Investigates the concept of recognition (anerkennen) under which term the German idealists discussed the Other, intersubjectivity, the interhuman.

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as skills (...) but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

In this book Robert R. Clewis shows how certain crucial concepts in Kant's aesthetics and practical philosophy - the sublime, enthusiasm, freedom, empirical and intellectual interests, the idea of a republic - fit together and deepen our understanding of Kant's philosophy. He examines the ways in which different kinds of sublimity reveal freedom and indirectly contribute to morality, and discusses how Kant's account of natural sublimity suggests that we have an indirect duty with regard to nature. Unlike many other (...) studies of these themes, this book examines both the pre-critical Observations and the remarks that Kant wrote in his copy of the Observations. Finally, Clewis takes seriously Kant's claim that enthusiasm is aesthetically sublime, and shows how this clarifies Kant's views of the French Revolution. His book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

Part 1. The rationalization and how it works. The culture war -- Order in the universe: Aristotle's laws of nature -- Rousseau's inversion of Aristotle -- The argument from justice -- The lessons from biology -- Inventing morality -- Part 2: Marching through the institutions. Sodomy and science -- Same-sex parenting -- Sodomy and education -- Sodomy and the Boy Scouts -- Sodomy and the military -- Sodomy and US foreign policy --Conclusion -- Afterword -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix: Disease and (...) mortality -- Index of proper names -- Index of subjects. (shrink)

"Magliola's exposition of Derrida has been acclaimed as the best in English.

This volume is a continuation of Robert Greystones on the Freedom of the Will: Selections from His Commentary on the Sentences. From this, five of the most relevant questions were selected for editing and translation in this timely volume. This edition should prompt not just a footnote to, but a re-writing of the history of philosophy.

My aim is both theoretical and practical. By characterizing what I call points of convergence between analytic and continental philosophy, I offer suggestions about how to bridge the gap. I do not attempt to retrace the moment at which the divide occurred nor offer historical explanations of the rift, but instead discuss points of convergence, with reference to Kant. I summarize this discussion in two tables. I give theoretical and practical suggestions for moving forward. I conclude with some comments on (...) the need for dialogue and reflect on the historicity of philosophy. I compare the current situation to that of ancient Greece and Rome, when there was also a plurality of schools. By comparison, philosophers today specialize more, making it difficult to converse with philosophers from other schools or even to other sub-disciplines within their own school. Moreover, there is an enormous quantity of philosophical texts to read, and contemporary philosophers are not very tied to the idea of philosophy as the love of wisdom. The paper’s topic opens up the deeper queries, “How does philosophy differfrom scientific and other disciplines” and “What is philosophy?” It includes a bibliography of the recent, growing literature on the divide. (shrink)

Commonly regarded as one of the most serious philosophers of all time (this is a man who took his daily walk at precisely the same time each day), Kant's Humorous Writings explores a dimension of Kant's work that has hitherto been almost entirely ignored but which casts his philosophy into a new light. With entirely new translations of Kant's bon mots, quips, and anecdotes, supplemented by historical commentary and numerous illustrations, this guide outlines just why these pieces were important to (...) both the man and his work. (shrink)

A distinct logic to Gadamer's early writings makes them more than mere precursors to the mature thought that appeared in _Truth and Method_. They contain their own, new and different, "philosophical hermeneutics" and are worth reading with a fresh eye. The young Gadamer began his publication career by arguing that Plato's ethical writings did not "express" doctrine but rather depended upon the "play" of language among speakers in an ethical discourse community. This was the key idea of _Plato's Dialectical Ethics_, (...) Gadamer's first book. Following the classical formula of seeing politics as the continuation of ethics, Gadamer's writings in the 1930s and 1940s concentrated on the Platonic idea of the state and argued two key points. First, the exiling of poets from the city was a way of banishing monologue and clearing the way for a dialogue as the language form appropriate to political discourse communities. Second, the Platonic state's defining task was the educational one of shaping the soul, and this could not be achieved monologically but rather had to take place as a dialogical play between the educator and the soul. The mature philosophical hermeneutics of _Truth and Method_ is a metaphor taken from the literary experience of constructing textual meaning out of the play of parts and whole. The philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer's early writings rests on a play between the ethical whole initially the Gestalt figure of the "Platonic Socrates" but later the Platonic state and the individual soul in need of ethical guidance. There is no conflict between the early and the later hermeneutics, but the early hermeneutics retain a freshness of spirit and boldness of interpretation that is characteristic of the Weimar culture of Gadamer's Marburg youth.From beginning to end, Gadamer's early writings remind us that Plato's dialogues really do record the conversational essence of Western philosophy at its birth. (shrink)

