Précis of _Kant and the Reorientation of Aesthetics_ and replies to comments by Samantha Matherne and Moran Godess-Riccitelli.

What is it that we encountered with in our aesthetic experience of natural beauty? Does nature “figuratively speaks to us in its beautiful forms”, 2 to use Kant’s phrasing in the third Critique, or is it merely our way of interpreting nature whether this be its purpose or not? Kant does not answer these questions directly. Rather, he leaves the ambiguity around them by his repeated use of terminology of ciphers when it comes to our aesthetic experience in nature. This (...) paper examines Kant’s terminology of ciphers in the Critique of Judgment and demonstrate through it the intimate link aesthetic experience in natural beauty has with human morality. A link whose culmination point is embodied in the representation of beauty as a symbol of morality. (shrink)

One main quandary that emerges in the context of Immanuel Kant’s moral ideal, The Highest Good, is that on the one hand Kant sets it as a moral demand, that is, as a principle that must be comprehended as an attainable end for man in practice while, on the other hand, it is set as a moral ideal, i.e. as something that cannot be concretized and realized within the empirical world. The main goal of this paper is to argue for (...) the realizability of the moral ideal by means of the principle of reflective judgment as a form of judgment that in fact clarifies human limitation. I assert that the very recognition of this limitation constitutes the possibility for hope in that ideal, or for striving towards it, and that this striving is the only way that the moral ideal can be concretized. I examine man’s recognition of self-limitation as a response to the moral demand to realize the moral ideal and the necessity of the power of imagination for this, used reflectively. Keywords: culture, final end, Highest Good, hope, imagination, Kant, moral ideal reflective judgment, ultimate end. (shrink)

The notion of ‘bipolar’ or ‘second‐personal’ normativity is often illustrated by such situations as that of one person addressing a complaint to another, or asserting some right, or claiming some authority. This paper argues that the presence of speech acts of various kinds in the development of the idea of the ‘second‐personal’ is not accidental. Through development of a notion of ‘illocutionary authority’ I seek to show a role for the ‘second‐personal’ in ordinary testimony, despite Darwall's argument that the notion (...) of the ‘second‐personal’ marks a divide between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on discourse-analytical (...) and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and (...) assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought. (shrink)

Authority and Estrangement addresses a set of questions about self-knowledge and seeks to answer them in the context of the broader differences between the first-person and third-person perspectives on oneself. Attention to these broader differences takes the discussion from epistemology to moral psychology, and seeks to relate some of the issues of contemporary philosophy of mind to the concerns with self-consciousness in post-Kantian thought.

The paper argues for the centrality of believing the speaker (as distinct from believing the statement) in the epistemology of testimony, and develops a line of thought from Angus Ross which claims that in telling someone something, the kind of reason for belief that a speaker presents is of an essentially different kind from ordinary evidence. Investigating the nature of the audience's dependence on the speaker's free assurance leads to a discussion of Grice's formulation of non-natural meaning in an epistemological (...) light, concentrating on just how the recognition of the speaker's self-reflexive intention is supposed to count for his audience as a reason to believe P. This is understood as the speaker's explicitly assuming responsibility for the truth of his statement, and thereby constituting his utterance as a reason to believe. (shrink)

A review of what a "human right" is. It is a claim that every person can make as an individual who is a part of the human race and which requires an underlying respect for all human beings. The author maintains that human rights can only be realized through conversations with those across all genders, ages, cultures and religions.

Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does not (...) know certain phenomenal facts while trapped inside the room, whereby these facts classify as physical due to being wholly and fully metaphysically grounded in the underlying fundamental facts which are themselves entirely physical. (shrink)

We often make a distinction between what we owe as a matter of repayment, and what we give or offer out of charity. But how shall we describe our obligations to fellow citizens when we are in a position to be charitable because of a past injustice on the part of the state? This essay examines the moral implications of past injustice by considering Immanuel Kant's remarks on this phenomenon in his lectures and writings. In particular, it discusses the role (...) of the state and the individual in addressing the problem. (shrink)

This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, epistemic (...) arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general the... (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that, according to the method followed by the Philosopher in metaphysics, it is convenient in science to treat first the determinations in the most common and general fashion in order to attend later to what is proper to each species. And it is in these sense that, according to Aquinas, the De Anima studies the most general and common affairs of the animated realities in order to treat later, in other books, about what is proper of (...) the animated in particular. (shrink)

Gustavo Machado, pertenece a la generación de intelectuales que se nutrió fundamentalmente de la doctrina marxista e hizo de ella la herramienta para desarrollar la interpretación de nuestra realidad. Este estudio recoge referencias sobre su vida, analiza su postura antiimperialista y la defensa que hace de la democracia participativa. Además desarrolla su postura ante la educación, la iglesia y su concepción de la historia.

Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues (...) for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others. (shrink)

The Doctrine of Microphysical Supervenience states that microphysical duplicates cannot differ in their intrinsic properties. According to Merricks :59–71, 1998a, Objects and persons, Oxford University Press, 2001), however, this thesis is false, since microphysical duplicates can differ with respect to the intrinsic property of consciousness. In my view, Merricks’ argument is plausible, and extant attempts to reject it are problematic. However, the argument also threatens to make consciousness appear mysterious, by implying that consciousness facts fail to be microphysically determined and (...) that there can be brute and inexplicable differences in consciousness between material things. The paper therefore develops an account that can respect the soundness of Merricks’ argument while avoiding these problematic consequences. At the heart of the proposal is the idea that consciousness can be microphysically grounded despite failing to microphysical supervene. The proposed view also has the interesting consequence that consciousness is an intrinsic property despite depending on extrinsic factors for its instantiation. (shrink)

The Exchange of Words is a philosophical exploration of human testimony, specifically as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. This account weaves together themes from philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this basic human phenomenon.

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800idealisms immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

En este artículo se exploran algunas condiciones de posibilidad sobre un pensamiento bibliotecológico en América Latina. Para tales fines, se analizó la propuesta de una “Bibliotecología desde Abya Yala”, sobre todo por lo desafiante de sus pretensiones y porque exhibe algunos síntomas generalizados en esta clase de ideaciones (como inconsistencias conceptuales y metodológicas derivadas de prejuicios identitarios regionalistas). Se identificaron dos problemas básicos: “la identidad desde la exclusión” y el supuesto estado epistémico de “saber desde la inclusión”. La “identidad desde (...) la exclusión” se refiere al problema de intentar definir la identidad latinoamericana desde lo “no anglosajón”, y por el criterio de descarte de ideas ajenas como parte de las acciones para lograr, en modo artificial, el carácter “latinoamericano” auténtico (sin que exista de por medio una justificación epistémica). Por otro lado, el problema del supuesto “saber desde la inclusión” (que parte, más bien, desde la exclusión y la marginación hermenéutica) retoma los mismos prejuicios identitarios, y se posa, indirectamente, en el arcaico pensamiento funcionalista bibliotecológico. A pesar de esto, su rasgo más polémico resulta ser que se basa en estados epistémicos deterministas que no son sostenibles ni ética ni epistemológicamente (ni siquiera en la esfera práctica más inmediata). (shrink)

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (...) (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence. (shrink)

A concise and accessible dictionary of the key terms and concepts in Husserl's philosophy, his major works and philosophical influences.

Inspired by Aristotle, Franz Brentano revived the concept of intentionality to characterize the domain of mental phenomena studied by descriptive psychology. Edmund Husserl, while discarding much of Brentano?s conceptual framework and presuppositions, located intentionality at the core of his science of pure consciousness (phenomenology). Martin Heidegger, Husserl?s assistant from 1919 to 1923, dropped all reference to intentionality and consciousness in Being and Time (1927), and so appeared to break sharply with his avowed mentors, Brentano and Husserl. Some recent commentators have (...) sided with Heidegger and have endorsed his critique of Husserl and Brentano as still caught up in epistemological, representationalist approaches to intentionality. I argue that Heidegger is developing Husserl, focusing in particular on the ontological dimension of intentionality, not reversing or abandoning his account. Heidegger?s criticisms of representationalism merely repeat Husserl?s. Furthermore, I argue that Husserl?s account of cognitive intentionality, which recognizes the importance of the disinterested theoretical attitude for scientific knowledge, has been underestimated and misunderstood by Heidegger, who treats scientific cognition as a deficient form of practice. In short, Heidegger is more dependent on Husserl than he ever publicly acknowledged. (shrink)

