Notre Dame Philosophical Review 2003

NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003
Review Archives
Reviews Archive of 2003
Robert C Solomon
Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life
Reviewed by William Lad Sessions, Washington and Lee University
2003.01.01
Brian Leiter
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality
Reviewed by Bernard Reginster, Brown University
2003.01.02
Thomas Reid
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Reviewed by Philip de Bary, Thoemmes Press
2003.01.03
I. Bernard Cohen, George E. Smith, (eds.)

The Cambridge Companion to Newton
Reviewed by Zvi Biener, University of Pittsburgh and Christopher Smeenk , Dibner Institute, MIT
2003.01.04
Martin Heidegger
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's
Cave Allegory and Theaetetus
Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University
2003.01.05
Zhang Dainian
Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy
Reviewed by Xinyan Jiang, University of Redlands
2003.01.06
Stephen J. Pope (ed.)

The Ethics of Aquinas
Reviewed by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado
2003.01.07
Martin Kusch
Knowledge by Agreement: the Programme of Communitarian Epistemology
Reviewed by David Henderson, University of Memphis
2003.01.08
Thomas Duddy
A History of Irish Thought
Reviewed by Dermot Moran, University College Dublin
2003.01.09
Katherine Hawley
How Things Persist
Reviewed by Heather Dyke, University of Otago
2003.01.10
Page 1 of 15
Daniel Robinson
Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications
Reviewed by David Sussman, Princeton University
2003.01.11
Andrew Newman
The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Predication
Reviewed by Herbert Hochberg, University of Texas
2003.01.12
Joachim Kohler
Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
Reviewed by Mathias Risse, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
2003.01.13
Matthew B. Ostrow
Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation
Reviewed by Christopher Pincock, Purdue University
2003.01.14
Nicholas White
Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics
Reviewed by Paula Gottlieb, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2003.02.01
David Howie
Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early Twentieth Century
Reviewed by Colin Howson, London School of Economics
2003.02.02
Mark Timmons, (ed.)

Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays
Reviewed by Pawel Lukow, Warsaw University
2003.02.03
Byeong-uk Yi
Understanding the Many
Reviewed by Jim Hardy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2003.02.04
Jurgen Habermas
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity
Reviewed by Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame
2003.02.05
Benjamin Morison
On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place
Reviewed by Mohan Matthen, University of British Columbia
2003.02.06
Theodore Kisiel
Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts
Reviewed by Richard Polt, Xavier University
2003.02.07
Will Dudley
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom
Page 2 of 15
Reviewed by Robert Williams, University of Illinois at Chicago

2003.02.08
Nick Bostrom
Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy
Reviewed by Neil Manson, Virginia Commonwealth University
2003.02.09
Peg O'Connor
Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theory
Reviewed by Alessandra Tanesini, Cardiff University
2003.02.10
Alan Malachowski
Richard Rorty
Reviewed by David Dudrick, Colgate University
2003.02.11
Trudy Govier
Forgiveness and Revenge
Reviewed by Mary Sigler, Arizona State University
2003.02.12
Stanley Rosen
The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy
Reviewed by Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College
2003.02.13
Tad M. Schmaltz
Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes
Reviewed by Peter Anstey, University of Sydney
2003.02.14
Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity
Reviewed by R. M. Berry, Florida State University
2003.02.15
Peter Carruthers, Michael Siegal, Stephen Stich, (eds.)

The Cognitive Basis of Science
Reviewed by Nicola Lonsdale , University of Sheffield and John M. Doris , University of California, Santa
Cruz
2003.03.01
Nicholas S. Smith, (ed)

Reading McDowell on Mind and World
Reviewed by A. C. Genova, University of Kansas
2003.03.02
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Practical Reason
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kinlaw , McMurry University
2003.03.03
John Haldane
Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions
Page 3 of 15
Reviewed by Jeffrey E. Brower, Purdue University

2003.03.04
Paul Crowther
The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History
Reviewed by Daniel Herwitz , University of Michigan
2003.03.05
Susan Neiman
Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
Reviewed by Fred Rush , University of Notre Dame
2003.03.06
Thomas Nickles, (ed.)

