Our aim in this chapter is to shed light on Kant’s account of the pure forms of sensibility by focusing on a somewhat neglected issue: Kant’s restriction of his claims about space and time to the case of human sensibility. Kant argues that space and time are the pure forms of sensibility for human cognizers. But he also says that we cannot know whether space and time are likewise the pure forms of sensibility (...) for all discursive cognizers. A great deal of attention has focused on the first of these claims, both on how Kant argues for it and how it relates to transcendental idealism. But a satisfactory interpretation must also account for the second claim, and it must account for the fact that Kant endorses both of them. What we need is an explanation of why Kant thinks our knowledge that space and time are the pure forms of sensibility extends to all human beings but no further. (shrink)

In his Philosophy of Mind, Hegel treats human sensibility differently in the sections on anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. With the recent revival of Hegel’s work, there has been a lively debate about how to understand the progression from more primitive to more sophisticated human capacities. This paper differentiates three influential readings to that effect – the animals-first, the emancipatory, and the rational-first reading – and argues that they risk misconstruing mental development as a transition from one category of capacities (...) to the other. The transition is rendered in terms of either accumulation, emancipation, or maturation. But this basic picture confuses the capacities characterizing us as a kind of animal, a kind of consciousness, and a conceptually self-conscious being. This paper explains how anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology articulate complementary, but irreducible categories of human capacities. The apparently more basic capacities are abstractable aspects of those that come later in the order of presentation. The distinct kinds of capacities do not stand separately on a three-step ladder of mental development but are aspects of one singular and synchronous development of the human mind. Their particular development is mutually dependent on each other but can be properly accounted for only in distinctive categorial terms. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether, according to Plato, there are forms of sensible qualities; it is also addressed to the wider question of whether there are forms of physical and material things more generally. In particular, it considers the tension raised by the following theses: (1) a Platonic form is the essence of some thing; (2) for Plato, those essences that are forms are imperceptible and are knowable through reasoning alone; (3) knowing the essence of (...) a particular color (e.g., red) requires presentation with the relevant sensible quality and hence requires sense perception; (4) if a sensible quality has an essence, then that essence is a form. The solution I defend to this puzzle basically consists of accepting (1) through theses (3) but denying thesis (4). Sensible qualities, according to Plato, do have essences, but specifying their essences does not require that one postulate a separate form. (shrink)

This paper defends Kant against a neo‐Hegelian line of criticism, recently advanced by John McDowell, Robert Pippin, and Sebastian Rödl, targeting Kant's alleged claim that forms of sensibility other than space and time are possible. If correct, the criticism identifies a deep problem in Kant's position and points toward Hegel's position and method as its natural solution. I show that Kant has the philosophical resources to respond effectively to the criticism, notably including the set of claims about the (...) limits of meaningful thought that P. F. Strawson calls Kant's “principle of significance.” By Kant's lights, first, the concept “non‐spatio‐temporal form of sensibility” is meaningless, so he cannot meaningfully grant that such a form is possible; and second, there is no need to prove (e.g., from reflection on pure intellect) that non‐spatio‐temporal forms of sensibility are impossible, because insofar as the concept “knowing” means anything, that meaning is provided by our own always‐already‐spatio‐temporal case. An upshot of the argument is that Kant's two “stems” of knowledge or cognition, sensibility and understanding, are merely aspects of a single epistemic capacity rather than each a separate capacity in its own right. Many today are unwilling to take Kant's claims about the limits of meaningful thought at face value, notwithstanding their ubiquity and explicitness. This paper is therefore an indirect argument on behalf of that dimension of Kant's position: We have something significant to lose in not taking it seriously. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Forms of Knowledge and Sensibility: Ernst Cassirer and the Human Sciences and: Dilthey und Cassirer: Die Deutung der Neuzeit als Muster von Geistesund KulturgeschichteSebastian LuftGunnar Foss and Eivind Kasa, editors. Forms of Knowledge and Sensibility: Ernst Cassirer and the Human Sciences. Kristiansand: HøyskoleForlaget, 2002. Pp. 223. Paper, $25.00.Thomas Leinkauf, editor. Dilthey und Cassirer: Die Deutung der Neuzeit als Muster von Geistesund Kulturgeschichte. Hamburg: Meiner, (...) 2003. Pp. 170. Paper, € 34,80.These two new anthologies on Cassirer attest to the new attention that is being paid to what has often been referred to as "the last neo-Kantian." While interest in Cassirer's oeuvre as a whole, specifically his draft of a philosophy of symbolic forms as a philosophy of culture, has awoken again in the last decade on the European continent—mainly in Germany, but also in France and Italy—it is a pleasant surprise to see him also being well received in the Nordic European countries, as the volume edited by Foss and Kasa demonstrates. Both volumes—successfully, it should be noted—make the case that Cassirer can and in fact ought to play an important role for what goes on in contemporary philosophy and its projects, be they historical, hermeneutical, sociological, linguistic or other. These two books do a good job of demonstrating that Cassirer was unrightfully forgotten and deserves to be reconsidered, especially now that his complete works have and continue to become accessible in critical edition. This novel scholarship is not only about a reassessment of Cassirer's original achievements, as attempted in Foss/Kasa, but also about placing him in the context of twentieth-century philosophy. Leinkauf's volume, in particular, attempts to take stock of the history of philosophy and its meaning for us today—projects that were of paramount interest to Cassirer. It is only logical, hence, to compare his method to Dilthey's, whose manner of doing historiography is framed as a critique of historical reason.Leinkauf's anthology appears in the already well-established Cassirer-Forschungen with Meiner Publishers; as is known, Meiner also edits the critical Cassirer edition and the Collected [End Page 504] Works. Foss's and Kasa's volume, however, is an entirely novel venture into a philosopher who has been only little acknowledged in the Scandinavian countries—perhaps with the exception of Sweden to which the Cassirers emigrated and (after a brief stay in England) became naturalized after the Nazis' seizure of power. This seeming unfamiliarity with Cassirer also explains why the articles in the Norwegian volume are more general and intended to orient Cassirer in the intellectual landscape of these Northern countries that have traditionally been more inclined towards Anglo-American and Eastern-European philosophy. This, however, by no means diminishes the importance of this volume. Indeed, in terms of systematic philosophical approaches presented here, the essays in this volume are, with few exceptions, somewhat more lively and fresher than some of the rather staid historical studies of the German anthology. To be fair, the Leinkauf volume has a decidedly more specific agenda, namely, to locate Cassirer's attempts to interpret modernity, especially his studies of the Renaissance period, in a larger project of a historiography of modernity as a whole; a project that has been so much at the forefront in many philosophical endeavors in the late-twentieth and beginning twenty-first century. Cassirer is contrasted, as the title indicates, with another influential attempt at the same task, namely by Wilhelm Dilthey. This is especially interesting since Dilthey, being a generation older, took no notice of Cassirer's work, and Cassirer, in turn, gave only little attention to Dilthey's work, since his writings on the subject were published later. Thus, the anthology closes a gap both in Cassirer and Dilthey scholarship.What both books have outwardly in common, however, is the fact that they both are collections of papers given at conferences, in Potsdam and Trondheim, respectively. The contributors of the German volume are St. Otto, R. A. Makkreel, M. Mulsow, G. Cacciatore, E. Rudolph, H. Holzhey, U. Renz, G. Scholtz, and G. Hartung. It is no surprise to find some of these well-established authors in... (shrink)