This important collection of more than twenty original essays by prominent Kant scholars covers the multiple aspects of Kant’s teaching in relation to his published works. With the Academy edition’s continuing publication of Kant’s lectures, the role of his lecturing activity has been drawing more and more deserved attention. Several of Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, logic, ethics, anthropology, theology, and pedagogy have been translated into English, and important studies have appeared in many languages. But why study the lectures? When they (...) are read in light of Kant’s published writings, the lectures offer a new perspective of Kant’s philosophical development, clarify points in the published texts, consider topics there unexamined, and depict the intellectual background in richer detail. And the lectures are often more accessible to readers than the published works. This book discusses all areas of Kant's lecturing activity. Some essays even analyze in detail the content of Kant's courses and the role of textbooks written by key authors such as Baumgarten, helping us understand Kant’s thought in its intellectual and historical contexts. Contributors: Huaping Lu-Adler; Henny Blomme ; Robert Clewis; Alix Cohen; Corey Dyck; Faustino Fabbianelli; Norbert Fischer; Courtney Fugate; Paul Guyer; Robert Louden; Antonio Moretto; Steve Naragon; Christian Onof; Stephen Palmquist; Riccardo Pozzo; Frederick Rauscher; Dennis Schulting; Oliver Sensen; Susan Shell; Werner Stark; John Zammito; Günter Zöller. (shrink)

This paper examines the ancient Judeo-Christian worldview to provide a link between individual and societal attitudes and sustainable human welfare. This “moral ecology” links the welfare of the entire created order to human justice, or right living. Environmental degradation, poverty, and oppression all stem from humans grasping for control. To examine how these attitudes may affect material human welfare the paper develops the concept of natural systems as natural multiproduct factories, showing how they interact with other productive resources to improve (...) human material well-being. Maintaining or increasing such well-being depends upon creating a balance between these natural factories and human-derived inputs within a spatial context. Achieving balance, as well as overall human welfare, is shown ultimately to depend upon the attitudes of people toward one another and toward the rest of creation, indicating that the basic Hebrew perspective under girding western civilization has much to offer as a frame of analysis. (shrink)

These autobiographical reflections by a major contemporary philosopher offer an enjoyable and enlightening tour not only of his own intellectual development but of the rich and fruitful collaboration of minds during a rich period in German cultural history. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the author of Truth and Method, traces his "philosophical apprenticeships" with some of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.Perhaps more than anyone else, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Heidelberg, is the doyen of German (...) philosophy and the recognized chief theorist of hermeneutics. His book Reason in the Age of Science is an ideal introduction to his thought and to the problems of hermeneutics more generally. Philosophical Apprenticeships is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

Offers a collection of writings by analytic philosophers who have made lasting contributions to contemporary philosophical debate.

This article identifies three distinct temporal notions in Hume’s aesthetics: passing the test of time, repeated viewing of a work, and the personal aging of the critic. It applies these ideas to the evaluation and enjoyment of films. It characterizes positive, negative, and ambivalent film aging, which are associated with nostalgia, boredom, and comic amusement, respectively, and which bear on our enjoyment, not evaluation, of film. The paper discusses Allen’s Zelig, Antonioni’s La Notte, Cameron’s The Terminator, Lucas’s Star Wars, Scorsese’s (...) Taxi Driver, Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu. (shrink)