Thomas Kuhn
Reviewed by Howard Sankey, University of Melbourne
2003.03.07
Christopher Eberle
Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics
Reviewed by Gerald Gaus, Tulane University
2003.03.08
G.E.R. Lloyd
The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China
Reviewed by Eric Hutton, University of Utah
2003.03.09
George Pattison
Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, literature
Reviewed by M. Jamie Ferreira, University of Virginia
2003.03.10
Nancy J. Hirschmann
The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom
Reviewed by Ann E. Cudd, University of Kansas
2003.03.11
Theodore Schatzki
The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change
Reviewed by Joanna Crosby, Morgan State University
2003.03.12
Pascal Engel
Truth
Reviewed by Richard Rorty, Stanford University
2003.03.13
Georg Meggle, (ed.)

Social Facts & Collective Intentionality
Reviewed by Ingvar Johansson, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Leipzig
2003.03.14
Jan Patocka
Plato and Europe
Reviewed by David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame
2003.04.01
Page 4 of 15
Philip Soper
The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law's Morals
Reviewed by Leslie Green, York University
2003.04.02
Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten (eds)

Principles of Truth
Reviewed by Gabriel Uzquiano, University of Rochester
2003.04.03
Charles Taylor
Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited
Reviewed by Philip L. Quinn, University of Notre Dame
2003.04.04
Leon Pompa
Vico: The First New Science
Reviewed by Robert Miner, Baylor University
2003.04.05
Yvonne Sherratt
Adorno's Positive Dialectic
Reviewed by Deborah Cook, University of Windsor
2003.04.06
Max Kolbel
Truth Without Objectivity
Reviewed by Richard Fumerton, University of Iowa
2003.04.07
Catherine Chalier
What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas
Reviewed by Adrian Peperzak, Loyola University
2003.04.08
Cass Sunstein
Risk and Reason
Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette, University of Notre Dame
2003.04.09
Antiphon the Sophist

The Fragments
Reviewed by Michael Gagarin, University of Texas at Austin
2003.04.10
David Boonin
A Defense of Abortion
Reviewed by Win-chiat Lee , Wake Forest University
2003.04.11
Rosalyn Diprose
Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas
Reviewed by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, University of Notre Dame
2003.04.12
Thomas Aquinas
The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89
Page 5 of 15
Reviewed by Eileen Sweeney, Boston College

2003.04.13
Beatrice Han
Foucault's Critical Project
Reviewed by Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame
2003.05.01
Thomas Reid
The Correspondence of Thomas Reid
Reviewed by James A. Harris, St. Catherine's College, Oxford
2003.05.02
James Warren
Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia
Reviewed by Tim O'Keefe, University of Minnesota, Morris
2003.05.03
Jeremy Waldron
God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought
Reviewed by Victor Nuovo, Harris Manchester College, Oxford/ Middlebury College
2003.05.04
Adam Sutcliffe
Judaism and Enlightenment
Reviewed by Steven Nadler , University of Wisconsin, Madison
2003.05.05
Otfried Hoffe
Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity
Reviewed by Patrick Kain, Purdue University/ Philips-Universitat, Marburg
2003.05.06
John Searle
Consciousness and Language
Reviewed by Joelle Proust, Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS, Paris)
2003.05.07
Katerina Ierodiakonou
Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources
Reviewed by R.J. Hankinson, University of Texas at Austin
2003.05.08
Gordon Graham
Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry
Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan, University of Tennessee
2003.05.09
Raimo Tuomela
Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View
Reviewed by Seumas Miller, Australian National University
2003.05.10
Wolfram Hinzen, Hans Rott (eds.)

Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface
Reviewed by Michael O'Rourke, University of Idaho
2003.05.11
Page 6 of 15
Ross Harrison
Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Philosophy
Reviewed by Duncan Ivison, Princeton/University of Sydney
2003.05.12
Claudia Baracchi
Of Myth, Life and War in Plato's Republic
Reviewed by Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver
2003.05.13
Ian Hacking
Historical Ontology
Reviewed by David Hyder , University of Konstanz
2003.06.01
Dale Jamieson
Morality's Progress
Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette , University of Notre Dame
2003.06.02
Alvin Plantinga, Matthew Davidson (ed.)

Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality
Reviewed by Charles Chihara, University of California, Berkeley
2003.06.03
James R. Otteson
Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life
Reviewed by Robert McCarthy , Key School, Annapolis MD
2003.06.04
Paul J. Weithman
Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship
Reviewed by Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College
2003.06.05
Woods, John
Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences
Reviewed by JC Beall , University of Connecticut and David Ripley, University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill
2003.06.06
John Kekes
The Art of Life
Reviewed by Stephen Watt, The Open University
2003.06.07
Rodolphe Gasche
The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics
Reviewed by Rachel Zuckert , Rice University
2003.06.08
Pierre Hadot
What is Ancient Philosophy?
Reviewed by Donald Zeyl , University of Rhode Island
2003.06.09
Page 7 of 15
Louis E. Loeb,
Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise
Reviewed by Saul Traiger, Occidental College
2003.06.10
Bimal Krishna Matilal

Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion
Reviewed by Nick Gier , University of Idaho
2003.06.11
Mary Warnock
Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children?
Reviewed by Anthony Ellis , Virginia Commonwealth University
2003.06.12
Andrew Ariew, Robert Cummins (eds.), Mark Perlman (eds.)

Functions: New Essays in Philosophy of Psychology and Biology
Reviewed by Graham MacDonald, University of Canterbury
2003.07.01
Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (ed.)

Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon
Reviewed by Allan Silverman , Ohio State University
2003.07.02
Nancy K. Frankenberry (ed.)

Radical Interpretation in Religion
Reviewed by Charles Taliaferro , St. Olaf College
2003.07.03
John T. Lysaker
You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense
Reviewed by Herman Rapaport, University of Southampton
2003.07.04
Herbert Hochberg
Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 1879-2002
Reviewed by Richard Mendelsohn , CUNY
2003.07.05
Robert Solomon
Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice
Reviewed by Matthew Ratcliffe, University of Durham and ,
2003.07.06
D'Oro Giuseppina
Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience
Reviewed by Gary Ciocco, Wheeling Jesuit University
2003.07.07
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology
Reviewed by Eric Matthews , University of Aberdeen
2003.07.08
Alan Berger
Terms and Truth
Page 8 of 15
Reviewed by Robin Jeshion, Yale University

2003.07.09
Thomas Williams (ed.)

The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus
Reviewed by Stephen D. Dumont, University of Notre Dame
2003.07.10
Nagel, Thomas
Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays
Reviewed by John Gardner, University College, Oxford
2003.07.11
Richard Kearney
Strangers, Gods and Monsters
Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Kosky , Washington & Lee University
2003.07.12
Bruce Kuklick
A History of Philosophy in America 1720-2000
Reviewed by Richard M. Gale , University of Pittsburgh
2003.07.13
Rea, Michael
World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism
Reviewed by Troy Cross , Yale University
2003.07.14
R.M. Sainsbury
Departing From Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language
Reviewed by Dean Buckner, unknown
2003.08.01
John M. Doris
Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior
Reviewed by Lawrence Blum, University of Massachusetts, Boston
2003.08.02
Kai Hammermeister
The German Tradition in Aesthetics
Reviewed by Paul Guyer, University of Pennsylvania
2003.08.03
Martin Weatherston
Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality
Reviewed by Robert Hanna, University of Colorado, Boulder
2003.08.04
Lorraine Code (ed.)

Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer
Reviewed by Robert J. Dostal, Bryn Mawr College
2003.08.05
John O'Callaghan
Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence
Reviewed by Susan Brower-Toland, Saint Louis University
2003.08.06
Page 9 of 15
J. M. Bernstein (ed.)
Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics
Reviewed by Richard Eldridge , Swarthmore College
2003.08.07
Albert Casullo
A Priori Justification
Reviewed by Panayot Butchvarov, University of Iowa
2003.08.08
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Lectures on Philosophical Ethics
Reviewed by Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert , DePaul University
2003.08.09
Antonio S. Cua (ed.)

Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy
Reviewed by Manyul Im, California State University, Los Angeles
2003.08.10
Lenny Moss
What Genes Can't Do
Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan , Oregon State University
2003.08.11
Nicholas Rescher
Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice
Reviewed by Brad Hooker , University of Reading
2003.08.12
Philip Kitcher
In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology
Reviewed by Samir Okasha , University of York
2003.09.01
Andrea Iacona
Propositions
Reviewed by Christopher Gauker , University of Cincinnati
2003.09.02
Jose Bermudez
Art and Morality
Reviewed by Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
2003.09.03
Richard Swinburne
The Resurrection of God Incarnate
Reviewed by Richard Otte , University of California, Santa Cruz
2003.09.04
Joel Feinberg
Problems at the Root of Law
Reviewed by Russ Shafer-Landau, University of Wisconsin, Madison
2003.09.05
Kristin Shrader-Frechette
Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy
Page 10 of 15
Reviewed by Katie McShane, North Carolina State University

2003.09.06
Arnold Davidson
The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
Reviewed by Linda Martin Alcoff , Syracuse University
2003.09.07
Christopher Gauker
Words Without Meaning
Reviewed by Brian Weatherson , Brown University
2003.09.08
Herman Rapaport
Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work
Reviewed by Catherine Mills , Australian National University
2003.09.09
M.R. Bennett, P.M.S. Hacker

Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
Reviewed by Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University, Camden and New Brunswick
2003.09.10
Peter A.Redpath (ed.)

A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson
Reviewed by Denis Bradley , Georgetown University
2003.09.11
J.L. Bermudez (eds.), Alan Millar (eds.)

Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality
Reviewed by Todd Stewart , Illinois State University
2003.09.12
Adam Morton
The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics
Reviewed by Constantine Sandis , University of Reading
2003.09.13
Lynn Holt
Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules
Reviewed by Guy Axtell , University of Nevada, Reno
2003.09.14
Bernard Williams
Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy
Reviewed by Clancy W. Martin, University of Missouri, Kansas City
2003.09.15
John Locke, Victor Nuovo (ed)

ohn Locke: Writings on Religion
Reviewed by Thomas Lennon , University of Western Ontario
2003.09.16
Richard T. De George
The Ethics of Information Technology and Business
Reviewed by Norman Mooradian, unknown
2003.09.17
Page 11 of 15
Robert Figueroa, Sandra Harding (eds.)

Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophy of Science and Technology
Reviewed by Peter J. Taylor , University of Massachusetts, Boston
2003.10.01
Gregory McCulloch
The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism
Reviewed by Anne Jaap Jacobson , University of Houston
2003.10.02
Wayne A. Davis
Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Cambridge
Reviewed by A.P. Martinich , University of Texas, Austin
2003.10.03
Samuel Freeman (ed.)

The Cambridge Companion to Rawls
Reviewed by Wilfried Hinsch , University of the Saarland
2003.10.04
Claudia Card
The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil
2003.10.05
Laurence Paul Hemming

Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice
Reviewed by Jean Grondin , Universite de Montreal
2003.10.06
H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross

Moral Writings and The Right and the Good
Reviewed by Mark Timmons, University of Memphis
2003.10.07
Onora O'Neill
Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics
Reviewed by Alan Thomas , University of Kent
2003.10.08
Nicholas Saunders
Divine Action and Modern Science
Reviewed by Thomas Tracy , Bates College
2003.10.09
James B. South (ed.)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale
Reviewed by Karen Bennett, Princeton University
2003.10.10
Peg O'Connor, Naomi Scheman (eds.)

Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Reviewed by Mark Lance , Georgetown University
2003.10.11
Lorraine Smith Pangle

Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship
Page 12 of 15
Reviewed by Gabriel Richardson Lear , University of Chicago

2003.10.12
Gavin Kitching, Nigel Pleasants (eds.)

Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics
Reviewed by David G. Stern, University of Iowa
2003.10.13
Dominicus Gundissalinus, John A. Laumakis (translated)

The Procession of the World (De processione mundi)
Reviewed by Charles Burnett , Warburg Institute, London
2003.10.14
Allan Silverman
The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato's Metaphysics
Reviewed by Robert S. Colter , Centre College
2003.10.15
Richard Eldridge (ed.)