Mitochondrial bioenergetics plays a key role in multiple basic cellular processes, such as energy production, nucleotide biosynthesis, and iron metabolism. It is an essential system for animals' life and death (apoptosis) and it is required for embryo development. This, in conjunction with its being subjected to adaptive processes in multiple species and its gene products being involved in the formation of reproductive barriers in animals, raises the possibility that mitochondrial bioenergetics could be a candidate genetic mechanism of speciation. Here, we (...) discuss genetic and biochemical evidence for the possible involvement of this unique system, encoded by two genomes (the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes), that differ by an order of magnitude in their mutation rates in processes leading to speciation events. (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s formal-pragmatics are better understood as a set of weak-universal dispositions susceptible to erosion over the course of a lifetime, if exposed to continual “disappointing” communicative experiences. Habermas’s rational-reconstructive project to explicate the intuitive rule-consciousness held by competent speakers retains immense theoretical value for analyzing both partisan and mass political discourse, if his emphasis on isolated speech situations is supplemented with a logic of communicative memory better accounting for how disagreement antecedes discourse on the formal-pragmatic register. (...) I argue that Habermas’s concept of the “lifeworld” contains untapped theoretical resources for thinking about the formal-pragmatic consequences of accumulated partisan experiences; namely, how such experiences lead inter-partisan actors to jettison mutual imputations of communicative accountability. I conclude by offering revisions to Habermas’s discourse ethics. Rapport-building intended to alleviate the negative effects of prior accumulated partisan experiences is first necessary if a norm is to enjoy real justification. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Even the Papuan is a Man and not a Beast”: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of CulturesDermot Moran (bio)“[A]nd in this broad sense even the Papuan is a man and not a beast.” ([U]nd in diesem weiten Sinne ist auch der Papua Mensch und nicht Tier, Husserl, Crisis, 290/Hua. VI.337–38)1“Reason is the specific characteristic of man, as a being living in personal activities and habitualities.” (Vernunft ist (...) das Spezifische des Menschen, als in personalen Aktivitäten und Habitualitäten lebenden Wesens, Husserl, Crisis, 338/Hua. VI.272)1. Particular Historicities and Universal ReasonIn this paper2 i shall explore—and suggest a way of resolving—the evident tensions to be found in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (and associated texts) [End Page 463] between his commitment to the universality of reason as the goal or telos of European humanity (founded on the ancient Greek “breakthrough” to philosophy and science) and his recognition of the empirical plurality and “relativity” (Relativität) of individual peoples and nations (e.g. Indian, Chinese, Papuan, Bantu) locked into their own particular “socialities” (Sozialitäten), communal worlds, and historical trajectories (what Husserl broadly calls “historicities,” Geschichtlichkeiten, Historizitäten). 3 I shall examine the complex relations and tensions between Husserl’s conception of universality, whereby the same reason functions in every human as animal rationale, “no matter how primitive he is” (“Origin of Geometry,” Crisis, 378/ Hua. VI.385), and his concept of the self-enclosed particularity of individual peoples with their own cultural forms. Indeed, Husserl often emphasizes that the most prominent feature of cultural plurality is precisely its relativity: “relativity belongs to the normal course of life.”4 I shall evaluate Husserl’s response, which defends the project of realizing the ideal of a critical universal rationality, by situating his discussion in terms of the cultural conflict of the time with the rising National Socialist commitment to racial particularism, and by showing Husserl’s commitment to the inherent universality of the one shared life-world.In his research manuscripts of the 1920s and 1930s Husserl frequently discusses the complex relationships that exist between different cultures and traditions; different cultures have their specific historicities (Crisis, 274/Hua. VI.320), dialects, norms, ways of life, and so on. This is simply a matter of fact. There are, furthermore, some well-known and controversial passages in Husserl’s “Vienna Lecture” of May 1935 and also in his Crisis texts (both in the main 1936 published text, Part One [§6] and in the then unpublished Crisis Part Three A §365) where Husserl speaks of the universality inherent in European philosophical culture of the logos and contrasts it with various other communal forms, which are, in his view, merely “empirical-anthropological” types, enclosed in their particular historicities and relativities. Indeed, in this context, Husserl regularly invokes the idea of the “relativity of everything historical” (die Relativität alles Historischen, Crisis, 373/Hua. VI.382). In addition, there are a number of related texts, collected in the Crisis supplementary volume (Hua. XXIX),6 in the Intersubjectivity volumes (especially Hua. XV),7 as well as in the recent volume on the life-world [End Page 464] (Hua. XXXIX),8 which discuss the empirical differences between peoples and also the layers and strata of social groups, nations, and even the idea of larger international collectivities or “supernations” (Übernationen), such as Europe, or the League of Nations. Furthermore, there are—as Husserl indicates in his 1935 letter to the prominent French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl—even cultures that are completely “self-enclosed” (abgeschlossene) unities, cut off, some of which know no history. According to Husserl, into this classical world of closed cultures, the ancient Greeks bring a new form of universality, one that leads them, through the grasp of idealization to infinite tasks, to break through the finite horizons of their environing world (Umwelt), which presents itself to them as a “near-world” (Nahwelt, Crisis, 324/Hua. VI.303; Hua. XXVII.228), and to arrive at the highly refined concept of the “true world” or the “scientific world [which] is a purposeful structure (Zweckgebilde) extending to infinity” (Crisis, 382... (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is (...) constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ) philosophy. (shrink)