“Where did this unexpected mobility of epistemological arrangements come from…? What event, what law, do these mutations obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way…?” The recent wave of interest in the work of Jacques Rancière in North America can likely be traced back to the unique status he gives to the category of the aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of (...) debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics, Rancière’s oeuvre seems to offer the promise of a.. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception of (...) art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

The author examines Kant’s transcendental doctrine of space and time in order to find out possible anthropological connotations of the German philosopher’s topology. The analysis allows us to draw the following conclusions: 1) the anthropological features of space and time significantly correct the transcendental understanding of space and time as forms of sensual intuition; 2) the anthropological connotations of the forms of space and time make it impossible to have both noumenal, intellectual intuition of things and intuition based (...) on a different topology, on configurations of the world that are different from those familiar to humans; 3) Kant’s achievement is his work «Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science» (1786), which demonstrates the effectiveness of the transcendental method, in particular transcendental aesthetics, in substantiating the natural sciences (physics) of the time, which made it possible to prove the close connection of the natural sciences with the transcendental conditions of experience. (shrink)

This paper analyses the central function that the Forms of Likeness and Unlikeness perform in the metaphysics of Proclus. Mainly drawing from Proclus’ Commentary on the Parmenides, the focus will be on the double role of these Forms as causes of the relations of likeness between different sensible particulars on the one hand and of the relations between sensible particulars and the Forms in which they partake on the other. It will be argued that the relations of (...) likeness between sensible particulars, while not identical to the corresponding relations between particulars and Forms, can nonetheless be related to the causal operation of the same Forms. One can therefore conclude that Proclus’ account of the causality of Likeness and Unlikeness – despite its complexity, which is partly due to the combination of exegetic and more systematic considerations – is consistent. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to take a closer look at medieval discussions concerning the phenomenon of ‘perceiving as,’ and the psychological mechanisms that lie behind it. In contemporary philosophical literature this notion is usually used to refer to conceptual aspects of perception. For instance, when I perceive a black birdlike shape as a crow, I may be said to perceive the particular sensible thing x as an instance of a universal crowness φ, that is, as belonging to a (...) natural kind and falling under the concept of ‘crow’. In this sense, perceiving x as φ requires mastering the concept φ. However, I use the term ‘perceiving as’ in a wider sense and concentrate on various kinds of non-conceptual sensory processes, which can be understood as forms of ‘perceiving as’. Even though conceptual perception requires intellectual powers, medieval discussions on cognitive psychology can be understood properly only by taking into account the complex forms of perception that fall short of being truly intellectual, but are nevertheless over and above the simple sensation of sensible qualities of external things. The borderline between simple sensation and conceptual perception is unclear, and quite a lot is going on in the grey area between the two. Instead of presupposing any modern notion of ‘perceiving as’ and applying it to medieval discussions, my purpose is the opposite: to look at medieval discussions and see if they can be used to broaden modern discussions by including also non-conceptual varieties of perception. I shall begin the analysis in section two by specifying various types of cogni- tive processes that were discussed by medieval authors and can be considered as forms of ‘perceiving as’. The bulk of the historical work will be done in sec- tion three, where I focus on medieval discussions on three interrelated cogni- tive functions – perceiving different sensible qualities as a synthetic whole, incidental perception of one sensible quality through another, and the possi- bility of perceiving substances and recognising individuals. The reader should bear in mind that I shall use ideas from several medieval authors without pay- ing much attention to the differences between their theories of perception. Although occasionally radical, these differences are not highly relevant in the context of the present chapter. In section four, I propose two theoretical mod- els that can be used for analysing medieval views concerning these psychologi- cal phenomena. Finally, I conclude the chapter by making some remarks on the potential impacts of reading medieval views in relation to the concept of ‘perceiving as’. (shrink)

