is not a properly sensory experience but, rather, a cognitive awareness of the current experience – and, for Rosenthal, that accompanying higher-order thought renders the given experience conscious.17 It was Brentano who articulated the theory that every act of consciousness is “directed” toward some object and also incidentally toward itself; the latter directedness he called “inner consciousness” – which he distinguished from “inner observation” and from psychological introspection. By contrast, Amie Thomasson has argued for a “one-level” theory of consciousness. While starting with Brentano, Thomasson sought to avoid a secondary consciousness-ofconsciousness, or indeed any form of higher-order monitoring. On Thomasson’s model, an act of consciousness – in perceiving, thinking, desiring, and the like – need not and usually does not involve any intrinsic or accompanying self-monitoring. Rather, each conscious experience itself carries the potential for a further reflective regarding of that experience. In such reflection, the subject may effect a “cognitive shift” from, say, consciously perceiving a tree to a reflective cognition of her experience in so perceiving. What makes the experience conscious is, then, simply the lived phenomenological structure of the experience itself (if I may so gloss the view). The cognitive shift is a shift to a further state of “self-knowledge.” That shift is akin to Husserl’s technique of “bracketing” or epoché. Accordingly, we may say, phenomenal intentional experience provides the ground for subsequent phenomenological reflection on one’s passing experience, achieved via epoché. We might thus say, with just a dash of Rylean salt, that conscious experience grounds our knowing how to proceed in higher-order reflection on experience, but consciousness itself is prior to reflection and in no need of any intrinsic self-monitoring.18 Indeed, Dan Zahavi has argued, also drawing on the phenomenological tradition, that consciousness is essentially “self-given” but “pre-reflective.” Accordingly, Zahavi resists higher-order monitoring, looking to Husserl’s theory of intentional consciousness, supplemented with Jean-Paul Sartre’s 17 18

See Rosenthal 2005 for extensive discussion of this form of monitoring. And recall Armstrong 1993 [1968]. See Thomasson 2000; 2007; cf. Thomasson 2008.

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account of “pre-reflective” consciousness. Phenomenologically, consciousness remains on one level (à la Thomasson). And again, per Zahavi, consciousness does its thing without need of stepping up to a higher-level monitoring. Yet intentional consciousness is poised for phenomenological reflection in due course.19 Uriah Kriegel has argued that what makes an experience conscious is its subjective character, consisting in “the way it is for me to have it” (Kriegel 2009: 1). And this “for-me” character he explicates as a “self-representational” property of the experience. As Kriegel writes: the inner awareness of a conscious experience is one phenomenal item among others. In this sense, the inner awareness is part of the overall phenomenology. And, since a conscious experience represents itself in virtue of that inner awareness, it represents itself in virtue of one part of itself. (2009: 215)

That part is its “for-me” character, and for Kriegel it is this “subjective” character that makes the experience conscious. Importantly, the self-representing element Kriegel sees as a “logical part” of the experience (2009: 215ff ) – or rather, if I may interject, a dependent part of the experience (in Husserl’s sense). Kriegel proposes that the self-representing element of an experience may be reduced to a neural function of relevant parts of the brain. Hence “the neural correlate of consciousness . . . is not merely a neural correlate of consciousness, but also a neural reducer of consciousness” (2009: 267ff ). Higher-order monitoring has often been seen as reducible to a specific function of the brain (cf. Armstrong 1993 [1968] and Rosenthal 2005). Kriegel draws the monitoring into the experience itself, in an internal self-monitoring, nurturing the hope of reduction. We should see here, however, that such a reduction is but a variation on the category-mistake of identifying the lived phenomenal character of an experience with some categorially distinct property of its neural correlate (itself involving a pattern of electrochemical activation). Putting reduction aside, Zahavi and Kriegel (2016) have more recently joined forces in a further elaboration of the phenomenal character of subjectivity. Their target is “the notion that conscious experiences have a for-me-ness or mine-ness or subjective givenness as an integral feature and constitutive aspect of their phenomenal character” (2016: 49). And their conclusions include the principles that: “For-me-ness is an invariant dimension of phenomenal character.” And: “For-me-ness is the categorical basis of our capacity for first-person thought, which explains why we can usually . . . report on our experiences 19

See Zahavi 2005b for phenomenological detail, and recall Sartre’s conception of pre-reflective selfconsciousness in Sartre 1963a [1943].

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immediately and effortlessly” (49). I note that this form of subjectivity is specified as one particular “dimension” of phenomenal character – albeit the crucial dimension, on this view. An alternative feature of consciousness has been elaborated by Greg Janzen (2008). Brentano’s notion of “inner consciousness” and Sartre’s notion of “prereflective” self-consciousness set the scene. Janzen argues that: consciousness has a “one-state” structure (akin to one-level, à la Thomasson), where that structure includes an implicit self-awareness (à la Brentano), and this self-awareness takes a “reflexive” form in consciousness’s awareness of itself (in agreement with Sartre, and opposed to externalized “representational” forms of reflexivity that track causal or functional relations). Janzen’s model identifies the phenomenal character of an experience, its “what it is like” character, with this form of reflexive selfawareness. This character, Janzen holds, defines consciousness (2008: 1ff ). We thus have before us two proposals defining consciousness by appeal to its phenomenal character. On one view, this phenomenal character takes the form of what an experience is like “for me,” the subject. On the second view, this phenomenal character takes the form of what an experience is like “for itself” – recalling Sartre’s view that consciousness has “being for itself,” where per Sartre this form of “self-consciousness” (or conscience de soi) is constitutive of consciousness (Sartre 1956 [1943]). According to a final alternative view, which I have come to call the “modal model” of (self-)consciousness, the formal structure of a typical act of consciousness is factored into several interrelated forms. The overall structure of consciousness is framed in a phenomenological description such as: “Phenomenally in this very experience I now here see that Eucalyptus tree.” The way the object of consciousness is presented – here as “that Eucalyptus tree” – I call the mode of presentation in the experience. By contrast, the way the act is executed I call the modality of presentation in the experience – here as “phenomenally . . . I . . . see.” On this model, the separately parsed phrases indicate formally distinct features of phenomenological structure: “phenomenally,” inner awareness of “this very experience,” inner awareness of the subject “I,” spatiotemporal awareness as “now here” in the experience, the act-type “see,” and the mode-of-presentation of the object as so intended, respectively. On this model, phenomenality is its own basic character, which modifies the full structure of the “appearing” experience. Inner awareness of “this very experience” and inner awareness of the subject as “I” are distinct further features of the experience. If these three features of a typical experience are formally distinct in the “logic” of consciousness, then it is a category-mistake in phenomenology to identify phenomenality with either the “for-itself” structure alone or the “formyself” (“for-me,” “by-me”) structure alone. For both of these latter features

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are reflexive indexical features of phenomenological structure, and phenomenality governs each but does not reduce to either. The “what it is like” character of the experience is thus factored into the several distinct characters where phenomenality governs all of the other features. The term “modality” here alludes to the neo-Hintikka conception of intentional modalities (discussed above): amplified with phenomenological features highlighted by Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre.20 As we considered issues in philosophy of mind above, we indicated distinctions of ontological categories regarding mind and body, alert to potential category-mistakes. Here we consider distinctions of phenomenological categories regarding phenomenality and related features of consciousness, alert now to categorially distinct phenomenological forms. If the modal model explicates different features in the overall phenomenological structure of a typical everyday experience, this model allows for variations in distinct formal structures (or dimensions) of consciousness. If some experiences exhibit “transparency,” we may say that the form of inner awareness is either absent or merely implicit in such an experience. And if some experiences appear “self-less” or “subjectless,” we may say that the form of egocentricity (or “I . . .”) is absent in such an experience (as observed in Buddhist meditations or in analyses by Hume or Sartre). Nonetheless, these forms of subject-less consciousness remain phenomenal. In familiar forms of everyday consciousness, however, we find phenomenality governing forms of “self-consciousness,” including both inner awareness of the experience “itself” and inner awareness of “myself” at work or play. C O N C L U S I O N: O N T O “ C O G N I T I V E P H E N O M E N O L O G Y ” A N D “ P H E NO M E N A L I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y ”

As we close our historical appraisal of phenomenology vis-à-vis philosophy of mind and logic and language in the period 1945–2015, let us note the salience of phenomenal character in recent discussions of “cognitive phenomenology” and “phenomenal intentionality.” How widely distributed is phenomenal character, or “phenomenology,” as a bona fide experiential feature? Sensory experience, as in seeing a patch of blue or red, is widely granted as a “feeling” of “what it is like.” But is there a distinctive conscious experience of thinking, with its own bona fide “phenomenology”? If I consciously think that the Pacific is a glistening blue today, that experience involves an element of sensory consciousness, as I look at the water and think 20

This modal model is detailed in Smith 1986 and elaborated in Smith 2004; in the latter book, the modal model is featured in the essay “Return to consciousness” and buttressed by related essays.

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about its color. But is the intentional content of my consciously so thinking – its cognitive, conceptual, or propositional content – imbued with a lived phenomenal character of what it is like to be so thinking? Consider a richly cognitive experience. If I consciously think that “Kant rejected Hume’s skepticism,” does my so thinking have a “phenomenology” of what it is like? Recalling Husserl’s analyses of “noematic” meaning-content, we may ask, does a conscious intentional experience – in perception or thought or volition – have a phenomenal character, or “phenomenology,” that outruns any trace of purely sensory experience? A neo-Humean view holds that the phenomenal content of my Kant thought is restricted to an auditory image of the words coursing through my consciousness as I am thinking “Kant rejected Hume’s skepticism.” A contrary view notes that when I hear someone utter those words, I immediately and phenomenally hear what the other person is saying, that is, I hear the words imbued with meaning. And accordingly, an expansive view of phenomenality holds that when I consciously think that Kant rejected Hume’s skepticism, my experience of thinking has a phenomenal character that embraces the cognitive content or meaning of my so thinking: I immediately “feel” that content, as it were, in so thinking. Granted the modal model of consciousness sketched above, we may form a phenomenological description of this experience as follows: “Phenomenally in this very experience I now here think that Kant rejected Hume’s skepticism.” With that model in hand, we may say the “modal” character of phenomenality distributes through the full structure of the experience, including the propositional content “Kant rejected Hume’s skepticism.” Indeed, classical Husserlian phenomenology surely found a phenomenal intentionality at work in conscious acts of thinking, where the meaning-content of thinking is phenomenally presenting the intended object.21 Phenomenological issues are thus front and center in continuing debates about intentionality, phenomenality, phenomenal intentionality, and embodied consciousness in perception and action (e.g. Wheeler 2005; Dreyfus 2014). Accordingly, phenomenology weaves its way – with rich “cognitive phenomenology” – through contemporary philosophy of mind and language.

21

See Bayne and Montague 2011, on the contemporary debate about cognitive phenomenology. The debate begins with observations in Strawson 1994 and Siewert 1998, and is sharply posed in Pitt 2004.

45 THE IMPACT OF PRAGMATISM c h e ry l m i sak

INTRODUCTION

American pragmatism was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late 1860s in a reading group called The Metaphysical Club.1 Charles S. Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. were amongst its members. Each of these classical pragmatists has had an enduring effect not just on how the “Western” tradition of philosophy unfolded, but also on other distinct disciplines. Peirce, for instance, is considered the founder of the subject of semiotics, and his diagrammatic or iconic formal logic is now being studied as a tool for artificial intelligence and also as a freestanding competitor to the algebraic system Frege developed independently at the same time. James is still read in psychology for his fundamental ideas about the plasticity of the mind and for the richness of his insights about felt experience. His Varieties of Religious Experience continues to be an important text for those thinking about the value of religion. Holmes went on to be one of America’s most important legal theorists and Supreme Court justices, leaving indelible marks on the American legal books. The second wave of pragmatists, which included John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, and George Herbert Mead, also had wide-ranging and long-lasting impact – Dewey, for instance, in educational theory and Confucian philosophy; Lewis in logic; and Mead in sociology. In this chapter, however, I will be concerned with how the philosophical theses concerning truth and objectivity forged by the early American pragmatists have influenced philosophical thinking throughout the decades. Some of these trajectories will be well known – for instance, that Dewey and James had a major impact on contemporary philosophy through Richard Rorty. Some are less well known – for instance, that Peirce had an impact on C. I. Lewis, and that Lewis in turn influenced W. V. O. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Wilfrid Sellars, and their contemporary successors. It will be still less well known that 1

Much of what I say here is drawn from Misak 2013 and 2016.

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Peirce influenced the Cambridge philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey, and through Ramsey had a major impact both on Cambridge philosophers of science and on the later Wittgenstein and his successors. The pragmatist tradition I will focus on can be seen as comprising the following core ideas. First, pragmatism adopts a broadly empiricist account of meaning, on which the content of a word, expression, or belief resides in its consequences for action or experience. James put it thus: There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. (1975 [1907]: 30)

Closely aligned to this principle is a dispositional account of belief, on which a belief is to be individuated and assessed in terms of the actions or experiences it entails. Beliefs, Peirce said, are in part “that upon which a man is prepared to act”; or “habits of mind,” which are “good or otherwise,” or “safe” or otherwise (CP5:12 [1902]; W3, 245 [1877]).2 The classical pragmatists got this idea from the British empiricist Alexander Bain, but made it distinctive in that they moved directly from Bain’s account of belief to a doxastic account of truth. That is the next pillar of pragmatism. When pragmatists think about truth in light of their theories of meaning and belief, they arrive at a theory of truth on which truth is not to be understood as a relation between a proposition and the world, but must be understood primarily in terms of what is deserving of belief. On Peirce’s account, truth is what would be best, were we to inquire as far as we could on a matter and were we to arrive at a belief that really would stand up to all experience and argument. James at times agreed with that. But at other times he suggested that a true belief is one that works for someone – for “you and me, at definite instants of our life” (1975 [1907]: 30). This version of James would influence Rorty and one branch of pragmatism, while Peirce’s insistence that a true belief be connected to a reality that impinges upon us would influence Lewis, as well as Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Peirce argued that when inquirers see that “any belief of theirs is determined by any circumstance extraneous to the facts” they “will from that moment not merely admit in words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it ceases to be a belief” (W3, 253 [1877]). A belief is such that it resigns in the face of good evidence against it. 2

In-text Peirce citations as follows. Collected Papers (1931–58): “CPn:m” where n is the volume number and m is the paragraph number, followed by original publication year. The Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (1981-): “Wn, m” where n is the volume and m the page number, followed by original publication year.

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Finally, pragmatists adopt a fallibilist, dynamic, inquiry-centered account of knowledge; a rejection of dualisms, including the dualism of fact and value; and a commitment to the primacy of practice. Dewey’s version, for instance, took inquiry (scientific, political, legal, and so on) to be a matter of an organism facing an unstable or problematic situation and trying to resolve it so that we have “a decisive directive of future activities” (LW12, 124 [1938]).3 FROM JAMES AND DEWEY TO RORTY

In 1979, Richard Rorty revived a version of pragmatism with his revolutionary book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Over the next fifteen years he put forward a position on which he admonished us to give up the concept of truth. All we can have is agreement with our peers. He said that his narratives “tend to center around James’s version (or, at least, certain selected versions out of the many that James casually tossed off ) of the pragmatic theory of truth” (Rorty 1995: 71), and that Dewey was one of his philosophical heroes. Like James, Rorty often put forward a moderate pragmatist view, but it is his less moderate, more contentious, remarks that made him famous. As far as Rorty was concerned, the best James and the best Dewey were the radical versions of themselves who said that there is no certainty, no truth, and no objectivity to be had, only agreement within a community. Paul Carus said that James’s Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking appeared “cometlike on our intellectual horizon” in 1907 (Carus 2001 [1911]: 44). The same can be said of the impact of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature seven decades later. Its effects are still being felt in the work of Robert Brandom (1994), Michael Williams (1988), and John McDowell (1994), who were influenced by Rorty. But these three were not as revolutionary, nor as extreme, as Rorty, as their positions were influenced also by the pragmatist Wilfred Sellars, to whom we turn later. First, we shall look at another of Rorty’s philosophical heroes – Wittgenstein – and see how he was influenced by pragmatism. FROM PEIRCE TO RAMSEY TO THE LATER WITTGENSTEIN

The later Wittgenstein’s ideas that meaning is use and practice is primary seem very much in the pragmatist tradition. But since Wittgenstein himself hotly 3

In-text citations to this thirty-seven-volume critical edition of Dewey's writings give the series abbreviation, volume and page number, and original publication date. EW The Early Works (1882–98); MW The Middle Works (1899–1924); LW The Later Works (1925–53).

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denied that he was a pragmatist, it has been unclear whether the label should be affixed to him or not. One fact that paves the way for not thinking of him as being part of the pragmatist tradition is that Wittgenstein was allergic to any label – any “ism” or “Weltanschauung.” Pragmatism being an “ism,” Wittgenstein said he wasn’t interested in it. And yet, another set of facts, hidden in a relatively unknown corner in the history of analytic philosophy, makes it even more plausible to think of Wittgenstein as being influenced by pragmatism. As I have argued in Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein (Misak 2016), the pragmatist Frank Ramsey convinced Wittgenstein in 1929 to abandon his quest to nail (at least part of ) our language to the world. In the 1922 Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Wittgenstein had put forward a position on which we were to reduce everything that can be said to the primary language that mirrors objects in the world. Ramsey was the translator of the Tractatus (as an undergraduate!) and was Wittgenstein’s primary philosophical interlocutor during Wittgenstein’s wilderness years after the Great War and when he returned to Cambridge in 1929, the last year of Ramsey’s life. Ramsey was one of the few philosophers who understood Wittgenstein, and thus one of the few philosophers who could put sound objections to him. His 1923 Critical Notice of the Tractatus, published in Mind, contained the seeds of the objections that would eventually turn Wittgenstein away from the primary language and toward ordinary language – toward pragmatism. Ramsey had discovered Peirce in early 1923 and by 1926 was calling himself a pragmatist. The pragmatist objections that he set against the Tractatus were the turning point (indeed, the U-turning point) for Wittgenstein. Here are two of many of Ramsey’s objections: We cannot really picture the world as disconnected selves; the selves we know are in the world. What we can’t do we can’t do and it’s no good trying. Philosophy comes from not understanding the logic of our language; but the logic of our language is not what Wittgenstein thought. The pictures we make to ourselves are not pictures of facts. (1991 [1929]: 51) I used to worry myself about the nature of philosophy through excessive scholasticism. I could not see how we could understand a word and not be able to recognize whether a proposed definition of it was or was not correct. I did not realize the vagueness of the whole idea of understanding, the reference it involves to a multitude of performances any of which may fail and require to be restored. (1990 [1929]: 1–2)

Ramsey had adopted Peirce’s account of belief as being in part a habit or rule with which we meet the future and was in the process of developing a full pragmatist account of various kinds of beliefs when he died at the age of

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twenty-six. It was he who convinced Wittgenstein that there is nothing – no non-human thing – that holds up our rules, for instance, of making inductive inferences. There is only human habit and whether it is reliable or not. The later Wittgenstein took this idea in a direction that Rorty would later find attractive: There are no foundations, so there is nothing but human culture and convention. Ramsey would not have concurred. He did not conclude from the pragmatist insight that there are no absolute foundations, that there is nothing, besides what you can say within a form of life, to be said about what is right or wrong. He thought that we can and should try to discover what really works for humans. That’s as right as we can get, and if we acquire our beliefs by staying close to experience or the facts, that’s enough. His pragmatism, that is, was of the Peircean variety. That is, while Ramsey was responsible for Wittgenstein’s step away from the Tractatus and toward a kind of pragmatism, he would have thought that Wittgenstein then took a further step, and a step too far. What Ramsey called the “Bolshevik idea” is that different cultures make their own truth, reality, mathematics, etc. Wittgenstein became attracted to this idea, which he encountered in his conversations with the economist Piero Staffa and in the work of Spengler, after Ramsey died. It is the kind of revolutionary idea that would inspire Rorty and many others. Oxford ordinary language philosophy and its successors, for instance the work in aesthetics that emanates from Stanley Cavell, have felt the impact of pragmatism. Ramsey’s inquiry-focused version of pragmatism, on the other hand, would manifest itself in a long line of pragmatist-inflected Cambridge philosophers, including Simon Blackburn and Huw Price.4

THE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION OF DEMOCRACY

What aligns Dewey to the quietist, anti-truth version of pragmatism of the later Wittgenstein and Rorty is that he sometimes seemed to say that there is no truth, but only a temporary movement from one unproblematic situation to another unproblematic one. Whatever one’s interpretation of Dewey on this matter, it is important to see that Dewey’s signature contribution to pragmatism, and to political philosophy more broadly, was to argue that a broadly democratic method is a precondition of every domain of inquiry, from physics to politics. A “real social organization and unity” requires the space in which we can “convince and be convinced by reason” (MW10, 404 [1916]). Inquiry is the 4

See the papers collected in Misak and Price 2017 for more on how Ramsey’s pragmatism percolated through philosophy in Cambridge and for how Wittgenstein’s pragmatism percolated through Oxford.

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experimental method put to service in solving practical problems; it is an application of “cooperative intelligence” and it requires the unimpeded flow of information and the freedom to offer and to criticize hypotheses.5 That is, Dewey was the first pragmatist to see that a justification for democracy follows straight on from the pragmatist account of truth. If a warranted or true belief is one that accounts for all the experience or evidence, then if we are to aim at truth, we must get as much experience and evidence as we can. In the domain of science, that requires a commitment to certain kinds of access to data and openness of mind. In the domain of ethics and politics, this requires that everyone, in principle, in some way or another, have a say. That is, in any kind of inquiry, we have to take the perspectives and experiences of others seriously, given that we want to reach the right, or warranted, or true decision. This idea has given rise to a position in political philosophy that is sometimes called “deliberative democracy,” sometimes the “epistemic justification of democracy.” Legitimacy and authority flow from the fact that we employ a method that takes the experience of all into account, and is thus more likely to produce warranted or true decisions. In the early 1990s, Hilary Putnam, the last in the great lineage of Harvard pragmatists, started to call for a reconsideration of Deweyan democracy, bolstered by Peirce’s theory of inquiry. He put forward the idea of a pragmatist “epistemological justification of democracy” (Putnam 1992: 180). It was an idea taken up in Germany also by Jürgen Habermas (1990) and Karl-Otto Apel (1990), who argued that a condition of our possessing rationality or engaging in any discourse at all is that we (implicitly) acknowledge democratic norms or values as binding upon us. While Habermas and Apel might have focused too much on these norms’ necessity for any good pragmatist to abide (even though they called it a kind of pragmatic necessity), they were most definitely heavily influenced by pragmatism. I count myself one of the contemporary proponents of the pragmatist epistemic and deliberative conception of democracy. Along with Robert Talisse (2007), I build mostly on Peirce’s version of it. Ruth Anna Putnam (2017) has expanded on James’s version and Elizabeth Anderson (2006) on Dewey’s. While there are differences between our positions, we are united in taking experience as the driver for inquiry into what is right, just, and warranted. As Dewey put it, “formalist” theories hang on “scraps of paper” and “voices in the air” (Dewey 1941: 73–85), rather than attending to inquiry and experience. We must look to human experience or to a naturalized account of the authority or legitimacy of

5

See Dewey EW3, 33 (1895); LW11, 375 (1936).

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our moral and political principles. Holmes put forward a similar position about the authority and legitimacy of the law, upon which Dewey drew. F R O M P E I R C E T O L E W I S , T H E N T O Q U I NE , G O O DM A N , A N D S E L L A R S

When Clarence Irving Lewis arrived at Harvard as a faculty member in 1920, he “practically lived with” Peirce’s “manuscript remains” for two years (Lewis 1968 16). This massive bulk of papers had been left to Harvard in a state of disarray by Peirce’s widow and there was some hope that Lewis would start to put them into order, since he was already on a Peircean path. Lewis dipped in and out of the Peirce papers for those two years, coming to the opinion that the “originality and wealth” of this “legendary figure” was not fully evident in Peirce’s meager published writings and not well represented by those who were influenced by him (James and Royce) (Lewis 1970 [1930]: 78). Both Peirce and Lewis were after a pragmatism that rejected an ahistorical, transcendental, or metaphysical theory of truth, but was nonetheless committed to doing justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry – to the fact that those engaged in deliberation and investigation take themselves to be aiming at getting things right, avoiding mistakes, and improving their beliefs and theories. Lewis taught the next generation of first-rank philosophers, many of them recognizably pragmatist, even if they were reluctant to adopt the label. Quine, Goodman, and Sellars are the most notable of Lewis’s pragmatist progeny. They themselves had a massive impact on the next generation of analytic philosophy, not only through their own students, such as Donald Davidson, but more widely. The odd thing is that not only did they not want to acknowledge their Lewisian ancestry, but they turned against their teacher in print, pretty much burying his reputation for decades. In order to see the full impact of pragmatism on contemporary philosophy, the outlines of that story need to be traced. It was the second wave of the Harvard pragmatist juggernaut, the first being the early 1900s when James and Royce dominated the department of philosophy. Lewis had returned from a stint in California and was reintroducing the ideas of Peirce into the next generation. Quine arrived at Harvard in 1930 as a graduate student in philosophy, shortly after Nelson Goodman had graduated from his undergraduate degree. Two of Quine’s courses during his short, intense graduate study were taught by Lewis. It was here that he acquired his introduction simultaneously to epistemology and to pragmatism. Sellars, just a few years younger, then arrived and was taught by Lewis and Quine. By 1950 Morton White was on the scene as a faculty member with a strong

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background in classical pragmatism and a position very much allied to that of Lewis, Quine, Goodman, and Sellars. White (2002) would call it “holistic pragmatism.” But, for various reasons not having to do with philosophy, they were decidedly not keen on Lewis. In a series of papers, most famously Quine’s 1951 “Two dogmas of empiricism,” they attacked him for buying into what Sellars labelled “the Myth of the Given”: the myth that there is something given to us, with certainty, in experience, upon which we can, in truth-preserving ways, build the edifice of knowledge. For Quine, Goodman, Sellars, and White, there was no hard and fast distinction between the empirical and the analytic, and there were no basic or pure kinds of knowledge to underpin our less basic knowledge. Sellars undermined the distinction by arguing that all beliefs have an inescapably conceptual element: To grasp even something as simple as a triangle requires the concept of triangle so that one can classify it as such. To become aware of something in the first place is to respond to it by applying a concept. Awareness – all of it – “is a linguistic affair” (Sellars 1997 [1956]: 63). Quine undermined the distinction from the other direction. Statements about mathematics and logic have empirical content or pull their weight in our interconnected body of knowledge through the indirect structural support they provide. They are not different in kind from other statements in our webs of belief. They are not true or false solely in virtue of their meanings. But that does not mean that each and every statement can be empirically tested or verified on its own. The sentence is too small a unit to be the vehicle of empirical meaning. Rather: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (Quine 1980 [1951]: 42). What carries empirical meaning, or what has testable consequences, is a scientific theory taken as a whole: “our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body” (41). Our entire belief system must be seen as one interconnected web. Mathematics and logic are at the center, gradually shading into the theoretical sentences of science, and then to specific observation sentences at the periphery. When faced with recalcitrant experience, we must choose where to make adjustments in our web of belief. No sentence is protected from revision. We could, and on very rare occasion do, choose to revise some of our most cherished mathematical and logical assumptions. Quine argued that theories are underdetermined by the evidence and hence our choices about what to revise, when faced with recalcitrant experience, are “pragmatic.” Theory choice, once the evidence has run out, boils down to considerations of simplicity, elegance, and avoiding massive abandonment of our well-grounded beliefs. Moreover, there is no first philosophy – no theory of truth other than what science tells us is true.

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Sellars put his not dissimilar position thus. One can only be said to have a belief if one is able to locate that belief within the “logical space of reasons.” The very meaning of a sentence is its function or role within the game of asking for and accepting reasons – of “justifying and being able to justify what one says” (1997 [1956]: 76). Truth is proper assertibility relative to all possible relevant evidence. His aim was to explore our evaluative practices – the way we justify something we have done and the way we assess an action as right or wrong, an argument as valid or invalid, a belief as well grounded or ill grounded. This exploration is to be conducted, he says, by looking at “some typical contexts in which the terms ‘valid’ and ‘correct’ appear to be properly, shall I say correctly, employed” (1949: 293). We know how to apply normative terms in our language. It is a skill that one can be better or worse at, just as one can be better or worse at applying the rules of bridge. He thus calls for “a philosophically oriented behavioristic psychology” (289) or a “pragmatic empiricism” (301) that will enlighten us about what it is to follow a rule and be justified in doing so. (For more on Sellars, see Sachs, this volume.) These ideas from Quine and Sellars can be found very clearly in Peirce and Lewis (a similar point can be made about Goodman and White, but space restraints forbid developing it). Peirce argued that because knowledge and understanding are conceptual and inferential, they are open to error. A quality of feeling, a pure experience, is indescribable: “It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence . . . Stop to think of it, and it has flown!” (CP1:357 [1890]). Every one of our beliefs, including our perceptual beliefs, involves interpretation. In Lewis’s words: “There is no knowledge merely by direct awareness” (1956 [1929]: 37). The logical positivists, he thought, overemphasized what is given to us in experience (43). So did a band of realist philosophers, which included Roy Wood Sellars, father of Wilfrid. They argued that observation reports involve a direct, causal, and mirroring relationship between what is given in experience and our beliefs about what is given in experience (42ff ). Lewis opposed them, arguing that there is no making sense of the stream of experience without interpretation (195). As soon as one makes a statement or forms a belief about what one observes, the statement or belief contains much more than what is given to us by our senses. Sure, interpretation is “subject to the check of further experience.” But this does not “save” or guarantee an interpretation’s validity, for we bring a wealth of concepts to that interpretation. Moreover: “what experience establishes, it may destroy; its evidence is never complete” (195). He called his own attempt at making sense of the distinction between what is given to us and our beliefs about it “conceptual pragmatism.” It is a kind of combination of

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Peirce and Kant. We have something given to us in brute experience, which we immediately interpret. Lewis set out this position in many places, over many decades, including the 1923 aptly titled “The pragmatist conception of the a priori.” It is arguable that his An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1971 [1946]) was an exception, and perhaps this is what the new wave of pragmatists latched onto. But there is plenty of evidence that Lewis continued to promote the following position, one wants to say “right out of Quine,” except of course the order is reversed: The whole body of our conceptual interpretations form a sort of hierarchy or pyramid with the most comprehensive, such as those of logic, at the top, and the least general such as [“all swans are birds”] etc., at the bottom; that with this complex system of interrelated concepts, we approach particular experiences and attempt to fit them, somewhere and somehow, into its preformed patterns. Persistent failure leads to readjustment . . . The higher up a concept stands in our pyramid, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the more radical and far-reaching the results will be . . . The decision that there are no such creatures as have been defined as “swans” would be unimportant. The conclusion that there are no such things as Euclidean triangles, would be immensely disturbing. And if we should be forced to realize that nothing in experience possesses any stability – that our principle, “Nothing can both be and not be,” was merely a verbalism, applying to nothing more than momentarily – that denouement would rock our world to its foundations. (1956 [1929]: 305–6)

Let us set aside academic sociology and conclude charitably that Sellars, Quine, and Goodman (with his pragmatist solution to the “new riddle of induction” [1955]) put the old pragmatist points in crisp, new language and reinvigorated them, under a different name, usually “naturalism.”

46 UNRULY READERS, UNRULY WORDS Wittgenstein and Language

dav i d r. c e r b o n e I

At §194 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes the following about what tends to happen in philosophy: “When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this.”1 With just a bit of tweaking, Wittgenstein’s remark might be taken to be applicable to readers of his work: When we read Wittgenstein, we are like savages, primitive people, and so forth. At least, that is how some readers of his work must appear to other readers, given how polarized readings of his philosophy can be. Although Wittgenstein’s life extended only six years into the period of philosophy covered by this volume (as he died in 1951), his shadow – much like that of Nietzsche’s Buddha in The Gay Science – nonetheless looms over its entirety. One measure of this is the vast scholarship devoted to Wittgenstein’s work in the form of articles, anthologies, and monographs, which has grown so large as to be practically unsurveyable.2 Yet even when it is read piecemeal, as it must be, the reader can be struck by the vast divergence among prominent interpretations on the most fundamental questions concerning what Wittgenstein is up to, what his views are (including whether he should be understood as having views), what his remarks mean, which remarks should be given emphasis, which ignored or discounted, and so on. Part of this is due, no doubt, to the difficulties his writings present in terms of their status as works, as the bulk of what we have consists of manuscripts, typescripts, and notebooks, 1 2

All subsequent references to Wittgenstein’s primary works are cited in the text by section and (when relevant) page number. Another measure would be the impact of Wittgenstein’s philosophy on the development of philosophy in this period more broadly. Unlike counting the number of scholarly articles, determining this impact is a more delicate matter, as Wittgenstein often has the peculiar status of being hailed as a giant in the history of philosophy while being shunned and derided within philosophy’s current activity. I suspect a lot of this has to do with a feeling, however vague, that Wittgenstein would in some deep way disapprove of what contemporary philosophers are often up to.

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as well as writings (most notably the Philosophical Investigations itself ) that were on their way to being works (albeit unconventional ones) but were only published posthumously with considerable editorial assistance. That there is so much in the way of unregimented material certainly explains some of the disagreements and disputes among interpreters, but it does not explain all of it. One reason for thinking this is that we find such divergence even when attention is confined to Wittgenstein’s only published work, the notoriously enigmatic Tractatus, and what comes closest to a canonical work from the latter part of his life, namely, the Investigations. To illustrate the stark divide, I will take as an example Investigations §116, which appears roughly midway in the stretch of remarks (§89, 133) that are often referred to as the “chapter on philosophy,” insofar as Wittgenstein interrupts the development of various themes in order to reflect more explicitly on the nature of his own activity and its relation to philosophy more generally. Here Wittgenstein characterizes his own philosophical activity in the following way: “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” This characterization appears as a second paragraph that is preceded by a first, slightly longer one, which contrasts what “we do” with the aspirations of “philosophers” in a broader and more problematic sense: “When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition/sentence’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home?” If we stop with just this remark and ask just what kind of activity it is that Wittgenstein is referring to when he says “what we do,” a clear answer is by no means easy to come by. Of course, one can answer with Wittgenstein’s own words: what “we do” is “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”; but what doing that really means or looks like and why it should be important or have an impact on those inclined toward the “metaphysical use” of words is left entirely open.3 We might start with what seems basic or obvious: Wittgenstein is here contrasting two ways of using words (the same words), which he here labels the “everyday” and the “metaphysical.”4 That there is a contrast here is an indication of a kind of distance between those two uses: when philosophers 3 4

This contrast is at issue in Baker 2002. Baker’s handling of the distinction falls into the second variety of readings I consider here. The issue here is not a contrast between technical and non-technical vocabulary (at least not primarily), where philosophers use an array of specialized terms in contrast to the pedestrian terminology of everyday life. If that were the case, it would not be at all clear what Wittgenstein’s project could be, as there would be no prior or original “home” to which such terms might be returned.

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use words metaphysically, they use them differently than when people use them in everyday contexts. Part of what Wittgenstein is doing (in raising the question that closes the first paragraph of §116) is underscoring that difference, emphasizing the distance between the “at home” and “metaphysical” uses of words. So far, so clear, perhaps. But then one might begin to wonder about this contrast – these two different ways of using words (the “at home” and the “metaphysical”) and how it should be understood. For one thing, this remark appears well after §43, wherein Wittgenstein emphasizes the relation between the meaning of an expression and how the expression is used (a thesis sometimes condensed, again controversially, as “meaning is use”). It is more than tempting to bring that notion to bear on the contrast being offered here, such that if there are two ways of using words – everyday and metaphysical, let us say – then there are two different kinds of meaning. The contrast between everyday meanings and metaphysical meanings then becomes something like the difference between non-scientific and scientific meanings, respectively, or else between what words mean in ordinary contexts and in legal ones: The contrast suggests a difference between a loose, informal, unregimented notion of meaning and a kind of meaning that is more precise, exact, or rigorous, such that speaking in that more rigorous way requires qualification along the lines of “Strictly speaking . . .” or “If we are being careful . . .” or the like. Put this way, Wittgenstein’s activity of bringing words back would appear to be very odd indeed, as it is unclear why one would want to use words with deliberate imprecision. What, we might thus wonder, is wrong with using words “metaphysically” rather than in their “everyday” way, if the metaphysical use is more precise, rigorous, or the like? Precision and rigor would appear to be virtues in the context of doing metaphysics, where the goal is to get things right. If lawyers get to talk in a legal way and scientists get to talk in a scientific way, then why not philosophers or metaphysicians? Why don’t they get their own ways of talking, just like any other kind of specialist? In this chapter, I want to sketch out two ways of addressing these general questions, and so two ways of understanding Wittgenstein’s activity (the activity he refers to as “what we do”). For, these two different responses exemplify what I think are the two most prominent and influential approaches to Wittgenstein’s philosophy. As I hope to make clear, what is at issue is not merely a local disagreement about how to read a particular passage but the entire tenor of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I will begin with a reading of §116 that emphasizes an appeal to rules – a reading that I will, following Gordon Baker, call a policing model of

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Wittgenstein’s activity.5 After indicating some of the difficulties such a reading faces, I will sketch an alternative, dialogical approach – an approach that questions, rather than affirms, the appeal to rules in order to make sense of the phenomenon of language.6 On this dialogical reading, Wittgenstein’s critical activity takes on an entirely different look. My sympathies very much lie with the second way of reading Wittgenstein, but what I offer here will be far from conclusive. II

Here is one way of trying to answer questions concerning philosophers’ entitlement to their own ways of speaking, their own “language-games,” an answer that comes from what is often taken to be a fairly Wittgensteinian perspective. The philosophers Wittgenstein has in mind purport to talk about various things using familiar words, words which people use meaningfully in their ordinary talk. But there are rules for these uses of words, rules that people by and large follow or obey in their ordinarily meaningful talk. As Baker and Hacker explain, “speaking a language involves following these rules, exhibiting mastery of them in practice, and understanding expressions is manifested both in giving correct explanation of what they mean and in applying them correctly” (Baker and Hacker 1985: 25).7 When Wittgenstein asks whether words are “ever actually used in this way in the language,” then, he is asking whether these uses are in accord with the rules of ordinary speech. A negative answer would show that the philosopher violates the rules that constitute the ordinary meaning of these familiar words. As a result, the words in question would not make a different kind of sense but, instead, would unwittingly lapse into nonsense. To again quote Baker and Hacker: 5

6

7

I picked up this term from a presentation made by David Stern to my seminar on the Investigations several years ago, although it traces back at least to Baker 2002. See also Stern 2004: 123: The contrast between what I will be calling the policing model and the dialogical model corresponds (roughly) to the anti-Pyrrhonian and Pyrrhonian readings respectively discussed by Stern. The locus classicus for a reading of Wittgenstein along these lines is Cavell 1962, but see also Cavell 1979a for further developments. Other readings along these lines include Baker 2002, Bridges 2014, and Conant 1998, many of the essays in Crary and Read 2000, Diamond 1995, Friedlander 2011, Glendinning 2004, Minar 1995, and Morris 2007. See also Kuusela 2008, which builds upon the work of Gordon Baker. While many of these draw some inspiration from Cavell, another source of this model is Rhees 2006. (It should be noted that Rhees presents a thornier case, as it is not always clear whether he is explicating Wittgenstein’s ideas or working against what he sees as some of their shortcomings.) For a discussion of the contrast between this kind of reading and the policing model, with an attempt at (at least partial) reconciliation, see Mulhall 1998. Baker and Hacker 1980, Baker and Hacker 1985, and Hacker 1993 are central here. See also Glock 1996. Another, separate source for the identification of meaning with rules is Kripke 1982, which spawned a small industry of its own.

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Grammar, as Wittgenstein understood the term, is the account book of language . . . Its rules determine the limits of sense, and by carefully scrutinizing them the philosopher may determine at what point he has drawn an overdraft on Reason, violated the rules for the use of an expression and so, in subtle and not readily identifiable ways, traversed the bounds of sense. (1985: 55)

On this reading, the mistake the questions above are predicated upon is the thought that there are two kinds of meaning – everyday and metaphysical – that contrast with one another in terms of exactness or precision, whereas really there is only a contrast between meaning and non-meaning, sense and nonsense. Notice that this response allows for a straightforward rendering of Wittgenstein’s activity: Bringing words back to their “everyday use” is simply a matter of calling attention to the rules of usage for these words, along with documenting the way those rules have been violated by philosophers. Wittgenstein’s activity is, accordingly, one of policing the uses of words in order to expose and in some way thwart transgressions, what Baker and Hacker (and then later just Hacker)8 refer to as “carefully scrutinizing” the rules that “determine the limits of sense.” This model of Wittgenstein’s method as a kind of linguistic policing raises as many questions as it attempts to allay, however. We might wonder, for example, why we have to play by just the rules that the Wittgensteinian police officer manages to ferret out of our usual ways of talking.9 What makes these rules – whatever they are – sacrosanct or inviolable? Can’t philosophers legitimately change the rules or play by different ones? If everyday folk get to play “language-games,” then why can’t metaphysicians make up their own games and speak however they want, or at least however they agree to let each other speak? I want to suggest quickly that, at this point, the savages are already at the gate, since this invocation of sacrosanct or inviolable rules is apt to make Wittgenstein’s project come off as a rather bizarre form of parochialism – indeed, as an idolization of the Volk, a privileging of the untutored and the customary. Ernest Gellner, a longstanding critic of ordinary language philosophy, reads Wittgenstein as exhibiting just such a perverse preference, insofar as Wittgenstein deploys a “communal-cultural vision of thought” in order “to solve or dissolve abstract problems of knowledge, to proclaim that they do not really arise, that our customary thought processes stand before no bar, face no indictment, have no case to answer” (Gellner 1998: 77). For Gellner, the aim of 8 9

Baker 2002 exemplifies Baker’s departure from the interpretation he developed in collaboration with Hacker. Whether there even are such rules is an issue to which we will return shortly.

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Wittgenstein’s later philosophy was to dissolve “the problem of the validation of our thought styles, our habits of reasoning and inference” by applying a “profoundly populist” method (77). On this reading, Wittgenstein believed “our conceptual customs are valid precisely because they are parts of a cultural custom. It is not merely the case that no other validation is available: no other validation is either possible or necessary. The very pursuit of such extra-cultural validation is the error of thought” (77). To bring words back to their everyday use, then, would be to insist that “custom is all we have, all we can have, and all we need” (77). But Gellner’s charge that Wittgenstein fetishizes the “village green” is at odds with much of what Wittgenstein actually says in the Investigations, starting at the very beginning of the book. Consider in particular the closing sentences of §18: Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs and straight and regular streets and uniform houses.

Wittgenstein does not say here whether or not the “maze of little streets and squares” includes a village green but, either way, there is nothing in his remark that displays any kind of favoritism toward the more ancient parts of the “city” of language: There is no lament regarding the appearance of the “new suburbs,” no call that their growth be curtailed, their sprawl reined in. The “diversity” of language “is not something fixed, given once for all” (PI, §23). Instead, “new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten” (PI, §23). And consider: “Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (PI, §25). Just as these latter change, taking on different and often unexpected forms – even as older forms persist, sometimes hardly changing at all – so too is there a dynamic interchange as new vocabularies and styles emerge and older ones give way. This living, dynamic vision of language (which emerges at the very beginning of the Investigations) does not sit well with the kind of conservatism Gellner, Hacker, and others attribute to Wittgenstein.10 It raises questions about the policing model insofar as it raises a worry as to whether an appeal to rules carries a kind of ultimate critical force to determine what someone can or cannot mean by their words. If “new types of language” are continually coming into existence while older kinds often fade away, then an appeal to linguistic rules risks

10

I discuss the general issue of Wittgenstein and conservatism, including Gellner, in Cerbone 2003.

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being perpetually behind the curve.11 Perhaps there is another way of understanding what it might mean to return words to their “everyday use.”

III

At Tractatus 5.4733, Wittgenstein writes: Frege says that any legitimately constructed proposition must have a sense. And I say that any possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and, if it has no sense, [then] that can only be because we have failed to give a meaning to some of its constituents. (Even if we think we have done so.)12

It might be difficult to see what the contrast could be between what Wittgenstein says Frege says, on the one hand, and Wittgenstein’s alternative, on the other. The difference might be understood as something like this: On Frege’s conception of a proposition, we can distinguish between those propositions that are legitimately constructed and those that are not; that is, there are two kinds of propositions, legitimate and illegitimate ones. This distinction between legitimate and illegitimate propositions allows for a further distinction between different ways of not making sense: A string of words might not make sense by amounting to a nonsensical proposition or, alternatively, by failing to be a proposition at all. Nonsensical propositions, unlike nonsensical strings of words, would still have a kind of sense – a nonsensical sense – because the words’ meanings do not fit together in the right sort of way, in which case the proposition is nonsensical because of what the words in fact mean. To make such a distinction is thus to conceive of words as having their meanings independently of the role they play in meaningful propositions, which is a way of conceiving meaning Frege himself vehemently rejected.13 Wittgenstein’s diagnosis – that failures of sense arise from our failure to give a meaning to some of the constituents of the proposition-like string of words – avoids that way of thinking about meaning. Here Wittgenstein takes himself to be more true to Frege than Frege himself was, as can be seen in the parenthetical remark that ends the above quote. For Frege insisted on sharply distinguishing between the logical and the psychological, and Wittgenstein is 11

12 13

In less savage terms than Gellner’s, the rule-bound policing model incurs the problem of what is sometimes called semantic inertia. See, for example, Gregory 1987 (although Gregory is not directly concerned with Wittgenstein). Here I draw upon the work of Cora Diamond and James Conant. See the essays collected in Diamond 1995, as well as Conant 2002. Frege warns, “never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition” (1980: x). This is often referred to as Frege’s Context Principle.

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echoing that insistence here.14 It is not enough to think that we have given a word a meaning. Thinking that is enough is what leads to the problematic distinction between kinds of nonsense which we have been considering. Here the problem is that we retain in thought the meanings of words as they appear in meaningful propositions, which gives them the illusion of meaning something in strings of words that are not really propositions at all. To begin to demonstrate the relevance of this foray into the Tractatus, first consider just a bit more of the Tractatus. In the remark immediately preceding the one we have been considering (5.47321), Wittgenstein invokes Occam’s razor, which he reads as entailing “that unnecessary units in a sign-language mean nothing.” This appeal to Occam helps us understand what Wittgenstein means when he goes on to record his divergence from Frege on the matter of legitimate and illegitimate propositions. For Wittgenstein, to fail to give a meaning to the constituents of a would-be proposition is to fail to indicate what role those constituents play in the overall string of words. It is, moreover, to leave unclear what, if any, work they are doing. This, moreover, is actually Occam’s second appearance in the Tractatus: Far earlier, at Tractatus 3.328, Wittgenstein appeals to Occam in a way that connects meaning with use: If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam’s maxim. (If everything behaves as if a sign had meaning, then it does have meaning.)

These ideas about meaning and use – sense and nonsense – carry over into Wittgenstein’s later work. In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein writes: “I want you to remember that words have those meanings which we have given them; and we give them meanings by explanations.” Here Wittgenstein appeals once again to the idea of giving words meaning, glossing this idea in terms of offering explanations of what we mean when using words. This further appeal to explanation allows for a way to distinguish between giving a word meaning and only thinking one has done so. In the latter case, the need for explanation will be felt and the possibility of that explanation misfiring (thereby requiring still further explanation) will likewise arise. Notice already that we are diverging from the transgressive model connected to the appeal to rules. On that earlier model, failures of sense are determined by a word’s deviance from an antecedent rule: In light of that rule for the use of the word, its meaning doesn’t fit or work here. (That is, what is said does not make 14

See again Frege 1980: x: Frege’s warning “always to separate the psychological from the logical” immediately precedes the statement of his Context Principle.