This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off problem’ for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any (...) particular view about the psychological nature of hallucinatory experience to handle the screening off problem. Consequently, room opens up for naïve realists to endorse whatever theory of hallucinatory experience seems to best capture the distinctive nature of such episodes. (shrink)

Dermot Moran provides a lucid, engaging, and critical introduction to Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with specific emphasis on his development of phenomenology. This book is a comprehensive guide to Husserl's thought from its origins in nineteenth-century concerns with the nature of scientific knowledge and with psychologism, through his breakthrough discovery of phenomenology and his elucidation of the phenomenological method, to the late analyses of culture and the life-world. Husserl's complex ideas are presented in a clear and expert manner. Individual chapters (...) explore Husserl's key texts including _Philosophy of Arithmetic_, _Logical Investigations_, _Ideas_ I, _Cartesian Meditations_ and _Crisis of the European Sciences_. In addition, Moran offers penetrating criticisms and evaluations of Husserl's achievement, including the contribution of his phenomenology to current philosophical debates concerning consciousness and the mind. _Edmund Husserl_ is an invaluable guide to understanding the thought of one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. It will be helpful to students of contemporary philosophy, and to those interested in scientific, literary and cultural studies on the European continent. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains how is it that certain animals seem to possess prudence in some degree, according to Aristotle, thanks to the memory that they have, because it allows them to consider past facts besides the present ones. Thus, De Memoria et Reminiscentia treats about memory, which is common to man and perfect animals, and reminiscence, which is proper to man.

By the notion of imitation, Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between the cognoscitive approach towards nature and the productive approach towards art. From these relation arises the possibility of reason ordering the multitude of men who conform a community. Thus, Saint Thomas Aquinas explains how is it that the city is the most important whole that reason can know and produce directing it towards an end. Aquinas continues annotating that politics belong to the genre of practical and moral sciences, not mechanical (...) or productive, and that in these genre it is the most worthy and perfect science of them all. (shrink)

Beauty is a contested concept insofar as it seeks to mark a categorical distinction among the sources of pleasure, typically in terms of oppositions such as objective/subjective, universal/particular, necessity/contingency. Kant represents a culmination of this tradition in defining the judgment of beauty in terms of the requirement for universal agreement, modeling the judgment of beauty as closely as possible to ordinary factual judgments. A different tradition of thinking about beauty, however, while still seeking to mark a categorical distinction by reference (...) to the idea of necessity, finds the relevant sense of necessity not in conditions of agreement but necessities of erotic love and the sense of requirement felt toward its objects. This paper explores the consequences of taking this other tradition seriously, using Proust as a representative exemplar, as a way both of making sense of some of the features Kant ascribes to the concept of the beautiful, while avoiding the paradoxes stemming from his focus on the conditions for universal agreement. (shrink)

Moran, Stuart With the solemnity of the Ascension the Year A lectionary returns momentarily to the Gospel according to Matthew and, in fact, to the very end of that Gospel. We might note in the first place that Matthew makes no attempt to describe the mysterious reality that the tradition has come to call the Ascension.