n his 1785 review of Herder’s Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit Kant stresses the negative effects of sensibility and imagination in undermining philosophy. This essay will offer a defence of Herder against Kant in order to gesture towards a more positive account of the cognitive function of these capacities. I will argue that the eighteenth-century fascination with the experimental sciences and the demand to engage in anti-speculative philosophy in fact called for the integration of sensibility and imagination. The (...) reason for this call is that it is in virtue of these capacities that the mind is able to focus on the world of particulars and avoid the kind of metaphysical speculation that came under attack for its failure to account for the experienceable reality of human life. By analysing which cognitive role Herder attributes to our sensible and imaginative engagement with the world, it will emerge that the kind of inquiry advocated as a remedy against school metaphysics was not a reductive form of verificationism that pits the benefits of observation against reason, but a position marked by the belief that the mind’s best results can be achieved only if it commits itself to an integrated use of its rational and non-rational capacities. (shrink)

Silence in organizations refers to a state in which employees refrain from calling attention to issues at work such as illegal or immoral practices or developments that violate personal, moral, or legal standards. While Morrison and Milliken (Acad Manag Rev 25:706–725, 2000) discussed how organizational silence as a top-down organizational level phenomenon can cause employees to remain silent, a bottom-up perspective—that is, how employee motives contribute to the occurrence and maintenance of silence in organizations—has not yet been given much research (...) attention. In this paper, we argue that this perspective is a meaningful complementation of the existing literature and that it is sensible to conceptualize distinct forms of employee silence (Pinder and Harlos, Research in personnel and human resources management. JAI Press, Greenwich, 2001; van Dyne et al., J Manag Stud 40:1359–1392, 2003). Drawing on past research and theory we conceptualize four forms of employee silence, namely quiescent, acquiescent, prosocial, and opportunistic silence. We present scales to assess the four forms and provide empirical tests for their distinctiveness and patterns of relationships to various correlates and potential antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

This paper seeks to reconstruct the role of schooling in a moment of accelerated social, political, economic, geo-political, climatic, indeed planetary crisis. It identifies the school as a potentially prefigurative institution, an evolutionary social frontier, capable of nurturing the democratic social character, a form of sensibility apart from which authentic political democracy is not possible. As theorized by Herbert Marcuse and Richard Hart and Antonio Negri, the “new sensibility” or “multitude” is characterized by greater psychological freedom, individuality, social (...) creativity and self-rule, comprising a “whole of singularities” that “acts in common”. It suggests a human subject with a vital, biological drive for liberation, with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of a society based on hierarchy and domination, and is associated politically with democracy and social-anarchism, or what Murray Bookchin called “communalism”. This paper identifies three main characteristics of an institution informed by this form of modal subjectivity, all of them based on student-teacher dialogue: an emergent, project-based curriculum, whole-school direct democratic governance on all levels of the community, and the regular practice of communal philosophical inquiry, through which we problematize the concepts we live by, in the interest of their ongoing reconstruction. (shrink)

To advance a successful reading of Kant's theory of motivation, his interpreter must have a carefully developed position on the relation between our rational and sensible capacities of mind. Unfortunately, many of Kant's commentators hold an untenably dualistic conception, understanding reason and sensibility to be necessarily conflicting aspects of human nature that saddle Kant with a rigoristic and fundamentally divided moral psychology. Against these interpreters, I argue for a reading that maintains a unified conception, claiming that we must think (...) of reason and sensibility as interdependent capacities, which stand to one another as form to matter. Our sensible nature thus does not stand opposed to reason; its fundamental character is determined by reason's activity. I take Kant's account of moral motivation and the feeling of respect to represent the lynchpin of this unified account. Against interpreters who would emphasize either the intellectual or affective nature of respect, I claim that it should be understood as the formal element of moral sensibility, the result of practical reason determining the capacity to feel and fundamentally transforming its character. To make this argument, I draw on Kant's account of sensibility in the Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that space, time, and respect for the moral law are analogous formal elements of sensibility. (shrink)

The paper investigates the distinction between form and matter in Kant’s theoretical philosophy – his adoption of an Aristotelian hylomorphism. This connection to Aristotle is sometimes recognized in Kant scholarship, though most proponents claim that against the backdrop of a structural analogy, Kant and Aristotle also differ in an important respect: according to them, while Aristotle puts forth a hylomorphic conception of being, Kant merely offers a hylomorphic conception of cognition in which sensibility provides the matter and understanding the (...) form. Against this, the paper claims that this “interiorization” of form cannot be squared with Kant’s actual views. Form is not internal for Kant, but neither is it external. Rather, it is “original form”. This interpretation ascribes a “hylomorphism all the way down” to Kant, meaning that the form and the matter of cognition are jointly actualized in virtue of each other. The understanding cannot be understood apart from its part in a hylomorphic unity with sensibility. Therefore, a proper appreciation of this unity enables us to see that it is impossible to distinguish the form that objects have as objects of cognition from the form they have in themselves. (shrink)