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sense because of what the word means, according to the rules that determine its meaning.) Whereas Wittgenstein again insists in The Blue Book, as he did in the Tractatus, that the problem is not one of a sense being illicitly used but, instead, of the sense not (yet) being determined.15 The issue of sense and nonsense is thus, we might say, dialogical rather than dictatorial: A failure of sense is a failure to be understood by whomever one’s words are directed toward (including oneself ), a failure which in turn can elicit a request for explanation. The explanation may succeed in clarifying what was said, and so moving the discussion forward – or it may not, in which case further requests may be forthcoming. Such back and forth is quite different from the idea of appealing to rules that settle the matter, that show that what was said cannot make sense. Earlier in The Blue Book, Wittgenstein considers the example of someone’s talking about where he feels his visual image to be located, and his way of handling the example illustrates the distinctions I’ve been emphasizing here: We don’t say that the man who tells us he feels the visual image two inches behind the bridge of his nose is telling a lie or talking nonsense. But we say that we don’t understand the meaning of such a phrase. It combines well-known words, but combines them in a way we don’t yet understand. The grammar of the phrase has yet to be explained to us. (BB, 10)

That we don’t yet understand – that the grammar has yet to be explained to us – leaves open the possibility of further discussion, further invitations for explanation, and so forth. We don’t (yet) know what someone is doing with those words and so we don’t (yet) know what he is trying to say in talking about “where he feels the visual image.” That, however, is different from saying that he cannot mean anything because saying that violates the rules for “feels” and “visual image.” Indeed, Wittgenstein points out that any such rules are for the most part not forthcoming. We do not already know how to enumerate the rules that would determine correct and incorrect self-ascriptions of where one sees from, as it were. When “we are asked to give such rules, in most cases we aren’t able to do so.” This is not because “we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real [already established] ‘definition’ to them. To suppose that there must be would be like supposing that whenever children play with a ball they play a game according to strict rules” (BB, 25).

15

Compare Investigations, §500: “When a sentence is called senseless, it is not, as it were, its sense that is senseless. Rather, a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.”

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Consider at this juncture an example that occupies Wittgenstein in The Blue Book. Here Wittgenstein devotes considerable attention to the case of a scientist’s (likely Sir Arthur Eddington) report that modern physics has discovered that tables and other commonplace items are not really solid.16 Saying this has the appearance of a remarkable discovery, as it suggests that people are by and large mistaken in their views about much of what populates the world around them. There are, to be sure, remarkable discoveries concerning microphysical reality that prompt the scientist to put forward such claims. At the microphysical level, objects that we would ordinarily classify as solid – my desk, the floor I walk on, and so forth – turn out to be composed of vast numbers of rapidly moving particles and an even greater amount of empty space. This vast emptiness shows, the scientist claims, that tables and the like are not really solid. Wittgenstein refers to this example as a “parable,”17 arguing that this popular-scientific way of framing the relation between physics and our everyday conception of things involves a “misuse” of language. When the scientist presents modern physics as discovering that tables and the like are not really solid, they are using the word in a way that is divorced from its ordinary use. Wittgenstein does not say it in The Blue Book, but here the word “solid” is “on holiday” (see Investigations, §38) insofar as it is vacationing away from the implications the word usually carries, and thus from the kind of work the word does when we use it. Typically, when we use the word “solid” in relation to things such as tables and floors, the term is used in contrast to such notions as rotten, flimsy, fragile, unstable, and so on. If, for example, a friend is giving me a tour of her old barn, she might say: “Careful! Don’t step there – the floor is not solid!” Here not being solid carries such implications as that the floor is rotted away, that I need to exercise caution in how and where I step, that other parts of the floor are solid in terms of being safe for me to walk, and so on. That is what it means to say

16 17

See the Introduction to Eddington 1929. Hacker’s recent efforts (with the collaboration of M. R. S. Bennett) to criticize the language of contemporary neuroscience provides a perhaps more serious example of the different ways to understand the lessons of Wittgenstein’s parable. See Bennett and Hacker 2003, as well as Bennett et al. 2007. Hacker and Bennett base their critical examination of neuroscience on what I have called the policing model, since they maintain that “nonsense is generated when an expression is used contrary to the rules for its use” (Bennett et al. 2007: 12). Daniel Dennett’s reply to Hacker and Bennett, wherein he charges that they have “no idea what ‘the rules’ for the use of these everyday psychological terms are” (85), is instructive on these matters, since Dennett emphasizes that what matters in the language of contemporary neuroscience is the work everyday psychological terms do in conducting neuroscientific research. Although Dennett expresses disdain for any appeal to “Saint Ludwig,” I think his response to Hacker and Bennett is far more consonant with Wittgenstein’s philosophy than it is with their project. This should be less surprising than it might initially sound, as Dennett has often acknowledged the importance of Wittgenstein in the development of his own views on consciousness and the mind (see e.g. Dennett 1991: 463).

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that the word is doing some kind of work. There are, however, no such implications when it comes to the popular scientist’s “discoveries” regarding the solidity of things.18 When I learn that the floor consists of mostly empty space, I may feel a certain sense of intellectual surprise, but I will not change how I walk, nor will I be any less inclined to place my coffee cup on my desk or sit down in my favorite chair. The scientist’s discovery – or his presenting the discovery this way – does not affect any of the usual contrasts and practical implications that “solid” carries. This is why Wittgenstein says that “our perplexity was based on a misunderstanding; this picture of the thinly filled space had been wrongly applied. For the picture of the structure of matter was meant to explain the very phenomenon of solidity” (BB, 45). The misapplication consists in the picture’s being taken to impugn ways of characterizing things at an entirely different level; or, rather, the misapplication consists in the picture’s not impugning those ways while carrying the suggestion that it does. In saying that the example of “solid” involves a “misuse” of language, it is tempting to hear Wittgenstein as charging that the scientist has violated the rules for using the word “solid.” Wittgenstein does say that the word is being used “in a typically metaphysical way, namely without an antithesis,” but it is not clear how that violates a rule for the use of “solid” in particular. On the contrary, the absence of a ready antithesis in the scientist’s use of “solid” leaves it open or unclear just what the scientist is saying, as well as how what he is saying comports with what we typically say in talking about the things around us. Insofar as there is a rule at issue, it is the scientist who imputes to our uses of “solid” a rule, such that the discoveries of modern physics compel us to withdraw its ascription. That the scientist’s remarkable discovery contravenes “ordinary language” depends on its being a rule for describing something as solid that it not consist of mostly empty space. Yet, while there is something surprising about science’s discoveries regarding the table’s being “thinly filled space,” there is nothing in that discovery that compels us to retract the ascription of solidity to the table. We can, without contradiction, say things along the lines of “Science has demonstrated that solid tables consist of mostly empty space.”19

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This is not to say that there may be no implications whatsoever to the scientist’s use of “solid.” The suggestion, rather, is that whatever implications those are move in other directions, further undermining the appearance of conflict. Imagine, using the procedure that Wittgenstein describes at §82 of the Investigations, following someone around, noting his talk about his solid pick-up truck, the solid gold bracelet he bought for his girlfriend (because they have a solid relationship), the solid A he got on his philosophy paper, and so on. While all these uses hang together in a certain sense, so that we can discern what “solid” means in each case (which means we can see what kind of work it is doing in each case), what is not clear is that there is anything like a rule that holds them all together.

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IV

I said before that the rule-centered, policing model of Wittgenstein’s activity of returning words to their everyday use managed to summon the “savages” in fairly short order. So, on the alternative I have been sketching, in which the role of rules in making sense of linguistic meaning gets discounted, do corresponding forms of savagery threaten to arise? I do not think there is anything that plays quite the same role as Gellner’s parochialism that might gain an audience here, but it is worth noting that there is a kind of savagery that is internal to this alternative, dialogical model. Here there is nothing like a network of rules that secures or ensures the success of communication – of meaning and being understood; on this vision, language is held together by nothing more (but also nothing less) than what Cavell aptly dubs “the whirl of organism” – a fact that is, as Cavell himself notes, both “simple” and “terrifying” (Cavell 1962: 74). This terror, however, arises from the desire that language rest on something more than just our shared sensibilities and inclinations, our (ongoing) activity of making ourselves understood to one another through our (ongoing) willingness to explain what we mean. It rests on a desire, in other words, for something we conceive to be, in some special way, really, genuinely solid.

47 ANGLO-AMERICAN EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY mar k a . w rat ha l l an d pat r i c k lo n d e n

A significant development in late twentieth-century philosophy was the fusion of pragmatist and analytic currents of thought in the Anglo-American tradition with existential approaches to phenomenology and philosophy in the European tradition. The foremost champion of this fusion was Hubert Dreyfus, although other prominent philosophers like Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty also have been influential in bringing existential phenomenology to bear on the analytic mainstream of philosophy in the English-speaking world. Dreyfus’s pragmatism-inflected and analytically friendly style of phenomenology draws freely on the work both of analytic philosophers like Wittgenstein, C. I. Lewis, Quine, and Davidson, as well as of Continental thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, and Foucault. Dreyfus was a pioneer in showing how phenomenology and existentialism are relevant to the concerns of contemporary analytic philosophy, but also in forging a distinctively AngloAmerican style of existential phenomenology. In this chapter, we articulate some of the salient features – both the methodological presuppositions and the characteristic doctrines – of Dreyfus’s existential approach to phenomenology. In doing so, we hope to survey the contours of the philosophical space opened up by his fusion of European existential phenomenology with Anglo-American philosophy. We then turn, in the second half of the chapter, to a critical examination of a specific problem faced by Dreyfus’s approach to philosophy – the problem of understanding the kind of normativity that governs human action, given his radically pragmatist and non-discursive conception of human agency. S A L I E NT F E A T U R E S O F D R E Y F U S ’ S A P P R O A C H T O E X I S T E N T I A L P H E N O ME N O LO G Y

To fully appreciate the impact Dreyfus had on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century philosophy, it is important to attend to both the 646

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methodological tendencies and the substantive philosophical commitments that are central to his work. 1. Methodology. Dreyfus practices a hermeneutic phenomenology – that is, he addresses philosophical problems through an interpretative description of the phenomena at issue. “Phenomenology,” in the words of Heidegger, means “a grasping of its objects in such a way that everything which is up for discussion must be dealt with in a direct exhibition and a direct demonstration” (SuZ 35). On this view, philosophical insight requires, first, the right kind of direct, firstpersonal experience of the phenomena in question and, second, the right kind of hermeneutic reading or interpretative account of the phenomena. The methodology is also hermeneutic in a second sense: the description of the phenomena is guided by the interpretation of philosophical texts, texts in which other thinkers have tried to come to grips with the same phenomena. At the same time, direct experience of the phenomena guides the interpretation of the texts. The description of experience and textual exegesis thus form inextricably intertwined moments of a hermeneutical circle: “I try to use [the] text to draw attention to pervasive phenomena that are often overlooked,” Dreyfus explains, “and then use an elaboration of these phenomena to cast exegetical light on the text” (Dreyfus 2017: 27). One can think of different approaches to the history of philosophy as falling on a spectrum. At one extreme, philosophy is practiced as the interpretation of historical texts, with a regulative ideal of a perfect exegetical fidelity that restricts itself only to what the author directly could have intended to mean given the historical conditions and understandings that prevailed at the time. At the other extreme, philosophy is practiced as “problem solving” – as taking up timeless philosophical problems and working out solutions to the challenges they pose (or at least dissolving the appearance of a problem). When a “problem solving” approach to philosophy bothers to read historical texts, it treats them as offering little more than a catalogue of alternative attempts to address a common problem. There are good reasons to doubt the viability of a position at either extreme. Every philosophical problem is indelibly shaped by the historical conditions under which it arises as well as by the forms of life and patterns of thought that make it a salient issue. It is naïve to try to treat questions in philosophy without at least some appreciation for the history that generates them, and one risks significant misunderstanding when one takes philosophers in past ages to be addressing precisely the same questions that preoccupy us today. At the other end of the spectrum, it is simplistic to think that we could get access to a philosopher’s intended meaning without ourselves appreciating

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the problems and matters that provoked her reflection. That means we have to interpret philosophical texts in conjunction with our own independent effort to work through the philosophical issues they pose according to our own best lights. As practiced by, for example, Heidegger, phenomenology occupies a position somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. It insists on the significance of interpretative engagement with the historical tradition of philosophy, but it also insists on interpreting those historical texts in a way that draws on our contemporary grasp of the problems of philosophy. Heidegger explained that every interpretation must of course not only take things from the text but must also, without forcing the matter, be able quietly to give something of its own, something of its own concerns. This something extra is what the layman, comparing it to what he takes to be the content of the text devoid of all interpretation, necessarily deplores as interpolation and sheer caprice. (Heidegger 1987 [1940]: 191–2; 1997a [1939–46]: 236)

Elsewhere, Heidegger took the even stronger position that “it is impossible to understand a thinker in his or her own terms” (Heidegger 2002b [1951–52]: 112). To understand a philosophical text at all, he insisted, requires us to “ask our way into the questioning of a thinker, pursue it into the questionableness of his thought” (112) – and that meant, for Heidegger, to read it as addressing the one “living question” (lebendige Frage) that he believed was at the heart of all great philosophy, both past and present. “In the history of philosophy,” Heidegger noted, “all thinkers say fundamentally the same thing” (1983 [1935/53]: 74), because “in some sense all philosophy interrogates existence” (Heidegger 1994a [1923–24]: 319).1 Heidegger was fully aware that by departing in such an extreme way from the ideal of perfect exegetical fidelity, his readings of the historical canon would be controversial. “We willingly admit,” Heidegger noted defiantly, “that what we are doing here is historically false, that is, false according to the judgment of professional historians of philosophy” (Heidegger 1995a [1931]: 120; 1981b [1931]: 142). It is in the same spirit that Dreyfus reorients the interpretation of the texts of philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard

1

When Heidegger took issue with more mainstream approaches to the history of philosophy, it was only because they interpreted the history of philosophy in light of the wrong questions. At the same time, he held that “all philosophical discussion, even the most radical attempt to begin all over again, is pervaded by traditional concepts and thus by traditional horizons and traditional angles of approach” (GA24: 30). This is why a deconstruction of the history of philosophy is necessary to get to the actual question that philosophers were addressing, whether they knew it or not.

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toward the problems that motivate contemporary work in the analytic mainstream of philosophy and the cognitive sciences.2 By the same token, he treats works of analytic philosophy as if they are engaged in a project of phenomenological description – a project that itself grows out of a particular background understanding of being. Many philosophers working in the Continental tradition took umbrage at Dreyfus’s almost complete disregard for the social, historical, and especially political context of Heidegger’s life. Habermas reportedly complained once that “Dreyfus treats Being and Time as if it had just washed up as flotsam on the shores of some Californian beach.”3 Dreyfus recounted this anecdote with impish delight, because for him it was a virtue rather than a defect of his approach that he could stay focused on the phenomena that motivated Heidegger’s concern without getting drawn into issues like Heidegger’s reprehensible entanglement with National Socialism.4 2. Substantive Philosophical Commitments. At the substantive core of Dreyfus’s style of existential phenomenology is a particular vision of what it means to be human – namely, a vision of human existence as practical, engaged, and (at its best) passionately committed being-in-the-world. At the risk of considerably oversimplifying things, we want to focus here on four substantive philosophical commitments that we take to be central and foundational to this vision. They are: (1) the thesis of the primacy of practice; (2) the belief that highly skilled, fluid coping is paradigmatic for understanding practice in general; (3) the thesis that ontology is contained in background practices; and (4) the belief that a meaningful life comes from taking a stand on one’s existence. Let’s look at each of these commitments in turn.

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Dreyfus also reads these “Continental” thinkers as offering accounts that complement one another – sometimes in surprising ways. For instance, as we will see below, Dreyfus sees Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality to be straightforwardly applicable to explaining Heidegger’s account of coping with equipment. The remark was made in a joint workshop in Frankfurt in 1989, featuring Habermas, Dreyfus, and Karl-Otto Apel. The remark is reported by Christensen (1998: 84). Christensen, who was a participant in the workshop, complains that “in the otherwise commendable effort to make Heidegger intelligible, Dreyfus one-sidedly maps him on to debates and problems within contemporary cognitive science and North American philosophy of psychology.” Christensen takes issue with the interpretation of Heidegger that results from this: “once he has in this way been brought up to speed with Dreyfus’s own unquestioned present, Heidegger now appears as a proto-participant in contemporary North American debates” (84–5). Heidegger himself famously argued that a philosophical interpretation of a philosophical text requires us to resist the tendency to explain a philosopher’s works “in terms of the influences of their milieu and from the results of the predispositions for ‘life’ that belong to them” (Heidegger 1996b [1936–39]: 447). In Heidegger’s case, it is unsettling to discover just how very influenced he was by his milieu.

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The thesis of the primacy of practice is, in the words of William Blattner, the thesis that “the intelligence and intelligibility of human life is explained primarily by practice and . . . the contribution made by cognition is derivative” (Blattner 2007: 17).5 The thesis thus depends on maintaining a relatively sharp distinction between cognition and practical activity and on showing that human comportment responds to meanings – and itself has a meaning – that cannot be captured in terms of the propositional states and attitudes that are native to the sphere of cognition. From his early work on computers and AI through his later works on hermeneutic realism, nihilism, technology, and the philosophy of life, Dreyfus argued consistently that making practical sense of things through skillful action is the fundamental mode of human engagement with the world. He developed in considerable detail the thought, advanced by both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that the articulation of the world that is carried out in our practical engagement with our environment is the foundation for the cognitive attitudes. Explaining just precisely how practical intelligibility is foundational for cognitive intelligibility is an ongoing project. Samuel Todes’s Body and World (1996), a work Dreyfus admired and often drew upon, is an impressive (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to provide the details of such an account. Dreyfus’s APA presidential address offers a good assessment of where things stand in the execution of this project (Dreyfus 2014: 104–24). We should note that many philosophers inspired by Dreyfus’s brand of existential phenomenology question whether we can or should draw such a sharp distinction between cognition and practice. One can understand thought itself as a kind of practice, one which we can engage in more or less expertly. And even if practical intelligibility cannot be captured in thought, cognition undoubtedly enhances our ability to act in a number of ways. Through thought we can set aims or goals for action; we can deliberate about how best to reach those aims; we can redirect and concentrate our focus as we act. In the terms we will develop later in this chapter, thought can play a role in switching practical gestalts, and it holds open on the horizon of our current activity other gestalts that could reorient us to the present practical situation. An existential-phenomenological approach to action thus should not see all thought as inimical to fluid coping. Highly skilled, fluid coping is paradigmatic for understanding practice in general. Dreyfus rejects mainstream accounts of human activity, which take as their paradigm planned, deliberate action. As a result of Dreyfus’s work, many philosophers working in the emerging Anglo-American style of existential

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For a more in-depth exploration of some of the issues surrounding this thesis, see Wrathall 2017.

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phenomenology accept that the consummate form of human activity is the highly skilled, fluid kind of action that Dreyfus calls “coping,” the activity of responding immediately and expertly to the solicitations of a practical setting. We are all intimately familiar with many examples of everyday coping – sitting down to a meal, carrying on a conversation with close friends, getting dressed in the morning, typing at a keyboard – even if we don’t usually think of these as forms of expertise. But in all these cases and many more, we are typically highly skilled at discerning and responding appropriately to the subtle features and specific requirements of each situation. And when we are coping at our best in these activities, we do so without any explicit sense of effort, responding intuitively to the unfolding of circumstances without having to stop and think about what we are trying to accomplish – or otherwise needing to represent the conditions of satisfaction of our activity. Such skills, one might say, are embodied rather than known. Coping skills are nevertheless guided by our grasp of the right or appropriate thing to do. Success in fluid coping is a matter of achieving and maintaining the best possible grip on the situation, one in which solicitations to act are effortlessly met by the appropriate responses. Ontology is contained in background practices. A background practice is a complex structure of skillful dispositions to act, organized equipmental contexts, and acts of mutual recognition – a structure that is so familiar and pervasive that we scarcely (if at all) recognize it as a practice as such. Background practices operate in the background of the actions to which we typically attend. Every day, each of us performs innumerable actions as a part of very complex but inconspicuous practices. For instance, I adopt a certain posture when I approach a clerk in a store so that I will be acknowledged and can ask a question. In doing this, I am participating in and reinforcing a practice that not only organizes the domain of commercial activity. It also helps establish an ontology that determines what it is to be human, because, in showing a certain kind of respect or deference to the store clerk, I manifest and reinforce an understanding of what it means to be a human being. Dreyfus argues that these fundamental, nearly inconspicuous practices – practices to which we all contribute and in which we all take part – embody an ontology that is transmitted to everyone who is inaugurated into those practices. In our technological world, for instance, the basic understanding of all entities as resources is established and reinforced by the practices we acquire from infancy onward: Our everyday know-how involves an understanding of what it is to be a person, a thing, a natural object, a plant, an animal, and so on. Our understanding of animals these days, for example, is in part embodied in our skill in buying pieces of them, taking off their

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plastic wrapping, and cooking them in microwave ovens. In general, we deal with things as resources to be used and then disposed of when no longer needed. A styrofoam cup is a perfect example. When we want a hot or cold drink it does its job, and when we are through with it we throw it away. This understanding of an object is very different from what we can suppose to be the Japanese understanding of a delicate, painted teacup, which does not do as good a job of maintaining temperature and which has to be washed and protected, but which is preserved from generation to generation for its beauty and its social meaning. Or, to take another example, an old earthenware bowl, admired for its simplicity and its ability to evoke memories of ancient crafts, such as is used in a Japanese tea ceremony, embodies a unique understanding of things. It is hard to picture a tea ceremony around a styrofoam cup. (Dreyfus 2017: 178–9)

These first three substantive commitments imply that to inhabit a world is to achieve a high level of skill in participating in the background practices that disclose the world. In addition, the thesis that ontology is contained in the background practices leads Dreyfus to an ontological pluralism, according to which the understanding of being changes along with changes in the background practices, and according to which any given world is contingent and no world can lay a claim to absolute validity. “The understanding of being in those practices,” Dreyfus explains, “cannot be spelled out in detail and given a transcendental or metaphysical grounding” (2017: 51). Together, these commitments have important implications for the way we think about a worthwhile human existence. A meaningful life comes from taking a stand on one’s existence. Much more is at stake in Dreyfus’s landmark What Computers Can’t Do than a “critique of artificial reason.” Dreyfus’s arguments are rooted in “an alternative conception of man” (Dreyfus 1972: 192), a conception that, he fears, is being erased as “people have begun to think of themselves as objects able to fit into the inflexible calculations of disembodied machines – machines for which the human form-of-life must be analyzed as a meaningless list of facts, rather than the flexible pre-rational basis of rationality. Our risk [Dreyfus concludes] is not the advent of super-intelligent computers, but of subintelligent human beings” (192). In warning of a possible devolution into “subintelligent” beings, Dreyfus is not really worried about impaired intellectual capacities. Rather, his focus is intelligence in the broad sense of the ability to discover and respond to meanings. As Dreyfus develops this thought in his subsequent work, he comes to hold that our highest achievement as humans is to play a role in uncovering meanings and preserving or disclosing worlds. The passage from What Computers Can’t Do also points to another central concern: the way that the practices of the technological world we inhabit tend to “level” down and strip out meaningful differences. The Internet is an illuminating example of how emerging

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technological practices do this: “Thanks to hyperlinks, meaningful differences have, indeed, been leveled. Relevance and significance have disappeared. And this is an important part of the attraction of the Web. Nothing is too trivial to be included. Nothing is so important that it demands a special place” (Dreyfus 2017: 223; see also Dreyfus 2008.) This fourth substantive commitment that runs throughout Dreyfus’s work is thus a view about how best to counteract the spreading nihilism that characterizes the technological age. Overcoming nihilism will require an ability to recognize and respond to the technological understanding of being that is embodied in our background practices. Most of the time background practices are invisible to us while we are absorbed in our everyday activities and concerns; they are “like the water to the fish” (Dreyfus 2017: 49). But, Dreyfus argues, we can come to recognize the contingency of the background practices we inhabit – for instance, in an experience of anxiety- and guilt-provoked uncanniness (à la Heidegger),6 or through a genealogy of power (à la Foucault).7 Once we have recognized this contingency, new possibilities open up. One possibility is to clarify for oneself what is ultimately at stake in one’s (admittedly contingent) world, and commit oneself to reinforcing the coherence of the world by reengaging in everyday practices with renewed perspicacity and an increasingly refined sense of the social situation. Dreyfus dubs people who do this “social virtuosos,” because they find meaning through their resolute commitment to developing in their own expert way what has been given to them in the form of fixed social norms (2017: 33ff; cf. Rorty 1989). Another possibility is to open up new styles of inhabiting a world by developing formerly marginal practices into whole new coherent sets of background practices. Dreyfus refers to such a person as a “cultural master,” because he “takes up marginal possibilities in his culture’s past in a way that enables him to change the style of a whole generation and thereby disclose a new world” (2017: 44). Both the cultural master and the social virtuoso take a stand on their existence. They experience something as making demands on them – either an existing cultural style or a marginal practice. Such things are contingent, vulnerable, and for that reason

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Dreyfus summarizes Heidegger’s view as follows: “Not only is human being interpretation all the way down, so that our practices can never be grounded in human nature, God’s will, or the structure of rationality, but this condition is one of such radical rootlessness that everyone feels fundamentally unsettled (unheimlich), that is, senses that human beings can never be at home in the world” (Dreyfus 1991: 37). Dreyfus summarizes Foucault’s view as follows: “The space that governs human activity by determining what counts as a thing, what counts as true/false and what it makes sense to do, is not static, nor does it have abrupt discontinuities, but it does fall into a distinguishable, if overlapping, series of epochs” (Dreyfus 2017: 158).

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meaningful. They then commit themselves to preserving or developing those meaningful practices. On Dreyfus’s “alternative conception of man,” we are all experts at a multitude of mundane activities that together determine the being of everything that is. Our lives gain meaning when we, like the social virtuoso or cultural master, “take a stand” on our way of disclosing the world by committing ourselves to developing in our own way the possibilities opened up by existing practices. In disclosing meanings by taking a stand on existence, Dreyfus believes that we realize our highest dignity as human beings and, in the process, also help to counteract the spreading nihilism of the contemporary understanding of being. PRACTICAL NORMATIVITY AND MAXIMAL GRIP

Like more mundane forms of skillful coping, activities of world disclosure also have a normative structure baked into them – a structure that doesn’t require us to form deliberate intentions or even to have an ability to identify upon reflection the determinate goals or success conditions of our action. This normativity is instead manifest in the way agents achieve and maintain what Dreyfus calls an “optimal” or a “maximal grip” on the world: “as experts in getting around in the world, we are all constantly drawn to what MerleauPonty thinks of as a maximal grip on our situation” (2014: 240). But what exactly is a “maximal grip” on a situation? Is having a maximal grip something that we do? Is it a comportment? Or is it just something that happens to us? And what is the normativity implied in the notion of a maximal grip? Maximal with respect to what? On a representationalist view of action, it is a relatively straightforward matter to explain the normativity of action. Something only counts as an action if it stands in the right kind of relation to a representation of conditions of satisfaction. Because the agent can represent to herself the aim or goal of her activity – the conditions of satisfaction of the action – she is in a position to recognize whether and how her movements are succeeding or failing to advance her toward the realization of her purposes. In addition, the representationalist account has a straightforward story to tell about how the norm plays a role in generating and determining the significance of the action since, on this view, the agent’s entertaining of success conditions plays a role in causing her movements. On a “standard” representationalist view of action, then, actions are (a) purposive in nature – that is, they are performed in order to accomplish an end or goal; (b) normatively structured – that is, they succeed or fail to the degree that they produce the specific desired end or meet the determinate conditions of satisfaction of the action; and (c) performed deliberately – that is, the agent is

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aware (or at least capable of becoming aware) that she is performing the action in order to accomplish the end. For Dreyfus, the phenomenology of highly skilled, fluid coping shows that deliberateness is a sign of impairment – that is, either a sign of an agent who lacks the requisite skill to perform at the highest level, or a sign of a situation that is not well suited for sustaining the activity in question.8 It is also an unresolved question whether fluidly performed bodily movements are necessarily something of which we are or can be made aware.9 To avoid the largely semantic question whether fluid coping should count as an action even if it lacks deliberateness, Dreyfus proposes that we use the term “comportment” to refer to a movement that “is not intentional in the strong sense” but nonetheless “has intentionality” in that the movements are purposive and normatively structured (2014: 147 note 10). From this point on, when discussing highly skilled, fluid coping, we will follow Dreyfus in referring to such actions as “comportments.” The challenge for the Dreyfusian account is to vindicate the claim that, despite lacking the guidance or mediation of a representation of conditions of satisfaction, comportment is nevertheless both sufficiently purposive and normatively structured to count as a doing (i.e. as an action in the broadest sense). Unless we can vindicate such claims, we face a dilemma: either accept that comportment does in fact have tacit representational conditions of satisfaction, or concede that it is not after all a genuine action. Dreyfus’s first line of response to this dilemma is to attend to the phenomenology of skill acquisition, culminating in highly skilled activities that are uncontroversial instances of human doings – playing basketball, for instance, or driving a car. A phenomenology of learning shows, Hubert Dreyfus and his brother Stuart argue, that a representationalist account of intentional action is in fact only applicable to rudimentary phases or levels of skillfulness.10 As the learner develops and her actions become more fluid and skillful, there is less and less need for a representation of the desired outcome to guide her current actions. The illusion that purposiveness and normativity require representational conditions of satisfaction arises from focusing on earlier rather than later stages of skill acquisition. Beginners do in fact need to be provided with a determinate preview or representation of their end goal. Some of the features of the environment that are relevant to reaching that end goal are pointed out to 8 9 10

Here Dreyfus is building on his interpretation of Heidegger’s Being and Time view of the relation between the “ready-to-hand” and the “present-at-hand” (see Dreyfus 1991). Sean Kelly, for example, has suggested that there is a “kind of motor intentional understanding . . . that we cannot reflectively access as such” (Kelly, 2002: 389). For overviews of the brothers Dreyfus’s phenomenological account of skill acquisition, see Dreyfus 2014: 25–43, 185–9.

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the beginner in a relatively decontextualized way – that is, in a way that takes little skill to pick them out. And beginners are furnished with clear-cut rules of operation. This might include the rules of a game and its basic tactics, or the scales of a musical instrument and the primary chords. With practice, the beginner becomes adept at applying the rules to the relevant features. With repeated experience over time, the learner no longer needs to pick out decontextualized features and apply the rules that dictate the proper response because she starts recognizing and responding to whole situations as presenting similar patterns and calling for similar responses as in successful past encounters. She also begins to notice limitations in the rules she was taught, and to understand how variations in circumstances require modifications in the appropriate response. Because the learner starts relying on her own insights and experience rather than on rules she’s been given, she becomes emotionally invested in her activities. Failures become painful reminders, and successes heartening encouragements. As the learner continues to enrich her experience, she learns to pick out ever more subtle variations in the types of situations she encounters, becoming attuned to features of the world that were not apparent to the beginner. Rather than attending to individual, decontextualized features, the agent perceives whole situations as either well or poorly adjusted to facilitate a successful outcome. Eventually, for the expert, the situation shows up immediately as calling for a particular response, without the performer needing to deliberate about what to do or even which perspective to take on things. “In learning,” Dreyfus explains, “past experience is projected back into the perceptual world of the learner and shows up as affordances or solicitations to further action” (2014: 234). The expert no longer needs to attend to the decontextualized features that she was first taught to pick out, nor to consult rules for responding to those features, nor even to attend to the representation of the conditions of satisfaction that once guided her action. For the highly skilled agent, then, the environment is made up not of objects with fixed properties, but of invitations to act in contextually specific ways. “We experience the situation,” Dreyfus insists, “as drawing the action out of us” (2014: 82). The expert thus has developed fine-grained discriminatory capacities that allow her to see environmental features in terms of their significance for the aims and purposes of the activity. The expert also has developed skills for responding in ways finely calibrated to the needs of the situation. Rather than having to choose what to do, the expert feels drawn to move in just the right way (meaning, the way that is best suited to bring about the desired result). But above all – and this is the key for understanding the kind of normativity and purposiveness that govern comportment – the expert has developed a sense for what Dreyfus dubs an “equilibrium” or an “optimal gestalt” of active bodies

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perfectly synched to their environment: “in absorbed coping, rather than a sense of trying to achieve success, one has a sense of being drawn towards an equilibrium” (2014: 148). In fluid coping, neither the bodily movements nor the features of the situation can be grasped as what they truly are outside of the context of the whole agent-moving-in-her-environment. This is the “gestaltist” dimension of comportment. Gestalt theories of perception argue that there is no neutral and independent stratum of sense data that is not already experienced as shaped or patterned to fit into the overall configuration to which it belongs. In the same spirit, Dreyfus argues that there are no neutral, independent bodily movements and situational features in fluid comportment – in acting, the agent’s movements are constitutively shaped by the situation which, for its part, is determined as the situation that it is in terms of the comportments that are performed in it. For instance, Dreyfus notes, you can’t accurately make the motions of dribbling a basketball unless you actually have a basketball to dribble with, since the ball influences one’s own movements as one finds oneself having to respond to its particular features and those of the playing surface, and so on (Dreyfus 2014: 95). Or consider basketball great Bill Russell’s description of being in the flow of the game – what he describes as a “special level” of play – in this way: The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, “It’s coming there!” – except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct. (Russell and Branch 1979: 157)

This captures nicely, we think, the gestaltish character of playing basketball at a very high level. The whole dynamic, unfolding configuration of activity on the court points toward a particular movement as the right next move. Because a highly skilled player like Russell recognizes and responds to this gestalt, he has “premonitions” of the movements other agents will make. And yet, the whole configuration could change in an instant if he were to say something, since saying something would introduce a new feature, thus altering the overall gestalt. The optimal gestalt is that particular complex whole of bodily movements plus environmental arrangements that cannot be changed without making the achievement of aims or purposes less likely or less easy. “For the most part,” Merleau-Ponty argues, “preferred behavior is the simplest and most economical with respect to the task in which the organism finds itself engaged” (MerleauPonty 1966 [1942]: 147). In an optimal gestalt, any deviation from the bodily

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movements solicited by the situation, or any rearrangement of the things in the environment, will have the consequence of forcing the agent to expend more effort or take more time to achieve her goals (assuming, that is, that they can still be achieved at all). This means that there is no abstract, universal optimal gestalt. Optimality will always be determined relative to the particularities of the agent and her situation. The basketball player’s dexterity, strength, height, quickness, and so on, all affect what would count as the best movement in the situation.11 But so do a variety of situational features – the lighting conditions, the playing surface, the size of the court, the condition of the rims, the defensive shape or formation of the opposing team, and countless other factors relationally determine the best movements in response to the unfolding situation. The overall gestalt of a fluid comportment is oriented toward some end or goal. But how is the experience of acting normatively structured if the end is not represented by the agent in acting? The point of the learning process described above is to train the student to feel an attraction to move and rearrange the situation in such a way that the active body in its environment forms an optimal gestalt. The optimal gestalt then exerts an attraction akin to the gravitational pull of the earth, or like Merleau-Ponty’s example of the bubble, where local forces dispose a deformed film of soapy water to draw itself into a sphere without the spherical form “play[ing] a causal role in producing the bubble” (Dreyfus 2014: 84; see Merleau-Ponty 1966: 131, 146). Dreyfus describes the experience of the optimal gestalt in this way: Without trying, one experiences one’s arm shooting out and its being drawn to the optimal position, the racket forming the optimal angle with the court – an angle one need not even be aware of – all this, so as to complete the gestalt made up of the court, one’s running opponent, and the oncoming ball. (Dreyfus 2014: 148)

Bill Russell describes a similar phenomenon of being drawn into the optimal gestalt when he writes of “magical” moments during a game, or of a “mystical feeling” when “I could feel my play rise to a new level” (Russell and Branch 1979: 156). That feeling of being swept up into the game, Russell writes, “would spread to the other guys, and we’d all levitate. Then the game would just take off, and there’d be a natural ebb and flow that reminded you of how rhythmic and musical basketball is supposed to be . . . The game would be in a white heat of competition,” he concludes, “and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive.” 11

A complication that we’ll touch on below is the possibility of multiple optimal gestalts – that there are different competing ways to be drawn to respond to a situation. And different individuals might have different ends as a result of different tactical or aesthetic orientations to the situation – say, in scoring a goal as beautifully or spectacularly as possible, versus running down the clock.

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This paradoxical description of “being in the white heat of competition” without “feeling competitive” is Russell’s attempt to explain how an expert’s maximal grip on the situation is a peculiar kind of active passivity. She has to let herself be pulled by the attraction of the optimal gestalt. For the expert, whose past experience is directly informing the way present things show up, things are perceived directly as solicitations – as “attractors” that draw us to respond in a particular way. Although Dreyfus isn’t always consistent in drawing the distinction, it is important to differentiate between the attraction exerted on an expert by the optimal gestalt, on the one hand, and the tension an agent feels when she deviates from the gestalt, on the other: once an expert has learned to cope successfully, at each stage in a sequential, goaldirected activity, either he senses that he is doing as well as possible at that stage, or he senses a tension that tells him he is deviating from an optimal gestalt and feels drawn to make a next move that, thanks to his previous learning, is likely to be accompanied by less tension. (Dreyfus 2014: 240)

Deviation from an “optimal gestalt” is sensed directly as an uncomfortable feeling of tension. A comportment is good to the degree that it either relieves this feeling of tension or sustains the optimal gestalt by responding correctly to the attractions. A comportment is bad to the degree that it either disrupts the flow of responding to attractions, or it fails to relieve or increases the feeling of tension. The experience of flow or tension frees the agent from the need to represent the conditions of satisfaction of her movements in order to be in a position to evaluate the success of her action. Thus we have Dreyfus’s alternative to the standard account of the normativity of action. For Dreyfus, fluid comportment is (a) purposive in nature – the gestalt that shapes the agent’s fluid responses is oriented toward an end; and (b) normatively structured – acting well is a matter of achieving and maintaining a maximal grip on the situation (i.e. pursuing an optimal body–environment gestalt); yet (c) consummate action is not deliberate but fully engaged and intuitively responsive. In explaining the notions of maximal grip and optimal gestalt, our examples thus far have all been cases of fluid coping that occur within the context of intentional actions – actions in which there is a determinate purpose with conditions of satisfaction to which the agent for the most part has conscious access. The basketball player knows that success consists in her team scoring more baskets than the opposing team, and that aim or purpose continues to give normative structure to her activities even when the expert player loses herself in the flow and rhythm of the game. These determinate and representable aims or goals play an important role in defining the optimal gestalt, even if skillful

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agents can proceed “myopically” – responding to the current solicitations of the situation without needing to be aware of the overarching aim of the activity. The intention, as Dreyfus puts it, can function as “merely an occasion that triggered the motor intentionality of the bodily movements” (Dreyfus 2014: 150). Thus, in cases like these, one could argue that the normativity bestowed on comportments by the optimal gestalt is parasitic on the representation of conditions of satisfaction. The optimal gestalt of an expert basketball player on the court is, after all, optimal precisely to the degree that it helps her win the game. Yet, Dreyfus insists there is a deeper and more fundamental form of purposive comportment that, despite having no representable conditions of satisfaction at all, is nevertheless genuinely normative. This most fundamental form of purposive and normative comportment is the “background coping” discussed earlier. But from where do background comportments get their purposive normativity, if it is indeed the case that no one ever recognizes or deliberately adopts their aims? We propose approaching this problem by scaling a kind of ladder, looking at cases where our sensitivity to an optimal gestalt is progressively more mysterious. First, take the class of activities that have been our focus so far, where we know what the goal is (say, winning the basketball game). Deciding to pursue that goal makes the situation show up in light of achieving the goal and the skillful agent will thereafter experience her actions and the situation as forming a gestalt structure. But this means that, having polarized the situation in terms of the goal, she no longer has to deliberately pursue conditions of satisfaction. As Dreyfus explains: the bodily movements that make up an action must, indeed, be initiated by an intention in action with success conditions, but carrying out such actions normally depends on the contribution of absorbed coping with its conditions of improvement. It thus turns out that, where intentional action is concerned, each form of intentionality requires the other. (2014: 155)

But now, second, we can imagine cases where an agent does not know what the goal is, but is guided by someone who does. The agent can be given feedback and reinforcement from the guide or “critic” until she learns to experience action-situation gestalts as optimal or suboptimal. Dreyfus compares such learning to the game of hot and cold, where “the performer is led by the clues without knowing where they are leading” (2014: 150). In this way, the agent will learn to act in a way that is goal-directed and normatively structured, even if she never knows what the purpose is. Dreyfus suggests that cultural practices – like learning to stand the appropriate distance from other people – are transmitted like this from generation to generation, and it is quite possible that everyone is “socialized into what feels appropriate” while remaining ignorant of what the purpose of the practice is (155). As the Japanese baby, for instance, is initiated

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into Japanese practices, she is being taught an optimal gestalt, and thus oriented to an end or purpose that she may never be able to represent to herself. The social virtuoso has a better sense for what the purpose of cultural practices really is, and thus can recognize a tension in the activities of people to which less skillful inhabitants of a cultural space are oblivious. We’ve moved, then, from a case where the agent must adopt the end herself in order to perceive the optimal gestalt, to a case where the agent is taught to perceive the optimal gestalt by someone else who knows what the end is, to a case where successive generations of agents can teach each other to perceive the optimal gestalt even if no one in the community knows what the purpose of the activity is. Finally, there may be even deeper kinds of aims or ends built into us insofar as we are agents at all. Whenever we act, the agent–environment gestalt forms itself in response to these ends, and this could happen even if no one has ever recognized those ends. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argues that action itself inherently aims at being as efficient as possible and the felt need to sustain efficient action imposes norms on perception. One can see how the aim of efficiency normatively guides action by noting that, to manipulate an object effectively, we need both a clear articulation of the fine details of the object but also the ability to see the object as a distinct whole in relation to other objects. Moving closer to the object increases our ability to discern the fine details but, at a certain point, brings us too close to discern the object as a whole within the exterior horizon of its relations to other objects. Conversely, moving farther away gives as a better perspective on the object’s relationship to its surroundings but deprives us of a fine-grained view of the surface details of the thing. The optimal trade-off between clarity of articulation and breadth of perspective is a gestalt phenomenon that depends on all the specificities of the current task, the agent, and the environment. Merleau-Ponty thus claims that “this maximum distinctness in perception and action defines a perceptual ground, a basis of my life” (Merleau-Ponty 1962 [1945]: 250). Consequently, there is an aim intrinsic to action that informs the optimal gestalts that govern our comportments without our normally being aware of it.12 In our everyday action, Dreyfus argues, we are so good at coping with the normal range of things and situations that “we are normally drawn directly to the optimal coping point” for perceiving and handling things (Dreyfus 2014: 240).

12

More generally, as Sean Kelly has explained, “it is part of my visual experience that my body is drawn to move, or, at any rate, that the context should change, in a certain way. These are inherently normative, rather than descriptive, features of visual experience. They don’t represent in some objective, determinate fashion the way the world is, they say something about how the world ought to be for me to see it better” (Kelly 2005: 87).

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Dreyfus gestures toward another aim intrinsic to agency itself while clearing up a deep confusion about expertise as understood in the model of skill acquisition outlined above. “When Stuart [Dreyfus] and I describe how one can become an expert, let us say, in tennis, chess, driving or whatever,” Hubert Dreyfus notes, that could mean becoming very good at driving or playing tennis or chess. But that is not what it means when Stuart and I say it. It means that you become able to respond intuitively in a way which is appropriate to the situation. But you might have learned tennis in such a way that you chop at the ball, and you may have become an expert at playing tennis without a forehand stroke. That means you will never play very good tennis, but you will be able, given your limitations, to respond intuitively with the best possible chop. So we just need to distinguish two senses of expertise. (Dreyfus 2000: 107–16)

This distinction is at first a little perplexing: Why would we think of someone who can’t play very good tennis as an expert just because she responds intuitively to the situation? To make sense of this, recall that the optimality of a gestalt is always determined relative to some aim or purpose, and there are a plurality of possible aims that can govern one and the same activity.13 One such aim is to achieve the outcome that is conventionally believed to be the best. But another aim, or so Dreyfus suggests, is ongoing coping as an end in itself. Skillful coping seems to be oriented toward maintaining itself, as the expert responds to shifting solicitations of the environment in such a way as to maintain the fluidity of comportment. In Dreyfus’s example of the expert tennis chopper, this latter aim would be undermined were she to play a forehand shot because, never having mastered the forehand, this would force her to act deliberately, and draw her away from her optimal gestalt. Bill Russell illustrates the same phenomenon when describing those magical moments when every player on the court would get in sync with an optimal gestalt: There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine. But these spells were fragile . . . Sometimes the feeling would last all the way to the end of the game, and when that happened I never cared who won. I can honestly say that those few times were the only ones when I did not care. I don’t mean that I was a good sport about it – that I’d played my best and had nothing to be ashamed of. On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who had won. If we lost, I’d still be as free and high as a sky hawk. (Russell and Branch 1979: 157)

13

“Once learned, skilled behavior is sensitive to an end that is significant for the organism, and . . . this significance . . . directs every step of the organism’s activity without being represented in the organism’s mind or brain” (Dreyfus 2014: 245).

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Russell did not care who won because the aim that was ultimately governing his comportment was the aim of maintaining the flow of ongoing coping. The experience of responding fluidly to the particular possibilities of the situation, and thus remaining open to whatever solicited him next, Russell claimed, “was one of my strongest motivations for walking out” onto the basketball court. Dreyfus argues that this aim is intrinsic to the consummate form of human agency: “You can’t be an expert, in the sense of being the best, without having this attitude” of aiming to maintain the flow of ongoing coping, Dreyfus argues, “but you can have this attitude and still not be the best” (2000: 114). There is no widely accepted label for the phenomenologists who continue to work in the space opened up by Dreyfus’s fusion of analytical pragmatism, existentialism, and phenomenology. We have heard or seen them referred to as “analytic Heideggerians,” “Heideggerian pragmatists,” “California Heideggerians,” and (in Europe) “American Heideggerians.” None of these labels seems to us adequate. For one thing, the approach is not limited to California or the United States. These labels also occlude the fact that an important feature of this movement, and of Dreyfus’s contribution in particular, is the way that it reads Heidegger in tandem with other existential phenomenologists – especially Merleau-Ponty. If a label is necessary, we would propose referring to the movement as “Anglo-American existential phenomenology.” Like Dreyfus himself, his students and inheritors largely ignore the division between analytic and Continental philosophy that opened up in the first half of the twentieth century. They are refining and, in many cases, challenging and critiquing Dreyfus’s reading of historical figures, as well as his accounts of the primacy of practice, the paradigm of fluid coping, background practices, and his existentialism – all while bringing these insights to bear on new problems. Largely as a result of the influence of Dreyfus and his students, the analytic/pragmatist interpretation of thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Kierkegaard is now viewed as directly relevant to ongoing debates in epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of culture and society, art and aesthetics, the philosophy of education, metaphysics, agency theory, the philosophy of mind and perception, and, of course, cognitive science.14

14

We’d like to thank participants at the Hubert Dreyfus Memorial Conference (sponsored by Wake Forest University, September 22–24, 2017) for their helpful comments on and objections to an earlier version of this chapter. Special thanks are owed to Joseph Schear, Wayne Martin, Bill Blattner, and Charles Siewert for their suggestions. Our efforts to respond to their concerns undoubtedly improved this chapter, even if we have not answered their objections to their satisfaction.