This article focuses on the conceptual relationship between awe and the experience of the sublime. I argue that the experience of the sublime is best conceived as a species of awe, namely, as aesthetic awe. I support this conclusion by considering the prominent conceptual relations between awe and the experience of the sublime, showing that all of the options except the proposed one suffer from serious shortcomings. In maintaining that the experience of the sublime is best conceived as aesthetic awe, (...) I draw from historical theories of the sublime as well as recent work in empirical psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of ThinkingRobert MagliolaZen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking. By Carl Olson. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. 309 pp.Carl Olson's Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy compares two paths of liberation from the representational mode of thinking, namely, (...) Zen Buddhism and postmodern philosophy. Olson is to be commended for encouraging this dialogue, especially since professors of religious studies usually marginalize Gallic postmodern thought. He is also to be appreciated for the enormous effort that must have been required to describe so much material. Olson treats Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard on the postmodern side; and Dogen, Hakuin, Nishitani, many Chinese Ch'anists, and some Indian Buddhists on the Buddhist side. His method is to arrange the chapters according to topoi such as "Language, Disruption, and Play," "Ways of Thinking," "The Body," and so on, and to treat the pertaining ideas of the individual Buddhist and postmodern authors insofar as applicable.Because Olson's book assembles between two covers the names, selected works, and—at least in a general sense—the "key" ideas of the postmodern movement and their grosso modo similarities/dissimilarities via-à-vis Zen Buddhism, I think it serves an undergraduate readership well enough. The problem is that the book too often performs like a crib sheet in the CliffsNotes manner, reducing so-called "key" ideas to misleading clichés. The book is at its best when it gives an author some length of attention, as it does with Dogen. Rather than reduce my review to a series of sound bites (print bites?) corresponding to Olson's, I shall resort to what hermeneuts call an Auerbachian decoupage, that is, a close analysis of several passages that can be taken as indicative of an author's mode in general. I'll address three interpretations from Olson's book, one of Derrida, one of a Chinese kung-an (koan), and one of Lacan.Within his comparison of Derrida/language/Buddhism, Olson cites (p. 46) a sentence from Derrida's Writing and Difference: "Speech is stolen: since it is stolen [End Page 295] from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative." Olson glosses as follows: "Derrida claims that a speaking subject, representing an irreducible secondary status, is no longer the person who speaks because his/her origin is elusive in an already established field of speech." Because of glosses like this, Derrida is all too often subjected to the ridicule of nonspecialists, who exclaim, "Derrida denies that a person can use speech instrumentally? Aren't his lectures the instruments of his own ideas?" Actually in the section Olson quotes, Derrida is appropriating Lacanian thought and mutating it for Derridean purposes. For Derrida, all life is stretched out in time and diced-out in space in such a way that phenomenological self-identity is an illusion. Physical writing is the best metaphor for this, in that written words (even Chinese ideograms) cannot, in the scientific sense, be perceived in one absolute moment: it "takes time" and it "takes space" to recognize a word, that is, "build" a word-meaning. Derrida calls life a "text" or "writing" because life is like writing: life on the phenomenological level appears holistic (much as a word-meaning appears self-identical, i.e., arising all at once), but life is actually a time/space "drift."1In the sentence Olson quotes, what Derrida means has the following gist: Speech (spoken words) is stolen from language in that it belongs to language as writing and is really writing; and insofar as it is really writing, it is stolen from itself; speech has "always already" been lost to language in that the instrumentality of speech is always undercut by language's nature as writing. Speech is always undercut by an inevitable drift that subverts intentionality and foils our attempts to make speech our absolute "property." This does not mean most of the intention... (shrink)

THE CARTESIAN IDEA that a self is a private consciousness has been subject to criticisms from many points of view. The most basic of these criticisms are that once we admit that the self is private, we cannot be certain of a common world, cannot conceive of outward actions of the self, and cannot have reasonable assurance of the existence of other selves. Those who hold fast to the private self might be willing to admit these criticisms and to hold (...) that the private self is indeed the only immediate object of experience and to regard the common world and other selves as objects of problematic hypotheses to explain the contents of the private self; on the other side, those who find these criticisms decisive might be willing on this account to deny private consciousness altogether and to regard the self as a form of behavior of the human organism. The one side seems to lose the world to save the self; the other side seems to lose the self to save the world. My aim in this article is to show that we can maintain that a self is a private consciousness without giving up the immediate certainty of a common world, outward action of the self, or assurance of the existence of other selves and that we are therefore not faced with the alternatives that the critics of Descartes suppose. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain (...) stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)