Silence in organizations refers to a state in which employees refrain from calling attention to issues at work such as illegal or immoral practices or developments that violate personal, moral, or legal standards. While Morrison and Milliken (Acad Manag Rev 25:706–725, 2000) discussed how organizational silence as a top-down organizational level phenomenon can cause employees to remain silent, a bottom-up perspective—that is, how employee motives contribute to the occurrence and maintenance of silence in organizations—has not yet been given much research (...) attention. In this paper, we argue that this perspective is a meaningful complementation of the existing literature and that it is sensible to conceptualize distinct forms of employee silence (Pinder and Harlos, Research in personnel and human resources management. JAI Press, Greenwich, 2001; van Dyne et al., J Manag Stud 40:1359–1392, 2003). Drawing on past research and theory we conceptualize four forms of employee silence, namely quiescent, acquiescent, prosocial, and opportunistic silence. We present scales to assess the four forms and provide empirical tests for their distinctiveness and patterns of relationships to various correlates and potential antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

I re-examine the starting point of the Philebus’ description of the ‘divine method’ and argue that the vexed phrase τῶν ἀεὶ λεγομένων εἶναι at 16c9 refers to sensibles only. In doing so, I especially stress the significance of the phrase τούτων οὕτω διακεκοσμημένων at 16d1. The proposed interpretation fits the rest of the description of the ‘divine method’, preserves the Forms’ unmixed nature and the consistency of the Philebus.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 49-75 [Access article in PDF] Sensible Ends:Latent Teleology in Descartes' Account of Sensation Alison Simmons One of Descartes' hallmark contributions to natural philosophy is his denunciation of teleology. It is puzzling, then, to find him arguing in Meditation VI that human beings have sensations in order to preserve the union of mind and body (AT VII 83). 1 This appears to (...) be just the sort of teleological explanation that he proscribes. Descartes' Anglo-American commentators have had little to say about the teleological overtones of his claims about sensation. His French commentators acknowledge these overtones, but seem largely untroubled by them. 2 It is worth pausing to be troubled, for a closer analysis reveals that Descartes' famous proscription against teleology is not as simple as it is generally thought to be. In the first half of this essay, I argue that Descartes advocates a genuinely teleological conception of the senses. My aim is not to charge Descartes with employing illicit teleology, but to argue that there is a place for teleology even in his revisionist natural philosophy. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay, I argue that Descartes' assault on teleological explanation is [End Page 49] not a sweeping assault on finality, but a more directed attack on particular uses of ends in natural philosophy. Descartes' assault leaves standing a form of teleological explanation that proves crucial to his own treatment of sensation. 1. Descartes' Rejection of Teleological Explanation at a Glance A teleological explanation is one that purports to account for something in terms of its ends or its function relative to the ends of the system of which it is a part. Aristotle's physics provides many classic examples: plants produce leaves for the protection of their fruit; spiders spin webs in order to catch food; animals grow sharp front teeth and dull back teeth in order to facilitate biting and chewing respectively; eyes are for seeing. According to Aristotle, all natural phenomena are directed toward ends and no explanation is complete without a teleological component that specifies the end for the sake of which the phenomenon occurs. Indeed ends take explanatory priorityover other causes: "Both causes [the end and the matter] must be stated by the student of nature, but especially the end; for that is the cause of the matter, not vice versa." 3 And: [T]he causes concerned in natural generation are, as we see, more than one. There is the cause for the sake of which [the end], and the cause whence the beginning of motion comes [the efficient cause]. Now we must decide which of these two causes comes first, which second. Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call that for the sake of which. For this is the account of the thing, and the account forms the starting-point.4In other words, Aristotle argues that natural substances have the matter they do, have the parts or organs they do, are organized as they are and act as they do for the sake of their ends. To explain why things are as they are, the natural philosopher must therefore explain the ways in which they contribute to ends.Among the late scholastic Aristotelians familiar to Descartes there is considerable debate concerning the causal efficacy of ends. Genuine final causation, in which something is said to be acted on by an end, is limited to the intentional behavior of rational agents who consciously recognize their ends: only something that recognizes an end can be "moved" by one. Even here the sort of causation involved is peculiar: a rational agent is "moved" by an end insofar as the end induces a "metaphorical motion" toward (or desire for) the end in the agent's will. 5 While these scholastic Aristotelians resist attributing final causation [End Page 50] to non-rational creatures, they nevertheless persist in attributing ends to them. When Toletus, Rubio, the Coimbrans and Suarez take up the question whether nature acts propter finem, each answers it affirmatively: natural... (shrink)

Robert Corrington likes to delineate “ecstatic naturalism” by comparing and contrasting it with three other naturalistic philosophies. The first is descriptive naturalism, which conceives of nature as nonconscious, utterly vast, resistant to categorial reduction, and indifferent to human needs and desires. Descriptive naturalists, from John Dewey, George Santayana, and Justus Buchler to Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, espouse a form of materialism that mitigates or repudiates religious sensibilities, puts a methodological premium on scientific inquiry, and grants material and efficient causality (...) explanatory priority. The second mode of naturalism, the honorific, views nature differently, even oppositely.. (shrink)

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. _Music and the Forms of Life_ examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and (...) explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life. The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's _Goldberg Variations_ to the genetic code. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (shrink)