48 A CONCEPTUAL GENEALOGY OF THE PITTSBURGH SCHOOL Between Kant and Hegel

car l b . sac h s Unlike the Vienna Circle or the Frankfurt School, the Pittsburgh School was never self-consciously constituted as a coherent or even semi-coherent group by adopting this label. Rather, it seems to have been chosen as a retrospective name that functions to draw our attention to three prominent twentieth- and twentyfirst-century philosophers whose work exhibits important commonalities and whose influence has been considerable: Wilfrid Sellars (1912–89), Robert Brandom (1950–), and John McDowell (1942–). In collecting Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom, emphasis should be given to Maher’s (2012) outstanding synopsis of these three philosophers. Maher deserves credit for promoting the idea that these three belong to a school, with shared concerns. In doing so he builds nicely on Lance’s (2008) careful justification of using the term “Pittsburgh philosophy” for describing the arc of thought that runs from Sellars through McDowell and Brandom to dozens of contemporary philosophers. However, as Wanderer and Levine (2013) point out in their review of Maher, shared concerns are not sufficient to justify the term “school.” Instead, they suggest, the term “the Pittsburgh School” needs to be justified based on how these philosophers share core metaphilosophical issues and themes, in part by thinking of themselves as inhabiting a tradition within which reflection on tradition is a central theme. This metaphilosophical selfconsciousness does indeed bring Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell closer together than other philosophers who otherwise share similar concerns. Below I will develop this thought in terms of how the Pittsburgh School reflects on Kant and Hegel’s critique of Kant within the idiom of “analytic philosophy.” The persistent question with which I shall end is whether the return of Hegelian thought within analytic philosophy, which began as institutionalized antiHegelianism, is ultimately satisfying.1 1

My use of “conceptual genealogy” is indebted to Dutilh Novaes (2016).

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Two other philosophers who must be mentioned in relation with the Pittsburgh School are Richard Rorty (1931–2007) and John Haugeland (1945–2010). Though Rorty never taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Haugeland was preoccupied by a slightly different set of concerns, both are crucial to the historical narrative. Rorty is crucial because, in addition to his philosophical contributions, he also helped mediate the line of transmission of Sellars to Brandom and McDowell. Between Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Brandom’s Making It Explicit and McDowell’s Mind and World, both in 1994, virtually nothing was written on Sellars. Moreover, it is very much Rorty’s Sellars who influences Brandom and McDowell. Due in large part to Rorty, Brandom and McDowell reject two of the most important parts of Sellars’s philosophy of mind: his rehabilitation of sense-impressions as non-conceptual episodes of consciousness and his distinction between signifying and picturing.2 Haugeland deserves separate mention not because of his direct influence on Brandom or McDowell – though he was their colleague at the University of Pittsburgh for many years – but because Haugeland exerted considerable influence on philosophers who also studied with Brandom and/or McDowell at the University of Pittsburgh. In particular, Joseph Rouse, Rebecca Kukla, and Mark Lance were as influenced by Haugeland’s naturalized Heideggerianism as by the Sellarsianism of McDowell and Brandom. In selecting Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell (and those they influenced) as if they belonged to a “school,” it is not my intention to do any of the following: (1) downplay the influence of other philosophers besides Sellars on Brandom and McDowell; (2) neglect philosophers influenced by Sellars other than Brandom and McDowell; (3) overlook the important differences between Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom.3 Indeed, as I will argue, there are issues on which we can align Brandom and McDowell against Sellars, Sellars and Brandom against McDowell, and Sellars and McDowell against Brandom. The future of the Pittsburgh School depends in part on whether these points of contention are productive and fruitful.

2

3

McDowell notes that he came to Sellars through Rorty (1997a: ix–x). Rorty was one of Brandom’s thesis advisors. Rorty’s rejection of sense-impressions informs what deVries and Coates (2009) call Brandom’s “two-ply error” in Brandom’s reading of Sellars. A brief comment on “right-Sellarsians” and “left-Sellarsians.” Generally, right-Sellarsians emphasize the ontological priority of the scientific image and want to naturalize phenomena such as values, norms, or consciousness. By contrast, left-Sellarsians emphasize the conceptual irreducibility of the space of reasons and how norms are sui generis with respect to the natural sciences. Right-Sellarsians include Dennett, Churchland, and Millikan. The Pittsburgh School consists of left-Sellarsians. See O’Shea (2016) for a recent introduction to this distinction and its importance.

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I begin with an overview of prominent philosophical themes broadly shared by Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, and others, then closely examine the so-called “Myth of the Given” in the context of the history of philosophy. I then turn to one important difference among these philosophers about how rational thought is constrained by the world, then conclude with reflection on what the return of Hegelian thought within analytic philosophy indicates about the significance of the Pittsburgh School. THE PITTSBURGH SCHOOL THEORY OF INTENTIONALITY

One of the more difficult philosophical concepts is intentionality. What is it for a thought or utterance to be about something? How can we have meaningful thoughts about fictional or even impossible entities, like Batman or golden mountains? What are we talking about when we talk about mental content? These problems, which arguably lie at the historical foundations of Western philosophy, received new urgency during the Scientific Revolution. In response to the rise of mechanistic physics, Descartes invented a new conception of intentionality in which meanings were wholly internal to the mind and immediately available to it. Despite the widespread rejection of Cartesian dualism, Descartes’s assumptions about intentionality can influence even the most antiCartesian of naturalists.4 One crucial theme in the Pittsburgh School is an explicit and sophisticated criticism of the Cartesian picture of intentionality. As Haugeland observes in his “The intentionality all-stars” (1998b), Sellars and Brandom (and to some extent McDowell) are social pragmatists about intentionality. Social pragmatism holds that all questions of content, meaning, aboutness, etc. are really questions about norms, and that norms are only intelligible in terms of social practices. The first move, from intentionality to normativity, involves how meaning or content is always governed by normative considerations. If I am looking at a window, it ought to be the case that I am disposed to think or say out loud, “that is a window.” To be the sort of creature that can think or say “that is a window” under the appropriate circumstances requires that one can discern whether the circumstances are indeed appropriate for entertaining that judgment. Perception, thought, and action are all inextricably normative affairs. In a slogan often attributed to Sellars, human life is “fraught with ought.” The second move, from norms to practices, is indebted to the rule-following considerations in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations 4

Muller (2014) argues that a Cartesian picture of intentionality informs Rosenberg’s (2014) eliminativism about intentionality.

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(1953): Norms are not rules that are applied to behavior, but rather constitutive features of our social practices. To be a norm-governed creature is to have been initiated into what Sellars (and Brandom and McDowell following him) call “the space of reasons.” By introducing the term “the space of reasons,” Sellars specifies that reasons are sui generis: “in characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (1963a: 169). Since Sellars thinks of intentional acts – acts with intentional content – as involving knowledge (in the sense of “knowing how”), he is committed to normativism about meaning as well as to normativism about knowledge. Reasons, which are essentially involved in perceiving, thinking, and acting, are thus sui generis with respect to empirical descriptions. Indeed Sellars stresses this point of continuity with the naturalistic fallacy: Normative statements cannot be analyzed in terms of natural statements. More precisely, for any normative claim, there is no exhaustive set of empirical descriptions that are intensionally equivalent to the normative.5 Though some analytic philosophers since Quine have been suspicious of intensional discourse, the Pittsburgh philosophers are not. The Pittsburgh School philosophers also aspire to a modest or non-reductive naturalism: The key to understanding normativity, intentionality, and rationality is not to be found in positing entities that transcend the physical universe. Meanings are things of this world; the difficult task is to understand them. In McDowell’s helpful terms, we must avoid both “bald naturalism” and “rampant Platonism.” In the former case, intensional discourse and intentionality are eliminated rather than explained; in the latter case, they are reified as causally efficacious non-spatiotemporal abstracta. The need to steer a path between bald naturalism and rampant Platonism is certainly shared by Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell.

THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN

Perhaps no concept is as central to the Pittsburgh School, and as prone to a diversity of interpretations and misinterpretations, as “the Myth of the Given.” Though all philosophers influenced by Sellars share his misgivings, there is considerable disagreement about what must be done to avoid it. Accordingly, I shall first lay out what I take to be the most philosophically productive 5

The emphasis on intensional equivalence is intended to capture what Sellars means by “analyzable.”

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understanding of the Myth of the Given, and while not disagreeing with other interpretations (deVries and Triplett 2000; O’Shea 2007), I will do so in a way that detours through Kant and Hegel to highlight the historical significance of the Pittsburgh School. The phrase “the Myth of the Given” is best known from Sellars’s essay “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.” In that essay, Sellars focuses for the most part on how traditional empiricism has fallen foul of the Myth. However, he also states at the outset that This framework [of givenness] has been a common feature of most of the major systems of philosophy, including, to use a Kantian turn of phrase, both “dogmatic rationalism” and “skeptical empiricism.” It has, indeed, been so pervasive that few, if any, philosophers have been altogether free of it; certainly not Kant, and, I would argue, not even Hegel, that great foe of “immediacy” . . . If, however, I begin my argument with an attack on sense-datum theories, it is only as a first step in a general critique of the entire framework of givenness. (Sellars 1963a: 127–8)

While it is controversial whether the Myth of the Given is as wide-ranging as Sellars takes it to be, I will argue that on a highly charitable interpretation of Sellars’s work, he is indeed correct. The Given, in its most generic form, is the idea that any claims at all can be held immune from the possibility of revision.6 To say that the Given is a Myth is a perhaps innocuous thesis with nevertheless quite radical implications. Once we reject the Given, we will see that making any claim at all involves subjecting it to the critical scrutiny of others; hence all claims must be subjected to the assessment of others who are recognized as having the correct authority to contest it. Consequently, no claim can be made exempt from the back-andforth of the pragmatics of rational discourse. In their excellent and detailed analysis of the Myth of the Given, deVries and Triplett (2000) focus on the empiricist version of the Myth. In this version, sense-impressions are taken as having indefeasible epistemic authority: Senseimpressions function as a final court of appeals for all assertions. But senseimpressions can play this role only if they are both epistemically efficacious (able to confer warrant on claims) and epistemically independent (not requiring warrant from claims). Epistemic efficacy depends on having conceptual form, which bare sense-impressions lack. Hence sense-impressions cannot play the foundational role that traditional empiricism requires of them.

6

See Williams 1999 for a concise introduction to Sellarsian epistemology. Despite the parallel with Quine’s “empiricism without the dogmas” (Quine 1951), the differences between Quine and Sellars are crucial; see Rosenberg 2007a.

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Though deVries and Triplett are correct, their focus on traditional empiricism could result in underestimating the Sellarsian critique of the Given. For one thing, the Myth of the Given is a fatal flaw not just for empiricism but also for rationalism.7 Consider, for example, Descartes’s procedure of resorting to “what is clear by the light of reason” when attempting to justify claims on which his vindication of the reliability of the intellect depends. As Sellars puts it, “no giving of reasons for adopting a language game can appeal to premises outside all language games. The data of the positivist must join the illuminatio of Augustine” (Sellars 1963b: 356): Just as we no longer allow appeals to “what is clear by the light of reason” as licensing claims for discussion, we should no longer allow appeals to the testimony of the senses to do so as well. There are no unjustified or self-evident claims of the sort that either empiricism or rationalism requires. The thought that neither bare sense-impressions nor the direct intuitions of reason can legitimize claims is not, of course, original with Sellars: It is one way of understanding Kant’s contribution to philosophy. Hence I shall briefly examine Kant and also Hegel’s response to Kant, because the philosophers of the Pittsburgh School can be understood as positioning themselves between Kant and Hegel, yet internal to analytic philosophy. On the Kantian view, unschematized intuitions cannot constitute a judgment, nor can pure reason establish claims about ultimate reality that transcend the conditions of our embodied subjectivity. Following McDowell (1994: 156ff ) I will present the relevant ideas in terms of what is “exogenous” to the mind and what is “endogenous” to it, and accordingly in terms of “the exogenous Given” and “the endogenous Given.”8 The exogenous Given is the idea that the mind can receive truths about the world that are immune to revision in light of rational discourse, whether those are grounded in the deliverances of non-conceptual sense-impressions or of pure reason unencumbered by the constraint of sensible intuition. Kant’s criticism of both rationalism and empiricism can thus be seen in terms of his rejection of the exogenous Given, given his claims about the structure of the mind itself. Yet the difficulty for Kant lies in how he can establish his claims about the structure of the mind. To rehearse a well-known complaint, there seems to be something arbitrary in Kant’s procedure of deriving the categories of the understanding from Aristotelian logic and his account of the spatiotemporal

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Brandom’s work on logic as a semantic metavocabulary that expresses the norms implicit in ordinary discourse shows how to avoid “the logical Given”; see Brandom 2008. Redding (2007) introduces “the myth of the endogenously given” (159) in terms of McDowell’s Aristotelian critique of Humean accounts of practical reasoning. I use the term in a different but related sense.

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structure of sensible intuition from Euclidean geometry. In short, Kant does not call into question “the endogenous Given”: He assumes that the mind can immediately intuit its own structures, even though it cannot immediately intuit the structure of the world. Though Kant criticized the exogenous givenness of both empiricists and rationalists, his own thought remains imprisoned with the framework of givenness – the endogenous Given. What, then, of Hegel?9 On a charitable interpretation of Hegel, Hegel’s considerable achievement was to expose and overcome the endogenous given.10 The very reason why there needs to be a “phenomenology of Spirit” is because the structures of human self-consciousness are not immediately intuitable; we rather must find out what those structures are, and test the various accounts of human self-consciousness for their dialectical adequacy. The transition from understanding to spirit, from desire to recognition, and above all from the master/slave dialectic to mutual recognition, shows that we must engage in both activity and reflection on activity to discover what Kant thought was directly intuitable: the structure of rational self-consciousness. On these grounds, I am reluctant to endorse Sellars’s contention that Hegel was not entirely free of the framework of givenness. Rather, Sellars’s achievement is to transpose the rejection of both the exogenous Given and the endogenous Given into a philosophical framework that relies on less extravagant metaphysics. Whereas Hegel’s arguments for rejecting both the exogenous Given and the endogenous Given are integral to his absolute idealism, Sellars reaches similar conclusions within a resolute, even austere, materialist ontology. Sellars’s rejection of the endogenous Given, however, relies on his account of theory-change in science, rather than on the struggle for recognition central to Hegel’s account of how self-consciousness discovers for itself what it has always been. Though perhaps not all Pittsburgh School philosophers would endorse this narrative, it identifies a specific line of thought that runs through Kant to Hegel. What justifies the collection of Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom as “the Pittsburgh School” is that they take up, within analytic philosophy (as inaugurated by Russell, Carnap, and others), a revival of Kant’s critique of both empiricism and rationalism together with Hegel’s critique of that critique. Not only Kant but also Hegel are crucial for assessing what Sellars, Brandom, and 9

10

For two excellent assessments of Sellars in relation to Hegel, see Pinkard 2006 and deVries 2016. The interpretation pursued here is largely due to deVries, though in the details it should be stressed that Hegel and Sellars rely on quite different arguments for similar conclusions. Though Margolis (2010) does not use the terms “exogenous Given” and “endogenous Given,” his explication of Hegel’s critique of Kant shows precisely how Hegel succeeds in overcoming the endogenous Given.

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McDowell are attempting to do within analytic philosophy. For this reason, it is not quite true that Sellars took analytic philosophy from its “Humean” phase (e.g. Carnap) to a “Kantian” phase, and that it falls to Brandom (and in some respects McDowell) to follow that through to a “Hegelian” phase.11 Instead, we should see that Sellars himself is already deeply Hegelian. If he returns to Kant (in ways that Brandom and McDowell reject), it is because he locates a dialectically stable position in philosophy of mind between Kant and Hegel. The questions raised by Brandom and by McDowell then turn on whether Sellars’s partial return to Kant should be endorsed or rejected. The three-way debate here turns on the question as to how we should account for the constraints on rational discourse.

A P O I N T O F DI V E R G E N C E : R A T I O N A L AND CAUSAL CONSTRAINT

Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell share not only Hegel’s criticism of the endogenous and the exogenous Givens, but a strong interest in avoiding absolute idealism (or at least a caricatured version of that view). Yet here there are striking differences between their respective views. This is because Sellars argues that it is crucial to make a strategic return to Kant and rehabilitate, within a physicalist ontology, sense-impressions as causal and not as rational constraints on discourse. By contrast, both Brandom and McDowell, largely due to the influence of Rorty, reject sense-impressions. On Brandom’s view, our discourse about the world is rationally constrained by how we keep track of our respective commitments and entitlements in a process that he calls “deontic scorekeeping,” while it is causally constrained by how phenomena interact with our “reliable differential responsive dispositions.” By contrast, on McDowell’s view, our discourse is rationally constrained by the world itself by virtue of how perceptual experience consists of the passive actualization of our conceptual capacities within sensory consciousness.12 The remainder of this section will articulate these different positions and the subsequent debates they have engendered. Given that Sellars was writing in the 1960s, when the analytic rejection of Hegel was in full force, it is not surprising that he endorses the view that Hegel’s analysis of consciousness and self-consciousness leads to the extravagant metaphysics of British idealism. But, since Sellars does seem to think that, for him the 11

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See Rorty’s Introduction to the 1997 edition of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind; see also Redding 2007. The debates within the Pittsburgh School can be thought of as being about how Hegelian we should be to correct the anti-Hegelianism with which analytic philosophy began. It is a nice question whether this entails absolute idealism under a different guise.

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question is then how to prevent the slippery slope that leads from Hegel’s Phenomenology to nineteenth-century idealism. The solution is to retain Hegel’s rejection of both the endogenous Given and the exogenous Given but to add as a corrective that Kant was right about the need for “sheer receptivity,” or senseimpressions, as non-conceptual, non-intentional states of consciousness that have representational purport and that causally constrain the application of concepts in perception and judgment.13 Here it is crucial to note that Sellars and Brandom, but not McDowell, deny that intentionality is a relation between mind and world. On Sellars’s view, “the non-relational character of ‘meaning’ and ‘aboutness’ [is] a thesis I have long felt to be the key to a correct understanding of the place of mind in nature” (Sellars 1967: ix). If intentionality is world-relational, then every intentional object must be included in the ultimate ontology of the world, which in turn leads to problems long associated with Meinong and Husserl. In short, Sellars holds that if we want to hold on to metaphysical naturalism, then we should think of intentionality (meaning, aboutness) not as a relation between mind and world, but rather as a kind of functional classification: To say that (for example) “‘Hund’ means dog” is to say that ‘Hund’ in German and ‘dog’ in English are governed by similar pragmatic norms, including norms of appropriate use in response to perceptual stimuli and guidance of intentional action. Though Brandom does not use Sellars’s technical apparatus, he agrees that intentionality is internal to the discursive community. On his Hegelian view, the “unit” of intentionality is the whole discursive community; only through the interpretative practices internal to that community can there be any attribution of beliefs, desires or other intentional states (including attributions to animals and infants). The complicated structures in which members of the discursive community hold each other accountable to what they say, by tracking the respective commitments and entitlements in what Brandom calls “deontic scorekeeping,” is the very structure of rational constraint. Although Brandom allows for causal constraint by the world, he rejects Sellars’s claim that causal constraint necessarily involves non-conceptual episodes of sensory consciousness. Rather, Brandom questions whether there really is a need for a story about what happens when causes meet reasons (Brandom 2010). Though McDowell shares Brandom’s rejection of non-conceptual senseimpressions, he argues that we can dispense with non-conceptual sense-impressions if intentionality is a relation between mind and world. The passive actualization of conceptual capacities (intentionality) within sensory consciousness in response

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For Sellars’s account of sense-impressions, see O’Shea 2010 and Levine 2016.

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to worldly facts is precisely the constraint that we take ourselves to have and which requires philosophical vindication. If experiences were merely caused by the world’s impingement on our sensory surfaces, we would have at best “exculpations” for our perceptual judgments, not genuine justifications for them (McDowell 1994: 10–23). We should therefore notice a crucial respect in which McDowell modifies the social pragmatism of Sellars and Brandom. For Sellars and Brandom, intentional content is instituted by the normative commitments we take toward one another. Sellars calls this a “non-relational” theory of intentionality; intentionality is not, on Sellars’s view, a relation between mind and world. Following Sellars, Brandom holds that to be an intentional agent is to be a member of the discursive community; the discursive community as a whole is the locus of original intentionality.14 By contrast, although McDowell shares the Sellarsian emphasis on the logical space of reasons as sui generis form of intelligibility, he nevertheless also thinks that intentionality is a mind–world relation.15 This comes out most clearly in his thinking about perceptual judgment; on McDowell’s view, when all goes well, one directly perceives what is the case. McDowell’s aim here is not systematic and constructive, as Sellars and Brandom are, but therapeutic, following the later Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy. (See both Cerbone and Mulhall, this volume.) His aim is to remove the barriers erected by hasty philosophizing against accepting a commonsense view explicated by ordinary language. For McDowell, the question is, why would we ever think that intentionality cannot be a relation in the first place? Here the contrast with Sellars is central: As Sellars sees it, intentionality cannot be a mind–world relation because, if it were, then all intentional objects must be counted in our ontology. And that is not consistent with Sellars’s metaphysical naturalism. McDowell’s response would be to say Sellars is simply assuming that the natural sciences are the whole truth about nature. But this is not so; there is also what Aristotle calls “second nature.”16 While it is not entirely clear (even to McDowell’s sympathetic interpreters) how this solves the problem, McDowell thinks that if we can accept that the natural sciences do not exhaust the truth about nature, then we can happily accept that intentionality is a natural relation: What prevented us from accepting that it is both a mind–world relation and a part of nature is no more than the 14 15 16

This is a Hegelian theme that Brandom develops in his theory of language; see Brandom 1994: 61ff; see also Brandom 2009: 27–108. For McDowell’s criticisms of Sellars on precisely this point, see McDowell 2009. “The problem posed by the contrast between the space of reasons and the realm of law, in the context of a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law, is not ontological but ideological” (McDowell 1994: 78 n. 8).

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dogmatic insistence that nature is whatever the natural sciences say it is. Sellars, by contrast, does accept the epistemic authority of the natural sciences, which he takes to entail that intentionality cannot be a relation between mind and world.17 Hence, despite the complex ways in which Sellars and McDowell work out their views about intentionality through close-quarters combat with Kant and Hegel, they end up taking quite opposed views due to deeper concerns. Sellars and McDowell both aim to naturalize intentionality, but since Sellars accepts the epistemic authority of the natural sciences about what counts as natural and McDowell does not, they draw different conclusions as to whether we can naturalize intentionality successfully while retaining the commonsense view that intentionality is a relation.

THE PITTSBURGH SCHOOL IN RELATION TO ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

It is no secret that the roots of analytic philosophy lie in a rejection of Hegel (Hylton 1993), though arguably this rejection was directed more at British Idealism than at Hegel proper. What, then, are we to make of the return of Hegelian thought within analytic philosophy, as Redding (2007) puts it? Here I want to suggest that while the Pittsburgh School is generally correct to urge a return to Kant and Hegel to solve the problems inherited from Russell and Carnap, it is less clear what consequently happens to analytic philosophy. The crux of the problem can be identified in what is missing from Redding’s superb explication of the “analytic Hegelianism” he attributes to Brandom and McDowell. As he puts it, McDowell puts to work Hegelian thoughts from the Perception chapter of the Phenomenology, whereas Brandom is a Hegelian of the Understanding. Redding is indeed correct to use those categories – what Hegel calls “shapes of consciousness” – as a framework for understanding the distinctive contributions of Brandom and McDowell. Indeed, Redding’s suggestion that we use Hegel’s distinction between those shapes of consciousness to reconcile McDowell and Brandom is highly compelling. And yet there is a problem that can be located internal to Hegel’s own thought. Put simply: Hegel does not think that reflection on shapes of consciousness is sufficient to adequately resolve philosophical problems. The dialectic that begins with reflection on “shapes of consciousness” must give way to a new reflection on 17

To clarify: Sellars does think that there is a relation between mind and world, but that “intentionality” is not that relation. Instead, the mind–world relation is what Sellars calls “picturing” (Sellars 1967: esp. 116–50). See Rosenberg 2007b, Price 2013, and Seibt 2016 for interpretations of this difficult notion.

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“shapes of a world” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 265).18 It is not enough to critically examine the conceptual coherence and explanatory adequacy of a philosophical system considered by itself. Rather, we, as observers of the unfolding of Spirit, come to realize that philosophical systems are never isolated from politics, religion, social norms, institutions, and economics. But this means that the Hegelian project becomes far broader and more wide ranging than anything yet rehabilitated within the idiom of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy begins with the rejection of precisely that broader systematic view; it follows the neo-Kantian restriction of philosophy to Erkenntnistheorie (Köhnke 1991). This means that the recovery of Hegelian motifs within analytic philosophy must be also an implicit rejection of Hegel’s own dialectic from shapes of consciousness to shapes of a world. This is not to say that the Pittsburgh School is problematic. On the contrary, it has yielded enormous gains in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and (in the case of McDowell) ethical theory. It promises to breathe new life into old debates and has promoted a vigorous research program. The question remains, however, whether Pittsburgh School philosophy will transform analytic philosophy from within into something that is no longer recognizable as such, or if Hegelian themes will be domesticated to suit the requirements of analytic philosophy as a professional discipline.

18

See Pinkard 2008.

section nine COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

49 AUTHENTICITY AND THE RIGHT TO PHILOSOPHY On Latin American Philosophy’s Great Debate

car lo s a l b e rto sa´ n c h e z

INTRODUCTION

The brutal subjugation of America’s Indigenous cultures required an equally brutal erasure of indigenous epistemologies and their corresponding cosmologies. Because the success of the colonial project depended on the spiritual conquest of native peoples, however, what was erased was immediately replaced with something else. This replacement, although similar in structure, was radically different in content, namely: Western religion (Catholicism) and philosophy (Scholasticism), the latter conceived as an advanced method of dialectical reasoning and rigorous conceptual analysis, representing civilized rationality. As a result, philosophy replaced indigenous oral metaphysical traditions with a written tradition that privileged disembodied rationality and linear thinking over other kinds of knowing that could be described as embodied, holistic, and nonlinear.1 Philosophy is thus a modern intervention into Latin American history, a fact that makes it difficult, and some would say anachronistic, to speak of an Aztec or Nahual philosophy.2 This philosophy’s role in the spiritual colonization and subjugation of Indigenous peoples, moreover, makes it problematic to speak here of an authentic and autonomous Latin American philosophy. For these reasons, the history of Latin American philosophy has been written as the history of the appearance and progress of Western philosophy in Latin America. The historiographical record thus makes it seem as though Latin American culture has been passively witnessing the progression of philosophical history while remaining incapable of contributing anything new, original, or authentically Latin American to it. This historical record thereby makes it seem,

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For an excellent and abridged analysis of this contrast, see Quijano 2007. The issue of whether or not pre-Hispanic thought is philosophy has been discussed most rigorously in Miguel Leon Portilla’s Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (1990 [1963]). James Maffie (2015) makes a strong case for an Aztec systematic philosophy.

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moreover, as though Latin America has been unable to produce philosophers capable of making these contributions, which means that Latin America has been unable to produce its own philosophy, a Latin American philosophy.3 The fact, however, is that there have indeed been such philosophers and they have made their own contributions, and, thus, that there has indeed been a Latin American philosophy. The question thus becomes whether these philosophers or this philosophy have been valuable, original, or authentic. If so, how? If not, why not? In light of this history, it is unsurprising that a split has emerged between those who believe that the Latin American contribution to philosophy is original and authentic and those who do not. Those who do not believe it often find the claim that philosophy’s progression through Latin America has been unoriginal, inauthentic, or derivative as indicating that Latin American culture has not been capable of expressing itself in an autonomous and authentic way. Moreover, this alleged incapacity to express itself in this way signals an underlying Latin American underdevelopment (the “proof” of which they find in the actual social and economic conditions of Latin American countries); this underdevelopment prohibits the kind of authentic philosophical self-expression and understanding that validates fully rational, self-authenticating, and autonomous human beings, who have become capable of such philosophical selfaffirmation and self-creation. Those who believe the opposite suggest that such philosophical authenticity and originality have been there all along, since the beginning, in philosophical declarations that, although articulated with European concepts and within European intellectual horizons, have nonetheless spoken of a unique and historically determined human struggle to understand and communicate a revealed, and universal, human truth. This split was embodied in (what I’m calling here) the “Great Debate” between Augusto Salazar Bondy and Leopoldo Zea toward the end of the 1960s. This debate represents the defining moment in the history of Latin American philosophy as we understand it today.4 On one side of the debate, 3 4

This is a critique leveled by Gracia (1992). By “we” I mean those of us for whom Latin American philosophy is a topic of concern, especially those of us in the English-speaking North American philosophical establishment. While these kinds of considerations, namely, about the nature and possibility of Latin American philosophy, do at times take place in the various philosophy departments and institutes throughout Latin American countries themselves, for the most part philosophy as practiced there mirrors that of other European and North American universities. A quick glance at the major centers of philosophical activity in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, for instance, reveals a strong commitment either to Continental traditions such as phenomenology, poststructuralism, and critical theory or to Anglo-analytic figures or themes in the philosophy of language, mind, or logic. As in the USA, interest in Latin American philosophy as such is far from normalized.

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Bondy holds that an original and, thus, authentic Latin American philosophy is not possible due to Latin America’s historical, political, and economic conditions of dependency. On the other side, Zea argues that an original and authentic Latin American philosophy is possible in spite of – and even because of – those challenging historical conditions. Since both positions cannot be right at the same time, this debate has naturally caused a rift among philosophers and philosophical historians. Even more importantly, however, it has provided a set of shared problems for philosophical engagement – in particular, a problem of interpretation, as both sides of the issue aim either to interpret or to interpret away the possibility of an autonomous, original, and authentic Latin American philosophy. In what follows, we will thus reconsider the main lines of this formative debate, paying particular attention to the trope of authenticity that motivates it and that ultimately lends it its historical and philosophical significance. AFFIRMING OURSELVES: ZEA’S HISTORICIST P O S I T I O N (19 4 2 )

While questions regarding the authenticity, originality, and, ultimately, possibility of Latin American philosophy have been posed since the mid-1800s, it is the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea who first develops a profound philosophical response in lectures delivered in 1942 and then published in 1945 under the title En torno a una filosofía Americana (Toward a [Latin] American Philosophy). Here Zea asks whether there is such a thing as a Latin American culture. If there is, then philosophy is possible; if there is not, then philosophy, as “[culture’s] highest expression,” is not (Zea 1945: 16). But why ask the question in the first place? In other words, why concern oneself with the existence or non-existence of one’s culture halfway through the twentieth century? Because, Zea insists, “before today, the Latin American had no need of a culture that would be considered properly his, comfortably he had lived in the shadow and from the shadow of European culture” (16). Zea expresses a sense, that is, that the colonial yoke has been loosened enough after Independence (1800s), Revolution (early 1900s), and the European crises (manifested in the two World Wars) to allow Latin Americans to ask themselves, as if for the first time, about the authenticity of their own cultural existence. For Zea, the crisis of Europe is especially relevant because it means that, as Europe fractures and breaks down, it can no longer serve as the unproblematic purveyor of higher culture – direction and influence – for Latin Americans. As Zea writes: “European culture has arrived at a crossroads in which it threatens to completely collapse . . . what must [Latin] America do? Collapse as well? Fall

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into that chaos in which that culture has fallen of which it was a shadow . . .?” (17). His answer is that Latin America will not collapse into chaos but, instead, affirm its historical identity and cultural authenticity in the process of liberatory thinking. “Liberatory” in the negative and positive sense, because it will become thinking rooted in the Latin American circumstance and not in European culture (from which it will liberate itself ), and because it will thereby liberate its own capacities to confront its own necessities, something that it had no need to do while in the shadow of Europe. This kind of rooted liberatory thinking will be authentic thinking: “This form [of thinking] can no longer be an imitation, but a personal, ownmost, creation” (18). So, philosophy, to be doubly liberatory, must be authentic and, to be authentic, it must be grounded on its distinctive circumstances. The question then becomes whether Latin Americans are now in a position – historically, existentially, socially, and so on – to make authentic philosophy. For Zea, following Jose Ortega y Gasset and Karl Mannheim (Zea 1945: 27 nn 6–7), philosophy is conceived in a historicist manner. Historicism, or the notion that philosophical truths are fundamentally historical (that they derive from and remain relative to history), thus gets appropriated as a point of departure for the articulation of an authentic Latin American philosophy. Zea writes: the truth of each individual or generation is nothing more than the expression of a determinate conception of the world and of life. This makes it so that philosophical truths, as attempted solutions [to vital problems], are circumstantial, each one dependent on the individual that expresses them, and this [individual expression depends] in turn, on a determinate society, a determinate historical epoch, or, in one word, on a circumstance. (26)

Because historicism allows, or even validates, philosophical truths rooted in a specific life-world or in the lives of particular people, authenticity, for Zea, will have to do with the manner in which that rootedness is articulated in the philosophical ideas. Ultimately, because philosophical truth is historical in this way, philosophy is not restricted to the rigid definitions of the Greeks, Germans, and French. Historicism thus breaks philosophy free from its traditional conceptual enclosures, allowing it to become a vital response to one’s own particular historical needs. Thus Zea conceives philosophy rather pragmatically as a “natural discipline [of thinking] for the human being” (19) that “resolves problems that the circumstance presents” (17). By “natural” here, Zea means the human ability to respond philosophically to certain existential needs: “[philosophy] is something that is made, and it is made when it is needed” (22). Moreover, “philosophy must not be the result of an ability to philosophize, but rather of a having the

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necessity to philosophize” (22). Thus, philosophy emerges from a breakdown in the historical circumstance in which one finds oneself, existential breakdowns to which one must respond with philosophical solutions. Zea’s historicist-inspired move to characterize philosophical authenticity in terms of its rootedness in concrete origins (as a response to the problems to which these existential circumstances give rise) is meant to affirm the right of Latin Americans to philosophy – to their colonial inheritance. To conceive of oneself as endowed with the ability, capacity, or right to speak philosophically from that place on which one stands is an existential challenge, moreover, to the historical restrictions that deemed philosophy a strictly Western practice, rooted in Greece and intimately wedded to the historical unfolding of the European cultural Geist. Zea thus makes an empowering and liberatory move that also wills Latin American thought to become philosophy. Not everyone agrees with Zea’s historicist reading of Latin American philosophy, however. Critics charge that his historicism is nothing more than a perspectivism in disguise, one implicated in a short-sighted cultural relativism that thus betrays the principal task of philosophy, namely, to find universal, transcendent truths, truths free of historical and cultural residue.5 Such is the stand of the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy, who finds in Zea’s founding provocation a concealment, rather than a revelation, of the possibility for an authentic Latin American philosophy. It is Bondy’s refusal of Zea’s conception of philosophy, and Zea’s subsequent response, that constitutes the foundational debate in contemporary Latin American philosophy.

B O N D Y A N D T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F T H E F U T U R E ( 19 6 8 )

Zea’s affirmative position regarding the nature and possibility of a Latin American philosophy assumes that philosophical ideas are tied to their place, in the sense of being responses to crises which emerge from that circumstance or within it, and thus that philosophy can emerge anywhere (and anytime) there is a human need for it. Against this view, Augusto Salazar Bondy aims to problematize the ability of place to serve as a ground for authentic philosophizing. He does this, as Ofelia Schutte notes, primarily by drawing a connection between “the conditions for authenticity and the level of economic development” (Schutte 1993: 96) in any particular place, for instance, in the Latin American world. Because economic development (or underdevelopment) in Latin 5

Jorge J. E. Gracia is considered a founder of Latin American philosophy in the USA and also its biggest critic. Gracia accuses Zea of being a “culturalist” for the reasons here outlined. See Gracia 1986; 1992; Mendieta 2003.

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America is necessarily tied to its colonial history, Bondy looks there first, and finds philosophy unavoidably implicated in the colonial aspirations of Europe. Philosophy in Latin America, Bondy concludes, responds primarily to the crises and needs of Europe and serves, ultimately, to maintain Latin America in a state of subjugation, dependence, and underdevelopment. He writes: Brought to America and promoted in our countries are those doctrines that better harmonize with the goals of political and spiritual domination that originate . . . in the peninsula. In this way, Latin Americans learn as first philosophy, that is, as a foundational manner of thinking that accords with universal theorizing, a system of ideas that respond to the motivations of the men from overseas. (Bondy 1968: 12)

According to Bondy, philosophy’s history shows that it has been just another weapon in the arsenal of spiritual, intellectual, and material conquest and domination, one used against Latin Americans by Europeans. “Philosophy was brought by the Spaniards because they came to conquer and dominate America and they imported with them the intellectual weapons of domination” (27). Bondy makes a valid and influential point. Even if we think of philosophy in the technical sense in terms of rigorous conceptual and logical analyses, these philosophical methods can nonetheless be deployed in the service of juridical and biblical readings that serve to justify the indoctrination or subjugation of entire groups (see, for instance, the Villadolid debates between Bartalomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda).6 This perception of philosophy as a tool for conquest and domination will remain in the Latin American consciousness for centuries, so it is not surprising that a philosophy or philosopher claiming that an authentic Latin American philosophy is one that connects back to Latin American history and circumstance, to its place, will be looked at with suspicion. Moreover, even calling a particular kind of thinking “philosophy” will sound alarms, as this naming can call up philosophy’s original aspirations in the New World. For Bondy, then, while philosophy has existed in Latin America – albeit, as a weapon of 6

Held in the Spanish city of Villadolid in 1550, the debate between de las Casas and Sepúlveda was meant to settle the question regarding the “rights” of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It was the first international debate of its kind. Arguing on behalf of the Spanish Crown and on Aristotelian grounds, Sepúlveda proposed that because the Indigenous population engaged in human sacrifice, cannibalism, and other crimes against nature, they were barbarians and natural slaves, and, therefore, their enslavement, exploitation, or destruction through war or other violent means was morally justified. De las Casas, arguing on behalf of the Indigenous populations with whom he had lived and to whom he had preached as Bishop of Chiapas, proposed that the Aristotelian notions of “barbarian” and “natural slave” did not apply to the natives, who were in fact capable of reason, and, as such, could be baptized and saved. History does not record a clear winner, although years later certain rights for which de las Casas had previously argued were accorded to the Indigenous populations (Hanke 1994).

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domination – a genuine, authentic philosophy, one not intimately tied to the colonial project, has not. Indeed, a break with that colonial history is required for an authentic philosophy to take root. Bondy is thus forced to deny Zea’s affirmation of Latin American philosophy on the grounds that underdevelopment, colonialism, imperialism, and the general lack of cultural and mental independence that these brought about, has prohibited anything like originality, autonomy, and authenticity in this philosophical thought. Bondy does not seek to close off all possibility, however. An authentic Latin American philosophy is possible, but only in the future, and only after a dramatic shift in the social and political realities of Latin America. Bondy calls this dramatic shift by various names, including “mutacion de conjunto,” or a collective change, and revolution. This change, shift, or revolution must allow the Latin American individual to “jump over his actual condition and transcend reality toward new forms of life, toward previously unknown manifestations that will endure . . . [toward] what in the social-political field are called revolutions” (Bondy 1968: 88). As an expression of the actual conditions, as a part of present reality, philosophy as it has existed must likewise be transcended; that is, philosophy as part of the colonial inheritance, and thus as a tool of domination, is partly responsible for the situation of underdevelopment that prohibits original and free thinking (and, as such, must likewise be overcome). As Bondy puts it: The problem of our philosophy is inauthenticity. Inauthenticity digs itself into the historical condition of underdeveloped and dominated countries. Overcoming philosophy is, in this way, intimately tied to the overcoming of underdevelopment and domination in such a way that if an authentic philosophy is possible it must be the result of a transcendental historical change. (89)

The suggestion here is that an authentic Latin American philosophy will not be possible until after the old order is overcome, that is, until philosophy as it has been known – as it has appeared in Latin American history – is transcended in a collective and revolutionary gesture. Zea’s rebuttal will take issue with this conclusion by questioning the manner in which an authentic philosophy is supposed to arise as a consequence of social and political change. For Zea, this kind of revolutionary change can only be made possible by a philosophy that is conscious of one’s immediate circumstantial crisis. If philosophy is to come only after the fact, then what good is philosophy? Bondy anticipates this objection, writing: [Philosophy] must not wait [for a “transcendental” change]; philosophy should not be merely a thinking that sanctions and crowns the events that have already occurred. It may gain its authenticity as part of the movement of overcoming our historical negativity, assuming that history while striving to cancel its own roots. (89)

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This remains problematic, however, as Bondy insists that an inauthentic philosophy has the power to create revolutionary change and in the process gain its authenticity. If inauthentic philosophy has this power, then why strive for authenticity in the first place? What will authenticity add to a philosophy that can already bring about transcendental change? Bondy’s response to this challenge is to rethink philosophy, as found in Latin America, in terms of a consciousness of inauthenticity. That is, an inauthentic philosophy is already a philosophical consciousness, but one directed to the conditions of its own inauthenticity. In this sense, philosophy will be a consciousness both of and for underdevelopment, or a specialized postcolonial critique that speaks only to those conditions. Moreover, as a consciousness of underdevelopment, i.e. as inauthentic philosophy, its path to authenticity will be destructive: It will seek to destroy or overcome itself as it seeks to destroy or overcome the material conditions that maintain it in its inauthenticity. As Bondy explains: Philosophy . . . has a possibility of being authentic in the midst of the inauthenticity that surrounds and affects it [by] converting itself into a clear consciousness of our deprived condition . . . and into a thinking capable of breaking chains and promoting the process of overcoming our condition. It must be, then, a reflection about our anthropological status or, in any case, conscious of it, with a view towards its cancellation. A reflection applied to language or things, thinking or conduct, but always anthropologically relevant as self-analysis. This means that a good portion of the task laid out for our philosophy is destructive, [both] of its being as well as its alienated thought. (89–90)

While Bondy’s vision for a Latin American philosophy to come – as a destructive, critical, and ultimately political philosophy – is in many ways an attractive reconceptualization, his real critique, that is, his answer to Zea, is that the “philosophy” that has been has not been philosophy at all, but something else. Latin Americans have not been capable, in theory or practice, of thinking for themselves, much less claim a right of ownership to a philosophy they can call their own. Philosophy has existed in Latin America, but in the same sense that Europeans, Catholicism, or Positivism has existed in Latin America, that is, as already made realities unoriginal to Latin America. Z E A ’ S R E B U T T A L ( 19 6 9 )

Zea responds to Bondy a year later in La filosofía Americana como filosofía sin más (1969) (Latin American Philosophy as Simply Philosophy). Overall, Zea acknowledges Bondy’s critical insights into the state of the Latin American situation, but he disagrees with Bondy’s underlying claim, namely, that authenticity in philosophy is possible only after underdevelopment is overcome. Philosophy,

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Zea insists, is born out of immediate circumstances, regardless of the state of their development. According to Zea: “Authentic philosophy will be found in any of the phases of human being, be that phase in which human beings aspire to their own fulfillment or one in which this fulfillment is possible” (1969: 114). That is, authentic philosophizing about one’s place in the universe or about one’s moral ideals will not be closed off by the economic or material conditions in which one lives; while remaining conditioned by these circumstances, philosophy will always aspire to transcend them by aspiring to universal form, as propositions the truth of which cannot be reduced to and so clearly transcend the contingent circumstances in which they arise.7 But the most glaring problem with the view, according to Zea, is Bondy’s insistence that an authentic philosophy is possible only after underdevelopment is overcome; for Zea, this view is itself a manifestation of that colonial mentality that Bondy thinks maintains Latin Americans in their underdevelopment. The criteria for authenticity, Zea suggests, should be set not by the perpetrators of underdevelopment but rather by the Latin American people themselves. In his harshest tone, Zea declares: “Let us not once again repeat the old history and accept that we will only be fully human, that we will have an authentic culture and philosophy, only when we approximate, once again, Western man in his own development” (113). Against Bondy, Zea proposes that inauthentic philosophy is what propagates those relations of power that keep Latin Americans in various states of historical, social, and economic marginalization, including Bondy’s implicitly Western criteria for a claim to philosophy. For Zea, inauthenticity in philosophy and culture is not a result of underdevelopment but instead results from undervaluing one’s own abilities and one’s own solutions to immediate problems – a persistent undervaluation which is itself a result of continuing to believe that one’s abilities and one’s solutions are inferior to the Western standard. As Zea concludes, “to accept this supposition is precisely to be inauthentic, to continue to depend on the expressions of Western man” (113). Authenticity, then, has to do with doing what one must do – with taking a stand on and for one’s circumstances regardless of their material, spiritual, or economic condition. Ultimately, the problem with Bondy’s view is that he limits the scope of his future philosophy to a liberatory thinking in only the negative sense – that is, to

7

Bondy writes that we cannot have an authentic Latin American philosophy because of this condition of underdevelopment, but we can still aspire to a “clear consciousness of our oppressed condition . . . and a thinking capable of unleashing and promoting the process that will bring about the overcoming of this condition” (quoted in Zea 1969: 115). But the idea here is that we are no longer talking about philosophy, but about a critical consciousness that remains ensconced in the situation.

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a consciousness of underdevelopment – that while circumstantialist in its grounding is still restricted to a thinking about one’s situation of dependence. This limiting conception has two roots: first, Bondy’s association of authentic philosophy with the Western conception of philosophy as pure and transcendental, possessing “a characteristic methodological tendency and theoretical proclivity . . . capable of founding a tradition or thought” (Bondy 1968: 30); and second, an explicit denial of Latin America’s philosophical history (again, there is a “history of philosophy,” but it is not a philosophical history of philosophy). The irony of the first of these roots is that Bondy appears victimized by the same imperialistic ideology that his diagnosis reveals as the cause for the absence of a Latin American philosophical tradition. In other words, Bondy illegitimately measures the originality, authenticity, and autonomy of Latin American thinking against the standard set by Western historians and philosophers. Bondy does think that authenticity in philosophy will reflect one’s ability to be responsive to “one’s own reality.” Such philosophy is thus desirable; it is sought. But, Bondy argues, due to underdevelopment and economic dependence, there is no such thing as “one’s own reality,” which means that authenticity, like philosophy, is impossible so long as these conditions persist. Unlike Bondy, however, Zea does not think Latin Americans must wait for a revolutionary change in order to pursue the authenticity of their philosophy. Appropriation of the past, rather than negation, is the way to an authentic Latin American philosophy. THE PROBLEM WITH AUTHENTICITY

In sum, then: Zea argues that an authentic Latin American philosophy is possible when philosophy is understood as a tool in the existential labor of everyday life in Latin America; thus, there is and there has been a Latin American philosophy, one that makes possible a critical confrontation with current crises. Bondy disagrees and suggests that there is not nor has there been a Latin American philosophy, since the philosophies that have existed in Latin America have been inauthentic, imitative repetitions of Western conceptions, and will continue to be so as long as social and historical conditions marginalize and oppress the Latin American. For Bondy, an authentic Latin American philosophy is possible but only after those conditions are overcome in revolutionary action. In short, for Zea, philosophy is of the now; for Bondy, philosophy is of the future. For these reasons, I maintain that this is the foundational debate in contemporary Latin American philosophy. In it, we find those points of contention and those themes that define the tradition and will continue to define it for some time to come. An idea central to both Zea’s and Bondy’s positions, for example,

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is the idea of authenticity. Authenticity is what marks out the properly philosophical from some derivative manner of thinking. But authenticity as the mark of distinction is not without its problems. Latin American philosophers might well see the very notion of authenticity as implicated in the same Eurocentric rationality that its affirmation is meant to overcome. A main proponent of this view is the Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Pereda (2008). Pereda argues that authenticity, as a term signifying cultural difference, is actually a term of exclusion, that it is prohibitive and totalizing. When a culture – and we could say a cultural expression such as philosophy – deems itself authentic, it has drawn boundaries around itself that exclude elements that may threaten its sense of itself as authentic; when a culture desires authenticity, it seeks that power to delineate itself, to close itself off from future incursions and the disruptions of difference. Because cultural traditions are always the result of different contributions by diverse groups of people coming together in a common space, they “lack any precise demarcations” (Pereda 2008: 111). Cultures are made up of exiles, migrants, immigrants, and the like; they are “nomadic” in their origin and never cease being nomadic so that change and alteration is always a possibility (213–16). So, unlike nations around which precise borders could be drawn by means of real (walls) and ideal (laws), cultures themselves lack borders, political or otherwise. While philosophers have attempted – especially in Latin America – to define and determine culture in various ways, such as by appeals to ways of life or a common history, what makes a culture unique is not something that can be captured by any one determined set of characteristics (see also Cerbone, this volume). Such determinations can only lead to intolerance and fear of “foreign elements” (212). Appealing to a genealogy of cultural formation, Pereda insists that the notion of a cultural “identity” itself is a means of protecting the perceived unity and uniqueness of a culture. As Pereda writes, “so called ‘cultural identities’ can often be reduced to protective shields produced by interests and fantasies; invented narratives with little reality but necessary for some political end” (212). Those who promote such identities, such closed totalities, rely less on some “ontological” or philosophical insight (which, Pereda suggests, are impossible to have) and more on rumors and stereotypes: “[W]e are dealing with a colonial attitude that confuses the heterogeneous reality of a culture with some fragile set of stereotypes that, in the best of cases, designate the exception rather than the rule” (212). Here it thus is a fear of change and also a desire for purity and stability that motivates the search for cultural and philosophical authenticity. Pereda situates philosophers such as both Zea and Bondy in a common “cult of authenticity,” whose objective is always to return culture to some unadulterated

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state, a state of purity, untouched by “syncretism” and “mestizaje” (or miscegenation; see also Thomson, this volume). The narrative of authenticity, to which both Zea and Bondy appeal without much critical resistance, ultimately seeks to “defend precise borders, ideals of homogeneity and consensus, fantasies of stability” (216). This narrative, Pereda concludes, just like all forms of colonialism, must be dismantled (tenemos que desmantelarlo). A critique such as Pereda’s seems to undermine the entire enterprise of a Latin American philosophy if, as I have suggested here, the tradition is encapsulated in the great debate between Zea and Bondy. If authenticity is truly as bad as Pereda thinks, then there is no point in searching for it. I don’t agree with Pereda on this issue, however. The search for authenticity is rooted in a desire not for uniqueness of an exclusionary kind but, instead, in a desire for recognition, a desire that, coupled with a hope for inclusion, allows Latin Americans the right to affirm themselves before and within the Anglo, Continental, and other philosophical traditions. What is overcome in becoming authentic, more importantly, is a colonial narrative that insists that what is Latin American is not original or genuine but merely an imitation, reproduction, and repetition of an Old World.8

CONCLUSION

For both Bondy and Zea, authenticity represents a resolute affirmation of Latin America before the demands of an absolute sameness that historically called its colonies to conform to the terms of a European rationality and selfunderstanding. To make such an affirmation is to say I am this and not that; this is philosophy and not something else; it is to say I am difference before sameness – and that is, ultimately, what it means to be authentic. This, then, is a liberatory affirmation. It affirms a place in the universe of ideas and proclaims a right to think philosophy as a philosopher. In fact, according to Schutte, and despite those shortcomings to which Zea alludes, the “power of Salazar Bondy’s argument . . . lies in provoking one not to become self-complacent, not to sit still, despite one’s previous or current” situation (1993: 104).

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A more straightforward way of understanding the role of authenticity in Latin American philosophy is offered by Schutte. Authenticity can refer to: (1) “whether . . . cultural formations reflect naïve or alien values”; this is the “problem of imitation, of being a copy rather than an original”; (2) the “problem of whether one is living a lie, not because one imitates what is alien to one, but because one fails to know or appreciate what most properly belongs to oneself”; and (3) “whether a particular culture is able to sustain a set of enduring autonomous values over a period of time” (Schutte 1993: 76).

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Again, it could be objected that authenticity as a concept is part of the hegemonic ideological cluster that is Western philosophical history, so much so that to demand authenticity is to continue to propagate a Western bias concerning what philosophy ought to be. But in reply we could simply point out that authenticity is the name given to the achievement of self-worth that comes from staking one’s claim to that which is properly one’s own in, as I say above, a resolute affirmation of oneself. It is to say: This belongs to us, and although you might’ve introduced me to it, I’ve made it mine through love and labor and it is now different and unique, and so originally ours! Regardless of whose side one takes, Bondy’s or Zea’s, their debate serves as the defining intervention that hastens the arrival of a critical consciousness in Latin America, a critical consciousness capable of addressing itself as philosophy and affirming itself as such by taking up one of the horns of the debate, by finding a path between them, or even by avoiding them altogether.

50 THE EAST IN THE WEST Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

lau ra g u e r r e r o, l eah ka l man s o n, an d sarah mat t i c e

INTRODUCTION

The task of this chapter is to consider the impact of Asian philosophies on the English-speaking philosophical world from 1945 to 2015. While this time period has been profoundly productive of philosophical engagements across cultural boundaries, it is important to begin by noting that the history of philosophy is itself a history of ideas, texts, and thinkers crossing linguistic and geographical borders. Only relatively recently have European and American philosophers considered philosophy to be a distinctly “Western” pursuit. In the beginning of modern European engagement with Asia in the sixteenth century, for instance, many Europeans counted Asian traditions and civilizations as partners in – even the originators of – philosophical inquiry. Since the reconstruction of the “philosophical canon” in the eighteenth century, however, the discipline has been largely Eurocentric, and this has resulted in dramatic inequities in the terms of engagement with Asian philosophical traditions (Park 2013). Much early comparative work, in fact, often treats Western traditions as the gold standard, frequently doing violence to non-Western traditions in forcing them to try to conform to artificial, external standards (Kirloskar-Steinbach, Ramana, and Maffie 2014.) Philosophers working with Chinese, Japanese, and Indian traditions in the twentieth century have spent significant time and energy engaging in metaphilosophical criticism that argues for a more inclusive and pluralistic conception of philosophy (see, for example, Garfield and Van Norden 2016) and, generally, justifying their very existence within the academic discipline. A notable number of published works in the field address topics such as: What is “Japanese philosophy”? What is “Chinese” about Chinese philosophy? Does India have “philosophy” prior to contact with the West? These metaphilosophical works have begun to change the very fabric of academic philosophy – the kinds of courses that are taught to undergraduate and graduate students, the languages prioritized for philosophical research, and the specializations valued in hiring practices. 692

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A central thread of metaphilosophical work in Asian and comparative philosophy after 1945 argues for the importance of taking philosophical texts, ideas, arguments, traditions, and thinkers on their own terms, and not valuing them solely for their relation to Western philosophy. However, in light of the task of this chapter, we have focused on English-language materials and primarily included English-language entries in the bibliography. The journal Philosophy East and West, founded in 1951, provides a major forum for specific concerns in Asian and comparative philosophy and, more generally, for the equal exchange of philosophical ideas across cultural boundaries. In its pages, thinkers in various traditions such as John Dewey, George Santayana, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan have contributed reflections on the nature and value of philosophical pluralism. Philosophy East and West has since been joined by journals such as the Journal for Indian Philosophy (first published in 1970), Asian Philosophy (first published in 1991), and Dao: A Journal for Comparative Philosophy (first published in 2001), which have been important venues for Asian philosophy within Western academia. The following includes a necessarily brief sketch of some of the contributions Chinese, Japanese, and Indian philosophies have made to the broader philosophical landscape since 1945 (we are unfortunately unable to include material on other Asian regions, e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.). Each region has a distinctive history, distinctive areas of interest, and, often, distinctive methodologies, and as such, this sort of project cannot be either complete or exhaustive. Each section begins with a brief sketch of the historical context and key terms, followed by a few key areas of philosophic interest.

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY

Discussions of Chinese philosophy often refer to three central traditions or teachings (sanjiao 三教): Ruism (rujia 儒家 or ruxue 儒學, a.k.a. Confucianism1), Daoism (daojia 道家 or daojiao 道教), and Buddhism (fofa 佛法 or fojiao 佛教). Ruism and Daoism have their origins in the fertile philosophical periods of Spring and Autumn (771–467 bce) and Warring States (475–221 bce), with Ruist texts such as the Analects (論語), Mengzi (孟子, Mencius), and Xunzi (荀子), and Daoist texts such as the Dao De Jing (道德經) and 1

The Chinese term ru (儒) means “scholar” or “ritual master” and the Chinese terms rujia 儒家 and ruxue 儒學 mean, approximately, the “scholarly lineage” or “scholarly studies.” The English term “Confucianism” reflects the popular misperception that the “ru” tradition is best understood on the nineteenth-century model of religion, where a tradition is named according to its founder. We use the alternate English term “Ruism,” which better approximates the Chinese original.

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Zhuangzi (莊子). While it would be misleading to suggest that only Ruist and Daoist philosophers were active during these periods – texts such as the Hanfeizi (韓非子) and the Mozi (墨子) were very important – the lasting impact of the early Ruist and Daoist texts is hard to overstate in the development of Chinese philosophical traditions. After the arrival of Buddhism in China during the Han Dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), Buddhist traditions in China became distinctively Chinese, and developed their own schools, concepts, practices, and philosophical concerns that respond to and arise out of other Chinese philosophical traditions. Philosophical developments in Later Ruist Li-Studies (lixue 理學 or “neoConfucianism”), neo-Daoism, and Buddhist schools such as Chan (禪) and Huayan (華嚴) are a result of the creative interaction between all three traditions during the Tang (618–907 ce), Song (960–1279 ce), Yuan (1271–1368 ce), and Ming (1368–1644 ce) and early Qing Dynasties (1644–1912 ce). Several of China’s philosophical giants emerged during these periods, including Ruists Zhu Xi (朱熹) and Wang Yangming (王陽明). These periods also saw the prominence of several philosophical figures who do not fit easily into the sanjiao model such as the Sino-Islamic philosopher Liu Zhi (劉智) or Yijing philosopher Wang Fuzhi (王夫之). Most Chinese philosophical traditions articulate an account of self-cultivation and corresponding contemplative practices. Historically, major enduring philosophical debates revolve around terms such as xing (性, human nature/ natural human tendencies), xiao (孝 filiality), li (禮 ritual propriety), li/qi (理/氣 pattern/vital energy), ren (仁 humaneness), de (德 potency/moral character), dao (道 way(s)/way-making/prescriptive discourse), wuwei (無為 non-impositional activity), tian (天 the heavens), and concerns such as sudden versus gradual enlightenment, deference, spontaneity, naturalness, the nature of political office, and so on. While many early texts are at least partially pragmatic and concerned with the nature and role of human persons in communities and governments, later traditions engage in complicated metaphysical speculation about the cosmos. The first half of the twentieth century was a tumultuous time in China – during this period the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, fell, only to be replaced by a series of governments, warlords, and other temporary political structures. China had several military conflicts with neighbors (Japan, Korea, and Russia) and Euro-American powers (Britain, France, and the United States), and China had a decades-long civil war that ended only in 1949 with the victory of the Communists over the Nationalists and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This period also saw the rise of the May Fourth Movement, the replacing of literary/classical Chinese with colloquial Chinese,

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and extensive involvement between intellectuals in China and in Japan, Germany, England, France, Russia, and the United States. Major Western philosophers such as John Dewey (1859–1952) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spent time in China and with Chinese intellectuals, and major Chinese philosophical figures of the time such as Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Carson Chang (Zhang Junmei, 1886–1969) were active in international circles. Scholars such as Eric Nelson have done much to uncover the intellectual history of connections between China and Europe during this period. After the PRC became particularly insular in the 1950s and 60s, many Chinese intellectuals either fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the USA, or were unable to continue scholarly work not approved by the PRC. This impacted figures like Zhang Dongsun (1886–1973), a Japanese- and Western-educated comparativist who published prolifically until the late 1940s, and was later silenced and then imprisoned in the PRC. This also impacted later figures such as Li Zehou (b. 1930), a major figure in the Chinese Enlightenment period of the 1980s, and a prolific writer on aesthetics and human subjectivity, who was labeled a “thought criminal” by the PRC in 1989 for three years, and later was granted permanent resident status in the United States. Thus much of the engagement between Chinese and Western philosophers/philosophies in the post-1945 era involves the Chinese cultural sphere, but often not China (PRC), precisely. One exception to this may be the influence of Maoism as a political philosophy in places like Cuba. In the post-1945 world, we can see (at minimum) four areas or topics that have been fertile ground for interaction between Chinese and Western philosophies: New Confucianism, Ruist (Confucian) ethics, Daoist spontaneity, and translation of classical texts. Much of the philosophy of this period is in a broadly comparative context, as philosophers from the Chinese cultural sphere were often trained first in Western philosophy, and then came to put that training into conversation with their own tradition(s); likewise philosophers from Europe, Canada, and the USA were often trained first in Western philosophy, and came later to engage Chinese philosophers/philosophies. Even sinologists of the period, whose work focuses primarily on Chinese traditions, were often trained out of Western intellectual frameworks and, in several prominent cases, received their language training in a military context. Major journals publishing work in Chinese and Chinese-comparative philosophy post-1945 include Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, and Asian Philosophy. Many influential Chinese philosophers were involved in the New Confucianism (lit. New Ruism 新儒家) movement (PRC 现代新儒家, Taiwan 當代新儒家), whose “Manifesto on Chinese Culture to the World”

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was published in 1958. This movement began with Xiong Shili (1885–1968), who was early in his career influenced by Buddhist philosophy but later came to criticize Consciousness-Only Buddhism from a Ruist perspective. His students included Mou Zongsan (1909–95), who was heavily influenced by Kant, neo-Confucianism, and Tiantai Buddhism; Tang Junyi (1909–78), who was influenced by Plato, Hegel, and early Confucianism; and Xu Fuguan (1902–82). Together with Zhang Junmei (Carson Chang), these philosophers became the center of the New Confucianism movement, which attempts to harmonize Chinese and in particular neo-Confucian philosophies with Western philosophies and methodologies. All of these figures were prolific writers and teachers who shaped the following generations of scholarship on Confucianism. Although many topics in Chinese philosophy have received attention in the West, perhaps none has received so much as Ruist (Confucian) ethics. As a broadly pragmatic tradition, Ruism has a great deal to say about central ethical concerns such as the nature of persons, the height of human achievement, duties or obligations of persons pursuing moral cultivation, emotions and moral psychology, and the set of characteristics/roles/virtues whose development constitutes moral development. One respect in which this tradition differs from common Western ethical traditions is the distinctively central place of family, relationships, ritual, and deference in its account of human flourishing. Early accounts of Ruist ethics focus on several “virtues” including ren (仁 humaneness, consummatory conduct), li (禮 ritual propriety), yi (義 appropriateness, honor), zhi (知/智 wisdom, understanding), xin (信 trustworthiness), and xiao (孝 filiality), and discuss the process of becoming a junzi (君子 exemplary person) or a shengren (聖人 sage). There are several excellent edited volumes that bring Ruist ethics into conversation with contemporary ethical theories and concerns (see for example Shun and Wong 2004; Yu, Tao and Ivanhoe 2010). This is also not a field without controversy and differences of interpretation. For a sample of some of the different interpretative positions available, see Ames 2011, Ivanhoe 2000, Olberding 2013, Rosemont 2015, and Van Norden 2007. Scholars of Ruist ethics have also recently begun to engage with contemporary feminist concerns, as seen in the work of Li (2000) and Rosenlee (2007), among others. Western philosophers such as Michael Slote and Ernest Sosa have also been strongly influenced by Chinese ethics and epistemology, and have begun publishing comparative work in these fields. One of the many Daoist philosophical ideas that have become influential in contemporary circles is spontaneity, which arises out of early Daoist concerns with living a natural, harmonious, and non-impositional or non-interfering life (wuwei 無為). Spontaneity here is part of an account of both persons and the

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cosmos, where dao (道) as cosmic source is ziran (自然), natural and “self-soing,” and human artifice tends to cover over our natural spontaneity. To give just a couple of examples, Brian Bruya makes connections between Daoist spontaneity and analytic philosophy of action (2010), and Edward Slingerland puts this Daoist account of spontaneity into conversation with research in contemporary cognitive science (2014). The last area for attention here is translation. Although some might not think of translation in philosophically significant terms, when considering Asian philosophy in general and Chinese philosophy in particular, translation is very significant for both early texts and contemporary work. Because few mainstream Western philosophers read either Mandarin or Classical Chinese, the burden for conversation rests with translation. In the post-1945 period, there have been many important translations that make possible greater philosophical engagement between Chinese and Western philosophies. Early translators and interpreters such as Wing-tsit Chan, Feng Youlan, D. C. Lau, Joseph Needham, David Nivison, and A. C. Graham set the stage for more contemporary translations that are both less impositional of Western languages/concepts and more faithful to the original texts and include commentaries, a common traditional practice. Philosophical translators such as Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., Phillip J. Ivanhoe, Edward Slingerland, Daniel Gardner, Brook Ziporyn, Bryan Van Norden, Justin Tiwald, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Chad Hansen, and Christopher Fraser have given philosophers without the ability to engage primary source materials on their own terms a bridge for connecting with Chinese philosophical traditions. This, then, has made for Chinese and comparative philosophical inquiries that go far beyond the brief sketch presented here. JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY

In order to appreciate the influence of Japanese philosophy in the twentieth century, we must know a little about the history of philosophy in Japan. The word for “philosophy” (tetsugaku 哲学) was translated into Japanese in the late 1800s, along with a cluster of other Western terms including “religion” (shu¯kyo 宗教), “science” (kagaku 科学), and “superstition” (meishin 迷信). After all, in order to understand what philosophy means in a Western context, one must also understand how it distinguishes itself from both science and religion, as well as how so-called legitimate sciences and religions distinguish themselves from superstition. The importation of this cluster of terms – philosophy, religion, science, superstition – remapped the Japanese intellectual landscape (Josephson 2012). What were the philosophical traditions of Japan prior to this importation

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and remapping? And how does this historical legacy still shape Japanese philosophy in the twentieth century? Prior to the coining of the term tetsugaku to refer to Western philosophy, Japanese philosophical inquiries were deeply influenced by Chinese Ruism (Jp. juka 儒家), the South Asian dharma (“teachings”) of S´akyamuni Buddha (buppo¯ 佛法), and Tokugawa-period “ancient studies” (kogaku 古学) or “national learning” (kokugaku 国学) movements associated with indigenous Shinto¯ (神道) discourses. China’s Ruist lineage is a diverse tradition that encompasses studies of ethics, politics, and statecraft, empirical investigations of the natural world (especially astronomy), training in music, poetry, and gymnastics, and the maintenance of official court rituals and ceremonies. The Buddhist dharma similarly comprises diverse schools of thought marked by, at times, radical disagreements over how to interpret and practice basic Buddhist principles. Of the people associated with either Ruism or Buddhism in Japan (priests, laypeople, and so forth), those whom Westerners would be most apt to call “philosophers” tended to be Ruist academics and government officials, on the one hand, and Buddhist monastics on the other. At important junctures in Japanese intellectual history, we often see the educated elite change allegiances between Ruism, Buddhism, and the national learning movements, as they negotiate questions regarding which intellectual tradition better promotes successful societies or better supports human flourishing. The above is important to remind readers that Japan’s rich intellectual history is home to many philosophical trends and developments that can and should be appreciated apart from any role that Japanese thought has played in the West.2 Moreover, these rich traditions continue to shape Japanese philosophy today, even after the importation of Western terminology. That said, it was undoubtedly the translation of Western terms that first initiated sustained philosophical contact between Japan, Europe, and America, and it was the Kyoto School’s keen interest in Western philosophy that set the stage for much of the work that happens now. Thomas Kasulis has already provided an excellent overview of the Kyoto School in his contribution on Japanese philosophy to the Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, so we will focus on Kyoto School developments after 1945 as well as other Japanese discourses that have become influential in English-language philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, including Zen and aesthetics.

2

Readers might consult the definitive Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011) for an extensive collection of Japanese philosophical writings. For more on Japanese intellectual history in general, see the influential two-volume work Sources of Japanese Tradition (de Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann 2002; de Bary et al. 2006).

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In brief, the Kyoto School began with faculty and students at Kyoto University in the late nineteenth century, when several scholars under the mentorship of Nishida Kitaro¯ (1870–1945) left Japan to study with Western philosophers in Europe and Great Britain.3 Central figures from the early years include Nishida, his younger colleague Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), and the students Nishitani Keiji (1900–90), Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), and Hisamatsu Shinichi (1889–1980). The Kyoto School itself was situated in a broader network of cross-cultural philosophical efforts in Japan, including figures such as Watsuji Tetsuro¯ (1889–1960), Kuki Shu¯zo¯ (1888–1941), and Yuasa Yasuo (1925–2005), all based at Tokyo University. Work in the Kyoto School continues today through the influence of more recent members such as Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–2002), Abe Masao (1915–2006), Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926), and their students. Many Kyoto School figures have taught for extended periods in either North America or Europe. The impact of the presence of various Japanese scholars in Europe can be seen as early as Martin Heidegger’s 1959 “Dialogue on language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” first published in English in On the Way to Language (Heidegger 1971). The subject is, ostensibly, a discussion of the aesthetic philosophy of Kuki Shu¯zo¯, although the “dialogue” is mainly a vehicle for Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics. But Heidegger’s work foreshadows the role that various Japanese philosophical discourses would come to play in Western thought, especially on themes of nihility and non-duality. This influence is evident, in particular, in areas such as phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of religion. For example, from the 1950s to the 1990s, major works by Kyoto School figures were translated into English, including Nishida’s wellknown writings on nothingness, religion, and morality (1958; 1973; 1987; 1990), Nishitani’s works on religion and nihilism (1982; 1990), Ueda’s comparative work on Zen and Meister Eckhart (1983a; 1983b; 1990; 1991),4 and Wastuji’s and Yuasa’s contributions to contemporary phenomenology through their work on subjective experience and mind–body non-duality (Watsuji 1988; 1996; Yuasa 1987; 1993). An important moment in the reception of Japanese philosophy in Englishlanguage scholarship occurs with Graham Parkes’s edited collections Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987) and Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), both of which included authors associated with Kyoto School philosophy. These two volumes, coupled with the Kyoto School’s own longstanding interest in figures 3 4

Historical and philosophical studies of the Kyoto School include Michiko Yusa (2002) and James W. Heisig (2001). Many of Ueda’s works were written originally in German (for example, 1965).

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such as Heidegger and Nietzsche, speak to Japanese thought’s particular influence on Continental philosophy in the twentieth century. For example, Joan Stambaugh, the noted translator of Heidegger, also wrote on the Kyoto School and Zen (1990); and Bret Davis, a student of Ueda, has promoted Japanese philosophy in Continental venues including the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and the Collegium Phaenomenologicum. Davis and his colleagues, such as Brian Schroeder, Jason Wirth, David Jones, and Michel Schwartz, are associated with projects including the journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy and the edited collection Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth 2011). Other recent books that show the influence of Kyoto School (and related) philosophers on Continental philosophy include those by Graham Mayeda (2006), Erin McCarthy (2010), and John Krummel (2015). For discussions of the political philosophy of the Kyoto School and, in particular, controversies surrounding the relation of its members to Japanese imperialism during the Second World War, see Parkes (1987), James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (1995), and Christopher Goto-Jones (2005). Another area of Japanese thought that has received attention among Western audiences is, of course, Zen Buddhism. The noted popularizer of Zen in the West, D. T. Suzuki, was a speaker at the first four East–West Philosophers’ Conferences in Honolulu (1939, 1949, 1959, and 1964). So many thousands of people showed up to hear Suzuki’s 1964 lecture that the event was moved to an alternative venue and later broadcast on local television.5 Today, a quick search of the journal Philosophy East and West will bring up over 200 articles on one Zen Buddhist in particular, the Kamakura-period monk Do¯gen Kigen (1200–53), whose work on time, existence, and non-duality has attracted sustained attention.6 Other important English-language scholars on Zen and philosophy include Thomas Kasulis (1981), Abe (1989), and Peter Hershock (1999; 2014). For a discussion of recent critiques of Zen associated with Japan’s hihan bukkyo¯ (批判仏教) or “critical Buddhism” movement, see Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson (1997), Steven Heine (2008), and James Mark Shields (2011). Due in part to Zen’s noted uses and abuses of language to express seemingly contradictory ideas, the 1990s and 2000s saw several publications dedicated to Zen, deconstruction, and postmodern philosophy (Odin 1990; Loy 1996; Olson 2000; Park 2010). In addition, Zen has influenced philosophy of religion and

5

6

Bob Sigall, May 20, 2016, “Philosophers forum has rich history with Hawaii,” Honolulu Star Advertiser, www.pressreader.com/usa/honolulu-star-advertiser/20160520/282136405643964, accessed February 7, 2017. For example, see Hee Jin Kim (1987; 2006), William R. LaFleur (1985), and Gereon Kopf (2001).

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contributed significantly to interreligious dialogue, especially on topics related to kenosis and process theology (King 1967; Odin 1987; Cobb and Ives 1990; McCullough and Schroeder 2004). Lesser known in the English-speaking world is Izutsu Toshihiko (1914–93), a specialist in Islamic philosophy who taught for a time at McGill University in Canada and the Iranian Institute of Philosophy in Tehran, and who published comparative philosophical studies of Islam, Zen, and Daoism (1983; 2001). Related to the reception of Zen in the West is a picture of “Japanese aesthetics” as focused on issues of transience, decay, and certain melancholic aesthetic feelings. This picture was promoted to Western audiences by scholars such as Suzuki and Okakura Kakuzo¯ (1862–1913); but, like other areas of Japanese thought, today’s academic engagement with aesthetics also has roots in Japan’s encounter with Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. Michael Marra states: “The word ‘beauty’ coming from the West together with an arsenal of concepts belonging to the field of aesthetics forced the Japanese intelligentsia to rethink their cultural heritage in terms of Western ideas” (Marra 2010: 27). Japanese scholars looked to indigenous writings on practices such as poetry composition and brush painting for suitable counterparts to Western aesthetic concepts (33–5); and, as a result, a set of Japanese aesthetic terms entered English-language philosophical discourse. For example, the literary critic Motoori Norinaga (1730–1881), who was associated with the national learning school, identifies one of the major themes of the Japanese classic Genji monogatori as mono no aware, often translated as the “sorrow of things” (Nosco 2006: 485). Aware is difficult to render in English, connoting “pathos” or an emotional openness to life’s poignancy. Later, the ¯ nishi Yoshinori (1888–1959) promoted aware as a general aesthetic philosopher O category: “Just as in Western aesthetics, we must think of this experience as something that gives us a special aesthetic satisfaction or pleasure, such as the ‘Tragic’ and the ‘Melancholic.’ In the same manner, the experience of aware is nothing but the production of a complex and special aesthetic experience because of the unique nature of the external situation” (quoted in Marra 1999: 139).7 Although Norinaga’s original project was to separate the Genji monogatori’s depiction of aware from Buddhist didacticism (Marra 1999: 127), the term today is closely associated with the Buddhist theme of impermanence. Two other common aesthetic terms, wabi and sabi, have a distinctly Buddhist flavor. The first, often translated as “imperfect beauty,” refers to an appreciation 7

¯ nishi’s two-volume 1959–60 Bigaku We cite here a readily available English-language excerpt from O (Aesthetics), which appears in Marra 1999. Marra has written and edited numerous influential works on Japanese aesthetics (for example, 2001 and 2010).

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for the asymmetric, irregular, and rustic. The second, which can be translated as “desolate beauty,” is associated with death, decay, and in general the effects of the passage of time. As with aware, the focus is on the influence of Buddhist impermanence in the aesthetic experience – impermanence provides a sense of poignancy, resignation, or sadness characteristic of the aesthetic mood. An innovative contribution to the development of this Japanese aesthetic vocabulary occurs in Kuki’s work on iki, a difficult-to-translate word that he analyzes in terms of geisha culture, samurai ethics, and Buddhist “resignation” (akirame). Written in 1930, the book was translated into English in 1997 and again in 2004. Other late twentieth-century philosophers who have contributed to or been influenced by Japanese aesthetics include Steve Odin (2001), Yuriko Saito (1997; 1999; 2007), Sakabe Megumi,8 and Tanizaki Junichiro (1977). Given that our topic has been the influence of Japanese philosophy in the English-speaking world, this brief overview has focused on the Kyoto School, Zen philosophy, and Japanese aesthetics, which do stand out as topics frequently appearing in English-language literature. But, of course, not all Japanese scholars work in these particular philosophical areas, and recent years have seen increased attention focused on the philosophy of figures including critical theorist Karatani Ko¯jin and psychoanalyst Kimura Bin. Karatani, for example, who has influenced thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, is the subject of a 2016 special issue of the Journal of Japanese Philosophy. Ongoing series such as Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy (founded in 2006), and the more recent venues Journal of Japanese Philosophy (founded in 2013) and the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy (founded in 2016) promise to help promote a greater diversity of Japanese philosophers in Western discourses. I ND I A N P H I L O S O P H Y

Philosophical thinking in India can be traced as far back as the Upanisads (800–300 bce) and has developed systematically and dialectically through _the classical period (200 bce–1300 ce) in ways that continue to shape contemporary Indian philosophical discourse. Classical Indian philosophy, which encompasses a wide variety of views, is traditionally categorized into different dars´ana, or philosophical systems. There are six a¯stika, or orthodox systems, that accept the Vedas as authoritative: Sa¯mkhya, _ Yoga, Nya¯ya, Vais´esika, Mīma¯msa _ ¯ , and Veda¯nta. In addition to these there are three na¯ stika, or _unorthodox systems: Buddhism, Jainism, and Ca¯rva¯ka. These systems are classed primarily 8

Little of Sakabe’s work appears in English, although he remains influential especially on specialists in the field. Excerpts of his writings appear in English in Marra 1999.

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soteriologically, reflecting different views about the highest human good and the means to achieve it. In the historical development of these systems, however, initial differences in soteriology involved individual thinkers in debates over a wide range of positions concerning ontology, epistemology, language, mind, aesthetics, and ethics. Through lively exchanges among the different systems, Indian philosophy has come to encompass a wide variety of philosophical views that, while still often associated with particular systems, vary greatly in the extent of their concern for the soteriological issues that originally distinguished the systems. While philosophy has long been practiced in India, Indian philosophy’s engagement with the West only really began in the eighteenth century as a result of European colonialism. The colonial presence in India made Sanskrit philosophical texts available to Western scholars, thereby increasing the awareness in the Western academy of the sophisticated intellectual history of the region. The imposed European style of education during the British Raj, and the opportunity this afforded Indian scholars to study in Europe, also resulted in a class of Indian intellectuals who were well versed in both Indian and Western thought and wrote in English using a Western academic idiom (Bhushan and Garfield 2011). These two consequences of European colonialism made possible the development of, engagement with, and inclusion of Indian philosophy in the Western academy in the postcolonial era. In the early years of Western engagement with Indian philosophy, when “Eastern thought” was often characterized as spiritual or mystical in contrast to Western thought’s supposed materialism and rationalism, a lot of work focused on Indian traditions, especially Advaita Veda¯nta, that deny ontological ultimacy to the world of our ordinary experience and posit instead a more fundamental Absolute that can be known only through an intuitive kind of direct knowledge. Philosophers were particularly interested in the comparison of these types of views with German and British forms of idealism (Dasgupta 1953; Raju 1953; 1955; Shrivastava 1956; Lewis 1963; Kunst 1968) and were interested in highlighting the ways in which idealist or intuitive modes of thinking could complement realist and empiricist modes (Aurobindo 1942; Chaudhuri 1953; Sen 1957). In the 1970s work in Indian philosophy shifted focus away from aspects of Indian thought that could be described as religious or spiritual, undoubtedly as an effort to bring work in Indian philosophy more in line with work in mainstream philosophy. Adopting a primarily analytic style, Indian philosophers have since focused on explicating and critically assessing the philosophical problems that are addressed in Indian philosophical literature that is clearly argumentative, i.e. concerned to present and evaluate reasoned arguments for or against particular

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philosophical positions. The large body of such literature covers a wide variety of philosophical topics that have been of interest to philosophers in the last few decades. In the interest of space, we will here focus on outlining only a few key topics in the central areas of metaphysics and epistemology. In addition to the interest in Indian forms of idealism noted above, philosophers working in Indian metaphysics are interested in the debates between realist traditions, especially Nya¯ya and Mīma¯msa _ ¯ , and Buddhists over the nature of reality and truth. The followers of Nya¯ya and Mīma¯msa _ ¯ defend an arguably commonsense realist view that maintains that the world is, generally, as it appears to be: composed of different kinds of medium-sized objects that can be known as the types of objects they are. For them, cognitions and claims about such objects are veridical if they represent them as they independently are. Buddhists, on the other hand, typically deny that the world is as it appears to be. For Buddhists, cognitions of, and claims about, ordinary objects are at best only conventionally veridical: conventionally accepted by the folk but ultimately failing to represent the nature of reality as it is in itself. Buddhists differ in their accounts of why this is so: Abhidharma and Sautra¯ntika Buddhists appear to be reductionists (Duerlinger 1993; Siderits 2003), Yoga¯ca¯ra/Vijña¯nava¯da Buddhists appear to be idealists (Chatterjee 1962; Conze 1962; Garfield 2002; Tola and Dragonetti 2004) or phenomenologists (Lusthaus 2002), and Madhyamaka Buddhists appear to be global anti-realists (Siderits 2003; Garfield 2002). In light of these differences in metaphysics, different Buddhists give different accounts of the distinction they draw between conventional and ultimate reality and truth (Siderits 2003; D’Amato, Garfield, and Tillemans 2009; Cowherds 2011). Arguments between the realists and Buddhists over the nature of reality addressed questions concerning various topics in metaphysics, such as the ontological status of non-existent objects (Siderits 1991; Chakrabarti 1997; Gillon 1997; Perszyk 1984a), universals (Dravid 1972; Chakrabarti 1975; Staal 1988), and God (Krasser 1999; Patil 2009). Arguments concerning the existence and nature of the self, in particular, feature prominently in Indian metaphysics. Āstika traditions typically argued for a substantial, immaterial self that is the subject of experience and distinct from the body and the mind. Buddhists and the materialist Ca¯rva¯ka traditions deny that such a self exists. Classical and contemporary thinkers across traditions clash over how to account for diachronic and synchronic identity, the subjective unity of our experience, and the relationship of the self to the body (Collins 1982; Griffiths 1986; Siderits 2003; Siderits, Thompson, and Zahavi 2011; Ganeri 2012; Cowherds 2016). Recent work has also explored the ramifications of various Indian views of the self on questions in ethics about agency, freedom, and responsibility (Ganeri 2007; Dasti 2014).

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Related to metaphysics, Indian prama¯na theory is another area of central _ Western emphasis on identifying philosophic interest. Unlike the traditional the necessary and sufficient conditions for a dispositional state of belief to constitute knowledge, Indian epistemologists are primarily interested in identifying the means by which a veridical cognitive event (prama¯) is generated. On this view, a belief would count as knowledge only if it is generated by a knowledge-generating process: a prama¯na. The generally accepted prama¯na are _ ¯ na); however, there is a lot of debate _ perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anuma _ in the classical literature about the nature of these prama¯na and whether or not they are alone sufficient to account for the occurrence of_ all knowledge events. Some other candidates defended are: testimony (s´abda), comparison (upama¯na), postulation (artha¯patti), and perception of absence (anupalabdhi). Contemporary work in prama¯na theory often uses resources from Western _ critically assess Indian accounts of prama¯na, analytic epistemology to explain and _ bringing them into contemporary debates. Philosophers are interested in critically comparing Indian and Western epistemological frameworks and terminology, for example whether a knowledge event (prama¯ ) can be understood in terms of justified true belief (Potter 1984; Phillips 2012; Shaw 2016) and how Indian accounts enter into debates between internalism or externalism about justification (Phillips 2012). The general causal nature of Indian accounts of knowledge also generates debates about whether or not Indian accounts present a kind of naturalized epistemology (Arnold 2005; 2012; Coseru 2012). Indian forms of skepticism are also found to be instructive about the general structure of Indian accounts of knowledge (Potter 1975; Chatterjee 1977; McEvilley 1982; Garfield 1990; Kuzminski 2007; Mills 2015). In addition to these general comparisons, philosophers are interested in particular models of knowledge generation, especially perception, inference, and testimony. Every non-skeptical philosophical system in India accepted perception as a source of knowledge, although they differed in their accounts of it. The followers of Nya¯ya, for example, are direct realists while Buddhists are indirect realists or phenomenalists (Matilal 1992; Phillips 2012). Contemporary philosophers have been interested in various aspects of the inter- and intrasystem debates about the nature of perception, including questions about whether or not perception is conceptually determinate (savikalpaka) or indeterminate (nirvikalpaka) (Chakrabarti 2000; 2001; Chadha 2001; 2004; Phillips 2001; Bronkhorst 2011) and about how to account for perceptual error. With respect to the latter, for example, Matt Dasti (2012) and Anand Vaidya (2013) have argued over whether or not the Nya¯ya account is best understood to be disjunctive, taking perception and misperception to be distinct processes with different outcomes, or anti-individualist, which takes perception and

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misperception to be type-similar. In so arguing, Dasti and Vaidya relate classical Indian views to Western thinkers, such as Tyler Burge and John McDowell, in a way that is characteristic of much contemporary work in Indian epistemology and related areas in the philosophy of mind. Questions concerning the nature of cognition (Chakrabarti 1999; Gupta 2003; Dreyfus and Thompson 2007; Rao 2012; Thompson 2015), intentionality (Arnold 2009; 2012; Coseru 2012; Kellner 2014; Kellner and McClintock 2014), and the role and possibility of cognitive reflexivity (svasamvedana) (Perrett 2003; Mackenzie 2007; Moriyama 2010; _ Watson 2010; Chadha 2011; Kellner 2011) also enter into prama¯na accounts. _ In keeping with the general emphasis on knowledge generation, Indian philosophers offer various competing accounts of how an epistemic agent comes to know through the process of inference. Contemporary philosophers are interested in these debates concerning the proper structure of good reasoning, both public and private, and how these accounts compare with other forms of logic (see Hayes 1988; Matilal 1998; Ganeri 2001a; 2001b; Shaw 2016). An important common feature of Indian accounts of reasoning is a step where the epistemic agent establishes for herself, or for another, a pervasion relationship (vya¯pti) between the feature to be inferred and the inferential sign. This relationship is established through positive and negative examples that demonstrate the invariable connection between the sign and inferred property. With respect to this requirement, the skeptical Ca¯rva¯ka raised something akin to the problem of induction as a criticism of inference as a source of knowledge, to which Nya¯ya, Buddhist, and Advaita thinkers offer responses. Philosophers are interested in these debates and how they can enrich approaches to the problem generally (Perrett 1984; Chakrabarti 2010). Scholars have also been interested in the use of reason by the Buddhist Na¯ga¯rjuna (c. 150–250 ce), who employed a reductio strategy called the catusskotti, to demonstrate that the adoption of realist presuppositions results in _ _ the inability to assert of any purportedly real entity that it either is, is not, both is and is not, or neither is nor is not, exhausting all of the logical possibilities. This strategy is employed specifically with respect to the reality of prama¯na itself, generating a lot of exegetical and critical debate about whether Na¯ga¯_ rjuna is arguing for radical skepticism, quietism, global anti-realism, dialetheism, and/or an alternative semantics, and about the success of these arguments variously understood (Garfield 1990; Wood 1994; Garfield and Priest 2003; Westerhoff 2006; Tillemans 2013). Testimony, whether it is taken as a distinct prama¯na or as a form of inference, _ is an important source of knowledge for most Indian philosophical systems. Consequently many classical and contemporary Indian philosophers are concerned to offer an account of how one can come to know on the basis of the

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testimony of another. One important focus of these debates concerns the role that a trustworthy speaker plays in the account (see Chakrabarti and Matilal 1994). These discussions are relevant to ordinary verbal testimony, as well as to questions concerning the authority of religious texts and teachers. Arguments over the nature of testimony as a means of knowledge are strongly related to debates in the philosophy of language, given that part of examining testimony as a prama¯na involves trying to answer the question of how _ a speaker’s meaning from what they say and someone can come to understand thereby come to know what they are communicating. Generally, Indian philosophers take the meaning of a word or a sentence to be the object or state of affairs to which it refers, although there is debate about whether the primary unit of meaning is the word or the sentence. Among the various Indian philosophical systems there were debates about whether the referent of a word or sentence is a universal, a form, a particular, or some combination of these, as well as debates about how to deal with empty terms (Perszyk 1984b; Siderits 1991; Matilal 2015a; 2015b; Shaw 2016). Buddhist nominalists present a distinctive account of meaning by exclusion (apoha) as a way of avoiding having to attribute a general, common form or universal to the radical particulars of their ontology. By understanding the term “cow,” for example, to refer to the class of particulars that are excluded from an exclusion class – the not non-cows – the Buddhist hopes to avoid attributing to those particulars a shared cow nature. This counterintuitive position is often explicated by making reference to two kinds of negation, verbally bound (prasajya-pratisedha) and nominally bound (paryuda¯ sa), which when used _ circularity insofar as the verbally bound negation does not imply together avoid anything positive (Matilal 1968; Kajiyama 1973; Siderits 1991). Some scholars understand the apoha account not only as an account of linguistic meaning but as a more fundamental account of the generation of conceptual cognition, relating Buddhist philosophy of language to philosophy of mind in interesting ways (Siderits, Tillemans, and Chakrabarti 2011). The philosophical problems sketched above are but a few that have been of interest to philosophers since 1945. This account also does not do justice to the important work being done by scholars in related fields, such as South-East Asian studies, religious studies, philology, and history, which often provide much of the historical and contextual foundations necessary for sensitive philosophical work. There continues to be a dynamic and creative tension between philosophers who adopt a problem-focused analytic approach, which is conducive to cross-cultural exchange, and philosophers who adopt a more historical approach that seeks to ensure contextual depth and accuracy in the views presented. Given the topic of this chapter, we have here adopted the approach

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of the former set of philosophers, but it is worth acknowledging the work of the latter set and the important role they play in expanding the field of Indian philosophy in the West, especially given that many classical texts are still not widely studied or available in European languages. CONCLUSION

Since 1945 the body of philosophical work in Chinese, Japanese, and Indian philosophy has grown dramatically. Philosophers have written on a wide range of topics in ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, logic, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, phenomenology, feminism, epistemology, and metaphysics. Yet all that work still only scratches the surface of the rich philosophical resources available from these traditions. Many classical Asian philosophical texts, for example, in a wide variety of areas, still remain unedited and untranslated, and the scholars trained in both classical languages and in philosophy are few. As the Western academy pushes to be more inclusive in the kinds of philosophy it includes within its canons, and as more philosophy Ph.D. programs support research in Chinese, Japanese, and Indian philosophy, hopefully the number of scholars that can make these philosophies more widely accessible to a general philosophical audience will grow, helping to ensure that, over the next century, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian philosophies are common partners in philosophical conversations, and that new boundaries are being pushed in comparative work not only East–West, but also East–South, and East–East.

51 JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND THE SHOAH c la i r e kat z

At the conclusion to his 1965 essay, “Heidegger and God – and Professor Jonas,” the late Heidegger scholar William Richardson recounts the following story: Two years ago at a reception, someone who had read my book made reference to the chapter on the Epilogue to What is Metaphysics? that begins (banally enough) by saying: “1943 was a prolific year.” The gentleman said: “I remember 1943 well, Father. I was just talking to some of your friends about it, regaling them with amusing stories – they laughed and laughed. You know in 1943 I was in one of the concentration camps. It was a very prolific year indeed.” (Richardson 1965: 40)

Richardson recounted this same anecdote thirty years later at the 1995 conference on the work of Emmanuel Levinas hosted by Loyola University in Chicago. Here, he reveals more details in a story that was otherwise shrouded in mystery: “The gentleman” was none other than Emmanuel Levinas. The reception was Richardson’s post-dissertation celebration at Louvain. And Levinas, who had just published Totality and Infinity (1961), served as one of the examiners. In addition to revealing more details, Richardson also confessed that he had not forgiven Levinas for what Richardson interpreted, in the sardonic joke, as a lapse in Levinas’s ethical judgment. Richardson insinuated that Levinas’s lapse demonstrated that he (Levinas) was unable to live up to his own ethical command. By way of contrast, in 1943 nearly 190,000 Jews were deported and/or killed by the Nazis. In spring 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising occured, resisting the attempt to liquidate the ghetto. And by June 1943, it was estimated that German SS and police and military units had killed at least 1,340,000 Jews and an undetermined number of partisans, Roman (Gypsies), and others.1 In other words, while Richardson thought Heidegger was experiencing his prolific year, European Jews 1

Information retrieved from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website: “Holocaust encyclopedia,” accessed December 26, 2016. www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId= 10007767.

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were being systematically killed or deported to concentration or killing camps and then killed in huge numbers. Indeed, the years 1942–45 are characterized as the years when “Nazi Germany intensified its pursuit of the ‘Final Solution’.”2 When Levinas hears Richardson proclaim so blithely – and indeed in Richardson’s own words, banally – that 1943 was a prolific year for Heidegger, Levinas hears the ethical and political naïveté, if not, more harshly, the ethical and political failing, of a young man.3 The unfortunate side of this story is that so many years later Richardson was still unable or unwilling to reflect on what he said. He did not understand the irony of his remark as heard by Levinas, who as an examiner was one of the audience members actually intended to hear those words. Richardson’s inability to understand why Levinas would hear his remark as anything but banal helps us understand the direction Jewish philosophy takes after the Second World War. As Emil Fackenheim observes, the years 1933–45 ought to have been a rupture to all of philosophy, though certainly they were to Jewish philosophy.4 And Fackenheim thus asks, “What today, in the age of Auschwitz and the new Jerusalem, is Jewish philosophy?” (1996: 161). How does the Shoah direct us to address this question differently than it has been previously? For many twentieth-century Jewish philosophers, the Shoah represented a fissure or break in our thinking. Philosophy needed to reexamine how it understood the possibility of truth and the promise of ethics. Jewish philosophy needed to change also. Although the Jews in Europe certainly experienced anti-Semitism prior to the years 1933–45, these years fundamentally changed how Jewish philosophy is configured after 1945. In other words, although Jewish philosophy, and even modern Jewish philosophy, covers and can be analyzed from a varied set of themes – including aesthetics, phenomenology, gender, and political theory – Jewish philosophy after 1945 was so fundamentally changed by the events of the war that it would be remiss not to examine it closely with that influence foremost in mind. Fackenheim believes that three themes emerge that are truly philosophical and yet also idiosyncratically Jewish, namely: Jewish identity, a Jewish state 2 3

4

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/19421945, accessed December 26, 2016. See Emil Fackenheim 1987: 263. See also Adam Zachary Newton’s (2001) incisive treatment of Richardson’s story and the ensuing exchanges about it in the introduction to his book The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel among the Nations. Cf. Thomson 2009a: 42–3 n. 46. It is certainly the case that the Nazis targeted many different groups of people: homosexuals, Gypsies, those classified as mentally or physically disabled, political dissidents, and so forth. Nonetheless, the Nazis’ primary target was the Jews: The Final Solution, which details the complete extermination of a group of people, was directed at the Jews.