Plotinus describes sensible objects as conglomerations of qualities and matter. However, none of these ingredients seems capable of accounting for the structure underlying the formation of each sensible object so as to constitute an identifiable and discrete entity. This is the effect of the logos, the organizing formative principle inherent in each object, which determines how its qualitative constituents are brought together to form a coherent unity. How the logos operates differs in various kinds of entities, such as living organisms, (...) artefacts and inanimate objects; however, some basic characteristics render its contribution to reality both coherent and rationally accessible. It further indicates how the various constituents of the sensible universe combine so as to form a unified cosmos. (shrink)

One of the aims of phenomenology was to uncover a logic of the sensible world. This essay shows how rhythm can be understood as a logic of the sensible world and how rhythm is not only a profoundly aesthetic experience but one integral to phenomenological reflection. The essay highlights how aesthetic experiences accomplish phenomenological reductions and how phenomenological reflection demands a continued inquiry into the ways intelligibility first opens from within the sensible world. Rhythm is shown to be a preverbal (...) logic and expressive power that takes place between sensing and the sensible. The essay explores how art and phenomenology draw upon rhythms to bring forth senses of experience that normally get passed over and escape conceptual determination. The investigation digs beneath predicated experience and propositional language to reveal how rhythm is a preverbal mode of inquiry that takes place between solicitations made by the sensible and the body’s sensitive responsiveness. Rhythm establishes an original synchronic relation to sensible things that allows nascent forms of intelligibility to come into a dynamic and living clarity. However, rhythms comprise a latent form of intentionality that precedes the act-object schema of intentionality. As a form of intentionality rooted in the senses, rhythm is shown to be a mode of transport that effectuates absorptive experiences which pose unique challenges for phenomenological reflection and aesthetic theory. Nonetheless, rhythm helps clarify one way in which sources of intelligibility not only grow out of the sensible world but retain an enduring aesthetic quality. (shrink)

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER OF HIS BOOK Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, Robert Pasnau takes a position in a longstanding debate concerning the metaphysical status and the epistemological role of sensible forms in Aquinas’s theory of cognition. His main claim is that Aquinas was a materialist about sensation and developed “a theory of the sort that a modern materialist could love.”.

Drawing on a wide range of Kant's recorded thought beyond his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, this essay presents an overview of Kant's account of practical agency as embodied practical agency and argues against the intellectualized interpretations of Kant's account of practical agency presented by Christine Korsgaard and Henry Sidgwick. In both Kant's empirical-psychological and metaphysical descriptions of practical agency, he presents a recognizably human practical agent that is broader and deeper than the faculty of reason alone. This agent (...) chooses action from a reflective distance, but not from the complete affective distance of reason. We choose neither as reason alone, nor even as the sum of all of our ‘higher’ faculties, of cognition (including reason), feeling, and desire, in Kant's view. Instead, we choose as an agent that also has ‘lower’, ‘sensible’ faculties, of cognition (including sense), feeling, and desire, which together comprise our ‘sensibility’. These mental states of sensibility are not merely confused versions of our higher cognitions, feelings, or desires, and so different from them in degree only, but are instead distinct from our higher states in kind also; and these distinct sensible states are not dependent on our higher states and so on a commitment to the value of humanity, for example. For this reason, a choice in favour of sensible states and in opposition to the moral law need in no way undermine its own foundations and thus be incoherent, as Korsgaard and Sidgwick argue, but instead only immoral. Because Kant does not reduce the problem of immoral choice to one of insufficient reflection and ensuing confusion, he does not view moral progress in cognitive terms alone, whether in the form of a clearer understanding of the moral law, improved judgment in applying it, or deeper insight into our own nature as practical agents. Kant instead recognizes the crucial importance of cultivating our feelings and desires over the course of a lifetime both as a way to make ourselves worthy of the humanity within us directly and also as a way to facilitate future moral choices. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the role (function) of reflection in cognition and its modes (types) as part of the cognitive ability. Along with logical and transcendental reflection, Kant's transcendental shift (turn) is discussed, as well as the role of reflection in Kant's schematism (the ability to judge) and the formation of schemas. Particular attention is paid to another mode of reflection – reflexive switching, which underlies not only the formation of pure rational concepts and schemes (Kant's concept of epigenesis; (...) metaphysical deduction of categories), but the epigenesis of a priori forms of sensibility of space and (especially) time, connected with the Kantian synthesis of apprehension in the intuition. The article proposes an original conception of time, the so-called onion model of time, which is based on a reflexive (iterative) apperceptive ladder. (shrink)

What are the challenges of turning data subjects into research participants—and how can we approach this task responsibly? In this paper, we develop a methodology for studying the lived experiences of people who are subject to automated scoring systems. Unlike most media technologies, automated scoring systems are designed to track and rate specific qualities of people without their active participation. Credit scoring, risk assessments, and predictive policing all operate obliquely in the background long before they come to matter. In doing (...) so, they constitute a problem not only for those subject to these systems but also for researchers who try to study their experience. Specifically, we identify three challenges that are distinct to studying experiences of automated scoring: limited awareness, embeddedness, and ongoing inquiry. Starting from the observation that coming to terms with one's position as a data subject constitutes a form of learning in its own right, we propose a research strategy called critical companionship. Originally articulated in the context of nursing research, critical companionship invites us to accompany a data subject over time, paying critical attention to how the participant's and the researcher's inquiries complicate and constitute each other. We illustrate the strengths and limitations of this methodology with materials from a recent study we conducted about people's credit repair practices and sketch a set of sensibilities for studying contemporary scoring systems from the margins. (shrink)