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(as a problem for political philosophy), and the Holocaust. These themes engage larger philosophical questions even as they are of particular interest to Jews. Of course, questions about Jewish identity, assimilation, living as a Jew in a non-Jewish nation, and the Zionist movement can be found in both pre- and post-Second World War Jewish philosophy. And as those familiar with the eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn know, being a Jew in a non-Jewish nation generated questions that are applicable outside of Judaism. For example, what boundaries are there and should there be between state and religion? What authority rightfully belongs to each – to the state and to religion? Under what circumstances might their respective interests and authority transgress these boundaries? And how does one negotiate one’s particular identity in a nation proclaiming to be universal? These same questions persist in the work of, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, even as they adopt a more urgent tone in the wake of the Holocaust. This chapter focuses primarily on philosophy’s attempt to address the ethical and political complexity of the Holocaust. How one defines Jewish philosophy may determine what figures one would include in this discussion. Yet, no matter the definition settled upon, it will include too many Jewish philosophers to permit an exhaustive discussion. My aim in this chapter is to focus on a few important figures whose philosophical careers began just before or closely after 1945, whose philosophical work was directly influenced by the events of the Holocaust, and whose impact on the field persists today. JEWISH PHILOSOPHY POST-HOLOCAUST

In Fackenheim’s view, “philosophers have all but ignored the Holocaust” (1996: 129). He provides various general reasons for why this is the case. Philosophy prides itself on being universal and yet, following the lead of Hegel, views Judaism – and thus Jewish philosophy – as particular. Moreover, philosophy has long been preoccupied with evil, a topic that philosophers historically have trouble addressing, but that preoccupation is generally viewed in terms of theodicy, that is, within a religious framework that asks: Why, with a loving God, is there evil? We should thus ask: What does it mean for philosophy that, in the age of the Holocaust, philosophy has trouble addressing this very specific, historical evil, especially when the philosophical discipline includes ethics as a prominent subfield? Fackenheim’s own work thus attempts to address how a philosopher should approach the subject of the Holocaust. Should it be viewed within history, as a historical event? The development of philosophy might suggest that Fackenheim is right to adopt this historical perspective. To see the Holocaust within

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history is to view it, and the fascist ideology that delivered it, as the logical end of capitalism (and even Enlightenment rationality, see Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]; Young, this volume). It is also possible that Fackenheim is correct that philosophers have been unable to understand the Holocaust, but for other reasons than he explicitly provides. It might be the case that the development of philosophy as a theoretical discipline simply lacked the theoretical apparatus to address this kind of horror. Indeed, as Fackenheim suggests in his essay on Claude Lanzmann, the simplistic manner in which philosophy dealt with the question of such enormous evil made a mockery of the Holocaust and so revealed philosophy’s limits.5 The Holocaust delivered new ways of being both a victim and a victimizer. It also asked us to rethink how we understand living and dying. As a result, Jewish philosophy after 1945 manifested itself in two distinct kinds of responses to the Holocaust. Recognizing the limits of what philosophy through 1945 could accomplish, one such response was literary. The other response was an attempt by philosophy to reconfigure itself or, more specifically, to recast how it understood ethics. The first approach attempted to raise important ethical questions from the events themselves, even if all we could do was stare in horror at the impossibility of how one could act ethically at all in such circumstances. The second response offered us a new way to think about philosophy and its relationship to ethics. ETHICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY

The most famous and maybe even the most contested of the Jewish philosophical responses to Holocaust comes from Emmanuel Levinas (1905–95). An émigré from eastern Europe, Levinas was a naturalized French citizen. A student of both Husserl and Heidegger in the 1920s, he translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations into French and is credited with helping to introduce phenomenology to the French-speaking philosophical world. He married and had a daughter by the mid-1930s. In 1940 he enlisted as an officer in the French army where he served as a Russian translator. His unit was almost immediately captured and he was held in a POW camp from 1940 to 1945. Although his wife and young daughter were safely hidden for the duration of the war, both he and his wife lost their immediate families in the Holocaust – a fact that is poignantly remembered in the Hebrew dedication to Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974). To include Levinas in the context of this chapter is, to be sure, to take a side in a debate that is far from settled. For, there is much controversy within 5

See Fackenheim 1996, “Philosophical reflections on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” 137–45.

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Levinas scholarship about Levinas’s status as a Jewish philosopher and whether his philosophical writings should be considered Jewish philosophy. Certainly Levinas was a philosopher who was Jewish, but is his philosophy a Jewish philosophy? If so, why? And more significantly, if it is Jewish philosophy, what might that mean for the applicability or universality of his ethical project? The roots of Levinas’s ethical project can be traced to his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism,” published in Esprit. This essay sketches a logic of Western thought that originates in Christian redemption – characterized by the ability or opportunity to remake oneself with no history weighing one down – through the modern period and into the early part of twentieth-century Europe. The prescience exhibited in this early essay on Hitlerism is only limited by Levinas’s inability to imagine in its full horror what Europe was to experience. But Levinas would spend the next forty years working through an appropriate or adequate philosophical response to this horror. As a result, he radically reconceives philosophy, situating ethics as prior to ontology. In doing so, Levinas also inverts one of the deepest trends in the history of Western philosophy, which up to that point characterized human selfhood or subjectivity in terms of freedom and knowledge. For modern philosophy after Kant, ethical responsibility was contingent on freedom or autonomy. One is not ethically responsible unless one could have done otherwise, or at least autonomously affirm morality’s dictates for oneself. For Levinas, by contrast, ethical responsibility is first and foremost a claim made on me by the other (an other with whom I can never identity), a heteronomous claim from which I cannot freely recuse myself. To this ethical other, I cannot choose not to be responsible. Levinas’s concept of the Other first makes its appearance in his 1946 lectures published as Time and the Other (Levinas 1947: 77ff ), but the ethical relation for which Levinas is best known is not explicitly named in this early book. Time and the Other introduces many of Levinas’s famous ideas (along with a first sketch of the dialectic that connects and develops them), but it is not until Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961) that we get a fully developed account of his ethical project. In light of the subordinate position that otherness holds in most of Western philosophy, Levinas’s ethics, which privileges the other, provides a deliberate counternarrative to that history. He identifies the ethical relationship most uniquely by its asymmetry: I am infinitely responsible for the Other, but not vice versa: Levinas’s description of the ethical relationship intentionally makes no reference to the Other’s reciprocal responsibility. Read together, Levinas’s philosophical writings and his writings on Judaism both similarly describe an ethical subject and its development. The subjectivity whose ethical development Levinas describes in both sets of writings clearly has its roots in the Hebrew Bible (Levinas 1947; 1961). Yet, the status of Totality and

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Infinity as a work of Jewish philosophy remains controversial. The controversy can be traced to Levinas’s own words. In at least one interview, Levinas confessed to publishing his Jewish writings separately from his philosophical writings on purpose, even going so far as to use different publishing houses. Elsewhere, moreover, he rejected the label of Jewish philosopher. There are myriad reasons that could explain why he might have chosen to reject this label or physically separate his writings on Judaism from his philosophical writings, not least of which might be his having trouble securing a teaching position in a university sponsored by a country (France) that proudly viewed itself as secular and viewed Judaism as particular and parochial. Levinas’s ethical project ends on a note very similar to how it began. In 1974, he published Otherwise than Being, completing the trajectory of his philosophical work. Much has been made of the two dedications in this book: “[In French:] To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism” (Levinas 1978 [1974]: v). Levinas’s dedication in Hebrew lists the names of his family members and of his wife’s family members who died during the Holocaust. In many ways, moreover, his four epigraphs – two from Pascal and two from Ezekiel – summarize the project more effectively than anything else in the book’s complex argument. To see this, however, one needs to read the epigraphs from Ezekiel (3:20 and 9:4–6) the same way that Levinas reads them, not only as a philosopher but also as Jewish philosopher.6 In their plain reading, the passages from Ezekiel are actually horrifying. For, they seem to suggest that an injustice took place in a city and that, in response, God wiped out everyone in the city, including those who wept at the injustice. Not one person was spared, not even the seemingly righteous. If we approach the passage as Levinas would, however, and so attend to the layers of interpretation that characterize a Jewish reading, then we discover a very different meaning of the passage, one that provides a clear insight into the motivating sentiment behind Levinas’s writing of the book. 6

Here are the two passages from Ezekiel: “And when a righteous man repents of his righteousness and commits injustice, I shall place a stumbling block before him – he will die; if you do not warn him, he will die because of his sin, and his righteous deeds that he performed will not be remembered, but I shall require his blood from your hand.” (3:20.) “And the Lord said to him, ‘Pass through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and you shall mark a sign upon the foreheads of the men who are sighing and moaning over all the abominations that were done in its midst.’ And to these, He said in my ears, ‘Pass through the city after him and smite; let your eye spare not and have no pity. Old man, young man, and maiden, young children and women, you shall slay utterly, but to any man upon whom there is the mark you shall not draw near, and you shall commence from My sanctuary.’ So they commenced from the old men who were before the House.” (9:4–6.)

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Rashi, the twelfth-century French rabbi and foremost commentator on the Hebrew Bible, reads the passages as suggesting that not everyone is as righteous as he or she appears. In the Talmudic passage to which Rashi refers, Divine Justice not only stands outside of God but also calls God out for drawing a distinction between those who did nothing at all and those who merely wept at what happened. At first glance, the perspective attributed to God is that those who wept at an atrocity are more righteous than those who did not. But the Attribute of Justice cries out that these groups are not really different from each other: Neither group, including those who merely wept, did anything to protest the atrocities when they happened. The Talmud puts it this way: “Sovereign of the Universe! . . . They had the power to protest but did not” (Shabbat 55a). In other words, weeping at an atrocity, while it might indicate that you have compassion, is not the same as trying to stop the atrocity before or while it is happening, or even protesting that event in a meaningful way. Levinas scholarship differs on the significance of this point. There are scholars who claim that Levinas’s ethics is simply about the ethical importance of interruption, of being interrupted by the other. But there is ample evidence suggesting that Levinas wanted his ethical project to say more than that. Levinas would not say what exactly it was that we should do – since that would entail providing an ethical system or a set of rules (as on the modern understandings of morality with which Levinas broke). Nonetheless, his ethical project does suggest that our obligation to the other requires us to do something. In his 1963 Talmudic reading, “Toward the Other” – presented in response to the question: Should the Germans be forgiven? – Levinas makes the following observation: The “laws of Nuremberg already contain the seeds of the horrors of the extermination camps and the ‘final solution’” (1990: 27). In other words, a crime so severe can only happen once the ground has been laid. The violence thus begins long before the first physical blow. Creating a culture of people who are willing to turn a blind eye – or a culture of people who cut deals, or are beholden to others so that they must turn a blind eye – enables the atrocities to occur. The atrocities of the Shoah bear a striking resemblance to most atrocities, in other words, whether on a global scale or in our local communities. They are only able to happen because people look away, with or without tears in their eyes – they do not protest. THE BANALITY OF EVIL

If we return to Fackenheim’s characterization of Jewish philosophy as that which addresses the Jewish state, the Holocaust, and Jewish identity, then Hannah Arendt, who has written on all three of these themes, would be

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included in any list of Jewish philosophers. Arendt’s case is in some ways more complicated than Levinas’s insofar as she rejects not only the label “Jewish philosopher” but also the label “philosopher,” opting instead for “political theorist.”7 Regardless of the label she gives herself or that we try to attach to her, however, Arendt’s writings and reflections on the Holocaust are among the most penetrating, provocative, and indeed philosophical. (Many of her writings on Jewish identity and the Jewish state preceded 1945, however, and so for that reason remain outside the bounds of this chapter.) In 1963, the same year that Levinas delivered his Talmudic reading, “Toward the Other,” Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who made sure the execution machine ran smoothly.8 Writing from the perspective of both a journalist and also a trained philosopher, Arendt cannot help but notice that modernity has witnessed something new and horrific. In addition to the obvious cruelty unleashed by the Nazis, there was a new kind of evil, which Arendt named “the banality of evil.” This was the evil perpetrated by Eichmann, for example, who, in his own words, quotes Immanuel Kant’s ethical views and offers as his defense that he was only doing his duty. How does one argue with this? Arendt’s analyses in Eichmann in Jerusalem unleashed extraordinary fury against her, most notably for her criticisms of the Jewish Councils (Judenräte) that from one perspective looked like they had aided the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust. Yet, this was not the first time Arendt had made this observation. In her 1952 review of Léon Poliakov’s 1951 book Bréviaire de la haine: le IIIe Reich et les juifs (translated as Breviary of Hate: The Third Reich and the Jews), Arendt makes a similar point (Arendt 2008). Here, however, she does so precisely as a means to illustrate the complexity of the Nazi regime: How had they managed to get

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With respect to these labels, Levinas and Arendt both broke with their famous philosophy teacher Heidegger in their own ways after Heidegger’s support for the Nazis: Levinas, by trying to rethink philosophy itself so that it would avoid any such disastrous failure in the future; Arendt, by separating abstract philosophical theorizing from concrete political action, in response to her recognition that one could be an expert in the former and not the latter. Arendt 1977. Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is based primarily on testimony at the trial. She thus published this work without the benefit of fifty more years of documents, analysis, interviews, and so forth. It should be noted, however, that with the release of many, many documents – some in German archives, some in Israel – Eichmann’s anti-Semitism appears less disputable. In her 2011 book The Eichmann Trial, Deborah Lipstadt reveals that Eichmann was in fact deeply anti-Semitic. Using material that was unavailable to Arendt, Lipstadt also puts to rest Eichmann’s claim that he was simply following orders. For Eichmann admits in a memoir he wrote during the trial that he had exempted several Jews from deportation. On what grounds could he have done this? What allowed him not to follow orders in these instances? (And if he did not follow orders at these times, then why not at other times as well?)

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both Germans and Jews to be tools in a vast machine? Indeed, there Arendt comments explicitly about the “terrible dilemma” of the Judenräte, more sympathetically noting “their despair as well as their confusion, their complicity and their sometimes pathetically ludicrous ambitions” (459). Arendt was criticized harshly for similar remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she seemed not to recognize how difficult these decisions must have been, no longer contextualizing her critique of the Judenräte as she had in the Poliakov review ten years earlier in a way that showed more sympathy to those Jews who were put in such a terrible position. As such controversies suggest, the provocative themes that run throughout many of Arendt’s writings in response to the Holocaust include the “rationality” that motivated the plans for Nazi Germany as well as the cooperation of those not actually part of the Nazi regime. Indeed, Arendt’s work, along with the work of so many others writing about the Holocaust, reveals that no matter how much information we have, no matter how many facts we amass, no matter how much knowledge we attain, we are still left asking: Why? In other words, there is simultaneously a rationality and an irrationality to the evil that characterized Nazi Germany. As Arendt writes: Only if the reader continues [after asking why, and then asking why again,] after everything about the exterminations has been made tangible and plausible, to feel his first reaction of outraged disbelief, only then will he be in the position to begin to understand that totalitarianism, unlike all other known modes of tyranny and oppression, has brought into the world a radical evil characterized by its divorce from all humanly comprehensible motives of wickedness. (460)

It is this radical evil that philosophy has been ill equipped to address, for it is an evil characterized by a type of absence of philosophy, a thoughtlessness or “banality.” Arendt’s use of the term “the banality of evil” requires us to rethink what evil means. She defends her use of this term in her exchange of letters with the Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem. In her explanation to Scholem, Arendt asserts that by “banality” she simply means that there is no depth there, there is no thought. There is nothing behind it. We think of evil as a monster full of ill intentions. But sometimes evil simply comes dressed up as an everyday bureaucrat with no gun or knife, just an ordinary list of names and the extraordinary power to indicate who will live and who will die. Although more explicit in her other writings, this understanding of evil as the thought-less motivates Arendt’s analysis. Here, as elsewhere, Arendt insists that we best stop evil by taking a step back, by thinking or reflecting on the events that surround us. Eichmann exemplifies the thought-less person when he asks, “Who am I to judge . . . if all [those]

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around me think it right to murder innocent people?” But as this suggests, Eichmann was by no means the exception; his evil took the horrifying shape of a thoughtless bureaucratic banality surrounded and reinforced by more of the same (see also Young, this volume). Less attention has also been paid to the significant distinction Arendt makes between Nazi Germany pre-1941 and post1941, when what was happening became clearer to everyone. Nonetheless, her controversial judgment shows that history can be a harsh and unforgiving judge. While Arendt believed that SS soldiers could have said no to murderous assignments, and also that functionaries could have been less helpful with the information they provided at little cost to their own lives, we simply cannot know if she is right. Instead, her legacy suggests, we will have to think, and judge, for ourselves – a philosophical task taken up in the literary response to the Holocaust. THE INVERTED WORLD

Jean Améry’s struggle with his experience in Nazi Germany – first published in 1966 and translated as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities – led Améry to suggest that torture was the essence of Nazi Germany. While not a memoir of anyone’s own experiences in Nazi Germany, William Styron’s famous novel Sophie’s Choice nicely illustrates Améry’s experience and introduces us to this ethically inverted world. As the novel opens, we find Sophie depressed and alcoholic, unable to move beyond the tragic choice she made upon entering Auschwitz. The book is structured in such a way that we do not know Sophie’s secret until the very end. But for us the literary structure is of less significance than the story itself. In one scene, we find Sophie attempting to persuade Rudolf Hess to allow her son to leave the camp and join the Lebensborn program. It is only later that we find out what happened to Sophie’s daughter, and herein lies the key to understanding Sophie as we come to know her through the story. Upon entering the camp, a Nazi doctor forces her to choose one of her children to be sent to the gas chamber. If she does not choose, they will both be killed. She chose her son to be spared. Her daughter, Eva, was sent to a crematorium. How does one reconcile oneself with such a choice? No matter how many times one might tell oneself, “it is not my fault,” the weight of responsibility would nonetheless be unbearable and unshakeable. It was not the child’s death per se, but the trauma of choosing which of her children would live and which would die that is carved into the survivor, Sophie, and that, for Styron and Améry, shows how the evil that permeated Nazi Germany was so different from other atrocities. Here we see the existentialist position that, even in a situation

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where we cannot not choose, we nonetheless feel responsible. This kind of unavoidable choice reveals the inverted world of Nazi Germany. Was it genuinely a choice? Was Sophie responsible for it? No matter what answer we give to these questions, Sophie’s anguish cannot be assuaged. And, yet, had Sophie not chosen, both children would have been sent to the crematorium. How could any ethical theory (any philosophy, we might say) address Sophie’s experience? If we think about the question – “Was Sophie responsible?” – we can suggest that she was at once responsible and not responsible. The Nazi has implicated her in the act of killing her child. She can tell herself repeatedly that if she had not chosen, they would both have been killed, and yet, by being forced to choose one, it is as if she was responsible for her daughter’s death. Similar themes characterize Elie Wiesel’s Night and the works of Primo Levi. For Wiesel, the inverted world of the Holocaust not only led to ethical questions that the modern world was ill equipped to address; it also delivered a response to the very existence of God that for the Jews had been unprecedented. Wiesel, like most other Jewish survivors, resists the temptation of theodicy, of trying to find some greater “good” in all the evil and suffering. There was no good. There was no divine lesson to be learned. And like Arendt, Wiesel recounts with both shame and resignation the way that Nazi Germany turned individuals into the kind of people they hoped they would never become: people who stood by while others were beaten; or worse, people who took part directly, in one way or another, in the act of killing another person, hoping that their own lives might thereby be spared. The acts of cruelty that creep into the camps – committed not by the Nazis but by those who in their quest to survive have become like those in charge – are wrenching. In these moments of cruelty, we see humanity’s ethical fragility illustrated in the ways that good so easily becomes evil. As in Sophie’s choice, here too the ethical world has been inverted. The Nazis did not simply inflict pain and suffering on their victims; they implicated their victims in that very evil so that those who survived were haunted by these events for the rest of their lives. Indeed, what we see narrated in Wiesel’s Night is the undoing of Elie’s moral self.9 Wiesel’s book shows Elie struggle with his faith in God, theodicy, responsibility, choice, shame, evil, and, in some sense, with the very core of Judaism. While reciting the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, early in his arrival at the camps, Elie wonders if anyone had ever recited the Kaddish for oneself. The ensuing idea that the self is separated from the self – or, more specifically,

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See Wiesel 1982. These next few paragraphs are reproduced from Katz 2014.

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dead while alive – comes through even more clearly in two of Primo Levi’s books that document his experience during Nazi Germany. Survival in Auschwitz (1996; originally published in 1947 under the telling title If This is a Man) chronicles Levi’s capture as a member of the Italian resistance and his ultimate stay in and survival of Auschwitz. The Drowned and the Saved (1989), published forty years later, is a series of essays that raises questions about memory, the complexity of morality, shame, and responsibility. Levi’s motivation for this set of essays is the worry that the Holocaust will come to be seen as one of many events in history, that the enormity of evil and cruelty that define it will be forgotten. Although arrested in 1943, Levi was not deported to Auschwitz until 1944, which he considers lucky. Owing to the Nazis’ shortage of labor, he believes the timing of his entry into this camp may have saved his life. A poem written by Levi precedes the first chapter of Survival in Auschwitz and addresses the readers in the form of a command (Levi 1996). This poem captures the central theme of the book: What does it mean to say “this is a man” – this one treated with such inhumanity, this one degraded, this one called subhuman? How does one retain one’s humanity while on the verge of becoming, through a slow and systematic starvation, inhuman? Here Levi recalls the term Muselmann “used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection [for the gas chamber]” (88), those who in a sense are already dead.10 The same reference appears in a chapter titled “The drowned and the saved.” Here Levi describes those Muselmänner who have become entirely submerged into the attempt to get enough food to survive for one more day, or who have given up entirely and so reached the bottom, who are alive but dead.11

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The literal meaning of this term is “Muslim.” From the documents at the Yad Vashem website, we find one explanation for this term: that the weakness and near death state led to the prisoners succumbing to a prone position, not unlike the image of a “Muslim prostrating himself on the ground in prayer.” www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206474.pdf, accessed October 12, 2012. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explores this reference in his book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999). This work, largely an examination of Levi’s and Wiesel’s testimonies, raises interesting philosophical questions about what it means to bear witness to such dehumanization and cruelty. What does it mean to bear witness to death, given that only those who have died could really tell us? Those who are so near death but who survive are unable to relate what this means for those who did not make it. In the death camps, in other words, testimony becomes its own paradox. Those who survive can bear witness to their experiences in the camp, but because they ultimately survive, they cannot bear witness to the finality of the cruelty in succumbing to death. Thus the survivors – Levi and Wiesel included – ultimately bear witness to something which is impossible to bear witness to directly. The witness, like the Muselmann, sits at the border between human and inhuman, between alive and dead, and the question of testimony is put into question along with the question of the human itself.

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The philosophical issues that run throughout Levi’s work are both penetrating and unsettling. In “The gray zone,” an early chapter in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi explores the complexity of the hierarchy inside the camps. Those of us who never lived through the experience of Nazi Germany tend to see things in black and white: there were the Nazis and their victims. One was evil and the other good – an easy distinction. But Levi’s book, like Wiesel’s Night and Arendt’s observations, complicates that reassuring dichotomy, exposing the way evil infiltrates the hearts of all human beings. What allows this to happen? And why does it happen to some and not to others? How do we understand morality when the perpetrators and victims are not easily distinguished and classified? What does it mean when even the righteous cannot be completely distinguished from the evil? The brilliance of Levi’s analysis is that at the end of the day he raises these questions yet offers no clear answers. For Levi, there is no reason, and no set of reasons, that one can use to explain why this happened or to predict who will become a Kapo (a death camp commandant or one of his agents) and who will stand strong against the temptation to become in hopes of surviving. What does all this mean for ethics? What does this mean for the Enlightenment? Levi observes only that to resist the pressure and power of a force like National Socialism requires a “truly solid moral armature,” and he thus poses this question to his readers: How strong is yours? How would each of us behave if driven by necessity while also lured by seduction? (1989: 68) How, indeed? Levi ends this chapter by simply reminding us of our fragility and the fragility of morality, suggesting that we are all in the ghetto and that outside of this ghetto the train is waiting. Returning to Fackenheim’s question posed at the beginning of this chapter – “What in the age of the Shoah is Jewish philosophy?” – we can see that Jewish philosophy does not afford any easy classification. We would be foolish to say Jewish philosophy is only and all philosophy written by Jews. In light of the complexity of themes with which Jewish philosophy after 1945 contends, it would also be foolish to limit Jewish philosophy in a way that would exclude literary works such as those we have considered. For what we have seen is that the Holocaust demonstrates the limits of our traditional approaches to philosophy, which cannot address adequately the evil experienced in those events. The aim of this chapter has been to focus on a few central figures whose impact and influence persists. These thinkers approach a set of questions from a different perspective, a perspective made possible because they are Jews who have had particular experiences. Yet, even as they emerge out of this particularity, their writings continue to have a universal appeal.

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As we have seen, the Holocaust had a pivotal impact on the focus and development of Jewish philosophy after 1945. The themes that Jewish philosophy addressed previously, although eclipsed by this focus, were never extinguished. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I would have been remiss not to discuss Jewish philosophy within the context of the Holocaust. I would be equally remiss, however, if I did not at least mention the myriad ways the field continues to flourish. Yielding different intellectual paths, Jewish philosophy remains close to the theme of minority-to-majority relations that we saw characterized it both pre- and post-1945. Here I can only mention a few of the themes and a handful of the scholars working in these areas, but it is both important and illuminating to see the breadth of the field. In the past twenty or so years, the several scholars working in the area of modern Jewish philosophy, for example, published books and articles on these themes: Jewish philosophy and aesthetics (Zachary Braiterman); the political in general but, in particular, the renaissance of political thinkers like Arendt and Theodor Adorno (Martin Schuster); the feminine/maternal/feminist theory (Mara Benjamin, Claire Katz, Susan Shapiro); masculinity (Sarah Imhoff ); messianism (Jacques Derrida, Martin Kavka); the law (Yonatan Brafman, Chaya Halberstram, Christine Hayes, Randi Rashkover); the environment (Hava Tirosh Samuelson); Jewish philosophy and science (Norbert Samuelson); theopolitics (Samuel Brody); phenomenology (Elliot Wolfson); philosophy of Talmud (Sergey Dolgopolski); and more generally, the future of Jewish philosophy (Aaron Hughes). The books on philosophers that are read regularly outside of Jewish philosophy, such as Levinas and Arendt, are too numerous to list. The return to philosophers more situated within Jewish philosophy also bears mentioning: Leo Strauss (Jeffrey Bernstein, Leora Batnitzky); Hermann Cohen (Robert Erlewine); Martin Buber (Claire Sufrin, Sam Shonkoff, Sarah Scott); Moses Mendelssohn (Elias Sacks); and Franz Rosenzweig (Randi Friedman, Leora Batnitzky, Peter Gordon). The disciplinary boundaries that define academia, while frequently useful, are also limiting. My hope is that with these brief remarks about the current directions the field is taking, scholars might find useful discussions for their research and teaching.

Part IV Epilogue: On the Philosophy of the History of Philosophy

52 DEVELOPMENTS AND DEBATES IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PHILOSOPHY m i c ha e l b ean e y

“Historical knowledge can be gained only by seeing the past in its continuity with the present.” (Gadamer 1989 [1960]: 327)

History of philosophy, understood as the discipline of writing accounts of the history of philosophy,1 has always played an important role in philosophy, even if philosophers, at certain times and in certain traditions, have looked down on “mere” historians of philosophy. Philosophers will often motivate their own views by endorsing, developing, or criticizing the views of previous philosophers, whether charitably interpreted or caricatured, and hence will either draw on existing accounts of previous views or offer accounts of their own. But history of philosophy has itself undergone change over time – in its assumptions, methods and practices, and in its relationship to other disciplines and to the other fields of philosophy. History of philosophy has a history no less than any other field of philosophy, a history that reveals changing interrelationships with other fields of philosophy and other disciplines. This is as true of the period after 1945 as of any previous period of philosophy; indeed, debates about the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy, in particular, have arguably been more vigorously pursued than ever before. These debates about the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy, and developments in the discipline of history of philosophy after 1945, form the main themes of the present chapter. I have captured this in the

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The term “history” is used in three main senses. As I have noted elsewhere (e.g. Beaney 2016), it can mean a (relevant) series of past events, a (relevant) account of such a series, or the discipline of writing such accounts. Context usually makes clear which sense is intended, but I generally use it in the first sense with the definite article, as in speaking of “the history of philosophy” to denote philosophy’s actual past, in the second sense with either the indefinite or no article, as in speaking of “writing a history of philosophy,” and in the third sense with no article, as in speaking of “doing history of philosophy.” Sometimes both the second and third senses may be involved, as in speaking of “using history of philosophy,” but no confusion need arise. Where it might, an appropriate qualification will be added in parentheses.

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title by speaking of “Developments and debates in the historiography of philosophy.”2 When we look at these developments and debates in detail, however, we find an extraordinarily complex terrain. Each tradition of philosophy has its own conception – or better, variety of conceptions – of history of philosophy and its relationship to philosophy, of its own place in the history of philosophy, and of what is right and wrong about the conceptions in other traditions. Different fields of philosophy may reveal different historiographical conceptions: We should not expect logicians to have the same approach to the history of their subject as do philosophers of religion, for example. And the histories of the individual fields of philosophy are themselves different in many ways: Aesthetics, for example, is a much younger field than metaphysics, even if we can go back and read aesthetic views into the writings of philosophers prior to the eighteenth century. The reception of the ideas of previous philosophers also changes over time: There are fashions in what philosophers are studied, what aspects of their philosophies are discussed, and how they are studied and discussed, just like everything else in human culture. In analytic philosophy, for example, Wittgenstein’s private language argument was a major controversy in the 1960s, before his remarks on rule-following took center-stage in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1990s, his later philosophy became far less fashionable, while his earlier philosophy received a new lease of life through debates about the “new Wittgenstein.” More recently, there has been a revival of interest in his writings from the last few years of his life, most notably, in On Certainty. What accounts of a philosopher’s thought are offered are partly reflections of their times – though they in turn, of course, can influence the debates that go on. Perhaps most importantly of all, new interests and concerns also mean that we can revisit the history of philosophy and offer new accounts. The most striking example of this in recent years is the “discovery” of women philosophers in the history of philosophy, from the very earliest Pythagoreans and Diotima of Mantinea to Susan Stebbing and other neglected figures in twentieth-century philosophy.3 The history of philosophy is not a fixed canon, 2

3

The term “historiography” is used in two main senses. It can mean either the writing of history or the study (or theory) of the writing of history. I have thus traded on this ambiguity in the title of this chapter. Spelling it out more fully, I am concerned with developments (after 1945) in the historiography of philosophy in both senses of “historiography,” as well as debates (after 1945) in the historiography of philosophy in the second sense of “historiography” (though there are occasional allusions, such as in the next paragraph in mentioning Wittgenstein, to what might be regarded as debates in the historiography of philosophy in the first sense of “historiography”). Again, context usually makes clear which sense is intended, though clarification may be required (as here) if both senses are involved. Waithe 1995 was a pioneering work, in this respect.

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even though centuries of discussion of just a handful of great white dead male Western philosophers may give that impression. On a different level, new concepts, distinctions, and topics can also provide a fresh lens through which to view the past. Having drawn a distinction between axiom and rule, between agent-causation and event-causation, or between analyticity, apriority, and necessity, for example, we can look back and see to what extent previous philosophers respected or even articulated those distinctions, which may not have been appreciated at the time or have been forgotten later. With new questions in mind, we can interrogate past sources to reveal new and sometimes unexpected answers, which in turn help develop current philosophical thinking. All of this is part of the history of the period in which the new interrogations occur. It is too easy to assume that because someone is concerned, say, with Aristotle, an account of what they are doing belongs only to the discipline of history of ancient philosophy. We have only to think of the development of virtue ethics, say, in post-1945 philosophy to realize how deeply mistaken this assumption is. To give another example, interpretations of Kant have played a fundamental role in philosophy in all periods since Kant’s critical turn itself. Indeed, it would be an exaggeration worth making to say that the history of Western philosophy after Kant is a series of footnotes to Kant, so that the reception of Kant could fruitfully be taken as a foundation for any account of that history. Ironically, history of philosophy – as a field of philosophy – is sometimes conceived in the most ahistorical way of all. A philosopher’s ideas, texts, and context are assumed to be (now) fixed, so that any reading of them reveals something about their period rather than ours.4 In writing about them, however, something is typically revealed about both them and us, and sometimes, arguably, even more about us than about them. Consider the case of Frege. We might think of Frege as a late nineteenth-century philosopher, but his works only began to be seriously studied and translated after 1945. Michael Dummett’s pioneering book of 1973 on Frege presented him as the founder of modern philosophy of language, so that the reception of Frege is central to the history of philosophy of language. The consensus now is that Dummett’s interpretation 4

I was surprised to find, when looking through a whole host of histories of philosophy, including all the Cambridge histories and Oxford handbooks, that history of philosophy is very rarely treated as something that itself has a history worth talking about. An exception is Moran 2008, which has chapters on the reception of Hegel and Kant in the twentieth century, though again nothing specifically on the history of history of philosophy in that period. Leiter 2004 has chapters on both ancient philosophy and the history of modern philosophy, in considering the future for philosophy. Piaia and Santinello 1979–2004 remains the exception par excellence, head, shoulders, and knees above everything else published to date. For reviews of the English translations of volumes 2 and 3 see Catana 2012 and Lærke 2016, respectively.

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was anachronistic, and there has been much corrective work placing Frege in his historical context, but it illustrates very well how the study of a past philosopher both reflects and feeds very directly into contemporary debates. It is impossible to do justice to all these features of the complex and evolving landscape of history of philosophy after 1945. What I will do here is simply outline seven conceptions of philosophical historiography that illustrate something of the range of approaches to history of philosophy that developed in this period and the debates that they have generated. The conceptions are all characteristic of Western philosophy, and I shall end by briefly considering the historiography of Chinese philosophy, before drawing some conclusions. First, however, I shall say something about the institutional context in which these conceptions and debates arose – about the professionalization of philosophy and the effect it had on the development of the discipline of history of philosophy, and the establishment, in particular, of journals devoted to the subject. THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF PHILOSOPHY

Sociologically, the professionalization of philosophy has had by far the most important influence on the development of philosophy in the twentieth century, and this professionalization has been most marked in the period since 1945.5 Comparing the position then with the position today, not only are there many more universities altogether but there are also many more departments of philosophy, many of which have grown dramatically. To take just the case of the UK, in 1945 there were around twenty-five universities (depending on how one individuates the constituent colleges of the University of London and the University of Wales); today there are over 150. Of these, forty entered a selection of their philosophy staff into the research assessment exercise that took place in the UK in 2013, indicating where there was significant research strength, but there are many more philosophers in other universities, often working elsewhere than in separate departments of philosophy. What this tremendous expansion of the university system has meant is that there is room in any department of more than around ten members for a specialist in some area of history of philosophy. Most departments need someone, at the very least, to teach ancient philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) and early modern philosophy (Descartes to Kant), so it is very common to find someone 5

There have been surprisingly few studies of the professionalization of philosophy. For the British case from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, see Brown 2014. Kuklick (2001) offers a history of American philosophy that takes account of professionalization, and Campbell (2006) looks at the early years of the APA, more specifically. Hamlyn (1992) provides a very broad outline of the practice of philosophy from the ancient Greeks onwards.

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who is a scholar of one or more figures in either ancient or early modern philosophy. In larger departments, there may also be specialists in other areas, such as Continental philosophy or non-Western philosophy, or someone may double up as a philosopher of language, say, and a historian of analytic philosophy.6 The teaching of the history of philosophy, as a core part of the profession of academic philosophy, has certainly encouraged much more research and scholarly work in history of philosophy. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF JOURNALS FOR HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The first specialist journal for history of philosophy, the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, was founded in 1888. The Journal of the History of Ideas was founded in 1940. All the other main journals in the field, excluding those dedicated to particular periods or philosophers,7 were established after 1945: the Journal of the History of Philosophy (hereafter JHP) in 1963, the History of Philosophy Quarterly (hereafter HPQ) in 1984, and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (hereafter BJHP) in 1993. There are general journals, such as Philosophical Review, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the European Journal of Philosophy, that also publish high-quality papers in all areas of history of philosophy, but I shall focus here on the specialist journals founded after 1945, as their own history is especially intertwined with wider developments in the field of history of philosophy. The origins of the JHP go back to a decision of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1957 to found such a journal. It had a difficult birth and a financially troubled youth, but it was hoped that it “would arouse greater interest in philosophy scholarship, would produce livelier, more frequent, and better informed discussions of historical texts, and would thus help to improve the quality both of research and teaching in this field.”8 This relatively bland and modest aim is also reflected in the “Founding Editor’s Note” that Richard Popkin wrote in 2002, where he speaks of having made “historical research in philosophy respectable” (419). Subsequent editors, however, have offered more robust statements of the historiographical approach 6 7

8

For a discussion of the professional divisions in philosophy, see Thomson, this volume. There are many of these, from Ancient Philosophy to Vivarium, and from Augustinian Studies to Studia Leibnitiana, most of which were also founded after 1945. Space prohibits discussion of these, but some – such as Kant-Studien (founded in 1896 by Hans Vaihinger) – are as influential in their field as any of the top general journals. Strong 1987: 180. For further details of the history of the editing of JHP and its editors’ historiographical views, see the various reflections published in volumes 40 and 50: Popkin 2002; Watson 2002; 2012; Norton 2012; Makkreel 2012; Press 2012; Schmaltz 2012.

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they wanted papers published in the JHP to adopt.9 Richard Watson has been the most forthright. Attacking what he calls “structural” or “analytic” history of philosophy and endorsing “historicist” history of philosophy, he has emphasized the need to understand the ideas and arguments of philosophers in historical context (2002; 2012). Gerald Press has also spoken of his main aim having been “to select the best contextual history of philosophy submissions” (2012: 473). Tad Schmaltz has offered a more nuanced view in distinguishing between “internal” and “external” approaches within the broad category of “contextualist” historiography (2012). These slightly differing editorial views reflect something of the history of historiographical debates post-1945, as we will see in the sections that follow. HPQ was founded by Nicholas Rescher in 1984 to bring history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy into greater dialogue, as is made clear in the “Editorial statement” that opens its inaugural volume: Ideally, its contributions will regard work in the history of philosophy and in philosophy itself as parts of a seamless whole. They will treat the works of past philosophers not only in terms of historical inquiry, but also as a means of dealing with issues of ongoing philosophical interest . . . Either historical material should be exploited to deal with matters on the agenda of current discussion, or present-day concepts, methods, distinctions, arguments, etc., should be used to illuminate historical questions. (1984: 2)

This has remained HPQ’s policy ever since. The first two sentences are retained, almost word for word, on their website today, following an opening sentence that states that HPQ “specializes in papers that cultivate philosophical history with a strong interaction between contemporary and historical concerns.”10 BJHP is the official journal of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, which was established in 1984 “to promote and foster all aspects of the study and teaching of the history of philosophy.”11 The journal was founded by 9

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For the record, the editors have been: Richard Popkin (1963–79, after a brief period of “co-editing” with Benson Mates), David Fate Norton (1980–82), Richard A. Watson (1982–83), Rudolf Makkreel (1983–98), Gerald A. Press (1998–2003), Tad M. Schmaltz (2003–9), Steven Nadler (2010–14), Jack Zupko (2015–19). www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/hpq.html, accessed March 17, 2017. Andrew Reck took over from Rescher as Editor in 1993 (with Rescher remaining as Executive Editor, a post he still holds), and he was followed by Catherine Wilson (1998–2003), David Glidden (2003–9), Jeffrey Tlumak (2010–13), Richard Taylor (2013–15), Aaron Garrett (2015–18), and Brian Copenhaver (2019–). www.bshp.org.uk/about/index, accessed March 17, 2017. At the time, British universities were suffering from cuts in their funding from Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, and several philosophy departments were closed down altogether. When new jobs did get advertised in the UK at that time, history of philosophy was never high on the list of priorities of fields in which to make appointments, on the grounds that any philosopher could teach basic courses in history of philosophy regardless of their specialism. Historians of philosophy were seen as a luxury that small departments could not afford.

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John Rogers in 1993 to promote and foster this further. In his later reflections on its founding (2013), Rogers identifies the deepening concern in contextualizing philosophical thought and the scholarly work being done in producing reliable editions of philosophical texts as the two main driving forces behind the development of history of philosophy in the 1980s. As he notes, the Editorial Board was composed of scholars of early modern philosophy, and the first few issues featured predominantly articles on this period. But it gradually broadened out to include both ancient philosophy and nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. When I took over as Editor from John Rogers in 2010, I continued this policy of broadening the range of topics covered. In an analysis of the papers published in the first twenty years of the journal, I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that half of them dealt with just seven philosophers: the familiar figures of most courses on early modern philosophy (Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant), and over two-thirds on just sixteen philosophers (adding Hobbes, Aristotle, Malebranche, Reid, Plato, Hegel, Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche).12 Even if the work of these philosophers is itself “contextualized,” it is hardly an advert for contextualization. One of the ironies of “contextualized” history of philosophy is that much of it remains fixated on the canonical figures. My priority was to change this, and I think I can say that we have had reasonable success in this regard.13 Three other (general) journals might also be mentioned here as relevant to the developments discussed in this chapter. History and Theory was founded in 1960 and “leads the way in exploring the nature of history,” as it claims (with some justification) on its webpage.14 Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy was first published in 1998, “for articles deploying the resources of modern logical analysis in dealing with historical philosophical texts,”15 taking an even more “analytic” approach than HPQ. The Journal of the Philosophy of History was established in 2007, providing a venue for the great interest that had by then 12

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Beaney 2013e. It might be objected that this analysis merely represents a selection bias. In fact, however, the vast majority of papers did indeed focus on just one philosopher, and in most of the other cases on a comparison between just two philosophers. Of course, any journal article has to have a clear focus, and discussing just one philosopher, on just one text or theme, is the obvious way to satisfy this. But it does seem to discourage other types of investigation in history of philosophy. See Beaney 2018. Makkreel was also aware of this issue as Editor of JHP. When he began, he writes, there were more submissions on Hume than on anyone else, and although he did succeed in publishing more on non-canonical figures, he ended up with Kant taking Hume’s place (2012: 310). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468–2303/homepage/ProductInforma tion .html. For an account of the first fifteen years of its life, see Vann 1995. https://dbs-lin.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/pla/?q=volumes/volume-01-history-philosophygeneral.

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developed in the field.16 In retrospect it seems surprising that it took so long for such a journal to be founded, though History and Theory had also been publishing in that area for many years. These journals represent just one tip of one iceberg in the publishing sea of history of philosophy after 1945. There are important book series, such as the Cambridge History of Philosophy series (to which this volume belongs), the Oxford Handbooks (which include many volumes on different historical periods and traditions), the International Archives of the History of Ideas (founded in 1963 by Popkin and now comprising over 200 titles), monograph series in the catalogues of most major philosophy publishers, and a whole host of scholarly editions of texts, from the beginnings of ancient Greek and Chinese thinking to the twentieth century. The importance of having properly edited, reliably translated texts, and the enormous scholarly work that goes into this, deserve much greater appreciation: The development of philosophy generally in the period after 1945 has been heavily dependent on this essential work of translation and scholarship.

RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION

The idea of rational reconstruction (as a historiographical approach) has its roots in the development of history of philosophy as a philosophical discipline in the eighteenth century, and in particular in Johann Jakob Brucker’s conception of history of philosophy as concerned with the reconstruction of “systems” of philosophy, understood as deriving from “principles” that it is the task of the historian of philosophy to identify.17 Also important – indeed, absolutely fundamental – is the distinction that Kant drew between quid facti and quid juris questions: between questions of fact and questions of right.18 Reformulated as the distinction between questions of (psychological or empirical) genesis and questions of (logical or rational) justification, this distinction came to play a central role in neo-Kantianism and has remained fundamental to many of the philosophical traditions of the twentieth century, including analytic philosophy and phenomenology.19 Failure to respect it, by offering some kind of genetic account as an answer to a question of justification, is now called “the genetic fallacy.”20 16 17 18 19 20

See Ankersmit et al. 2007. See Brucker 1742–44; and for discussion, Catana 2008; 2012; 2013; Piaia and Santinello 2011. See Kant 1781/87, A84/B114. On the origins of this in Baumgarten’s discussions of ethics and the law, see Proops 2003. For the most detailed account of the distinction in neo-Kantianism, see Windelband 1883. The first use of the term “the genetic fallacy” that I have managed to find is in Cohen and Nagel 1934, in a chapter on fallacies.

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This distinction provides the rationale for what can be seen as the first work of “analytic” history of philosophy: Bertrand Russell’s Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, published in 1900. In its preface, Russell distinguishes between a “mainly historical” and a “mainly philosophical” approach to history of philosophy, the first concerned with questions of influence, growth, and causes, and the second dealing with questions of “philosophic truth and falsity” (1900: xv–xvi). Endorsing the second approach, Russell sets out to show how (almost) all of Leibniz’s doctrines follow from just five fundamental premises, from which he then proceeds to criticize Leibniz’s “system,” finding inconsistencies in it. Russell’s book has provided a model for “analytic” history of philosophy ever since, and it is worth noting that it was written at exactly the time that we now identify as one of the key moments in the emergence of analytic philosophy – Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion against British idealism. This was not coincidental: Russell’s objection to what he took as Leibniz’s claim that relational propositions could be reduced to propositions of subject– predicate form was regarded as equally an objection to Bradley’s theory of relations.21 We can see here how doing history of philosophy, of a certain kind, plays a key role in developing a philosopher’s own agenda or program. Although Russell’s book is a clear example of what we now know as “rational reconstruction,” the term itself – at any rate, in its German form as “rationale Nachkonstruktion”– does not enter philosophical discourse until 1928, when Rudolf Carnap used it in Die logische Aufbau der Welt. A second edition was published in 1961 and translated into English in 1967. In the preface to the second edition, Carnap writes: By rational reconstruction is here meant the searching out of new definitions for old concepts. The old concepts did not ordinarily originate by way of deliberate formulation, but in more or less unreflected and spontaneous development. The new definitions should be superior to the old in clarity and exactness, and, above all, should fit into a systematic structure of concepts. (1967: v)

Carnap goes on to suggest that this would now be called “explication,” a term he introduced in the 1940s.22 He is referring here to the “rational reconstruction” or “explication” of concepts, but this is understood as achieved through building a whole “constructional system.” Hans Reichenbach, in Experience and Prediction (1938), picks up on Carnap’s idea in distinguishing between psychology, which investigates thinking

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On Russell’s dispute with Bradley, see Candlish 2007. See Carnap 1945; 1950; and for discussion, see Beaney 2004; Carus 2007; Wagner 2012. For more details of the development of the idea of rational reconstruction, see Beaney 2013d.

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processes as they actually occur, and epistemology, which rationally reconstructs them as “they ought to occur if they are to be arranged in a consistent system.” Reichenbach goes on to say that “I shall introduce the terms context of discovery and context of justification to mark this distinction . . . epistemology is only occupied in constructing the context of justification” (1938: 6–7). This is precisely the neo-Kantian distinction between discovery (or genesis) and justification, combined with the idea that justification proceeds through rational reconstruction. The idea of rational reconstruction came to play an important role in methodological discussions in the history and philosophy of science. Imre Lakatos has been especially influential in this regard. In “History of science and its rational reconstructions” (1970), Lakatos takes rational reconstruction to involve the construction of what he calls an “internal history” in accord with a normative methodology or theory of scientific rationality. History of science, he writes, “is a history of events which are selected and interpreted in a normative way” (1970: 121). What “internal history” leaves out – “the residual nonrational factors” – is mopped up by “external history”: “[R]ational reconstruction or internal history is primary, external history only secondary, since the most important problems of external history are defined by internal history” (118). Lakatos allows that there can be alternative rational reconstructions, but one such reconstruction will be better than another the more it reconstructs “actual great science as rational” (132). This distinction between internal and external history also has a longer history, arguably going at least as far back as Brucker’s “systems” conception of history of philosophy.23 It became firmly entrenched in the period after 1945, and some such distinction is generally seen as essential in distinguishing history of philosophy from history of ideas and in doing justice to the philosophical character of history of philosophy. In seeking to engage with and critically evaluate a past philosopher’s thought, one must make as much sense as one can of that thought, interpreting it in one’s own terms and rendering it as consistent as one can, sifting out the “external, non-rational” factors that may have helped generate that thought in order to focus solely on what pertains to its justification. At any rate, this is the historiographical conception that informs the project of rational reconstruction. Paradigm examples of the genre are P. F. Strawson’s book on Kant (1966), Jonathan Bennett’s work on the British empiricists (1971), Michael Dummett’s first tome on Frege (1973), Bernard Williams’s study of

23

See Catana 2013, though he suggests that the distinction was only first explicitly drawn by Christian August Brandis (1815).

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Descartes (1978), and, more recently, Scott Soames’s writings on the history of analytic philosophy (2003a; 2014).

CONTEXTUAL HISTORY

What is now often called “contextual” or “contextualist” history of philosophy developed, at least in part, in opposition to the growing dominance of “analytic” history of philosophy in the period after 1945. Just as analytic history has roots in early analytic philosophy, so contextual history has roots – and certainly as far as its historiographical rationale is concerned – in the critique of early analytic philosophy spearheaded by Wittgenstein in his later work and J. L. Austin.24 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953, two years after his death, and Austin’s two most influential books (1962; 1975 [1962]), based on lectures he gave, were published in 1962, one year after Austin’s early death in 1961. Both Wittgenstein and Austin emphasized the multiplicity of the ways in which we use language and the need to understand the broader context of use – in our language-games, social practices, and forms of life, more generally – if we are to properly understand what is meant (in the broadest sense of that term) on any given occasion. (See also the chapters by Mulhall and Cerbone, this volume.) Richard Popkin has been one of the guiding spirits of contextualist history. The first edition of his History of Scepticism appeared in 1960, and went through several (revised and expanded) editions over the next four decades, providing a model of historical scholarship, placing Descartes’s approach to skepticism, among many others’ approaches, in context. Popkin was also the founding editor of both JHP and the International Archives of the History of Ideas (mentioned above), both established in 1963. But he wrote little directly in support of his historiographical approach. It was left to others to offer a justification for contextualism, and of these, the central figure has been Quentin Skinner, on whom both Wittgenstein and Austin were key influences. “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas,” published in History and Theory in 24

Two earlier sources might be suggested (cf. Rogers 2013): Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945), which was subtitled “and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day,” and Copleston’s A History of Philosophy (1946–86), where he stresses “the need for seeing any philosophical system in its historical setting and connections” (vol. 1, Introduction, §3). As far as Russell is concerned, his influence surely lies in the stimulus he provided to correct all his errors, distortions, and outrageous comments, entertaining as the book is. Fichte, for example, is accused of having “carried subjectivism to a point which seems almost to involve a kind of insanity” and condemned as having “worked out a whole philosophy of nationalistic totalitarianism”; and Schelling – though “more amiable” – is dismissed in just one sentence as “not important” (1945: 690).

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1969, is Skinner’s most widely cited paper.25 Skinner here identifies three “mythologies,” as he calls them, that are seen as characteristic of broadly “analytic” historiography: the mythology of doctrines, the mythology of coherence, and the mythology of prolepsis; and he outlines a methodology for avoiding these mythologies. The mythology of doctrines involves the assumption that there is a perennial set of doctrines in the history of ideas with regard to which any thinker – political theorist or philosopher, say – has a certain view. The mythology of coherence involves the assumption that any text in the history of ideas has an inner coherence. With these two assumptions, the task of the historian then becomes to rationally reconstruct that system of thought, as revealed in the writings of a given thinker, that maximizes the coherence of their views on the supposed perennial doctrines. Such an approach may well involve a further assumption, that in seeking to make sense of a past text or action, we are more interested in its significance today (insofar as it deals with what we suppose are the perennial doctrines) than in its meaning for the writer or agent themselves: This assumption is what underlies the mythology of prolepsis. It is in countering these mythologies that Skinner formulates what has come to be known as Skinner’s maxim: “[N]o agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done” (1969: 28).26 The precise interpretation of this maxim has been a matter of some controversy, and Skinner has not agreed with all the attempts to interpret him. But he does immediately go on to head off one possible objection: “This special authority of an agent over his intentions does not exclude, of course, the possibility that an observer might be in a position to give a fuller or more convincing account of the agent’s behavior than he could give himself. (Psychoanalysis is indeed founded on this possibility.)” (28). An observer might well be in a better position to explain someone’s actions or thoughts, but Skinner’s crucial claim is that the agent must be capable of recognizing that explanation, given the conceptual resources available to them at the time and their knowledge and beliefs. It is in attempting

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The paper was reprinted, in a much abridged and revised form, in Skinner’s later collection of his essays on methodology (2002). Skinner was also the editor of the first volume of The Cambridge History of Philosophy, launching the series that this present volume brings up to date. In the revised paper, this is formulated as follows: “[N]o agent can be said to have meant or achieved something which they could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what they meant or achieved” (2002: 77). One assumes that this revised description obeys itself – at the very least, in its use of gender-neutral language. In general, I recommend the (substantially) revised paper as a better – and certainly more succinct and clearer – statement of Skinner’s historiographical views.

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to uncover and clarify the intentions of a writer, Skinner argues, that we are directed to look outside the text itself. Skinner calls his methodology “contextual reading” (1969: 40), and a major motivation was Austin’s conception of a performative utterance and the distinctions he drew between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts (Austin 1975 [1962]; Mulhall, this volume). We do not just say things, but do things in saying things, and what we thus do needs to be understood just as much as what we literally say. In understanding a text, as Skinner put it in the revised version of his paper, “we must be able to give an account not merely of the meaning of what was said, but also of what the writer in question may have meant by saying what was said” (2002: 79). To understand what they were doing in writing as they did, we need to appreciate the context in which they were writing. Two prominent contextual historians of philosophy are Michael Ayers and Daniel Garber. In their introduction to The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, they wrote: When the book was originally planned, the editors shared the view that some movement was badly needed, with respect to the teaching of “history of philosophy” in philosophy departments, towards a more historical approach to early modern philosophy . . . Commentators in the analytic tradition in particular, writing very much out of their own philosophical interests and preconceptions, have often lost sight of the complex context in which philosophy was written. In doing so, they not only have distorted its achievements but also have often denied themselves the tools necessary for the interpretation of the very words and sentences they continue to expound. (1998: 3–4)

Ayers and Garber go on to note, however, that the situation had been remedied somewhat by the time the book was ready to be published, with new books on unduly neglected philosophers and translations of forgotten texts. Their volume itself is organized around topics or themes rather than individual philosophers,27 and includes chapters on both institutional and intellectual context.28 It also contains a biobibliographical appendix with entries on 119 philosophers. 27

28

In this respect it differs markedly from A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (2002), edited by Steven Nadler, published four years later, which is organized entirely by philosopher or philosophical tradition. A Companion to Analytic Philosophy (2001), edited by A. P. Martinich and David Sosa, is also entirely organized by philosopher (forty-one of them, thereby canonized as analytic philosophers). Perhaps this shows the difference between genuine histories and “companions,” though companions can also be organized – and often are – by theme or topic. Tucker (2009), for example, combines both forms of organization. This approach was continued and even deepened in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (2006), edited by Knud Haakonssen, with chapters on the curriculum in universities and informal networks as well as on other aspects of “context.” There are also 201 biobibliographical entries.

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Both Ayers and Garber have also written in defense of their contextualism. Garber, for example, in rejecting the “collegial approach” of analytic philosophers such as Bennett, has argued that even his own “antiquarianism” (a term he is happy to use) can be of value to the analytic philosopher by providing fresh views as to what philosophy is, helping us “to free ourselves from the tyranny of the present” (Garber 2005: 145). Ayers and Garber do not go as far as Richard Watson in proclaiming that “as history, analytic history of philosophy is bunk” (2002: 526). Rudolf Makkreel, who succeeded Watson as JHP Editor, distanced himself from this view in pointing out that even the most historicist of historians rarely claims to be able to understand past philosophers purely in their own terms. Makkreel goes on: All interpretation occurs through retrospective contextualization, and the very attempt to articulate the contexts that are relevant to past philosophical texts demands some form of analysis that has resulted in the hermeneutic expectation to produce either a “better” understanding (Schleiermacher, Dilthey) or one that is “more original” (Heidegger) or “different” (Gadamer). One does not have to be an analytical philosopher to approach past philosophers with the intent of examining whether their positions are worth applying to current debates and how they stand up in this new context. Continental philosophers have done the same. It is also possible that certain current positions can shed new light on our understanding of past philosophers. The usefulness of historical interpretation can go in both directions. (2012: 311)

We will look at more “Continental” approaches after exploring the theme of bidirectionality to which Makkreel also refers here. NARRATIVE ACCOUNTS

In the previous two sections we have considered two of the main historiographical approaches in post-1945 history of philosophy: “analytic” and “contextual” historiography. Analytic historians of philosophy typically seek to rationally reconstruct a past philosopher’s “system” to make use of it, through qualified endorsement or criticism, for their own purposes. Contextual historians typically seek to make sense of past philosophers’ writings by placing them in historical context and interpreting them as far as possible in those philosophers’ own terms. A third kind of historiographical approach, which may involve elements of both analytic and contextual history, seeks to tell a story that leads from some point in the past to the present or that connects us up in some developmental or narrative way to past events or thinking. Stories of one kind or another have always been part of philosophy, from anecdotes to Geistesgeschichte – big, sweeping stories aimed at self-justification and canon-formation, as Rorty has characterized them (1984: §2). Hegel stands out as the supreme

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master of Geistesgeschichte. But in the period after 1945 there emerged both “analytic” concern with the nature of narrative and greater recognition of its role in historiography. In the 1940s and 1950s, the main debate in the philosophy of history concerned the nature of historical explanation. In “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942), the logical empiricist Carl Hempel had sought to extend the deductive-nomological (DN) or “covering law” model of scientific explanation to historical explanation, arguing that an event is explained by specifying a general law under which it falls. Critics focused on the differences between scientific and historical explanation – between Erklären (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding). In The Idea of History (1994 [1946]), based on lectures given in the second half of the 1930s but only published posthumously, R. G. Collingwood had already offered an alternative conception. History, according to Collingwood, is the history of thought, and the aim of the historian is to get “inside” events – or more precisely, those events that are human actions, which have both an inside and an outside. While the “outside” of an event might be explicable scientifically (e.g. by subsuming it under an appropriate law), the “inside” of an event can only be understood by “reenacting” the thought that was involved. This conception of “re-enactment” has proved highly controversial, but one (mis)interpretation has taken it to involve some kind of empathy, and this was a view that Hempel criticized in his 1942 paper. Collingwood’s ideas were discussed and critically developed by a number of philosophers of history opposed to the covering law model, including W. H. Walsh, William H. Dray, Alan Donagan, and W. B. Gallie.29 All emphasized, in various ways that reflected their differing views about “empathy” and “reenactment,” the role that the intentions, motives, beliefs, and desires of the agents play in explaining human action, and argued for an alternative approach that accorded center-stage to the idea of a narrative. Writing from a more analytic perspective, focusing on the “logic of historical narration,” Morton White also proposed a narrative approach. In a paper dating from 1959, he argued that “narrative should be the central concern of the theorist of historical knowledge, just because narration is the most typical activity of the historian,” and urged analytic philosophers of language, who had tended to focus on the logic of single 29

See Walsh 1951: esp. chapter 3; Dray 1957; 1964: esp. chapter 2; Donagan 1962: chapters 8–9; Gallie 1964. For an account closer to the logical empiricist view, see Gardiner 1952. Gardiner edited two influential collections, Theories of History in 1959, with a section on explanation and laws, and The Philosophy of History in 1974. On the debate, see also Mandelbaum 1961 (in the first volume of History and Theory). Dray offered a full-length treatment of Collingwood’s idea of history in Dray 1995. On Collingwood’s philosophy of history, see also Mink 1970.

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statements, to pay more attention to it: “If we succeed in clarifying the logic of narration, we shall have inaugurated a new era in the philosophy of history with the help of the tools of linguistic philosophy” (1959: 73–4). White contributed to clarifying the logic of narration. Distinguishing between the (mere) chronicle of a subject, understood as “a conjunction of nonexplanatory empirical statements which expressly mention that subject and which report things that have been true of it at different times,” and a (genuine) history of the subject, understood as “a connected account of the entity’s development in time” (1963: 4–5), White discussed the problem of selecting the facts to be incorporated in an explanatory narrative, arguing for a pluralist view that allows different selections according to different historiographical aims.30 By far the most important contribution to clarifying the logic of narration, however, was made by Arthur Danto in his Analytical Philosophy of History, published in 1965. What Danto essentially seeks to do here is bring narratives under the covering law model of historical explanation. Danto’s basic idea is straightforward. A narrative explanation, on his view, offers an account of a change to a subject x (assumed as continuous) between time t-1 and time t-3, and has the following structure (2007 [1965]: 236): (1) x is F at t-1. (2) H happens to x at t-2. (3) x is G at t-3.

(1) and (3) constitute the explanandum, (2) the explanans: (2) explains why x changed from having property F at t-1 to having property G at t-3 in terms of an event H happening to x at t-2. This event H, Danto writes, “must be selected in the light of some general concept, expressible, perhaps, as a general law. H must be the kind of event which can produce a change of the kind F–G in the subject x” (238). This shows, he goes on, that “the construction of a narrative requires, as does the acceptance of a narrative as explanatory, the use of general laws” (238). Explaining how a car, undented at t-1, is dented at t-3, for example, involves finding an event at t-2 that causes the denting – such as being hit by another car, the general law here being that cars are dented when hit by another car (with sufficient force). The explanation is provided by telling a story that links the car at t-1, t-2, and t-3, a story that has – as all stories must have – a beginning, a middle, and an end.

30

See White 1963, which was revised and expanded as chapter 6 of White 1965. White’s original paper opened the collection edited by Hook (1963), which also contains papers responding to his account. Mandelbaum (1963), for example, took issue with the relativism that he saw as implied by White’s pluralism.

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What is Danto’s answer to the problem of selecting what to explain? What we select as the beginning of a narrative, Danto writes, is determined by the end (248), and it is here that he invokes what I would say is his most important idea, the idea of a narrative sentence. Narrative sentences, as he characterizes them, “refer to at least two time-separated events though they only describe (are only about) the earliest event to which they refer” (143). “The Thirty Years War began in 1618” is one example Danto gives: This says something about the beginning of this war, namely, that it occurred in 1618, but does so with reference to its end (in 1648). This sentence (or a related one such as “The Thirty Years War began this year”) is not one that anyone would have been likely to have said before 1648 (since they wouldn’t have known when it was going to end). It is only once we know the result of a certain chain of events, as given under a certain description, then, that we can go back and seek an explanation, selecting and describing the relevant beginning – and intermediate events – accordingly. Narrative sentences are far more widespread than one might initially think. In showing this, Danto discusses what he calls “project verbs” (159ff ). If I say “I am currently writing a book” or “Today I planted some roses,” I am describing what I am doing or did with reference to its intended or expected result. So sentences involving project verbs such as “write” or “plant” are narrative sentences. The histories we write – and the stories we tell – are full of such sentences. Some of these might be uttered at the time of the earlier event (which the sentence describes), but many of them we would not be in a position to think of uttering until at or after the time of the later event, when it is clearer just what has happened – as in the case of “The Thirty Years War began in 1618.” To the extent that they involve narrative sentences of the latter kind, then, there is a clear sense in which histories can only be written after the event. Danto’s account of narrative sentences proved more influential than his defense of the covering law model of historical explanation. Indeed, we can now redescribe Danto’s book in a narrative sentence that no one would have thought of uttering at the time of its publication: “Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History inaugurated the narrative turn.” This was reflected in the book’s change of title when it was republished in 1985, with three additional chapters, as Narration and Knowledge.31 By then the narrative turn had been developed and consolidated by, most notably, Michael Baumgarten in Germany, Hayden White in the United States, Frank Ankersmit in the Netherlands, and Paul 31

For Danto’s own account of the development in his thinking, see his introduction to Narration and Knowledge, and especially Danto 1995.

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Ricoeur in France.32 As an “analytic” philosopher, Danto had remained staunchly “realist” in his view of the past: Past events can be redescribed with the benefit of hindsight in the stories we tell, but the events themselves nevertheless happened – if the stories are to count as genuine histories. Talk of “narratives,” however, readily lends itself to anti-realist philosophies of history, and this was the direction that the narrative turn took. Baumgartner “transcendentalized” Danto’s narrativism by arguing that it is we who “construct” the subjects of historical change, the subjects whose existence Danto had taken as a requirement for the type of explanation he had sought to clarify. This might seem most obvious in the case of such phenomena as the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and so on, which later historians read back into what had happened in conceptually structuring it. Hayden White and Ankersmit, in giving the narrative turn more of a linguistic than an epistemological twist, went further in the direction of idealism in arguing that “stories are not lived but told,” to quote Mink’s slogan.33 Crucial here was the move from focusing on narrative sentences to narratives as a whole, with all the varied and complex structures that narratives have. Without going further into the story of narrativism, however, what are its implications for the historiography of philosophy? Here the key issue is its rejection of intentionalism, the view that our primary concern as historians is to interpret actions or texts in light of the agent’s or writer’s intentions. It was this to which Collingwood had given expression in talking of getting “inside” events and “reenacting” the agent’s thoughts. It was also reflected in Skinner’s maxim discussed in the previous section. The whole idea of narrativism, however, is that there are descriptions and hence explanations of events that are not available to the agents at the time. Applied to the interpretation of texts, narrativism allows for accounts that go beyond what the author would countenance as representing their intentions. Indeed, according to narrativism, we may not understand the significance of a text or the ideas it formulates until well after its publication, and there may be indefinitely many stories that might be told about its effects or influence. From Skinner’s point of view, narrativism falls prey to the mythology of prolepsis, which he characterizes as “the conflation of the asymmetry between the significance an observer may justifiably claim to find in a given historical episode and the meaning of that episode itself” (2002: 73). Here Skinner allows that a historical event may have later significance, and he specifically mentions Danto in this regard in a footnote (fn. 91), but his main point is that this must 32 33

See Baumgarten 1972; White 1973; Ankersmit 1983; Ricoeur 1984. For further contributions, see Schiffer 1980; Carr 1986; Mink 1987; Ankersmit 2001. See Mink 1987: 60. For brief accounts of these responses to Danto, see Ankersmit 2007; 2009.

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not be confused with the “meaning” of the event. As long as we keep “meaning” and “significance” apart, however, there is no mythology, and this presumably implies that Skinner’s maxim can be restricted accordingly, as indeed was noted in discussing it in the previous section. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the main aim of Skinner’s 1969 paper, even in its revised (2002) form, is to repudiate concern with “significance,” and in this respect it stands in direct opposition to narrativism. In my view, too contextualist a focus in history of philosophy (as a discipline) fails to do justice not just to history of philosophy but to philosophy itself. In discussing what he called the “retroactive re-alignment of the Past,” Danto remarked that: “Any novel philosophical insight, for instance, may force a fresh restructuring of the whole history of philosophy” (2007 [1965]: 168). The point can be deepened: It is characteristic of philosophy that the development of new ideas goes hand in hand with the reinterpretation of earlier views. Narrativism is intrinsic to philosophizing. Even if one is a contextualist, then, one must concede something to the narrativist. There may be narratives in the philosophical text itself to which an interpreter must be sensitive, and narratives will need to be provided, in any case, of the various events in the relevant context by means of which to identify the author’s intentions, as well as of how the text fits into its context. GE NE A LO G IES

One particular type of narrative is a genealogy, and it is sufficiently important to deserve separate discussion. The nineteenth century was the century in which the theory of evolution was developed and its influence extended into all areas of human thought. One result was the distinction that came to be stressed between genesis and justification, as the neo-Kantians, in particular, sought to defend their projects from the increasing incursion of science into philosophy by advocating rational reconstruction as the preferred method (as we saw above). Friedrich Nietzsche, by contrast, influenced by Darwinism, was one of those who adopted a more genetic approach in philosophy, manifested most powerfully in his 1887 book, On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche here argues that what we take to be universal moral values today are really the result of a long and complex series of battles between rival views and practices, whereby our concepts of good and evil became transformed by such “events” as “the slave revolt in morals,” as he calls it.34 34

For accounts of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, see Geuss 1994; Guay 2006; Jensen 2013: chapter 6 (which places the method in the broader context of the development of his philosophy of history); Prinz 2016; and the essays in Schacht 1994 and Dries 2008.

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Nietzsche’s genealogical method has had a strong influence on a number of philosophers in the period after 1945. Perhaps the most famous in this regard is Michel Foucault, who grafted a genealogical method onto the “archaeological” method of The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) in writing Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976). Like narrativism, Foucault’s archaeological method sought to offer historical accounts that did not grant primacy to the intentions of the relevant agents: The notion of an “episteme” or “discursive formation,” seen as underlying our beliefs and practices at a pre-logical level, took center-stage in his historiography. What his genealogical method sought to add was an account of the transitions between epistemes, transitions that were regarded – just as Nietzsche had seen historical change – as complex, contested, and not governed by rationality.35 Central to the use of the genealogical method is the concern to liberate ourselves from false, misleading, or outmoded conceptions, pictures, and views that we may hold today. In arguing for the indispensability of genetic methods in philosophy, Charles Taylor wrote of the importance of understanding how one has got to where one is, or how a certain way of seeing things became entrenched, if one is to challenge current views: “[W]here you want to break loose, you need to understand the past in order to liberate yourself” (1984: 22). Analogies, metaphors, and models that may have been fruitful in the past soon get laid down as something that is simply taken for granted, that forms the unconscious presupposition of a particular conception or practice. We may then need an archaeological method to dig them out and a genealogical method to show how they gained the traction or influence they had. In Taylor’s words, we may need to “undo the forgetting,” and what is needed for this are “creative redescriptions” that “bring our reasons to light more perspicuously, or else make the alternatives more apparent,” showing us that things do not have to be the way we now assume (19–21). There is a striking similarity here with methodological remarks that Wittgenstein makes in his Philosophical Investigations. In §308, in what I regard as one of the most significant passages, Wittgenstein writes of the “first step” in philosophizing being “the one that altogether escapes notice . . . But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter.” Such a first step might be the use of an analogy, the status of which (as a “mere” analogy) is soon forgotten: “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent.” It is in the very next section 35

For discussion of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, see Gutting 1989 and Koopman 2013. For Foucault’s own account of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, see Foucault 1977a. See also May, this volume.

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that he makes his famous remark that his aim in philosophy is: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (§309). Arguably, some kind of archeaologicalcum-genealogical method is needed to uncover such first steps and show how they gave rise to the philosophical problems that Wittgenstein was concerned to diagnose and dissolve. Wittgenstein did not himself pursue this method in a genuinely historical way, but it clearly lends itself to the kind of historical investigation that Taylor was advocating.36 A more recent discussion and exemplification of genealogy can be found in Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness (2002). Influenced by Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, on which he comments, Williams seeks to explain the value we have come to place on truthfulness. He defines a genealogy as “a narrative that tries to explain a cultural phenomenon by describing a way in which it came about, or could have come about, or might be imagined to have come about” (2002: 20). What this definition allows are fictional or imaginary genealogies, and it is just such an imaginary genealogy that Williams offers in explaining the value of truthfulness. What is crucial in his conception is treating the phenomenon to be explained as having a functional role (which it might not have been thought to have), which itself answers to various more primitive needs and interests that an imagined society may have. This does not obviate appeal to “real history,” however. On the contrary, Williams stresses that “philosophy goes only so far” and “must engage itself in history” (39). Imaginary genealogies only provide an abstract argument – one might say schema – which must then be filled in through detailed historical understanding of the relevant cultural developments. The point here can be generalized. Whatever genealogies someone offers, there will always be a need for historical investigation to either support them or else supply the necessary supplementations in offering the explanations that are sought. HERMENEUTICS

In his contribution to the influential collection of papers which he co-edited with J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner, Philosophy in History (1984), Rorty distinguished four genres of historiography: rational reconstruction, historical reconstruction, Geistesgeschichte, and doxography. We have now discussed the first three, historical reconstruction in the guise of “contextual history” and Geistesgeschichte as a type of narrative. Doxography is the bad form of history of philosophy, according to Rorty. It simply takes a philosophical question and 36

For further discussion of Wittgenstein’s talk of “first steps,” and an illustration of what he had in mind in Frege’s apparently “innocent” use of function–argument analysis, see Beaney 2019.

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canon for granted, and tries to extract the answer that each philosopher in that canon is supposed to have given. The first three genres, Richard Rorty argues, not only are indispensable but actually complement one another: Rational reconstructions are necessary to help us present-day philosophers think through our problems. Historical reconstructions are needed to remind us that these problems are historical products, by demonstrating that they were invisible to our ancestors. Geistesgeschichte is needed to justify our belief that we are better off than those ancestors by virtue of having become aware of those problems. (1984: 67–8)

Rorty even suggests that the tension between the first two is what gives rise to the need for the third, as a Hegelian “synthesis” of “thesis” and “antithesis.” Earlier in the paper, in discussing the relationship between “what the dead meant” and “figuring out how much truth they knew,” tasks often assigned to historical reconstruction and rational reconstruction respectively, Rorty had also remarked that the two “should be seen as moments in a continuing movement around the hermeneutic circle, a circle one has to have gone round a good many times before one can begin to do either sort of reconstruction” (53 note 1). Rorty’s reference to hermeneutics is significant. In the third and final part of his classic Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), which was his own attempt to offer a Geistesgeschichte in the grand narrative style, he had contrasted epistemology with hermeneutics. For hermeneutics, he wrote, “to be rational is to be willing to refrain from epistemology – from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put – and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own” (1980: 318). Drawing on Gadamer, he advocated replacing “knowledge” as the goal of thinking by “Bildung,” which he preferred to render as edification, understood as the project of “finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (360). According to Rorty, “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (377). But his conception of edification also had a critical and even destructive strand, the aim being to puncture the pretensions of “systematic” philosophers. This suggests a different approach to the history of philosophy that we should also consider here. Let me say something first, though, about hermeneutics. Hermeneutics has its origins in biblical criticism in Germany in the late eighteenth century, and more specifically in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher argued that the key to a text’s interpretation lay in uncovering its creative origin in the author’s intentions. Wilhelm Dilthey broadened the project of hermeneutics to include the interpretation of all historical acts and events, interpretation that

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proceeds from our own “lived experience.” This emphasis on lived experience was central to both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology.37 But it is in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer that hermeneutics finally came of age, in the post-1945 period, and we shall focus on this here. Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, was published in 1960. Divided into three parts, the second, where he provides his theory of hermeneutic experience as it is manifested in historical understanding, is of most relevance to our present concerns. In the first subdivision of Part ii, Gadamer sketches the development of hermeneutics from Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Husserl and Heidegger, and in the second subdivision he elaborates on his own view as based on the idea of interpretation as a “fusion of horizons.” We approach all texts with a set of preconceptions and expectations, but the proper reader is open to having their understanding transformed as they ask deeper questions about the text and progressively refine their interpretations in finding answers. In motivating his account, Gadamer offers a diagnosis of Enlightenment thinking and the transition to historicism. Central to the Enlightenment was the belief in the power of reason, which every human being can in principle exercise, as summed up in Kant’s famous exhortation “Sapere aude!” – “Have courage to use your own understanding!” – and as exemplified in the emergence and achievements of the natural sciences in the early modern period. This belief went hand-in-hand with the repudiation of reliance on tradition or of any kind of prejudice in seeking understanding. In reacting against this fundamental Enlightenment belief, romanticism emphasized the role of the non-rational in human thinking and acting, and sought a return to the values of the past, typically a mythological past. On Gadamer’s account, this paved the way for historicism, which aimed to understand the roots of our forms of thinking and acting, and hence to explain the prejudices from which the Enlightenment sought to free us. He sums it up as follows: Thus the romantic critique of the Enlightenment itself ends in Enlightenment, for it evolves as historical science and draws everything into the orbit of historicism. The basic discreditation of all prejudices, which unites the experimental fervor of the new natural sciences during the Enlightenment, is universalized and radicalized in the historical Enlightenment. (1989 [1960]: 275–6)

It is only when we have “explained” our prejudices that we can finally regard ourselves as no longer subject to their influence. 37

For a summary of these developments, see Makkreel 2011; and for a fuller account, see Gadamer 1989 [1960]: Part II, chapter 1; and see also Liakos and George, this volume.

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It is precisely at this point, Gadamer goes on to say, that “the attempt to critique historical hermeneutics has to start. The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness” (276). According to Gadamer, and here the profound influence of Heidegger comes out, we just are historical beings, and we have to work from this acknowledgment: Our prejudices, “far more than [our] judgements, constitute the historical reality of [our] being” (276–7). What does this mean for historical understanding? Understanding, Gadamer writes, “is to be thought of less as a subjective act [than] as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated” (290). He spells this out in the rest of Part ii of Truth and Method. We understand the past to the extent that we rethink it in present terms, a process that itself transforms the tradition of which both we and those we seek to interpret are part. Historical knowledge arises through dialogue with tradition, and is only achieved by “seeing the past in its continuity with the present” (327). What Gadamer offers us is a way of resolving – or transcending – the debate between rational reconstructors and contextualists, and the fact that this debate is still going on, at least within analytic philosophy,38 is a sign of how little analytic philosophy has learnt from “Continental” European traditions such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. The transition from Enlightenment to historicism, as Gadamer narrates it, can be seen as replayed in this contemporary debate, rational reconstruction being a paradigm of Enlightenment thinking and contextualism a reaction to it that ends up – via romanticist concern to uncover “original” meanings or intentions – only accentuating impoverished views of historical understanding. So how might we rethink Gadamer’s theory today by applying it to the debate between rational reconstructors and contextualists? Gadamer himself emphasizes that we must always make sense of a text for ourselves (see e.g. 1989: 308 and 376), so we might agree that rational reconstruction is the first step in interpretation. But it does not count as genuinely reading a text if we are not open to revising our interpretation in light of better knowledge about its historical

38

Compare, for example, Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner 1984, where the starting point is the opposition between rational and historical reconstruction, with Laerke, Smith, and Schliesser 2013, where the starting point is the opposition between “appropriationism” and contextualism (see e.g. 1–2, 50–2). A cynic might be forgiven for thinking that only the terminology has changed over the last thirty years.

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context, which helps us become aware of preconceptions we had in approaching the text that may need correcting. On the other hand, merely “explaining” the text as a function of its historical context is also inadequate. Gadamer attacks what he calls the “implicit presupposition of historical method,” namely, that “the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context – in other words, when it is dead enough to have only historical interest” (298; cf. 290). If we do indeed appreciate the significance of something, then that is because it continues to speak to us today, and proper articulation of that significance will express recognition of how it does so. It is a hermeneutic necessity, Gadamer writes, “always to go beyond mere reconstruction” (374), which we can interpret to mean both rational and historical reconstruction. Real historical thinking, on Gadamer’s view, “must take account of its own historicity” (299): It must show the continuity between what we are seeking to interpret and the self-reflective understanding we achieve. CONCEPTUAL HISTORY

For most of the period after 1945, one particular kind of history has had a bad name, at least among philosophers. This is the kind of history that includes history of concepts (conceptual history), history of ideas, and history of problems (Begriffsgeschichte, Ideengeschichte, and Problemsgeschichte, as they are called in German). Many analytic philosophers from Frege onwards have objected to history of concepts on the ground that concepts are abstract entities of which it makes no sense to say that they have a history. As Frege put it, there is history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of terms, but no history of concepts (1884: vii). Rational reconstruction arguably presupposes that concepts are abstract entities, so it is unsurprising that analytic philosophers such as Frege who pursue rational reconstruction reject conceptual history. Contextualists too, however, object to this kind of history, though for a different reason. It is not that concepts, ideas, and problems are abstract entities which have no history; it is rather that concepts, ideas, and problems only have their identity within specific historical contexts. In criticizing history of ideas, for example, Skinner offers the following variation on Frege’s remark: “[W]hat we are seeing is that there is no history of the idea to be written. There is only a history of its various uses, and of the varying intentions with which it was used” (2002: 85). For Skinner, influenced by Collingwood, every expression of an idea has to be seen as part of an answer to a question which only gets its meaning from the particular context in which it is asked. In the final section of Part ii of Truth and Method, Gadamer criticizes history of problems (Problemsgeschichte), seen as characteristic of neo-Kantianism, on

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similar grounds: “The concept of the problem is clearly an abstraction, namely the detachment of the content of the question from the question that in fact first reveals it” (1989: 376). Recognition of this, he argues, “must destroy the illusion that problems exist like stars in the sky” (377). I find all these views unsatisfactory, however. Once again, we seem to have a false dichotomy: Concepts, ideas, and problems are either abstract entities transcending history or entities existing only at particular points in history. Why should there not be entities that exist through history, entities whose criteria of identity are laid down in the process of historical transmission? Gadamer writes: “Part of real understanding . . . is that we regain the concepts of a historical past in such a way that they also include our comprehension of them . . . I called this ‘the fusion of horizons’” (374). Why should this not apply to ideas and problems as well? The historicity of our thinking involves not just “dialogue” with particular moments in history, but participation in an event of tradition, as Gadamer himself described it (quoted above). If we are historical beings, then is our historical consciousness not itself made up of concepts, ideas, and problems that have a history? Similar criticisms can be made of Skinner’s position. He claims that: “The only histories of ideas to be written are histories of their uses in argument” (2002: 86). But are these uses not connected in complex webs of influence and transmission? And how can we elucidate these connections without using the same or related terms that presuppose some kind of identity of ideas referred to? Much of Skinner’s work has been dedicated to showing how political ideas in the early modern period differ from our own. He argues, for example, that Locke’s concept of “government by consent” is not the same as ours (77). But what makes both of these concepts – Locke’s and ours – concepts of “government by consent”? There must be something in common, or at least something connecting them, for them both to be describable (not completely misleadingly) in this way. But if this is so, then there is a story to be told of how the one changed into the other, and this can be construed as a history of the relevant (generic) concept. Skinner is participating in just that event of tradition within which the criteria of identity for the ideas and concepts are laid down. In Germany, in political history especially, there has been a strong tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. A leading figure has been Reinhart Koselleck, who, together with Otto Brunner and Werner Conze, edited the multi-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–97), a historical lexicon of basic concepts used in social and political discourse as it developed in Germany in the modern period. A collection of his essays, Vergangene Zukunft, was published in 1979, translated as Futures Past in 2004. In “Begriffsgeschichte and social history,” Koselleck explains his conception of Begriffsgeschichte. All historiography, he writes,

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operates on two levels: “[I]t either investigates circumstances already articulated at an earlier period in language, or it reconstructs circumstances which were not articulated into language earlier but which can be worked up with the help of specific methods and indices” (2004: 91). Begriffsgeschichte is needed in both cases to clarify the connections and differences between the conceptualizations. What is most valuable in Koselleck’s work is the recognition and exploration of the complex ways in which concepts themselves form part of history, not least in their role in political discourse. Concepts are used not just in describing social and political events but also, transformed and contested, in effecting social and political change. Furthermore, even when used in a single sense, previous uses may be alluded to, or may simply form the background against which others interpret and react to that use. Indeed, Koselleck also emphasizes how concepts “reach into the future” (80), the goal being to change the way we see and do things: “[P]ositions that were to be secured had first to be formulated linguistically before it was possible to enter or permanently occupy them” (80). It is an essential part of the task of Begriffsgeschichte to explain all of this as well. There are important lessons here for philosophical historiography. Merely providing a series of snapshots of different stages in the history of philosophy, however contextually well informed, will not do justice to the “retentional and protentional” structure – to adopt Husserl’s terms – of the uses of the relevant concepts. Those uses echo and transform previous uses at the same time as they anticipate and help create new ones, and all of this must be captured and elucidated in a properly self-reflective historiography (in both of its senses). I also think more justice should be done to what Koselleck calls the “condensation effected by the work of conceptual explanation” (2004: 81). Such condensations themselves effect philosophical development, and their role, too, needs to be acknowledged and investigated. DESTRUCTIVE RETRIEVAL

This brings us to the final kind of historiography to be discussed in this chapter. Koselleck’s exploration of the role of concepts in political struggles leads naturally to consideration of the role that history of philosophy (as a practice) itself plays in political struggles, understood in the widest sense, as including power struggles within philosophy as a discipline or institution, as different approaches, perspectives, views, and traditions fight it out for dominance. Nietzsche’s genealogical method showed how powerfully history of philosophy (controversial as it might be) can be employed in critical philosophical work, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1944, can be seen as heralding a more politically engaged approach to history of

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philosophy – and philosophy, generally – that became one of the hallmarks of critical theory as it was developed by the Frankfurt School in Germany and of Foucault’s work in France. This volume covers the period from 1945 to 2015, so let me end this review of Western conceptions of historiography by considering one of the most recent accounts of the issues with which we have been dealing. In How History Matters to Philosophy (2014), Robert Scharff distinguishes three senses of “history,” “history” as simply referring to the past, “history” as the discipline, and “history” as “a living legacy of background understanding that gives us our initial take on what it all means” (2014: xii).39 It is “history” in this third sense on which Scharff focuses. His answer to the question that forms the title of his book is simple: History matters to philosophy because we just are historical beings (23, 289). Even those who stress that philosophy needs to be understood historically, he argues, tend not to apply this in their own case – in other words, think through what this means for their own philosophizing. He criticizes Rorty, for example, for supposing that what approach we take to the past is optional (11–14). In Part i of his book, Scharff considers three philosophers – Socrates, Descartes, and Comte – who explicitly denied that history matters to philosophy, and shows how their actual practice nevertheless conflicts with this.40 He also explores how one might think with them, from within their inheritance, to encourage us to become more self-conscious about our own legacy. In Part ii, Scharff turns to the work of Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in tracing the development of a view and practice of philosophizing that takes its historicity more seriously. Fundamental to his approach is what he calls, following Heidegger, “destructive retrieval,” which seeks to identify and articulate the tension between a philosopher’s explicit purpose and “the foreconception (Vorgriff) that seems to be the largely unspoken source of the author’s urge to pursue this purpose and make explicit claims” (272). Such a project has significance to the extent that the foreconception (another Heideggerian term) is sufficiently “rich and responsive to what is presently burdensome” and where it “resonates with one’s own current sense of what is not finding a proper voice” (273). The idea, Scharff writes, “is to interpret what is foreconceived in such a way that it might be 39

40

Scharff’s first and second senses correspond to the first and third senses I distinguished in note 1 above. Instead of my second sense of “history” as an account of the past, Scharff has “a living legacy.” (In both cases, the use of the indefinite article is typical.) To the extent that this living legacy is articulated, it could be considered as an account, but his talk of “background understanding” suggests that he sees it as only partially articulated. Cf. Beaney 2016, where I show that Frege’s and Russell’s own anti-historicism also conflicts with their actual practice.

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clarified further through repeatedly revised explications that also counteract the obscuring effect of the explicit original convictions” (273). In short, the philosopher is seen as trying to say something worth saying but which needs to be sifted out and expressed better. In destructively retrieving Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Scharff interprets them as giving progressively better or more authentic (phenomenological) expression to the historicity of our “lived experience,” to use Dilthey’s term. A similar approach could be adopted in understanding some of the attempts that we have discussed in this chapter to recognize the historicity of our thinking in the face of the dominance of analytic philosophy. We have already noted, for example, the irony in the ahistoricist way that some contextualists seem to think of history of philosophy, which certainly calls for destructive retrieval of their foreconception. Destructive retrieval is also needed in the case of all those contemporary historians of philosophy who seek to “justify” history of philosophy by showing its usefulness to philosophy. They are still operating within the living legacy of analytic philosophy, with its distinction between discovery and justification and the attendant fear of committing the “genetic fallacy.” Is it not imperative that we become far more self-conscious about this most deep-rooted assumption of our legacy? Perhaps there is something to retrieve here too, recovering the relevant foreconception and rearticulating it in such a way as to accommodate pluralism in the practices of both philosophy and history of philosophy, as well as a healthier view as to their relationship. Scharff describes how Heidegger contrasts his own approach with “philosophies that think ‘actual’ philosophy starts only after a ‘propaedeutic’ furnishes ‘clear concepts’ to guide us” (282; cf. 289). Within such philosophies, history of philosophy can easily then get relegated to the mere “propaedeutics” of philosophy “proper.” But perhaps we can retrieve the foreconception of wanting to work with clear concepts without marginalizing history of philosophy.

HISTORIOGRAPHY WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

This chapter has so far been concerned exclusively with Western philosophy, which has provided the living legacy in which my own thinking has been rooted – at least, until very recently. One of the most important and exciting developments in Western philosophy over the last twenty years or so, however, has been the growth of interest in non-Western philosophy, and I was fortunate enough to spend a semester teaching (history of analytic philosophy) in China in 2011 and have been going back regularly ever since. I have also started teaching Chinese philosophy in Berlin and London, so let me take the case of Chinese

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philosophy to say at least something about these developments and their historiographical significance. The term for philosophy (zhéxué 哲學, literally “wisdom-learning”) was only introduced into China (via the Japanese term tetsugaku) at the end of the nineteenth century, and the first history of Chinese philosophy (as opposed to “Chinese thought” more generally) was only written by Hu Shi (1891–1962), who had done his doctorate at Columbia University, in 1919.41 This was merely an “outline” covering just the ancient period, however, and it was left to Fung Yu-lan (1895–1990), who had also done his doctorate at Columbia, to offer the first history of the whole of Chinese philosophy, the first volume of which appeared in 1931. The work was translated into English by Derk Bodde and published in two volumes in 1952–53, a shorter version having appeared in one volume in 1948. Hu Shi and Fung Yu-lan were responsible for establishing the canon of Chinese philosophy and setting the agenda for the debates they opened up. Their training at Columbia University, and the influence upon them of American pragmatism, shaped their approach. In his own historiographical reflections, Fung admitted that Chinese philosophy lacks what he called “formal system,” but not “real system,” understood as an “organic unity of ideas,” and it was the underlying “real” system that he saw as the duty of the historian of philosophy to reveal.42 “Rationally reconstructing” Chinese philosophy, then, involved not so much identifying basic axioms and principles from which everything else could be derived but rather exhibiting the relationships between the various ideas – connective analysis rather than decompositional or regressive analysis.43 In the last years of his life, Fung published a new, multivolume history of Chinese philosophy, this time from a Marxist perspective, which shows the grip that Marxist-Leninist ideology by then had – in mainland China, at any rate – on historiography.44 The Chinese revolution of 1949 and the subsequent development of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (as it came to be called from the time of Deng Xiaoping) in the People’s Republic of China has provided a unique context in which the writing of history (of all kinds) has been debated. Central to these debates has been whether the Chinese case is indeed unique or whether Western approaches and narrative forms can also be applied. Marxist-Leninist 41 42 43 44

Hu 1919. On the emergence of Chinese philosophy as an academic discipline in China, see Makeham 2012. Fung 1931 [1952]: 4; cited by Cua (2009: 52). Cua provides an excellent account of the emergence of history of Chinese philosophy, to which I am indebted here. For this distinction between forms of analysis, see Beaney 2014. For discussion, see Standaert 1995; Pfister 2002; Standaert and Giever 2003.

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narratives have been dominant, but even here there have been tensions between theory-driven approaches, especially based on the kind of class analysis normally associated with Marxism, and approaches more rooted in traditional Chinese “source-oriented historiography,” aimed at “writing history the way it really was.”45 In some ways this mirrors the tension between rational reconstruction and contextualism discussed above, the “rational reconstruction” in this case being constrained by political ideology. In Chinese historiography, just as much as in Western historiography, there has been opposition between approaches that repudiate the past in order to clear the ground for better futures and more conservative – especially Confucian (or new Confucian) – approaches aimed at preserving and building on the past in a more reformist rather than revolutionary way. Besides Hu Shi, who went to Taiwan after 1949, and Fung Yu-lan, who stayed in Beijing, two other Chinese historians of philosophy might also be mentioned here. The first is Zhang Dainian (1909–2004), who taught at Tsinghua University and then, from 1952, at Peking University.46 As well as writing on the history of Chinese philosophy, his central aim being to reconstruct a Chinese tradition of materialism, Zhang also published a Handbook of Categories and Concepts in Classical Chinese Philosophy in 1989, which might justly be described as a Begriffsgeschichte of key Chinese concepts in metaphysics, anthropology, and epistemology. Philosophical concepts and categories, he writes, “all go through a process of emergence, development, diversification, and synthesis. Different thinkers and schools have differing interpretations of the same category.” But this does not mean, Zhang goes on to argue, that we cannot communicate with one another. On the contrary, “The existence of historical research is ample evidence to demonstrate that the past can speak to the present” (Zhang 2002 [1989]: xx–xxi). The second is Lao Si-guang (1927–), who published a history of Chinese philosophy in three volumes between 1967 and 1982. Like Hu and Fung, Lao was influenced by Western historiography, but he criticizes both Hu and Fung for not having learnt sufficiently from Western philosophy. Lao offers a detailed methodology that begins by recognizing the fundamental questions of Chinese philosophy and proceeds by developing a systematic theory that shows how those questions were answered through the history. Significant is the stress he places on the role of philosophical analysis. He writes: “We must admit that

45 46

For a helpful account of these debates, which also pays heed to the differences between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese historiography, see Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 2011. For an outline of his work, see Cheng 2002.