The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. -/- According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from (...) offering an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis piece explores the dialogic form as a way to engage in rigorously focused philosophical analysis and the generation of problems. We take up Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the relation of aesthetics and politics, and his critique of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic thought in its purported inability to generate political community. To develop the stakes of this problem, we introduce Simone Weil’s concept of decreation as a possible bridge between the deformative capacity of aesthetics emphasized by Deleuze, and the politically constitutive (...) aesthetics demanded by Rancière. To see the efficacy of the relation between the concepts of deformation, decreation, and political community, we explore the history of the problem of figuration in art and the problem of collective constitution in politics. We conclude that a process of deformation and decreation is an essential feature of political becoming which does not preclude the development of community; undoing the self, to the contrary, activates wider possibilities for relating to the human and non-human world. (shrink)

Kant attacks the Leibnizians on various fronts but the objection that occurs most frequently in his writings is that they are committed to an untenable conception of the relation between sensible and intellectual representations. They regard the difference between intellectual and sensible representations as a merely ‘logical’ difference that concerns their form, namely, their different degrees of distinctness, while in truth it is a difference in kind that concerns their nature, origin, and content. In the first part of this essay, (...) I provide a detailed reconstruction of what exactly this objection amounts to, and show why Kant takes this misconception to be so significant that he keeps coming back to it over and over again. The misconception is so significant because virtually all of the other mistaken doctrines of the Leibnizians can be traced back to it. Several commentators have argued that Leibniz is not guilty of the confusion of sensible and intellectual representations that Kant accuses him of. But this does not automatically clear him from all the other errors that Kant takes to be closely connected with this confusion. In the second part of this essay, I take a look at Leibniz's theory of confused perceptions and examine whether he is committed to one of these errors, namely, the view that we could learn something about things in themselves by experience if our senses were acute enough or our powers of 'disfusing' perceptions were strong enough. (shrink)

A sensible quality is a perceptible property, a property that physical objects (or events) perceptually appear to have. Thus smells, tastes, colors and shapes are sensible qualities. An egg, for example, may smell rotten, taste sour, and look cream and round.1,2 The sensible qualities are not a miscellanous jumble—they form complex structures. Crimson, magenta, and chartreuse are not merely three different shades of color: the first two are more similar than either is to the third. Familiar color spaces or color (...) solids capture, to a greater or lesser extent, these relations between the colors. The same goes for sensible qualities perceived in other modalities: middle C, high C, and D are not merely three different notes, and the taste of lemons, oranges, and sugar cubes are not merely three different tastes. How can this structure of appearance be explained? One idea is that sensible qualities are of two sorts: basic and derived. The basic sensible qualities are the building blocks from which the derived sensible qualities can be.. (shrink)

For Habermas, a moral point of view is based in the procedural requirements of our linguistic competence. For Levinas, it is the way in which we find ourselves related in speech to the face of the other that we find ourselves obliged to the other. But these differing conceptions of the moral significance of language need not be seen as opposed to each other. Rather, they can be conceptualized as complimentary accounts of the ways in which a moral point of (...) view onto life is inextricably bound up for us with our capacities as linguistic creatures. While Habermas enables us to see the importance of language as a rule-governed social practice for the constitution of a moral point of view, Levinas draws our attention to the way in which the moral significance of language so conceived lies in a form of sensibility, a sensible “exposure” or “vulnerability” to the other person, older than language itself. Appropriately coordinated, these two perspectives give us a more adequate understanding than either can on its own of the central place of language in our lives as moral agents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave1 David Gauthier Hume's account in the Treatise ofthe artificial virtues, their obligation and motivation, resists easy interpretation. Two passages, taken from his discussion of promises, will introduce, the problems I propose to examine. First: No action can be requir'd of us as our duty, unless there be implanted in human nature some actuating passion or motive, capable of producing the action. This motive (...) cannot be the sense of duty. A sense of duty supposes an antecedent obligation: And where an action is not requir'd by any natural passion, it cannot be requir'd by any natural obligation; since it may be omitted without proving any defect or imperfection in the mind and temper, and consequently without any vice. Now 'tis evident we have no motive leading us to the performance of promises, distinct from a sense of duty. If we thought, that promises had no moral obligation, we never shou'd feel any inclination to observe them.... But as there is naturally no inclination to observe promises, distinct from a sense of their obligation; it follows, that fidelity is no natural virtue, and that promises have no force, antecedent to human conventions.2 Ignore for the present the last sentence quoted. Hume seems clearly to be claiming that (1) an action can be a duty only if there is some motive to perform it other than a sense of duty, and (2) there is no motive to perform an act of promise-keeping other than a sense of duty. From (1) and (2) we may infer that (3) an act of promise-keeping can not be a duty. But since the sense of duty motivates an action only ifit is apprehended to be a duty, then from (2) and (3) we may conclude that (4) there is no motive to perform an act of promise-keeping that does not involve the mistaken apprehension that it is a duty. And the second passage: Afterwards a sentiment of morals concurs with interest, and becomes a new obligation upon mankind.... The difficulties, Volume XVIII Number 2 401 DAVID GAUTHIER that occur to us, in supposing a moral obligation to attend promises, we either surmount or elude. For instance; the expression of a resolution is not commonly suppos'd to be obligatory; and we cannot readily conceive how the making use of a certain form of words shou'd be able to cause any material difference. Here, therefore, we feign a new act ofthe mind, which we call the willing an obligation; and on this we suppose the morality to depend. But we have prov'd already, that there is no such act of the mind, and consequently that promises impose no natural obligation. (T 523) This time, ignore for the present the first sentence. The remainder would seem to confirm my reading ofthe first passage. Hume claims that (5) there is no natural obligation to perform an act of promise-keeping, but (6) we feign the willing of such an obligation. If, as Hume has claimed in the previous passage, (2) there is no motivation to perform an act ofpromise-keeping other than a sense ofduty, and if obligation and duty may be taken as equivalent, then we may conclude as before that (4) there is no motive to perform an act of promise-keeping that does not involve the mistaken apprehension that it is a duty. In his theory of the artificial virtues and vices, Hume considers "the three fundamental laws ofnature, thatofthestabilityofpossession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises" (T 526). It would seem, from the passages cited, that Hume must suppose that there is no real obligation to keep promises, but only a feigned obligation. And since the reasoning that Hume employs in the first ofthe passages that I have cited is explicitly identified with "that reasoning, which prov'd justice in general to be an artificial virtue" (T 518), it seems clear that he must also suppose that there is no real obligation to uphold stability of possession and its transference by consent—no real obligation to observe the other laws of justice or equity.3... (shrink)