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what China lacks is analytical skills. Naturally, we have to adopt most of these skills derived from Western achievements.”47 Analytic approaches to the history of Chinese philosophy have been especially characteristic of Western scholarship, at least in the English-speaking world. Two scholars deserve particular mention: A. C. Graham and Chad Hansen. Graham was responsible for editing and translating the Later Mohist writings on logic and philosophy of language which had been suppressed when Confucianism won out at the end of the ancient period and were only rediscovered two thousand years later. These writings shed a whole new light on ancient Chinese philosophy, revealing that there was a native “analytic” tradition with which the Confucians, Daoists, Legalists, and others were in debate. Graham’s own account of this was offered in Disputers of the Tao (1989), which was subtitled “Philosophical Argument in Ancient China.” Although Graham admitted that “even in the Axial Age rational demonstration had a much smaller place in Chinese than in Greek thought,” nevertheless “most of the ancient Chinese thinkers are very much more rational than they used to look” (1989: 7). He also emphasized that, just like the Chinese themselves, we fully engage with Chinese thought “only when we relate it to our own problems” (ix). Chad Hansen has carried this analytic approach forward in a particularly powerful – though also controversial – way. In A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (1992), he challenged what he called the “ruling interpretive theory,” which not only privileged Confucianism but also downplayed debates across the various schools of ancient Chinese thinking. Instead of offering accounts of Confucianism that begin with Confucius and then proceed through Mengzi and Xunzi to neo-Confucianism, and accounts of Daoism that focus on the Laozi (Daodejing) and Zhuangzi, Hansen stresses the importance that Mozi’s attacks on Confucius had for Mengzi, Zhuangzi’s concern to criticize both Mengzi and the later Mohists, and so on. Hansen also develops a novel view of the fundamental concern of Chinese philosophy by provocatively interpreting the central concept of dao (literally, “way”) as a rule-following practice. Chinese philosophy started, he claims, “embroiled in the Wittgensteinian challenge: Even given my acceptance of this traditional way of acting, how shall I know if I have followed it correctly?” (1992: 93). Different Chinese philosophers are seen by Hansen as giving different answers to this question. I began this chapter by noting some of the changes in fashion in the study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the period since 1945, so perhaps it is appropriate to end by noting how Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following has even been 47

Lao 1982: vol. I, preface; cited on p. 58 of Cua 2009, where more details can be found of Lao’s historiography.

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used in interpreting ancient Chinese philosophy, poles apart culturally and temporally as they might initially seem. In my view, this illustrates brilliantly how dialogue between past and present, even across cultures, can be tremendously exciting and fruitful (whatever controversies it may generate). In the last three decades, analytic philosophy has really opened up questions about Chinese philosophy that are not only leading to insights into Chinese thought but also, in turn, raising fundamental challenges to analytic philosophy.

CONCLUSION

The debates about philosophical historiography discussed in this chapter offer a lens through which to see the whole development of philosophy since 1945. Indeed, that development cannot be separated from those debates and the various histories of philosophy that have been written, drawn upon, and criticized, not just since 1945 but in the period before. Philosophy has always been a conversation with tradition, and the range of activity and interest in history of philosophy today shows how deeply history of philosophy really does matter to philosophy, even if some “official accounts” deny this.48 One sign of the healthier views that we now have about this (even within analytic philosophy) is the emergence of history of analytic philosophy as a major and respectable subdiscipline of philosophy.49 Within the mainstream analytic tradition of post-1945 philosophy, the opposition between rational reconstruction and contextualism has taken center-stage in historiographical debates. But these are not the only historiographical approaches, and indeed, as I have argued in this chapter, one must look to other approaches – and especially “Continental” approaches – in moving forward in these debates. There has been increasing recognition of the inseparability of our understanding of the past and our self-awareness in the present. Collingwood had made this point in notes written in 1936 but only published in 1999: “To know oneself is simply to know one’s past and vice versa” (1999: 220). In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto had shown how the past is made clear from the perspective of the present, and in concluding one of the chapters added in republishing that work as Narration and Knowledge, he stated the other side of the inseparability claim: “The present is clear just when the relevant past is known” (1985: 341). Narratives and genealogies are what link 48 49

For two recent accounts of how history of philosophy does matter to philosophy, see Redding (2013) and Antognazza (2015). See especially Beaney 2013a. I discuss the emergence of history of analytic philosophy (as a subdiscipline) in the two introductory essays (2013b; 2013c). See also Reck 2013.

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the past and the present. In his own way, too, as cited as the motto to this chapter, Gadamer had stressed how: “Historical knowledge can be gained only by seeing the past in its continuity with the present” (1989 [1960]: 327). Seeing – or constructing – that continuity, though, does not preclude making critical judgments about the past, sifting out what we want to recover and reconnect with, as we saw in discussing Scharff’s account of how history matters to philosophy, and, as I hope this chapter has shown, in pursuing philosophical argument through historical narrative. Narrare aude! A more controversial issue, however, concerns whether one can come to know oneself better by knowing someone else’s past or engaging with a past that might seem far less relevant – such as in attempting to understand cultures and ideas that are much further removed in space and time from one’s present situation, as in the case of ancient Chinese thought. My own answer is “yes,” and if one is looking to the future, then this is where I think the focus of historiographical debates will lie, as we seek to integrate philosophical approaches, concepts, doctrines, and debates from different traditions into a more global philosophy. Intelligere alios aude!

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INDEX

9/11 embodiment, and, 425 individualism and autonomy, critiques of, 424 retribution and, 425 theorizing after, 426 a posteriori realism, 176 a priori, 45 linguistic theory, 21 logical certainty, 335 pragmatic, 181 rejection by Quine and Armstrong, 181 synthetic, 32 traditional, 181 a priori knowledge, 44–7 Abe Masao, 699 absolute goodness, 231 access consciousness, 614 accommodation, 196 accomplished nihilism, 413 Achterhuis, Hans, 509 act consequentalism. See consequentalism action, aim of efficiency, 661 action theory influential works, 270 turn to reasons, 269 logic and architecture, 271 systematized, 270 actual causation, 165 actually operator, 72 Adams, Robert Merrihew, 233 adaptationism, 217 genes, and, 214 rejoinder to, 215 Adorno, Theodor W., 6 autonomy, and, 448–9

historically relevant version, 451 maturity, 455 product of repression, 450 self-evaluation, 451 within capitalism, 451 cult of authenticity, 393–4 culture industry, analysis of, 377 ethic of authenticity, critique of, 393 aesthetic alienation, 403 aesthetic virtues, 235 affect attunement, 467–8 agent-based virtue ethics, 233 aggregation, 261 Agrippa trilemma, 188 Alcoff, Linda, 421 alienation aesthetic, 403 consequentialism critique of, and, 402–3 historical, 403 all-things-considered duty, 270 Alston, William P., 338–9, 342–3 alternative conception of man, 652, 654 amentia, 602 Cavell’s view, 600 American pragmatism Dewey’s view democratic inquiry, 628 justification for democracy, 629 dispositional account of belief, 625 empiricist account of meaning, 625 establishment, 624 holistic pragmatism, 631 Lewis’s view, 630, 633 notable disciples, 630 Peirce’s view, 632 post-phenomenology, and, 512

851

852

Index

American pragmatism (cont.) primacy of practice, 626 Putnam’s view, 629 Quine’s view, 631 Ramsey’s view account of belief, 627 Bolshevik idea, 628 impact on Wittgenstein, 627 Tractatus, objections to, 627 Rorty’s view, 626 Sellars’s view, 632 theory of truth, 625 Améry, Jean, 718 analytic functionalism explanatory permeability, 84 qualia, attacks on, 87 analytic philosophy emergent picture, 9 expansion, 12 logic, and, 9 logical empiricism, and, 7 naturalism, and, 11 Pittsburgh School, 674 shapes of consciousness, and, 674 reasons for actions, and, 269 science, relation to, 8 analytic philosophy of language a priori knowledge, 44–7 analyticity central to, 32–3 Grice and Strawson defense of, 39–40 indeterminacy of meaning, and, 47–8 Kripke, and, 44 Carnap's analytic-synthetic distinction logical empiricism, 33–6 Putnam’s rejection, 40–2 Quine’s criticism, 36–9 consciousness. See consciousness establishment, 17 externalist semantics, 42–3 first philosophy, as, 19–21 inference capacity, and, 28 interrogative/imperative sentences, and, 29 linguistic meaning, and, 25 linguistics. See linguistics logical analysis, role of, 18

multiple roles, 29–31 operators, and, 25 post-Second World War, 23–4 propositions, and, 27 Russell, research on, 17 science, and, 21–3 semantic contents, 26, 29 truth conditions, 24 two senses of meaning, and, 28 world-states, and, 26 analytic/Continental divide analytic philosophy, defining, 572 arbitrary historical construct, 573 areas of specialization, Continental distrust, 581 creativity, role in Continental view, 586 cross-classifying, 569–70 deconstruction of, 573 German roots, 576–80 impact of, 571 important insights, 588 lack of mutual respect, 583 love, and, 587 mathematics and poetry, divisions between, 582 natural sciences and fine arts, differences between, 580 null-hypothesis, use by analytic philosophers, 584 philosophy and poetry, arguments between, 585 stereotypes, 574–6 synthetic philosophers future role, 587 leading the way, 587 weakening of, 571 analytic/Continental stereotypes progress, Continental view of, 582 Anglo-American existential phenomenology Dreyfus’s view agent learning, 660 comportment, 655, 657–60 expert learning, 656 four commitments of human existence, 649–54 learning, and, 655 maximal grip, 654, 659 methodology, 647–9

Index normativity of action, 654 on-going coping, 662 angoisse, 359 Angst, 357 animal ethics capabilities approach limits of, 464 Nussbaum list, 463 current attitudes, challenging, 459 killing, and, 460 pain and suffering, 459 principle of equal consideration, 460 rights-holders negative and positive rights, application to, 462 problems with exercising, 463 subject of a life, 461 utilitarianism, influenced by, 459 Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, 224 human agency, 105 intention concept, 110 different descriptions applied to single act, 111 rationalizing explanation, 270 reason for acting, 110 anthropocentrism, 486 antirealism constructive empiricism, 206 new forms, 209 Anwendung (application), 404 Apel, Karl-Otto, 354 Arendt, Hannah, 715–17 Aristotle, 480, 604, 673 Armstrong, David a priori augmentation, rejection of, 181 commitment to empiricism, 179 inner awareness, 611 inner sense, 618 observable states of affairs, 183 physicalism, and, 178 properties and relations, and, 182 Quine as anti-naturalist, 184 scientific naturalism as a postiori realism, 176–7 Aron, Raymond, 357 arthood, 327 artifacts, 505

853

artworld, 327 assertions, 338 asymmetric dependence, 70 asymmetry of overdetermination, 167 at home words, 636 atomic formulas, 140 attending, 530 aesthetically, 533 mode, 532 mode of, 533 parallel tracking, 533 attitudes, and externalism, 67–70 attributer contextualism, 122 Austin, John Langshaw, 10 acts, distinguishing, 737 claims to know, 117 fieldwork in moral philosophy, 594 human action, 595 parable of the donkeys, 592 performance utterances, 596 privileges common sense, 116 relevant alternatives proposal, 117 authentic self, 394 authenticity, 361 Adorno’s critique cult of, 393 obscurantism, as, 394 social relations, and, 394 They, conforming to, 394 Beauvoir, Simone de, and, 361 definition, 355 ethic of, 393 my truth, 393 ethic of authenticity, and unguided freedom, 394 Gadamer’s theory Gemeinschaft (community), and, 396 prejudices, and, 395 Heidegger’s view Beständigkeit (steadiness), and, 397 thrown project, humans as, 397 irony, and, 360 meaning, 392 Sartre, and, 360 virtue ethics, and, 396 decisionism, and, 398 ethos, role of, 396 telos (purpose), 396 autocracy of pure practical reason, 247

854

Index

autonomy Adorno’s view historically relevant version, 451 maturity, as, 451 product of repression, 450 self-evaluation, and, 451 within capitalism, 451 Frankfurt School deliberations, 445 ambivalent view, 447 contextualist approach, 448 human beings, dualized conception of, 447 irrationalism, contrast with, 446 product of social forces, 446 rationality of social totality, and, 448 rationalization, and, 448 Habermas’s view condition for realization, 452 Frankfurt School, differences from, 452 hierarchy of moral competencies, and, 453 normative basis for moral action, 453 politics, and, 454 reciprocity of recognition, and, 454 Honneth’s account idea of recognition, and, 456 starting point, 455 theory of intersubjectivity, 455 Marcuse’s view expanded notion, 455 freedom, and, 449–50 human capacity, as, 449 pleasure principle, and, 449 availability to recognition, 423 avant-garde assault on narrative film, 543 disappearance, 549 psychoanalysis, and, 543 axiom of choice, 138 Ayer, Alfed Jules, 323, 334–5 Ayers, Michael, 737–8 background practices, 651–2 backtracking, 166 Bacon, Francis, 189, 472 bad faith, 359 Badiou, Alain, 440 Bain, Alexander, 625 Baker, Gordon, 636

banality of evil, meaning, 716–17 Bapuwa, Mamalea, 316 Baron, Marcia, 244 Barrett, William, 354, 498 Baudrillard, Jean, 6 Bayes’ Theorem, 197 Bayesian confirmation theory, 339 religion, and, 340 Bayesianism Bayesian conditionalization, 197 critiques of, 197 Beardsley, Monroe C., 324, 326–7, 543 Beauvoir, Simone de, 390 critical social theory, and, 363 embodiment, and, 361 existentialist offensive, 352 institutional values and forms, 361 social relations, and, 361 Beck, Lewis White, 238 Bedeutung (designated object), 606 bedrock common sense, 179 being obligatory, 228 being virtuous, 228 Bellah, Robert, 391 Bennett, Karen, 169 Bentham, Jeremy, 459–60 Bergoffen, Debra, 425 Berleant, Arnold, 328 Bestand (standing reserve), 500, 551 Beständigkeit (steadiness), 397 Bewusstsein (consciousness), 402 Bildung (formative education), 403 biological naturalism, 612 Biological Species Concept (BSC), 212 biology areas of discussion, 202 genetic selection, 214–16 inheritance, and, 216 Modern (Evolutionary) Synthesis (MS), and, 210 eugenics, and, 217 evolutionary psychology, and, 218 extension of, 217 reproduction, and, 219 species, 211–14 population genetics, and, 210 biospheric egalitarianism, 490 Blackburn, Simon, 628 Blattner, William, 573, 649

Index Block, Ned, 613 Boden, Margaret, 93 body-subject and body-object, 361 Boghossian, Paul, 46 Bondy, Augusto Salazar authenticity after underdevelopment, 687 consciousness of inauthenticity, 686 denial of Zea’s affirmation, 684 Great Debate, 680 limitations of view, 687 non-existence of Latin American philosophy, 688 place serving as ground, 683 problem of inauthenticity, 685 role of Latin philosophy, 684 vision for Latin American philosophy, 686 Bookchin, Murray, 493 Borgmann, Albert, 510 Bourbaki, 138 brain-in-a-vat (BIV) hypothesis, 119, 128 Brand, Peggy Zeglin, 330 Brandom, Russell, 665–6, 671–3 Brandt, Richard, 263 Brentano, Franz, 604, 619 Breton, André, 542 Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus Jan, 145 Brucker, Johann Jakob, 732 Buchdahl, Gerd, 191 Budd, Malcolm, 328, 330 Buddhism Japanese philosophy, influence on, 698 language, 707 Bunge, Mario, 504 Burbules, Nicholas, 519 Burge, Tyler, 11, 67, 71 Butler, Judith availability to recognition, 423 critical social theory, 363 social construction of gender, 422 vulnerability, 425 Cage, John, 543 Cantor, Georg, 137, 604 care ethics entangled empathy definition, 465 underlying notions, 465 idea behind, 464 spread of use, 464

855

Carlson, Allen, 328 Carnap, Rudolf analytic–synthetic distinction, and, 36–7 empiricist criterion of meaning, 20 four domains, identifying, 20 logical empiricism, 33 Logical Foundations of Probability, 338 observational and theoretical terms, 200 Quine criticism of, 32 rational reconstruction, 733 statement of precise laws, 208 Carson, Rachel, 491 Carson Chang (Zhang Junmei), 695 Cartwright, Nancy, 191, 198, 201 Carus, Paul, 626 Categorical Imperative, 237, 272 conception of action, 278 constitutive principle of action, 281 self-constitution, and, 277 source of normative authority, 273 Catuskoti, 706 causa sui, 358 causal modeling causal explanation, as, 165 key ingredients, 164 late preemption case, 164 Lewisian counterfactuals, 165 skepticism of, 165 causal powers, 336 causation. See counterfactuals actual, 165 de facto dependence theory, 162 ground, 168 of or about, 152 redundant, 161 early preemption, 161 late preemption, 162–3 Cavarero, Adriana, 425 Cavell, Stanley “A plea for excuses,” and, 595 amentia, 600 Austin’s failures of speech, 596 film-philosophy, 530 notion of criteria, 599 proclamatory aspect of judgment, 599 reading of Heidegger, 594 readings, and, 532 scepticism of external world, 596–7

856

Index

Cavell, Stanley (cont.) skepticism, and, 531 whirl of organism, 645 Celan, Paul, 412 cells of functional response, 378 Chalmers, David, 44–5, 616 Chinese philosophy Buddhism, 694 Chinese revolution, impact of, 754 Daoism, 696 early twentieth century, and, 694 first history of, 754 Fung Yu-lan, role of, 754 Hu Shi, role of, 754 Lao Siguang, role of, 755 New Confucianism movement, 695 post-Second World War interaction with West, 695 Ruism interpretation, 696 virtues, 696 self-cultivation, and, 694 three central traditions, 693 translation, importance of, 697 Western scholarship, 756 Zhang Dainian, role of, 755 Chinese Room, 95–6 Chomsky, Noam, 10 conceptualism, 55 criticism of Quine indeterminacy thesis, 47 Katz, and, 55 meaning and representation, and, 48 poverty of the stimulus, 57–8 professional career, 50 reconception of linguistics, 53 relevant claims about language, 51 response to criticism, 54 writings, 51 Chomskyan linguistics, 56–7 Church, Alonzo, 142 Churchland, Paul, 97, 99 citizens’ reasons, 302 Cixous, Hélène, 419 claims to know, 117 Clark, Andy, 97 Clark, Michael, 127 cluster theories of art, 331 coefficient of adversity, 369, 371 freedom, and, 370

Cohen, Paul, 138 Collingwood, Robert George, 105, 739, 757 commonsense certainties, 116 communicative rationality, 380 comparative overall similarity, 161 complexity theory, 143 comportment fluid. See fluid comportment gestaltist dimension, 657 good or bad, 659 purposive, 660 structure of, 361 use by Dreyfus, 655 computability theory. See recursion theory Computational Philosophies of Mind (CPM), 90 AI-influenced Boden, and, 93 Chinese Room, 95–6 connectionist model, 96 Dennett, and, 94 dynamical systems, 98 Fodor, and, 93 Physical Symbol System (PSS), 95 Sayre, and, 92–3 Sloman, and, 93 consciousness eliminative materialism, 99 functional distinctions, 99 qualia, 99 realist/idealist divide, 100–2 virtual-machine functionalism (VMF), 99 early attempts, 90 functionalism, 91 computational, 92 liberation, as, 91 logical reasoning, 92 multiple realizability, 91 qualia, differences over, 90 symbolic AI, 90 computational theory, 612 Conant, James F., 571–2 concept of heed, 82–3 conception of justice, 288 common conception, 295 disagreement about the good, 289 disagreements over, 293 freestanding political conception, 290

Index maximization of primary goods, 288 meta-theory, and, 294 original position, 288 overlapping consensus, 291 public reason, 292 reasonable pluralism, and, 290, 293 stable society, 289 conceptual analysis, impact on linguistic turn, 520 conceptual history, 749–51 conclusive verification, 338 concrete universal, 538 confirmational holism, 199 conflation problem, 80 concept of heed, 82–3 ghostbusting, 81, 83 conflict of interpretations, and, 408 conformity to duty, 242 conquest of fortune, 478 consciousness Computational Philosophies of Mind (CPM) eliminative materialism, 99 functional distinctions, 99 conflation problem concept of heed, 82–3 ghostbusting, 81, 83 explanatory permeability, 76–7 four difficulties, 80 metadualist account, 77–8 metamonism future for, 89 pressures on, 78 unity problem, 79 qualia, 99 ineffability embraced, 86 order restored, 85 palace rebellion, 84 representation, attention to, 88 representation, significance of, 88 revanchist attacks, 87 Schlickean strategy, return to, 84 semantic isolation, 76–7 virtual-machine functionalism (VMF), 99 consciousness of inauthenticity, 686 consequence problem, 71 consequentialism, 250 aggregation, 261 criticisms of, 250

857

critique of alienation, and, 402–3 integrity, 251 right action, 251 too demanding, 255–7 defending common sense, and, 259 error theory, and, 258 moral thinking, and, 260 definition, 249 inviolable to a high degree, 260 justification for, 250 morality of restraint, and, 257 obeying, 258 sacrifices, 257 side constraint on choice, 258 rule, 263 scalar, 255 status of unignorability, 261 unignorable to a high degree, 261 consequentialism, critique of too demanding, 252 consequentialist moral theories, 223, 226 consequentialist morality, 252 consequentialist virtue ethics elements of, 233 objection to, 233 constancy of the self, 397 constitutivism, 275 action, and, 277 challenge seeking, 277 normative feature, 280 reflective approval, 277 self-understanding, 277 uncontroversial starting point, 278 aim-based, 276 definition, 276 examples, 277 alienation, and omnipresent aims, 282 self-validation, 282 aspirations, and, 283 derivability, and, 286 emergence of, 275 externalists, 276 inescapable normative standard, 281 instrumental principle, 284 internalists, 276 principle-based, 276

858 constitutivism (cont.) reasons, 279 disengaging from sources, 281 escaping from, 282 overriding, 281 success, and, 279–80 universal scope, 280 synthesis, and, 276 taking means to ends rational requirement for, 285 reason for, 285 constructible sets, 138 constructive empiricism, 206 context sensitivity, 166 contextual history contextual reading, 737 defence of, 738 mythology of coherence, 736 mythology of doctrines, 736 mythology of prolepsis, 736 origins, 735 Popkin’s view, 735 Skinner’s maxim, 736 Continental philosophy of religion Heidegger’s view divinities, and, 555 early development, 550 experience, as, 552 formal indications, 555 holy, and, 553–4 late modern culture, and, 551 late modernity, and, 551 return of the divine, 552 Marcel’s view disponsibilité, and, 558 engaged mode of reflection, 557 establishment, 556 faith, and, 558 indisponsibilité, and, 558 inner need, and, 557 metaphysical humility, and, 558 objective thought, and, 556 ontological exigence, and, 558 participation, and, 556 Ricoeur’s view, 559 act of composition, and, 560 kerygmatic discourse, and, 562 kerygmatic reliogisity, and, 561 late modernity, impact of, 560

Index linguistic experience, as, 559 parables, and, 561 Vattimo’s’s view death of God, and, 562 objective world order, lack of, 563 spiritualization, and, 563 weakening, and, 564 Continental tradition analytic tradition, distinguished from, 582 diversity of, 7 lack of monopoly of, 7 ontotheology, and, 6 rigor, and, 9 stating the obvious, 575 continuum hypothesis (CH), 137 independent of ZFC, 138 contrastivity of causation, 166 Cook, Stephen, 143 Copernicus, 171 Copleston, Father Frederick, 337 Copp, David, 274 core analytics, 11 corporeal feminism, 421 constructivist nature, 421 normative violence. See normative violence social construction of gender, 422 corroboration of theories, 193 counterexample-driven arguments, 61 counterfactual logic, 145 counterfactual skepticism, 168 counterfactuals, 160 asymmetry of overdetermination, 167 backtracking, 166 causal modeling actual causation, 165 causal explanation, as, 165 key ingredients, 164 late preemption case, 164 Lewisian, 165 scepticism of, 165 causation, and, 160 comparative overall similarity, 161 context sensitivity, 165–6 counterpossibles, 169 impossible worlds, 169 Lewisian, 165 pragmatics of, 166

Index problem of profligate omissions, 167 redundant causation, 161–3 reverse Sobel sequences, 166 Schaffer, Jonathan: contrastivity of causation, 166 temporal asymmetry, 167 trumping preemption, 163–4 truth conditions, 168 counterpossibles, 169 covering law, 198 Cowie, Fiona, 58 critical environmental philosophy anthropocentric perspective, 486 biospheric egalitarianism, 490 broadening of, 485 Christianity, and, 487 deep ecology, 488–9 anti-humanism, alleged, 494 diachronic justice, 487 ecological crisis, and, 486 ecocentric theory, 493 eco-phenomenology, 488 environmental pragmatism, and, 495 existensionism, and, 492 feminist environmental thought, 489 Leopold’s land ethic, 491 non-anthropocentric perspective, 486 postnaturalism, and, 495–6 social ecology, and, 493 sole value assumption, 486 standing up for causes, 494 stewardship, and, 487 synchronic justice, 487 technological interventions, impact of, 491 valuing natural entities last man argument, 492 selection of, 493 critical theory aim of, 378 autonomy, and, 452 Feenberg’s theory of technology, 511 humans, place within, 386 cross-modal correspondence, 468 cult of authenticity, 393, 689 cultural domain, 20 cultural masters, 653 culture industry, 377 cut‑elimination for sequent calculus, 144

Danken (thanking), 385 Danto, Arthur C. artwork, 328 artworld, 327 inseparability claim, 757 narrative explanation, 740 narrative sentences, and, 741 original project, 374 project verbs, 741 Daoism, 696 Darwin, Charles, 171, 210, 212, 467 das Heilige (holy), 553 data mining, 198 Davidson, Donald acting in the right way, 113 human action, and, 111 act and reason subsumed, 112 deviant causal chains, 113 waning influence, 113 intention, rationalizing explanation, 270 pure intending, 110 reason, concept of, 105 Dawkins, Richard, 214 de facto dependence theory, 162 de trop, 358 de Waal, Frans, 470 Death of God, 554, 556, 562 decisionism, 393, 398 deductive-nomological explanation, 198 deep ecology, 488–9 anti-humanism, alleged, 494 defeaters, 129 Deleuze, Gilles difference, and, 430, 434 epoch of difference, 427 field of difference, 431 identities, and, 430–1 Nietzsche, interpretation of, 428 self as difference, 436 vitalism, and, 431 deliberative democracy, 629 demarcation problem, 192 Denken (thinking), 385 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 94, 99, 615 deontic scorekeeping, 671–2 deontological moral theories, 223, 226 Depew, David, 210

859

860

Index

Derrida, Jacques, 6 deconstruction creator of, 432 outside Western metaphysics, 434 différance, 429 discussions with Gadamer, 411 economy, 433 Jean-Luc Nancy, influence on, 439 meeting with Gadamer, 410 view of Gadamer, 412 desacralization, 560 Descartes, René, 609, 616, 669 intentionality, 666 descriptive independence, 80, 84 ineffability problem, 87 descriptive set theory, 138 design, 505 artifacts, and, 505 rationality, and, 505 desolate beauty, 702 Dessauer, Friedrich, 503 destructive retrieval, 751–2 determination, 147. See also ground developmental systems theory (DST), 216 deviant causal chains, 113 Devitt, Michael, 58, 214 Dewey, John, 515 awareness of social-historical contexts, 516 broadly democratic method, importance of, 628 dualisms, overcoming, 518 epistemic contextualism, 517 instrumental rationality, 516 justification for democracy, 629 warranted assertability, 516 Dewey’s theory of inquiry, 516 Diachronic Dutch Book argument, 197 diachronic justice, 487 Dickie, George, 327 die Göttlichen (godly ones), 553, 555 différance, 433 meaning, and, 433 Diffey, Terry, 327 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 400, 746 Ding an sich (thing in itself ), 369 Diprose, Rosalyn, 425 discipline, as rehabilitation, 438 disclosive language, 406

discourse ethics, 380 orientation crises, and, 380 discursive formation, 744 disentanglement, 150–2 disintegrationism, 78 disponsibilité, 558 dispositional account of belief, 625 distance of the near, 4 distantiation, 560 disunity of science, 201 Division of Linguistic Labor (DOLL), 64 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 210–11, 214 doctrine of radical freedom, 367 doctrine of volitions, Ryle’s attack of, 108 Dōgen Kigen, 700 Donaldson, Sue, 462–3 Donnellan, Keith, 61, 66 doxography, 745 Draper, Paul, 344 Dreben, Burton, 184 Dretske, Fred, 70, 121, 128, 131, 613 Dreyfus, Hubert, 6, 100, 362, 510 agent learning, 660 alternative conception of man, 654 comportment, 655, 657–61 expert learning, 656 fluid comportment gestalt, 657 purposive, 660 purposive in nature, 659 four commitments of human existence, 649 background practices, 651 fluid coping, 650 taking a stand on one’s existence, 652 thesis of the primacy of practice, 650 hermeneutic phenomenology, 647–9 learning, and, 655 maximal grip, 654, 659 nihilism, overcoming, 653 normativity of action, 654 ongoing coping, 662 past experience, role in learning, 656 Driver, Julia, 233 du champ (room for maneuver), 371 dualism, 489 mind–body, 616 dualisms, rejection of, 626

Index Duhem, Pierre, 36, 199 Duhem-Quine thesis, 199 early preemption, 161 ecceity of the ego, 558 eclipse of reason, 392 ecocentric theory, 493 ecological crisis, 486 dualism, and, 489 eco-phenomenology, 488–9 Ecosophy T, 490 edification, 414 Edsall, Thomas, 416 effective capability, 143 ego formation, 449 Eichmann, Adolf, 716, 718 Eigentlichkeit (being one’s own), 393 Einerlei (monotony), 551 Einstein, Albert, 33, 41 eleatic principle, 176 elementary propositions, 19 eliminative materialism, 99 Eliot, T. S., 5 Ellul, Jacques, and technology, 502 embodiment, 362 feminist theory, and, 425 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 600 empiricism, 180 constructive, 206 Quine’s view, 183 empty self, 394 endogenous variables, 164 enervated hyperindividualism, 390 Enlightenment immaturity, and, 451 morality, 286 post-Enlightenment world, 521 power of reason, and, 747 prejudice, and, 404, 748 rationalization, 381 en-soi (in-itself ), 357, 369 entangled empathy care ethics, 465 definition, 465 Entbergung (disclosure), 382 entgegen steht (something that stands over against), 415 entity realism, 206 Entschlossenheit (disclosedness), 401

861

environment. See critical environmental philosophy environmental pragmatism, 495 episteme, 744 epistemic efficacy, conceptual form, 668 epistemic justification of democracy, 629 epoch of difference, 427 epoché, 604, 619 equilibrium. See optimal gestalt Erlebnis (lived experience), 365 eternity, as deepest human desire, 474 ethic of authenticity, 393 Adorno’s critique, 393 cult-like quality, 393 social relations, 394 decisionism, 393 obscurantism, as, 394 unguided freedom, and, 394 Ethical egoism, 231 ethics animals. See animal ethics care ethics. See care ethics evolutionary ethics. See evolutionary ethics response ethics. See response ethics être-en-soi (being-in-itself ), 365 être-pour-soi (being-for-itself ), 365 eudaimonia (happiness), 396 highest good, as, 231 eugenics, 217 Evans, Gareth, 68 evidence conflation, 80 Harman criticism, 88 evolutionary ethics anthropocentricity, and, 469 bottom-up approach, 466 continuist approach, 467 non-parallelistic approach examples, 469 principal interest, 468 wide range of programs, 467 evolutionary lineage concept, 212 evolutionary psychology, 218 existence precedes essence, 355, 389, 558 existential finitude, 2 existentialism authenticity, definition, 355 bad faith, and, 359

862

Index

existentialism (cont.) consciousness de trop, 358 focus on, 357 irrational human, 358 phenomology, framework, 357 current status, 362–3 critical social theory, 363 engagement, and, 362 naturalism, move toward, 363 situated subjectivity, 363 emergence, 352 Cold War phenomenon, 354 contrast with mainstream, 353 Existenz-philosophy, distinguished from, 353 Heidegger, influence on Sartre, 353 enervated hyperindividualism, and, 390 en-soi (in-itself ), 357, 365, 368–9 existence precedes essence, 389 existentialist moment, 389 freedom. See freedom Heidegger, systematic concept, 356 imperatives, and, 359 individualism, and, 390 inwardness, 356 pour-soi (for itself ), 357, 365, 368 self-deception, and, 358–9 significance of, 355 Existenz-Erhellung, 352 Existenz-philosophie, 352 exogenous variables, 164 explanation, covering law, 198 explanatory permeability, 76–7 extended (evolutionary) synthesis, 217 externalism attitudes, and, 67–70 context, role of, 60 counterexample-driven arguments, 61 modal arguments, 62 epistemological implications, 70–2 metaphysical implications, 72 Putnam, Hilary externalism three distinct senses, 65 natural kind terms, and, 64–5 Twin Earth thought experiment, 63–5 reference fixation, 72 resistance to, 72

three distinct senses, 65 varieties claims, reference-determination and Putnam meaning, 66 claims, relevant expressions, 66 factors, determination of reference, 67 external-world skepticism, 71 face of the other, 436 Fackenheim, Emil, 710–11 fact/value dichotomy, 227 is–ought principle, and, 227 facticity existentialism, and, 370–1 hermeunetics of, 400–1 Sartre’s definition, 370 factualism, 176 failure of sense, 642 fake barns case, 127 Falk, W. D., 264, 266–9 familiar modal operators, 25 Fanon, Franz, 361 Faraday, Michael, 171 fecundity, 134 Feenberg, Andrew, 510 Feigl, Herbert, 190 feminism 9/11 embodiment, and, 425 individualism and autonomy, critiques of, 424 retribution, and, 425 theorizing after, 426 Beauvoir, Simone de constructivism, 418 socialism as ideal, 418 subordination as the Other of man, 419 common oppression, and, 417 corporeal. See corporeal feminism environmental thought, 489 exchange and circulation of women, 420 gaze, and, 546 intelligibility, and, 420 materialism and culturalism, division between, 417 nature/culture binary, 425 normative violence. See normative violence race theory, and, 421

Index racism, impact of, 416 science, and, 509–10 sexual difference, and, 419 undermining of, 416 vulnerability autonomy, precedence over, 425 materialism, resurgence in, 426 non-human life, and, 426 feminist philosophy. See multiculturalism Feyerabend, Paul, 191, 200 fictional genealogies, 745 Figal, Günter, 415 objectivity, and, 414 fin de siècle metaethics, 264, 266 Fine, Kit, 154–5 first philosophy, 480 ambiguous meaning, 480 Aristotle and Socrates, distinguishing, 480 meaning, 484 first things, 474 first-order logic, 140 Löwenheim-Skolem theorems, 140 spectrum, 141 first-person authority, 71 first-person ontology, 612 Flew, Anthony, 336, 344 Floridi, Luciano, 506 fluid comportment overall gestalt, 658 purposive in nature, 659 fluid coping, 650, 657 Fodor, Jerry, 58, 101 asymmetric dependence, 70 autonomy of special sciences, 201 formalism, and, 94 formal-symbolic computational philosophies of mind, 98 qualia, solving, 99 Føllesdal, Dagfinn, 606 fond (background), 372 force of circumstance, 368 reducing, 371 forcing, 138 foregrounded figures, 372 Foreman, David, 494 formal categories, 618 formal conception, 273 Foucault, Michel, 6, 520 archaeological method, 744

863

challenging particular identities, 437 discipline, and, 438 discursive constitution, 523 epoch of difference, 427 games of truth, 523 governmentality, 522 great carceral continuum, 521 modernity and rationality, 521 power/knowledge, 438 undermining specific identities historical character of, 437 Western rationality, identifying, 522 foundationalism,Deleuze’s deconstruction of, 434 Fox, Warwick, 494 Fraenkel, Abraham, 138 Frank, Philip, 190 Franssen, Maarten, 505, 507 Fraser, Nancy Butler, rebuttal by, 424 normative violence, analysis of, 423–4 freedom bad faith, 359 Erlebnis (lived experience), 365 prereflective cogito, 365 Sartre, Jean-Paul coefficient of adversity, and, 369–70 equivocation, and, 372 facticity, and, 370–1 force of circumstance, and, 368 fundamental project, and, 373 infinity, and, 374 motifs and mobiles, 366 motives, and, 367 physical reality, and, 368 radical freedom,declaration of, 366 reasons, and, 367 reasons, constituting, 366 resistance of things, and, 369 situation, and, 370 self-deception, and, 359 social relations, and, 360 unguided, and, 394 Freeland, Cynthia, 330 Frege, Gottlob, 8–10 formal logic, 604 language as object of systematic inquiry, 29 logical clarity, 9

864

Index

Frege, Gottlob (cont.) predicate calculus, 17 proposition, and, 640 psychological and logical, distinguishing, 174 reducing arithmetic to logic, 8 second-order logic, 141 sense and reference, distinguishing, 265 sense, and, 606 Freud, Sigmund, 449, 542 Friedan, Betty, 417 Friedberg, Richard, 143 functionalism, 91 access consciousness, and, 613 argument against, 612 computational, 92 definition, 612 liberation, as, 91 logical reasoning, 92 mental representation theory, 613 multiple realizability, 91 phenomenal consciousness, and, 613 Fung Yu-lan, 754 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1, 747–9 Galileo, 171 games of truth, 523, 525 Garber, Daniel, 737–8 garden variety historicism, 475 Gardner, Sebastian, 186–7 Gaus, Gerald, 305 Gaut, Berys, 331–2 Gegenstand (object), 500 Gehören (belonging and listening), 396 Gelassenheit (letting be), 387 Gellner, Ernest: ordinary language philosophy, critique, 638 Gemeinschaft (community), 396 gene frequencies, 210, 219 genealogies, 743 exemplification of, 745 fictional, 745 imaginery, 745 Nietzsche, and, 744 Wittgenstein, and, 744 generalized quantifier logic, 141 generalized quantifiers, 25 genetic selection, 214–16 Gentzen, Gerhard, 144

Gespräch (conversation), 406 Gestell, 382 danger of, 382 definitive of modernity, 382 Gettier, Edmund, 133 Justified True Belief analysis (JTB) constructing case, 126 Hetherington response, 133 intuition, and, 134 justification for believing, 127 refutation, 126 responses, 129 Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich response, 133 Williamson response, 132 Geworfenheit (thrownness), 371 Glendinning, Simon, 593, 601 Gödel, Kurt, 138 Goldbach, Christian, 44 Goldman, Alan H., 330 Goldman, Alvin, 127–9, 131 Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI), 90, 96 Pandemonium pattern recognizer, 92 Goodman, Nelson, 54, 327 governmentality, 522 Graham, Angus Charles, 756 great carceral continuum, 521 great chain of being, 156 Greenspan, Alan, 391 Gregor, Mary, 239 Grene, Marjorie, 213 Grice, Paul, 39, 47 ground causation, 168 discovery, 148 disentanglement, 150–2 distinction between factive versus nonfactive, 155 distinction between full versus partial, 155 explanatory connection, 155 expression of claims, 155 logic, interaction, 155 modal analogy, 149–50 necessary connection, 155 open questions for research, 158 realism, Kit Fine and, 154 rediscovery, 148 rise to prominence, 148

Index Rosen, Gideon essence, and, 158 relation, and, 157 skepticism, and, 157 Schaffer, Jonathan great chain of being, 156 Quine, arguing against, 156 status and topic, 152–3 Trinity Papers, 153–4 Gruen, Lori, 465 guardianship, and, 387 Guyer, Paul, 326 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 453 autonomy, and, 452 Gadamer, influence on, 410 legitimate ideology critique, 409 political autonomy, and, 454 reciprocity of recognition, 454 relationship with Gadamer, 409 Hagberg, Garry, 327 Hamilton, William, 216 Hansen, Chad, 756 Haraway, Donna, 510 Hare, Richard Mervyn, 254, 258, 574 Harman, Gilbert, 87–8, 270 Harris, Zellig, 49, 52 Hasse, Cathrine, 508 Haugeland, John, 101, 362, 665 Hayek, Friederich, influence of, 191 Heath, Stephen, 545 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 7, 11 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 4, 6 being, and, 590 beings as resources, 385 concerns over science and technology, 500 constancy of the self, 397 Dasein, and, 100, 353, 356 disclosure and modern technology, 499 divinities, and, 555 Entbergung, and, 381 existential finitude, and, 402 first philosophical thoughts, 550 guardianship, and, 387 hermeneutics, concerns of, 401 holiness, and, 553–4 human contribution to technology, 499 humanism, and, 387 humans as social creatures, 601

865

inauthenticity, and, 394 Japanese philosophy, impact on, 699 living question, and, 648 meaning of being, and, 531 mineness of human being, and, 601 Nazism, and, 375 phenomenology meaning, 647 place on philosophical spectrum, 648 positing of ontological difference, 427 post-Platonic metaphysics, and, 591 presuppositions, and, 581 religion and modern culture, 551 return of the divine, and, 552 standing reserve, and, 478 they-self, and, 394 thinking, and, 474 thrown project, and, 397 transformations of modern world, 499 true freedom, and, 383 understanding of being, 384, 554 Hein, Hilde, 330 Hempel, Carl, 198, 338, 739 Herausforderung (challenging forth), 500 Herman, Barbara, 244–5, 247 hermeneutics application of, 399 Figal’s view, 414 Gadamer’s approach, 400 alienation, and, 402–3 facticity, discovery of, 401 Gespräch (conversation), and, 406 Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons), and, 405 linguisticality of understanding, and, 406 predecessors, views on, 400 Schleiermacher and Dilthey, assessment of, 400 Überlieferung (tradition), and, 404 Vorurteil (prejudice), 404 Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (historically effective consciousness), and, 405 Gadamer’s view engagement with Habermas and Derrida, 409–12 McDowell’s view second nature, and, 414

866

Index

hermeneutics (cont.) meaning, 399 pivotal figures, 399 Ricoeur’s approach conflict of interpretations, and, 408 methodological considerations, 407 suspicion, and, 408 theory of interpretation, 407 trust, and, 408 Rorty’s view cultural milieu, and, 413 edification, and, 414 epistemology, opposite to, 414 Vattimo’s view cultural milieu, and, 413 postmodernism, and, 413 hermeneutics of suspicion, 408 hermeneutics of trust, 408 Her-vor-bringen (bringing forth of things), 500 Hess, Amanda, 416 Hesse, Mary, 191 heteropsychological domain, 20 Hetherington, Stephen, 133 Heyting, Arend, 145 Hick, John, 337–8 Hickman, Larry, 512 hierarchy of moral competences, 453 higher-order monitoring, 620 Hill, Archibald, 53 Hintikka, Jaako, 607, 616 Hisamatsu Shinichi, 699 historical alienation, 403 historical explanation, 739 narrative accounts, and, 740 historical progress, pace of, 4 historicism, 473, 483 definition, 682 garden variety, 475 nature, denial of, 474 radical, 476 radical nature of, 473 Strauss critique of, 475–6 threat of, 473 Zea’s view, 683 history of philosophy, 725 always partial, 1 books, 732 Chinese philosophy, 753 Chinese revolution, impact of, 754

first history of, 754 Fung Yu-lam, role of, 754 Hu Shi, role of, 754 Lao Si Guang, role of, 755 Western scholarship, 756 Zhang Dainian, role of, 755 conceptual history, 749–51 contextualist history, 735 contextual reading, 737 defense of, 738 mythology of doctrines, 736 origins, 735 Popkin’s view, 735 prominent historians, 737 Skinner’s maxim, 736 creation of, 727 destructive retrieval, 751 genealogies, 743 exemplification, 745 Nietzsche, and, 744 Wittgenstein, and, 744 hermeneutics, 745 debate between rational reconstruction and contextualism, 748 epistemology, contrast with, 746 Gadamer’s view, 747 origins, 746 romanticism, and, 747 journals British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 730 history of, 729 History of Philosophy Quarterly, 730 Journal of History of Philosophy, 729 other titles, 731 law of proximity, 4–5 marked by finitude, 1–4 narrative accounts, 738 Danto’s idea, 740 historical explanation, 739 intentionalism, rejection of, 742 logic of, 740 mythology of prolepsis, 742 sentences, 741 necessarily incomplete, 1–4 new accounts, 726 professionalization, 728 rational reconstruction, 732, 746 Bertrand Russell, and, 733

Index Carnap, and, 733 internal and external history, 734 Reichenbach, and, 733 science and, 734 reception of ideas, 726 relationship with philosophy, 725 self-constituting, 1–3 unavoidable, 3–4 Hitchcock, Alfred, 530, 538, 546, 548 Hockett, Charles F., 52 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 552 holism, 184 confirmational, 199 holistic pragmatism, 631 Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell, 624 homophobia, 424 Honneth, Axel, 453–4 autonomy starting point, 455 theory of intersubjectivity, 453–4 Hooker, Brad, 263 hooks, bell, 417 Hopkins, Robert, 329 Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons), 405 Horkheimer, Max, 448 autonomy, and, 446–7 within capitalism, 451 culture industry, analysis of, 377 Hornsby, Jennifer, 109 Householder, Fred: linguists, classification of, 49 Howson, Colin, 191 Hu Shi, 695, 754 Hull, David, 213 human action act of will, 103 Anscombe’s view different descriptions for single act, 111 intention concept, 110 ideas defended, 110 reason for acting, 110 Austin’s view, 595 Collingwood’s view, 106 Davidson’s’s view, 111 act and reason subsumed, 112 deviant causal chains, 113 waning influence, 113

867

doctrine of violitions, Ryle’s attack, 108 empiricist consensus, shattering of, 109 Sartre’s view, 104 structural change, and, 104 study of, 103 theory of the will, 106 two large questions, 103 Wittgenstein’s view, 106 kinaesthetic sensations, and, 107 theory of the will, and, 106 voluntary acts, and, 107 Hume, David, 57, 172, 227 Hurka, Thomas, 234 Husserl, Edmund, 367, 402 calculus, study of, 604 formal/material categories, 618 intentional act of consciousness, 606, 616 phenomenology later conception, 605 meaning, 576, 605 phenomenological possibility, 617 theory of intentionality, 606 Huxley, Julian, 210 Hyman, John, 330 hyperintensional metaphysical concepts, 169 ideal of impartiality, 225 Bernard Williams, arguments against, 225 character, ignored, 226 departures from, 230, 232 utilitarianism, and, 225 idealism naturalism, versus, 184–5 transcendental, 605 idealistic desideratum, 300, 302 identities definition, 429 difference, and, 430–1 grounded, 429 Ihde, Don, 509, 511 illegitimate propositions, 640–1 illocutionary acts, 737 imaginary genealogies, 745 imperatives, 359 imperfect beauty, 701 impossible worlds, 169 inclination, 242 moral motives, and, 243

868 inclusive fitness, 216 inconsistency risk, 139 incremental confirmation, 338 indeterminacy of meaning, 47–8 Indian philosophy catuskoti, 706 darśanas, 702 engagement with West eighteenth century, 703 characterized as spiritual or mystical, 703 existence and nature of self, 704 history, 702 knowledge generation, 705 language, 707 pramāna theory _ contemporary study, 705 types, 705 process of inference, 706 reality and truth, debates over, 704 shift in focus, 703 testimony, 706 indisponsibilité, 558 individualism, 390 enervated hyperindividualism, and, 390 ontological individualism contribution of, 392 definition, 391 forms of, 391 influence of, 391 inductive-statistical explanation, 198 inductivism, Popper’s criticism, 193 ineffability problem, 81, 88 conflation problem, deflecting, 88 Harman’s defense against descriptive independence, 87 infinitary combinatorics, 138 inheritance, 216 innate grammatical ideas, 58 innate language of thought, 94 innatism, 54 inner consciousness, 604, 619, 621 inner sense, 611, 618 inseparability claim, 757 instrumental rationality, 448, 516 instrumental reason, 392 instrumentalization theory, 511 intentional possibility, 616 intentionalism, 742

Index intentionality, 604, 666 Descartes’s view, 666 Husserl’s theory, 606 mind–world relation, and, 673 social pragmatism, and, 666 interspecies ethics, affect attunement, 467–8 intersubjectivity, 455 intuition, 58–9 intuition of difference, 167 intuitionistic logic, 145 inviolable to a high degree, 260 Irigaray, Luce, 6, 419 exchange and circulation of women, 420 intelligibility, and, 420 sexual difference, and, 419 iron cage, 376, 390 irrationalism, 446 isomorphism, 140 is–ought principle, 227 Izutsu Toshihiko, 701 Jackson, Frank, 44, 182 James, William, 624 Janzen, Greg, 621 Japanese philosophy aesthetics, 701 desolate beauty, 702 iki, 702 imperfect beauty, 701 sorrow of things, 701 Buddhism, influence on, 698 critical theory, 702 history, 697 Kyoto School, 699 Ruism, influence on, 698 Western philosophy, impact of, 698 Western reception important works, 699 Japanese scholars in Europe, 699 Zen Buddhism popularity, 700 publications about, 700 Jaspers, Karl, 352 Jewish philosophy classification of, 721 future, 722 Holocaust, 711 approaching, 711