The work defines three aspects of Souriau’s animal aesthetics by stressing their relevance in the context of early and contemporary ethology: in (1), the concept «biological nature» which is interpreted by Souriau as a realm of appearances and as intrinsically aesthetic; in (2), the concept of animal sensibility, which makes it possible to reframe animals’ artistic behaviours and the sense by which such phenomena establish a meaningful relationship with the environment; in (3), the concept of form, in the description (...) of natural appearances, is presented as it enters into the process of institution that, accordingly to Souriau’s interpretation of biological nature, encompasses non-human animals and humans. All three definitions will allow us a), to present Souriau’s critique of anthropomorphism and his proposal of an «healthy» zoomorphism; b) to reformulate animals’ sensibility in a non-reductionistic fashion; and finally, c) to address the issue with the supposedly sole communicative function of animal artistic behaviors. (shrink)

This chapter explores the debate between contemporary projectivists or expressivists, and the advocates of sensibility theory. Both positions are best viewed as forms of sentimentalism — the theory that evaluative concepts must be explicated by appeal to the sentiments. It argues that the sophisticated interpretation of such notions as “true” and “objective” that are offered by defenders of these competing views ultimately undermines the significance of their meta-ethical disputes over “cognitivism” and “realism” about value. Their fundamental disagreement lies (...) in moral psychology; it concerns how best to understand the emotions to which sentimentalist theories must appeal. (shrink)

This paper develops insights from Foucault and Lyotard to examine the Darfur crisis and the transformative potential of spaces of alterity. We show that Foucault’s quest for an aesthetics of existence is an attempt to found an alternative form of ethics based on wakefulness, sensibility, and suspicion on the part of the subject. In the final part of the paper we link this idea to Lyotard’s sensibility of the sublime. We show how aesthetic sensibility can be transformed (...) in a political sensibility which bears witness to political injustices that result from the incommensurability of different genres of discourse. We illustrate this point using aesthetic representations of Darfur. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason by Beatrice LonguenesseMichelle GreerBeatrice Longuenesse. Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 420. Cloth, $59.50.Kant and the Capacity to Judge is (...) a translation of Longuenesse’s Kant et Pouvoir de juger, although Longuenesse has revised and added to the original version. The central argument seeks to demonstrate the essential role played by the logical forms of judgment in the arguments of Kant’s first Critique. Longuenesse emphasizes straight away Kant’s efforts (in the Metaphysical Deduction) to deduce a set of pure concepts from the logical forms of judgment. Against many standard readings, she aims to reveal the very “tight” connection between this attempt and subsequent arguments in the Transcendental [End Page 372] Analytic. That Kant takes the functions of judgment to be relevant to these arguments is hardly a novel claim. The originality of Longuenesse’s work, however, stems both from the central and pervasive role she assigns to the logical forms of judgment, and from the impressive, painstaking effort she makes to sustain the close connection between these forms and Kant’s subsequent arguments. According to Longuenesse, any proper understanding of the arguments of the Transcendental Analytic absolutely depends upon relating these “down to the minutest details of their proofs,” to the role of the logical forms (5).These minute details do not escape Longuenesse in her subsequent elaboration on this original thesis. Given the length and detail of her work, I can only highlight a few of the central points and strategies. One should note from the outset, however, that the detail and the scholarship evinced to support her claims constitute much of what is of value in the book. Many of these “supporting arguments” and discussions, which include efforts to trace Kantian conceptions back to their historical/philosophical origins, stand in their own right as independent contributions to Kant scholarship and interpretation.The work is divided into three parts. The first part is essentially propaedeutic. Longuenesse begins by drawing a distinction between the potential or capacity to judge and judgement itself (i.e., the “actualization” of this judgmental capacity under [externally grounded] sensory stimulation) (7). Taking this distinction as her cue, Longuenesse seeks to reveal the way in which the line of argumentation in the transcendental analytic presents an extended investigation into the formal capacity (ibid). The centrality of the logical forms of judgment is secured early on by assigning them a substantive role in the very presentation of something in intuition “as” an “object.” Insofar as she assigns this role to the logical forms themselves, her account clearly undercuts the primary function of the categories in this regard. Relevant here is Longuenesse’s construal of “appearances” as the intentional correlates of our representational capacities and activities (cf. 20–21). Given this, the problem now motivating the transcendental deduction is how to make sense of the relation between this “internalized” object of (indeterminate) empirical intuition (the appearance) and the object corresponding to intuition which concepts allow one to think in a determinate way (the phenomenon). This ability to think the object in a determinate fashion appears to be the essential contribution made by judgement.These preliminary considerations ground Longuenesse’s efforts (in Part Two) to isolate and examine the discursive activity of judgment. Longuenesse stresses the reflective (and not simply the determinative) role of judgment and its forms. Indeed, she suggests that concepts (not merely empirical concepts, but also the pure concepts of the understanding themselves) are formed by reflecting (through acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction) on the “sensible given.” Drawing extensively from the Logic, she interestingly argues that the form of judgment itself carries with it some inherent claim to objectivity. Thus, objectivity is folded into the formal activity of judging by being identified as a “normative propensity” inherent in every judgment by virtue of its form alone (87–88). Longuenesse accordingly eschews efforts to downplay the role of the logical use of the... (shrink)

This essay interprets the aesthetic with respect to conceptions of an individual, sensitive self which came to the fore since 18th-century anthropology. For the sake of the livability of its life, this self must inevitably get involved in extra-ordinary latitudes of a sensibility which can demand too much of it at any time and which cannot get sublated in a largely normalized life. Final considerations refer to questions of practical forms of life in which that interest presently takes (...) shape. nema. (shrink)

One of the aims of phenomenology was to uncover a logic of the sensible world. This essay shows how rhythm can be understood as a logic of the sensible world and how rhythm is not only a profoundly aesthetic experience but one integral to phenomenological reflection. The essay highlights how aesthetic experiences accomplish phenomenological reductions and how phenomenological reflection demands a continued inquiry into the ways intelligibility first opens from within the sensible world. Rhythm is shown to be a preverbal (...) logic and expressive power that takes place between sensing and the sensible. The essay explores how art and phenomenology draw upon rhythms to bring forth senses of experience that normally get passed over and escape conceptual determination. The investigation digs beneath predicated experience and propositional language to reveal how rhythm is a preverbal mode of inquiry that takes place between solicitations made by the sensible and the body’s sensitive responsiveness. Rhythm establishes an original synchronic relation to sensible things that allows nascent forms of intelligibility to come into a dynamic and living clarity. However, rhythms comprise a latent form of intentionality that precedes the act-object schema of intentionality. As a form of intentionality rooted in the senses, rhythm is shown to be a mode of transport that effectuates absorptive experiences which pose unique challenges for phenomenological reflection and aesthetic theory. Nonetheless, rhythm helps clarify one way in which sources of intelligibility not only grow out of the sensible world but retain an enduring aesthetic quality. (shrink)

Following Theodor W. Adorno’s reading of architecture as a purposeful art, the article explores how the social dimension is inscribed into the purposes ascribed to architecture by establishing a relation between what Adorno calls a sense of architectural space and the distribution of the sensible as defined by Jacques Rancière. Considering Rancière’s understanding of the political dimension of different “regimes of art”, the article attempts to show how similar observations can be made regarding architecture. What implications do these regimes of (...) architecture have for the constitution of a common world, given architecture’s vast spatio-temporal presence? (shrink)

The disjunction effect (Tversky and Shafir in Psychol Sci 3:305–309, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage’s (Cognition 57:31–95, 1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision-making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of (...) clear reasons for accepting an option (x) when the subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction into the text-problem of a non-relevant goal. (shrink)

Betrayal is both a “people” problem and a philosopher’s problem. Philosophers should be able to clarify the concept of betrayal, compare and contrast it with other moral concepts, and critically assess betrayal situations. At the practical level people should be able to make honest sense of betrayal and also to temper its consequences: to handle it, not be assaulted by it. What we need is a conceptually clear account of betrayal that differentiates between genuine and merely perceived betrayal, and which (...) also provides systematic guidance for the assessment of alleged betrayal in real life. In what follows I offer an account of betrayal that attempts to meet the two requirements of conceptual clarity and contextual adequacy. There is a great temptation to use the events in Washington of the past few years as the case study for such an analysis, but I believe that, for a variety of reasons, including the difficulty of viewing events from “within,” this would only complicate matters rather than clarify them. Rather, I believe that betrayal in literature is fruitful ground for analysis. I have chosen Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for examples of trust and betrayal, because Austen displays the needed complexity and subtlety of human relationships and because she recognizes that violations of trust come in a variety of shades and colors. This particular novel, moreover, not only supplies multiple instances of trusting relationships gone awry, but also a common, detailed, and intelligible landscape within which these relationships exist. Again, however, in order to illuminate betrayal and appropriately assess a purported betrayal, rich examples are not enough. We need a clear concept of betrayal. I will develop this concept by beginning with the related concept of trust. By starting with an explicit definition of trust and using this definition to analyze the various examples Austen provides, betrayal will emerge as but one of two types of violation of trust. This in turn will allow us to distinguish actual from merely “felt” betrayals. I will finally argue that understanding and being sensitive to the other form of violation of trust, which I call abandonment, may be even more significant to our moral life. (shrink)