Index ethics as first philosophy, 712–18 morality, and, 721 personal responsibility, and, 719 responses, 712 retaining humanity, 720 role of choice, and, 718 self separated from self, 719 theodicy, and, 719 Second World War, and, 709 three themes, 710 Johnson, Harriet McBryde, 460 Jonas, Hans, 506 judgment internalism, 267 Justified True Belief analysis (JTB) Gettier case, 125–6 assumptions, 126 defeaters, 129 discrimination requirement, 128 failable knowledge, 133 Ginet response, 127 intuition, 133 knowledge first epistemology, 132 knowledge is true belief, 130 New Evil Demon problem, 130 principle of closure, violation of, 128 relevant alternatives proposal, 131 reliabilism, 129 safety requirement on knowing, 130 semantic ascent, 131 solution, 126 subjective-sensitive invariantism, 132 Kamm, Frances, 260 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 231, 239, 242, 245–6 classification of, 247 interpretations, role in philosophy, 727 Myth of the Given, 669 peccatum originarium (original sin), 374 quid facti/quid juris questions, 732 setting own ends, 240 sheer receptivity, 672 Kantian ethics Beck’s interpretation, 238 complete moral system, 239 Gregor’s view, 239 Rawls’s view, 240–1 resurgence of, 237 Ross’s interpretation, 238 supreme principle of morality, 237

869

Kantian moral psychology. See moral psychology Kantian virtue ethics, 246 autocracy of pure practical reason, 247 distinctive conception of virtue, 246 Katz, Jerrold, 55–6 Kaufmann, Walter, 354, 578 Kechris, Alexander, 139 Kenny, Anthony, 109 kerygmatic discourse, 562 Kieran, Matthew, 235 Kierkegaard, Soren, 356, 360 kinetic view of culture, 219 Kivy, Peter, 329 Kleene, Stephen Cole, 142 knowledge first epistemology, 132 knowledge is true belief, 132 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 453 Korsgaard, Christine action attributable to whole agent, 278 constitutivism ethics and, 284 start of, 278 Enlightenment morality, deriving, 286 formal conception, and, 272 localized normality, 283 normative feature in action, 280 practical identity, 363 self-constitution, action and, 277 substantive conception of morality, 272 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 330 Koselleck, Reinhart, 750–1 Kraft, Viktor, 19 Kriegel, Uriah, 620 Kripke, Saul Chomskyan linguistics, challenge to, 56 concept of analyticity, 44 metaphysical modality, 149 mind–body identity theory, argument against, 615 necessary truth, separated from a priori knowledge, 7 possible-world semantics, 44 proper names, descriptivism rejected, 66 reference, and, 10 reference-determination for names, 61–2 semantic externalism, and, 45 Kristeva, Julia, 419 Kruks, Sonia, 418

870 Kuhn, Thomas discontinuous change, and, 509 disunity of science, 201 essential tension, tendencies, 199 incommensurability, 194 influence of, 191 paradigms, science and, 194 positivism, undermining, 200 Kuki Shūzō, 699 Kukla, Rebecca, 665 Kulvicki, John, 330 Kymlicka, Will, 462–3 Kyoto School, 698 Lacan, Jacques, 545–6 Lakatos, Imre, 191, 194, 207, 734 Lance, Mark, 665 Langer, Susanne, 329 language games, 519, 599, 637 Lao Si-guang, 755 large cardinal axioms, 139 last man argument, 492 late modernity, 551 nihilism, and, 552 religion, and, 552, 560 late preemption, 162–4 Latin American philosophy, 679 Bondy’s position break with colonial history, 688 consciousness of inauthenticity, 686 ideas not tied to place, 683 possibility in future, 685 role of, 684 used as weapon by Europeans, 684 Pereda’s position authenticity as exclusion, 689 cultural identity, and, 689 split over authenticity, 680 Great Debate, 680 Western philosophy treated as, 679 Zea’s position, 681 authenticity, possibility of, 688 Bondy, rebuttal of, 685–8 crisis in Europe, and, 681 critiques of, 683 historicism, definition, 682 ideas tied to place, 683 philosophy as natural discipline, 682 law of proximity, 4

Index law-cluster term, 41 Le Dœuff, Michèle, 419 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 320 lebendige Frage (living question), 648 Lees, Robert B., 51 legitimate propositions, 640–1 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 733 Leopold, Aldo, 491 Levi, Primo, 720–1 Levinas, Emmanuel, 6 commonality with Deleuze and Derrida, 436 early life, 712 ethics completion of work, 714 obligation to others, 715 response ethics, 465 role in life, 435 roots of, 713 subject development, 713 face of the other, 436 Other, and, 713 responsibility, and, 435 Levine, Joseph, 85–6 Levinson, Jerrold, 329 Lewis, Clarence Irving, 145, 630, 633 Lewis, David counterfactuals, 160 asymmetry of overdetermination, 167 backtracking, 166 causal modeling, actual causation, 165 causation, and, 160 comparative overall similarity, 161 context sensitivity, 165–6 late preemption, 163 overdetermination, 162 problem of profligate omissions, 167 redundant causation, 161–2 shoring up, 162 temporal asymmetry, 167 trumping preemption, 163 Lewisian counterfactuals, 165 Li Zehou, 695 liberal naturalism, 186 description, and, 187 liberalism, and modernity, 523 Lichtung (clearing), 397 lifeworlds, and moral norms, 380 linguistic philosophy, 337

Index linguistic policing, 638 linguistic turn, 515, 517 conceptual analysis, impact on, 520 linguisticality of understanding, 405 linguistics analytical procedures, and, 49 Chomskyan era mentalism and innatism, 53–5 professional career, 50–1 relevant claims, 51–3 externalism. See externalism intuition, and, 58–9 Katzian platonism, 55–6 Kripkean scepticism, 56–7 poverty of the stimulus, 57–8 realists and antirealists, 49 Liu Zhi (劉智), 694 locutionary acts, 737 logic of reference, 615 logical behaviorism, 610 logical clarity, 9 logical empiricism, 7 liberation from, 12 Wissenschaftslogik, 33 Logical Foundations of Probability, 338 logical positivism, 190 aesthetics, and, 323 decline, 338 defeat of, 339 first-order logic, use in, 206 London School, 50, 518–19 Lopes, Dominic McIvor, 329, 331 Löwenheim-Skolem theorems, 140 Lukács, György, 378 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 227, 232 Mackie, J. L., 275, 341 Makkreel, Rudolf, 738 Malcolm, Norman, 24, 338 man as measure of all things, 477 Marcano, Donna-Dale, 421 Marcel, Gabriel engaged mode of reflection, 557 inner need, and, 557 late modern world, and, 557 ontological exigence, 558 Other, and, 564 pessimism, and, 497

871

philosophy of participation, 556 Marcuse, Herbert, 2, 6 art reception of, 545 repression, and, 544 technology, and authentic existence, and, 502 capitalism and creativity, 502 technology as human experience, 501 Margolis, Joseph, 329 Marquit, Erwin, 502 Marra, Michael, 701 Marshall, James, 520 Martin, Donald A., 139 Martin’s axiom, 139 material categories, 618 material violence, link to normative violence, 423 materialism culturalism, division between, 417 eliminative, 99 functionalism, and, 612 post-materialism, 416 reductive, 616 resurgence in, 426 resurgence of, 426 mathematical logic limitations of, 75 theory-neutrality, and, 74 viewpoint contrasts excluded, 75 maximal grip, 654 active passivity, and, 659 fluid comportment, 659 Mayr, Ernst, 210–11 Mays, Wolfe, 90, 96 McCulloch, Warren, 91 McDowell, John, 11, 673 conscious experience, and, 101 discourse, restraint of, 671 intentionality, and, 673 non-conceptual sense-impressions, and, 672 phronimos, and, 276 reason, and, 186 second nature, and, 414 singular thought, and, 68 thought and world, relationship, 370 McKibben, Bill, 495 Mead, George Herbert, 624

872 meaning externalism, 66 mechanism of self-reference, 72 mediation, 512 Menschenmaterial (human resources), 500 mental content, 70 mental representation theory, 613 mentalism, 53 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice embodiment, and, 361 field, and, 372 freedom and situation, linking, 371 optimal gestalt bubble, example, 658 effort, and, 657 specificities, and, 661 Sartre critique of, 371 differences from, 365 rejection of distinction between objective reality and subjectivity of consciousness, 365 significance, and, 372 situational freedom, 371 constraints, and, 371 finitude, and, 371 ungrounded choices, and, 374 metaethics justification, and, 270 naturalist moral realism, 265 non-naturalist realism, 265 normativity nature of, 265 revolution of, 265 ought, understanding of, 266 external, 267, 269 formal conception, 272–3 judgment internalism, 267 moral deliberation, 272 moral obligation, 273 motivation in use of, 267 motivational, 268 normative pluralism, and, 274 pro tanto reason, 271 substantive conception of morality, 272 metamonism future for, 89 pressures on, 78 unity problem, 79

Index metanormativity, 264 action theory. See action theory Metaphysical Club, 624 metaphysical foundationalism, 6 metaphysical humility, 558 metaphysical realism, 180 metaphysical words, 636 Miki Kiyoshi, 699 Mill, John Stuart, 104 Miller, George, 51 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 545 Millikan, Ruth, 55, 69 mind–body identity theory, 611 argument against, 615 mineness of human being, 601 Minsky, Marvin, 92 Minteer, Ben, 496 Mitchell, Basil, 336–7, 340 mobiles, 366 modal arguments, 62 modal logic, 145, 607 operator “□,” 23 quantified, 145 relational models, 146 model theory first-order logic, 140 Löwenheim-Skolem theorems, 140 spectrum, 141 isomorphism, 140 second-order logic, 141 modeling, 207 causal. See causal modeling Modern (Evolutionary) Synthesis (MS), 210 eugenics, and, 217 evolutionary psychology, and, 218 extension of, 217 reproduction, and, 219 species, classification of, 211–14 modern logic emergence, 137 focus, 605 model theory. See model theory non-classical, 145–6 proof theory. See proof theory recursion theory. See recursion theory set theory. See set theory modern moral philosophy. See also virtue ethics consequentalist theories, 223, 226

Index deontological theories, 223, 226 eudaimonist ethics, 228 codifiability, rejection of, 229 focus on whole person, 229 goodness, and, 232 hierarchy, rejection of, 229 impartiality, departure from, 230 plurality of concepts, 230 virtue over obligation, 228 fact/value dichotomy distinction between, 227 is–ought principle, and, 227 notion of obligation. See notion of obligation modernity conquest of fortune, 478 crisis of, 472, 474 Gestell, definitive of, 382 late. See late modernity liberalism, and, 523 rationality, and, 521 modest naturalism, 667 modus vivendi, 306 monism, 488, 490 monotechnics, 498 Moore, George Edward, 7, 30, 115, 264–5 moral deliberation, 272 practical deliberation, constraint on, 272 moral motivation, 244 moral norms lifeworlds, and, 380 principle of action, 380 validity, and, 453 moral philosophy Austin’s view, 594 moral psychology, 537 Kantian, 242 development of, 244 good will, 242 inclination, 242 objections to, 242 respect for the law, 245 sense of duty, 243 view of duty supplemented, 245 morality of constraint, 257 Moran, Richard, 363 Moschovakis, Yannis, 139 Motherwell, Robert, 544

motifs, 366 Motoori Norinaga, 701 Mou Zongsan, 696 Mouffe, Chantal, 306 Muchnik, Albert, 143 multiculturalism Okin critique, 311 diversity over feminism, 311 final conclusion, 318 inconsistencies in, 317 marriage, and, 314–15 meaning, 312 polygamy, and, 316 special right of exemption, 313 multimodal communication, 468 multiple realizability, 91 Mulvey, Laura, 546 Mumford, Lewis, 497–8 musical expression of emotion, 329 Myth of the Given, 631 definition, 668 empiricist version, 668 exogenous and endogenous, 669 Hegel’s view, 670 Kant’s view, 669 rationalism, and, 669 traditional empiricism, and, 668 mythology of coherence, 736 mythology of doctrines, 736 mythology of prolepsis, 736, 742 Naess, Arne, 488, 490 Nāgārjuna, 706 Nagel, Thomas, 6, 84, 134, 303, 614 naïve set theory, 17 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 427, 439 Nannicelli, Ted, 332 narcissism, 395 narrative sentences, 741 narrative turn, 741 natural relation, 674 naturalism. See scientific naturalism a priori metaphysics, as, 180–3 existentialism, move towards, 363 idealism, versus, 184–5 normativism, versus, 185–8 Quine versus Armstrong, 183–4 religion, and, 345 naturalist moral realism, 265

873

874

Index

nature conquest of, 478 denial of, 478 end of, 495 historical meaning, 481 perfected but not conquered, 477 standard of measurement, 477 standing reserve, as, 500 turn away from, 478 way of things, 482 nature/culture binary, 425 Nazism Continental philosophy, and, 579 Heidegger, and, 375 Nietzsche, and, 578 necessitarianism, 208 negative rights, 462 neo-Mooreanism, 123 challenges facing, 123 New Confucianism movement, 695 New Evil Demon problem, 130 Newell, Allen, 92 Newton, Isaac, 171 niche construction, 217 Nicod’s criterion, 196 Nietzsche, Frederich, 6 calculative and poetic thinking, contrast between, 586 de-Nazification, 578 elusive thinker, 428 genealogical method, 744 leaps of poetic imagination, 585 Nazism, and, 577 strong nihilist, and, 356 nihilism, 356 accomplished, 413 late modernity, and, 552 overcoming, 653 Nishida Kitarō, 699 Nishitani Keiji, 699 noematic content, 606 noematic sense, 608 non-anthropocentrism, 486 non-classical logic, 145–6 counterfactual, 145 intuitionistic, 145 modal, 145 quantum, 146 relational models, 146

relevance, 145 sentential, 145 tense, 145 nonconsequentialism, status of inviolability, 261 nonconsequentialist morality, 260 non-Euclidian geometry, 604 non-naturalist realism, 264 non-parallelism examples, 469 principal interest, 468–9 non-reductive naturalism, 667 non-reductive physicalism, 614 nonsensical propositions, 640 non-vacuism, 169 normalization for natural deduction, 144 normative causation, 168 normative violence, 423 Fraser’s analysis, 423–4 material violence, link to, 423 recognition, and, 423–4 normativism, definition, 186 normativist liberal naturalism, 186 normativity of action, 654 fluid comportment, 659 Norton, Bryan, 496 notion of criteria, 599 notion of obligation, 228 basic and fundamental, 224 impartiality, 225 utilitarianism, and, 225 Williams’s arguments against, 225–6 moral sense, and, 224 Nozick, Robert, 132, 258 nuclear weapons, 497 Nussbaum, Martha, 463 objective Bayesians, 197 obscurantism, 394 observation, role in underdetermination, 200 Occam’s razor, 200, 641 Okakura Kakuzō, 701 Okin, Susan Moller multiculturalism, critique, 311 diversity over feminism, 311 final conclusion, 318 inconsistencies in, 317 marriage, and, 314–15

Index multiculturalism, meaning, 312 polygamy, and, 316, 319 special right of exemption, 313 Oliver, Kelly, 425 omissions, 167 ¯ nishi Yoshinori, 701 O ontological exigence, 558 ontological individualism contribution of, 392 definition, 391 forms of, 391 influence of, 391 operative theories, 504 Oppenheimer, Robert, 498 Oppy, Graham, 342 optimal gestalt definition, 657 deviation from, 659 experience of, 658 particular situations, and, 658 ordinary language, 10 ordinary language philosophy Heidegger and Wittenstein, key differences, 591 metaphysical use of words, 590 phenomenology, intimacy between, 592 problems, depth of, 591 splitting or doubling, 592 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 545 our way, 482–3 overdetermination, 162 asymmetry of, 167 overlapping consensus, 291, 300 citizens’ reasons, and, 302 Habermas critique, 304 justice as fairness, and, 291 justificatory support, 301 modus vivendi, and, 306 P versus NP problem, 143 palace rebellion, 84 Paley, William, 340 pandemonium pattern recognizer, 92 parable of the donkeys, 592 paradigmatic bivalent collectivities, 424 paradox of existence, 356 parallel distributed processing (PDP), 97–8 Paton, Herbert James, 237, 244 pattern recognition, 198

875

peccatum originarium (original sin), 374 Peirce, Charles S., 624–5, 630, 632 Peirce’s theory of inquiry, 188 Perada, Carlos authenticity, and, 689 cultural identity, and, 689 performative utterances, 596 perlocutionary acts, 737 permeabilism, 84 personal prerogative, 255 limit on beneficience, 256 limit on sacrifice fair share, and, 256 flat upper limit, 256 Scheffler idea, 256 pessimism, and technology, 497 Peters, Michael, 519 Peters, Richard Stanley, 518, 523 petitio principii, 446–7 pharmakon, 592 phenomenal consciousness, 613. See also qualia phenomenal domain, 20 phenomenal intentionalism, 89 phenomenology Brentano’s work consciousness, two types, 604 genetic versus descriptive, 604 five interrelated theses, 593 Frege’s work, 604 general features, 593 Husserl’s work consciousness, intentional, 606 later conception, 605 meaning, 605 noematic sense, 608 structure of intentionality, 606 transcendental perspective, 604 spiritual loss, and, 594 philia (filiation), 587 philosophical finitude, 3 philosophical logic, 23 philosophies of difference Badiou’s work, 440 common ground, privileging of identities, 429 Deleuze’s deconstruction calling attention, and, 432 creator of, 432

876 philosophies of difference (cont.) différance, 433 différance, and, 433 economy of symbols, 433 foundationalism, and, 434 outside of Western metaphysics, 434 self as difference, 436 writing, importance of, 433 Deleuze’s view, 430 difference, and, 434 identities, and, 430–1 vitalism, and, 431 epoch of difference, 427 Foucault’s undermining of identities discipline, and, 438 historical character of, 437 power/knowledge, and, 438 Levinas’s ethical difference, 435 Being, critique of, 435 commonality with Deleuze and Derrida, 436 face of the other, 436 totality, 435 motivation for, intersection of, 428 Nancy’s work, 439 philosophical motivation Heidegger, and, 427 Nietsche, and, 428 political motivation, 428 Rancière’s work equality, and, 440–1 political orders, and, 440 philosophy of action. See human action philosophy of art twenty-first-century topics, 332 aesthetic theory arthood, 327 artworld, 327 concepts, analysis of, 326 criticisms of, 327 defining art, and, 326, 329, 331 disinterestedness of, 326 engagement, 330 ethics, and, 332 expressing emotion, 329 feminist theory, 330 fiction and literature, 330 film, and, 332

Index metacriticism, 326 music, and, 331 nature and environment, 328 pictorial depiction, 327–8 proceduralism versus functionalism, 328 properties, 328 seeing as, 326 seeing in, 329 value of art, 330 aesthetics, moving away from, 324 analytic philosophy, dismissal by, 323 autonomy and independence, emphasis on, 323 cluster theories, 331 emotional engagement, 325 logical positivism, and, 323 new topics, 325 past topics, 325 primary focus post-Second World War, 325 semantic and representational properties, 324 studies in other disciplines, 325 philosophy of education affiliations and rivalries, 513 analytic philosophy conceptual analysis, 518 establishment of, 518 initiation into practices, 520 rule-following, 519 Dewey’s democratic approach, 515 decline and revival, 517 dualisms, overcoming, 518 epistemic contextualism, 517 individualism, and, 516 theory of inquiry, 516 warranted assertability, 516 Foucault’s view, 520 disciplinary rationality, and, 521 games of truth, 523 governmentality, 522 great carceral continuum, 521 power, and, 522 liberal values, and, 515 linguistic turn, 520 rationality, and, 514 philosophy of film as subdivision of aesthetics, 529

Index attending aesthetically, 533 mode, 532–3 parallel tracking, 533 attending, and, 530 cinematic experience, and, 529 formal unity, and, 541 functions, and, 534 level of generality, and, 538 moral psychology, and, 537 mutual interpretability, and, 539 narration, and, 530, 534–5 general significance, and, 536 ways of, 536 readings, 532 reflection, as, 530 scepticism, and, 531 taking in and responding, 540 theory of film, and, 539 understanding, 532 philosophy of mind and body central place, 609 consciousness, and, 614, 618 brain process, 616 Dennett’s self-narratives, 615 genuinely real and irreducible, 615 higher-order monitoring, 620 inner consciousness, 619 inner sense, 618 intentional, 616 intrinsic character, 614 modal model, 621 one-state structure, 621 phenomenological categories, 622 phenomenological character of subjectivity, 620 phenomenological possibility, 617 pre-reflective, 619 subjectivity, 620 functionalism access consciousness, and, 613 argument against, 612 definition, 612 mental representation theory, 613 phenomenal consciousness, and, 613 identity theory, 611 non-reductive physicalism, and, 614 properties, categorization formal and material, 618 ideal types, 617

877

Ryle’s view consciousness, 610 myth of ghost in machine, 609 philosophy of religion Alston’s interest, 342 anthologies, 1980s and 1990s, 343 assertions, 338 atheism defence of, 341 evil, challenge from, 344 God, account of simplicity, 345 God, arguments for and against, 342 Continental tradition. See Continental philosophy of religion divine agency, 340 emotivism, and, 335 female contributions, 344 linguistic philosophy, 337 logical positivism, and, 339 naturalism, and, 345 ontological argument for existence of God, 338 Principle of Verification, and, 334 Russell’s disdain for, 337 space–time continuum, 340 theism causal powers, 336 confirmation of, 335 disconfirming, 341 simplicity and explanatory power, 341 Swinburne trilogy and tetralogy, 340 philosophy of science analytic philosophy, impact on, 191 anti-positivist rebellion, 509 biology. See biology chemistry, and, 202 cognitive science, and, 203 complexity sciences, and, 204 corroboration of theories, 193 demarcation problem, 192 disunity of, 201 explanation. See explanation Feenberg’s critical theory, 510 feminism, importance of, 509–10 incommensurability, and, 194 inductivism. See inductivism intellectual influence, 191 law of nature importance of, 207

878

Index

philosophy of science (cont.) relations between universals, 208 logical positivism. See logical positivism mechanisms, and, 204 metaphysics early developments, 209 importance of, 207 method existence of, 193 importance of, 192 rejection of, 194 modeling. See modeling observation. See observation overlap with epistemology and metaphysics, 189 physics, and, 202 post-phenomenology. See postphenomenology prejudice, and, 203 probabilism. See probabilism reductionsism, and, 201 science and technology studies, establishment of, 195 science, post-Second World War changes, 189 scientific realism. See antirealism; scientific realism social practice, as, 509 specialization in, 190 theory of confirmation. See theory of confirmation underdetermination. See underdetermination unity of, 201 philosophy of technology, 375 analytical artifacts, and, 505 design, and, 505 emergence, 503 future oriented, 504 substantive and operative theories, 504 broad range of topics, 503 Cold War arms race, 498 critical theory, and, 386 Ellul’s view, 502 empirical turn, 509 ethics, and, 505 computer ethics, 506 human choices, 507

neutrality, 506–7 new topics and problem areas, 507 political perspectives, 508 specific technologies, 507 technological ethics, 506 technologies, application to, 507 Frankfurt School critique cells of functional response, and, 378 critical theory, and, 378 culture industry, and, 377 decolonization, and, 381 discourse ethics, and, 380 Enlightment, and, 379 essence, and, 378 freedom, loss of, 383 lifeworlds, and, 380 rationalization, and, 379 reification, and, 386 system, and, 380 Weber, endorsement of, 377 Heidegger’s critique convergence with Frankfurt School, 382 essence, and, 381 freedom, loss of, 383 Gestell, and, 382, 385 guardianship, and, 387 humanism, and, 387 intelligibility, and, 384 mystery, and, 384 open, and, 383–4 Heidegger’s view concerns, 500 disclosure, and, 499 enframing, 499–500 human contribution to, 499 transformation of the modern world, 499 Marcuse’s view authentic existence, and, 502 capitalism and creativity, 502 technology as human experience, 501 monotechnics, and, 498 nuclear weapons, and, 497 pessimism, and, 497 polytechnics, and, 498 preoccupation with, 497 rationalization, and, 376 singularity, and, 376

Index philosophy-as-pedagogy, 520 phronesis, 230 physical domain, 20 Physical Symbol System (PSS), 95 physicalism, 175 Armstrong, and, 178 non-reductive, 614 Quine commitment to scientific theory, 178 no givens of experience, 179 prioritization of physical theory, 177 Picasso, Pablo, 549 pictorial depiction, 327–8 Pierce’s theory of inquiry, 629 Pitt, Joseph C., 507 Pittsburgh School of philosophy analytic philosophy, 674 shapes of consciousness, and, 674 combination of Kant and Hegel critiques, 670 discourse causal restraints, 671 rational restraints, 669 gains to philosophy, 675 Haugeland’s influence, 665 influence on other philosophers, 665 intentionality critique of Cartesian view, 666 internal to discursive community, 672 mind–world relation, and, 673 natural relation, 673 non-relational, 673 relation between mind and world, denial, 672 key members, 664 modest naturalism, 667 Myth of the Given, 667–8 definition, 668 empiricist version, 668 exogenous and endogenous, 669, 672 Hegel’s view, 670 Kant’s view, 669 rationalism, and, 669 non-consensual sense-impressions, 672 sheer receptivity, 672 social pragmatism, 666 space of reasons, 667 Plantinga, Alvin basic belief in God, 339

879

logical positivism, critique of, 339 religion and science, relationship, 345 warrant, and, 339 Plato, 264, 474, 480, 483, 585 Plumwood, Val, 489, 492 Poliakov, Léon, 716 political liberalism desideratum, 300 development, 297 function, 298 idealist reactions to, 304–6 overlapping consensus citizens’ reasons, and, 302 Habermas critique, 304 justificatory support, 301 modus vivendi, and, 306 political conception, 300 public reason, 302 realist reactions to, 306–7 stability importance of, 299 Rawls’s definition, 299 Rawls’s solution, 300 theory of political obligation, 299 Western philosophy, twentieth-century revival, 298 political orders, 440 Pollock, Jackson, 543 polytechnics, 498 Popkin, Richard, 729, 735 Popper, Karl anomalous, 194 corroboration of theories, 193 inductivism, criticism of, 193 influence of, 191 metaphysics, role in science, 207 observations, and, 200 population genetics, 210 positive rights, 462 positivism, 483 Strauss critique of, 475 threat of, 473 possible-world semantics, 25, 27, 607 Post, Emil, 52 post-materialism, 416 postnaturalism strands, 495–6 Vogel’s view, 496

880 post-phenomenology, 508, 511 American pragmatism, and, 512 empirical analysis, importance of, 511 mediation, 512 phenomology, critique of, 511 understanding technological role, 511 pour-soi (for itself ), 357, 369 poverty of the stimulus, 57–8 power/knowledge, 438 practical deliberation, 273 Categorical Imperative, testing against, 272 moral deliberation, and, 272 practical identity, 363 pragmatic a priori, 181 pragmatism. See American pragmatism pramāna theory _ contemporary study, 705 types, 705 Prawitz, Dag, 144 prediction, 196 predictive coding, 97 prejudices, 395 overcoming, 747 premodernity, 476, 479 pre-reflective cogito, 365 pre-reflective self-consciousness, 621 Press, Gerald, 730 Price, Huw, 628 Prichard, Harold A., 266, 272–3 Prichard’s dilemma, 272 Prichard’s duty and interest connection, 266 prima facie duties theory, 238 principle of charity, 584 Principle of Indifference, 197 Principle of Verification, 334 Prior, Arthur, 145 priority method, 143 private autonomy, 454 pro tanto duty, 271 pro tanto reason, 271 liberal legitimacy, and, 304 variety of facts about situation, 271 probabilism Bayesianism, and, 197 issues driving, 196 objective Bayesians, 197 Principle of Indifference, 197

Index subjective Bayesians, 197 problem of induction, 195, 205, 340 problem of profligate omissions, 167 problematization, 522, 524 project verbs, 741 promiscuous realism, 201 proof theory proof-procedure, 144 propositions, legitimate and illegitimate, 640–1 psychoanalysis and art avant garde, and, 543, 546 discourse, and, 545 Freudian theory, 542 inner workings, and, 543 Lacan’s view gaze, 546 suture, 545, 548 Marcuse’s view, 544 reception of, 545 societal repression, escape from, 544 secondary meaning, 549 surrealism, and, 542 unconsciousness, and, 543 Žižek’s view, 548 public justification, 302 importance of, 305 legitimizing force, 305 two necessary conditions, 305 public reason, 302 guidelines assisting, 292 punishment. See discipline pure intending, 110 Putnam, Hilary, 10 CPM, and, 91 Division of Linguistic Labor (DOLL), and, 65 early career, 40 epistemological justification of democracy, 629 externalism reference fixation, 72 three distinct senses, 65 functionalism, computational, 92, 98 law-cluster term, 41 natural kind terms, and, 43, 64 naturalistic philosophy of mind, denial of, 101 synonyms, and, 41

Index theory change, and, 42 transtheoretical terms, and, 42 Twin Earth thought experiment, 61, 64–5 qualia, 99 brain states, and, 99 Computational Philosophies of Mind (CPM), differences over, 90 ineffability embraced, 86 order restored, 85 palace rebellion, 84 representation attention to, 88 significance of, 88 revanchist attacks, 87 Schlickean strategy, return to, 84 self-reports, and, 100 virtual machines, as, 100 quantum logic, 146 quantum mechanics, 202 quid facti questions, 732 quid juris questions, 732 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 7, 10, 93 conformational holism, 199 early studies, 630 empirical and analytic, distinction between, 631 first philosophy, rejection, 175–6 first-grade and second-grade systems, distinguishing, 180 metaphysical realism, 180 ontological commitment, criterion of, 182 physicalism commitment to scientific theory, 178 no givens of experience, 179 prioritization, 177 theoretical principles, governed by, 183 underdetermination problem, 199 race constructivism, effect on, 421 feminism, and, 421 racism, impact on feminism, 416 Radford, Colin, 328 radiance of divinity, 552 radical historicism, 476 radical immanentist theology, 173

881

radical skepticism attributer contextualism, 122 closure-based, 119 closure principle, 120 qua paradox, 121 common sense, and, 115 certainties, 116 default role, 115 hinge commitments, 124 neo-Mooreanism, 123 challenges facing, 123 ordinary language approach, and claims to know, 117 privileges common sense, 116 relevant alternatives proposal, 117–18 Railton, Peter, 253–4 Rainer, Yvonne, 546–8 Ramsey, Frank, 625, 627–8 Ramsey, William, 48 Rancière, Jacques, 440 Rand, Ayn, 391 Rashi, 715 rational reconstruction, 732 interpretation, and, 748 meaning, 733 paradigm examples, 734 Russell, and, 733 science, and, 734 rationalization bad, 376 good, 379 instrumental, 448 Weber’s definition, 376 ravens paradox, 196 Rawls, John conception of justice, 288 common conception, and, 295 disagreement about the good, 289 disagreements over, 293 freestanding political conception, 290 maximization of primary goods, 288 meta-theory pluralism, and, 294 original position, 288 overlapping consensus, 291 public reason, 292 reasonable pluralism, and, 293 stable society, 289 conception of justice, and reasonable pluralism, 290

882 Rawls, John (cont.) embrace of Kantian insights, 240 impact on Kantian philosophy, 241 morality of constraint, 257 political liberalism development, 297 diversity in moral thinking, 287 function of, 298 idealist reactions to, 304–6 overlapping consensus, 300, 302, 306 public justification, 305 public reason, 302 realist reactions to, 306–7 revisionist role, 296 stability, 299–300 theory of political obligation, 299 Western philosophy, reviving, 298 reasonable pluralism, and, 300 stability, 291 theory of the good, 290 Raz, Joseph, 271 realism, and ground, 154 realist liberals, criticism of Rawls, 306 realistic desideratum, 300, 302 reason, structure of, 6 reasonable pluralism, 293, 300 Rawls’s appreciation, 290 Recht zu Rechtfertigung (right to justification), 305 reciprocity of recognition, 453 recognition normative violence, and, 423–4 reciprocity of, 453 recursive theory decidability, 142 effective capability, 143 higher-type and ordinal, 143 priority method, 142 reductionism unity of science, 201 reductive materialism, two-dimensional argument against, 616 redundant causation, 161 early preemption, 161 late preemption, 162–3 reference determiners, 46 reference externalism, 66 Regan, Tom, 461 Reichenbach, Hans, 733

Index reification, 378, 386 relational models, 146 relative goodness, 231 relevance logic, 145 relevant alternatives proposal, 117, 131 reliabilism, 129–30 representationalist view of action, 654 reproduction, 219 Rescher, Nicholas, 730 response ethics, 465 self and other, respecting differences, 465 reverse mathematics, 144 reverse Sobel sequences, 166 Richardson, William, 709–10 Ricoeur, Paul, 559–60 Riemann, Berhard, 604 rights-holders, 461 negative rights, 462 positive rights, 462 second generation rights, 462 third generation rights, 462 rigid designator, 62 rigor, 9 Robinson arithmetic Q, 144 Rogers, John, 731 Rolston, Holmes, 493 Rorty, Richard, 1, 665 Deweyan democracy, and, 515 epistemology, contrasted with hermeunetics, 746 hermeneutics edification, and, 414 epistemology, opposite to, 414 identifying, 413 historiography, four genres, 745 truth education and, 525 pragmatic view, 626 Rosen, Gideon ground essence, and, 158 relation, and, 157 skepticism, and, 157 statements of ground, 155 Rosenberger, Robert, 508, 511–12 Ross, William David, 238, 270 Rouse, Joseph, 665 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 478 Routley, Richard, 486, 492

Index Rowe, William, 344 Ruism interpretation, 696 Japanese philosophy, influence on, 698 virtues, 696 rule consequentialism, 263 ruling interpretative theory, 756 Russell, Bertrand, 7–8, 10, 30, 126, 337, 733 Copleston debate, 337 Russell, Bill, 657–8, 662 Russell, Gillian, 46 Ryle, Gilbert, 81, 105 category mistake, 609 consciousness, 610 human action, attack on doctrine of volitions, 108 logical behaviorism, 610 safety requirement on knowing, 130 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 389, 391 authenticity, and, 360 body-subject and body-object, 361 coefficient of adversity, and, 369 consciousness, and Hegel, 357 consciousness, and ego, 363 critical social theory, and, 363 existence precedes essence, 355 existentialist offensive, 352 force of circumstance, and, 368 freedom motives, and, 367 reasons, and, 367 fundamental project, 373 Heidegger, influence on, 353 human action, 104 Merleau-Ponty, differences from, 365 motifs and mobiles, 366 radical freedom coefficient of adversity, and, 369–70 declaration of, 366 equivocation, and, 372 facticity, and, 370–1 force of circumstance, and, 368 fundamental project, and, 373 infinity, and, 374 motives, and, 367 physical reality, and, 368 reality, and, 370 reasons, and, 366

883

resistance of things, and, 368 situation, and, 370 reasons, constituting, 366 social relations, and, 360 taste for the abject, 353 thrownness, and, 371 Sayre, Kenneth, 92 scalar consequentialism, 255 Schaffer, Jonathan causation contrastivity of, 166 intuition of difference, 167 ground great chain of being, 156 metaphysical nature, 168 Quine, arguing against, 156 relations, and, 157 statements of, 155 trumping preemption, 163 Scharff, Robert, 752–3 Scheffler, Israel, 518 Scheffler, Samuel, 255–6 Schier, Flint, 329 Scheffler personal prerogative, 256 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 400, 746 Schlick, Moritz, 19, 79 Schmaltz, Tad, 730 Scholem, Gershom, 717 Schonen (caring for), 387 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 106 Schuld (guilt), 397 Science of Human Nature, 104 scientific explanation abstract facts, and, 198 causal explanation, as, 198 deductive-nomological (DN) model, 739 scientific naturalism analytic philosophy, and, 11 Armstrong’s view a postiori realism, 176–7 commitment to empiricism, 179 objects of physics, 178 history, 171 mid-twentieth century distinction between philosophy and science denied, 174 logical analysis, 174 problems with, 488

884 scientific naturalism (cont.) Quine distinction between first-grade and second-grade systems, 180 metaphysical realism, 180 physicalism, 177 rejection of first philosopy, 175–6 science of man, 172 supernaturalist ontotheology, rejection of, 173 themes, 173 scientific realism, 204 arguments against, 205 attacks on, 204 Scott, Joan Wallach, 320 Scruton, Roger, 327 Searle, John, 47, 72, 95–6 functionalism, arguments against, 612 second generation rights, 462 second nature, 186, 414 secondary meaning of art, 549 secularization thesis, 476 seeing as, 326 seeing in, 329 self-consciousness pre-reflective, 621 structures, and, 670 self-deception, 358–9 self-realization, 453 self-reports, and qualia, 100 Selfridge, Oliver, 92 self-understanding, characterizing, 4 Selinger, Evan, 508–9 Sellars, Roy Wood, 632 Sellars, Wilfred beliefs, and, 631–2 intentionality mind and world, denial, 672 mind–world relation, and, 673 naturalizing, 674 normative commitments, and, 673 Myth of the Given, 669 rejection, 670 traditional empiricism, and, 668 philosophy of mind, 665 sense-impressions, rehabilitating, 671 space of reasons, 667

Index semantic ascent, 131 semantic isolation, 76–7, 81 interpretation of, 84 sensus communis (common sense), 403 sentential logic, 145 separation problem, 81 separatism, 89 set theory CH independent of ZFC, 138 establishment, 137 incompleteness theorem, 138 large cardinal axioms, 139 Martin’s axiom, 139 naïve, 17 shapes of consciousness, 674 Sharp, Hasana, 426 sheer receptivity, 672 Shelah, Saharon, 141 Sibley, Frank, 326 side constraint on choice, 258 Sider, Ted, 154 Silverstein, Matthew, 284–5 Simon, Herbert, 92 Simpson, George Gaylord, 210, 212, 214 Singer, Peter, 459–61 singular thought, 68 singularity, 376 Sinn (sense), 606 Sircello, Guy, 328 skepticism counterfactual, 168 ground, and, 157 Skinner, Quentin, 736 contextual reading, 737 criticisms of, 750 ideas, expression of, 749 mythology of prolepsis, 742 three mythologies, 735 Skinner’s maxim, 736, 743 Skyrms, Brian, 219 Sloman, Aaron, 93, 99 Slote, Michael, 233 Smeyers, Paul, 519 Smith, Brian Cantwell, 102 Sober, Elliott, 216 social construction of gender Butler, and, 422 normative heterosexuality, and, 422

Index social constructivism feminist embrace of, 421 race, and, 421 social ecology, 493 social freedom, petitio principii, 446–7 social pragmatism, 666 social relations Beauvoir, and, 361 Sartre, and, 360 social virtuosos, 653, 661 Socrates, 448, 480, 482–3, 587 Socratic turn common sense, and, 482 meaning, 483 sole value assumption, 486 sophrosyne, 587 Sorge, 356 sorrow of things, 701 space of reasons, 667 second nature, and, 414 speciesism, 459 spectrum problem, 141 spiritualization, 563 Staffa, Piero, 628 Standish, Paul, 519 status and topic, 152–3 status of inviolability, 261 status of unignorability, 261 Stecker, Robert, 330 Steel, John, 139 Stern, Daniel, 467 stewardship, 487 Stine, Gail, 123, 131 stopped clock example, 126 Strangeness of Impossibility condition, 170 Strauss, Leo, 6 crisis of our time, 471 eternity as deepest desire, 474 God, and, 479 historicism and positivism, threat of, 473 natures, lost, 474 political philosophy, assessment, 473 premodernity, 479 tyranny, and, 472 early career, 471 first philosophy, 480, 484 garden variety historicism, vulnerabilities of, 476

885

historicism, critique of, 475 man as master, 478 man as measure of all things, 477 natural awareness, and, 481 nature as way of things, 482 political philosophy and political science, distinction, 480–1 positivism, critique of, 475 premodernity, return, 476 secularization thesis, 476 Socratic turn, 482–3 Strawson, Peter F., 39, 47 Stroud, Barry, 118 structural equations, 164 structural realism, 206 structure, 154 structure of intentionality, 606 Stump, Eleonore, 344 Styron, William, 718 subjective Bayesians, 197 subjective truth, 356 subjective-sensitive invariantism, 132 substantive reason, 392 substantive theories, 504 supernaturalist ontotheology, 173 supervenience, 151 supplice (torture), 438 supreme principle of morality, 237 suture, 545, 548 Swinburne, Richard, 339–41, 345 trilogy and tetralogy, 340 Symphilosophein, 352 Synchronic Dutch Book argument, 197 synchronic justice, 487 synthetic a priori, 33 synthetic philosophers, 587 Tacitus, 577 Takeuchi Yoshinori, 699 Tanabe Hajime, 699 Tang Junyi, 696 Tarski, Alfred, 22, 24 Taylor, Charles, 396, 744 Taylor, Chloë, 426 technological disclosure of being (TDB), 382 telos (purpose), 396 temporal asymmetry, 167 tense logic, 145

886 testimony, 706 Thales of Miletus, 6 theism causal powers, 336 confirmation issues, 335 confirmation of, 335 disconfirming, 341 simplicity and explanatory power, 341 theodicy, 719 theological impulse, 6 theory of confirmation, 195 basic principle, 196 Bayesianism. See Bayesianism verification, 195 theory of syllogism, 604 theory of the will, 106 theory of transfinite numbers, 604 theory of truth, 625 theory of value, 359 thesis of the primacy of practice, 649 they-self, 394 third generation rights, 462 Thomasson, Amie, 619 Thucydides, 480 Tilghman, Benjamin, 327 Tode, Samuel, 650 Tormey, Alan, 328 totalitarianism, philosophical resistance to, 428 Toulmin, Stephen, 191 traditional a priori, 181 transcendental idealism, 605 Trinity Papers, 153–4 trophic cascade, 491 Trump, Donald, 320, 392, 398 trumping preemption, 163–4 truthmaking, 151, 153 Turing, Alan, 142–3 Turing Test, 90 turn to reasons, 269 logic and architecture, 271 systematized, 270 Twin Earth thought experiment, 63–5 two-dimensionalist (2D) semantics, 72 tyranny, 472 Überlieferung (tradition), 404 Übermacht (overpowering), 553 Ueda Shizuteru, 699

Index un champ (field), 371 underdetermination, 199–200 observation, role of, 200 problem of induction, 205 unguided freedom, and, 394 unignorable to a high degree, 261 unity of science, 74–5, 201 unity problem, 79 universal normative claims, 276 Urbach, Peter, 191 utilitarianism animal ethics, influence on challenges to, 460 killing, and, 460 animal ethics, influence on, 459 rational choice, and, 257 vacuism, 169 Vallor, Shannon, 508 values, 164 van Gelder, Timothy, 98 variables, 164 Vattimo, Gianni, 562–3 hermeneutics cultural milieu, and, 413 postmodernism, and, 413 Vaught, Robert, 140 Vaught’s conjecture, 141 veil of ignorance, 226 Velleman, David, 277–8, 282, 286 Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 508, 511–12 Verfremdung (alienation), 403 verificationism, 9, 338 Verwüstung (desertification), 552 Vienna Circle, 189 virtual-machine functionalism (VMF), 99 virtue ethics. See also modern moral philosophy aesthetics, and, 235 agent-based, 233 consequentalist elements of, 233 objection to, 233 cross-disciplinary investigation, and, 235 epistemology, impact on, 234 modern moral philosophy, critique of. See modern moral philosophy non-Western traditions, and, 235

Index virtue Adams’s definition, 233 Hurka’s view, 234 virtuous partiality, 230 vitalism, 431 Vogel, Steven, 495 voluntary acts, 107 causes, 105, 108 mental antecedents, 107 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 172, 376 von Neumann, John, 143 von Sternberg, Josef, 546 Vorurteil (prejudice), and, 404 Waddington, Conrad H., 218 Wagnis (venture), 387 Walton, Kendall L., 328, 330 Wang Fuzhi (王夫之), 694 Wang Yangming (王陽明), 694 Warhol, Andy, 327 warrant, 339 warranted assertability, 516 Watson, Richard, 730 Watsuji Tetsurū, 699 Weber, Max, 376–8, 448 Wells, H. G., 498 Weltanschauung (world view), 446 Wheeler, Michael, 102 whirl of organism, 645 White Jr., Lynn, 487 White, Morton, 630, 739 wie es eigentlich ist (as it truly, properly, or authentically is), 474 Wiesel, Elie, 719 Wild, John, 354 William, Winsatt, 326, 543 Williams, Bernard consequentialism, critique of integrity, 251 right action, 251 too demanding, 252 constructivism, and, 276 cross-classifying Western philosophy, 569, 574 duty of obligation, and, 225 genealogy, exemplification of, 745 illumination, and, 535 impartiality character, ignored, 226

887

deontological and consequentialist approaches committed to, 225 two arguments against, 225 liberal legitimacy, and, 307 moral luck, and, 595 moral theories, and, 226 Williamson, Timothy, 132 Wilson, David Sloan, 216 Wilson, Edward Osborne, 218 Wilson, George, 533 Winner, Langdon, 508 Winnicott, Donald Woods, 455 wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (historically effective consciousness), 405 Wisdom, John, 335–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 10–11, 636 agreement in action, 517 avoidance of labels, 626 characterizing own activity, 635 depth of philosophy, 591 elementary propositions, 19 failure of sense, and, 642 first step in philosophizing, 744 human action, and, 106 kinaesthetic sensations, 107 theory of the will, 106 voluntary acts, 107 human culture and convention, and, 628 notion of criteria, and, 599 pharmakon, and, 592 philosophy, splitting or doubling, 592 philosophy-as-pedagogy, and, 520 propositions, and, 641 theory of intelligibility, 19 voluntary acts, and, 105 words contrasting use, 635 failure of sense, and, 642 giving meaning to, 641 linguistic policing, and, 638 living, dynamic language, 639 metaphysical, 636 microphysical reality, and, 643 propositions, and, 640–1 rules, 637 rules, and, 642 rules, violation of, 644 Wollheim, Richard, 327, 329, 548–9

888 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 329 Woodin, Hugh, 139 words at home and metaphysical, 636 contrasting use, 635 giving meaning to, 641 rules for use, violation of, 644 Wright, Crispin, 57 Xiong Shili, 696 Xu Fuguan, 696 Young, James O., 330 Yuasa Yasuo, 699 Zahavi, Dan, 619 Zea, Leopoldo criticism of, 683 Great Debate, 680 historicism, and, 682

Index Latin American philosophy affirmative position, 683 authenticity, possibility of, 688 Bondy, rebuttal of, 685–7 European crisis, 681 initial response, 681 philosophy as natural discipline, 682 Zen Buddhism popularity, 700 publications about, 700 Zermelo, Ernst, 138 ZFC, 138 consistency of, 139 continuum hypothesis, independent from, 138 Zhang Dainian, 755 Zhang Dongsun, 695 Zhu Xi (朱熹), 694 Žižek, Slavoj, 548 zukünftig (futural), 397