Stanley Cavell
Reviewed by Steven G. Affeldt , University of Notre Dame
2003.11.01
J.N. Mohanty
Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography
Reviewed by Lester Embree , Florida Atlantic University
2003.11.02
Immanuel Kant, Henry Allison (eds), Peter Heath (eds)

Theoretical Philosophy after 1781
Reviewed by Manfred Kuehn , Philipps-Universitat Marburg
2003.11.03
Richard Joyce
The Myth of Morality
Reviewed by R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley
2003.11.04
Mark Morford
The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the death of Marcus Aurelius
Reviewed by Wolfgang Mann, Columbia University
2003.11.05
Jay Rosenberg
Thinking About Knowing
Reviewed by Chad Mohler, Truman State University
2003.11.06
Lisa Shabel
Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy
Reviewed by Houston Smit, University of Arizona
2003.11.07
Husain Sarkar
Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck
Reviewed by Stephen I. Wagner, St. John's University
2003.11.08
Page 13 of 15
Hans-Johann Glock,
Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality
Reviewed by Cory Juhl , University of Texas, Austin
2003.11.09
Richard Swinburne (ed.)

Bayes's Theorem
Reviewed by Branden Fitelson , University of California'Berkeley
2003.11.10
Nomy Arpaly
Unprincipled Virtue
Reviewed by Julia Driver , Dartmouth College
2003.11.11
Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft

Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology
Reviewed by Peter Carruthers , University of Maryland
2003.11.12
Hallvard Lillehammer (eds.), Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.)

Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge
Reviewed by John Divers , University of Sheffield
2003.11.13
Hilary Kornblith
Knowledge and its Place in Nature
Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of Missouri, St. Louis
2003.12.01
Jurgen Habermas
The Future of Human Nature
Reviewed by Mary V. Rorty, Stanford University
2003.12.02
Anthony Kenny
Aquinas on Being
2003.12.03
Jon Marenbon
Boethius
Reviewed by Jeffrey Hause, Creighton University
2003.12.04
David Papineau
The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and Probability
Reviewed by Horacio Arlo Costa, Carnegie Mellon University
2003.12.05
Marilyn Friedman
Autonomy, Gender, and Politics
Reviewed by Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University
2003.12.06
Deen K. Chatterjee, , Don E. Scheid (eds.)

Ethics and Foreign Intervention
Page 14 of 15
Reviewed by Robert L. Holmes, University of Rochester

2003.12.07
Jurgen Habermas, Barbara Fulmer (edited and translations)

Truth and Justification
Reviewed by Richard Rorty , Stanford University
2003.12.08
Page 15 of 15
Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003
2003.05.07
John Searle
Consciousness and Language
Searle, John, Consciousness and Language, Cambridge University Press,
2002, 278pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521597447
Reviewed by Joelle Proust, Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS, Paris)
The fourteen essays collected in this book—most of them already published—cover a

variety of topics that John Searle has been concerned with over twenty years, from
language, conversation, and speech-act theory to consciousness, cognition, and the
indeterminacy of translation. As a whole, the book offers many stimulating views, and
some of the most controversial should spark new interdisciplinary reflections. Chapter
10, “How performatives work”, presents a fascinating discussion of how declarations
are encoded. The analysis of self-referentiality in promises that is offered in this
chapter is a great piece of philosophical theorizing. The present review will
concentrate on the main topic of the book: consciousness and its role in cognition.
Consciousness and intentionality, the author contends, are essentially biological
phenomena, which might at first blush seem to imply that no artificial device can ever
think or become conscious of the world. But the view is, rather, that a computational
representation offering a simulation of the logical relations between the subset of
brain states that are the vehicles of mental representations would not qualify as a
possible candidate for conscious agency. For such a simulation ignores that the
relevant dimension for conscious awareness cannot be information processing (the
argument as will be shown below, relies on Searle’s particular view as to what
information consists in); what is relevant to consciousness is rather a specific set of
“biological” processes in the brain that produces it.
Although, as Searle acknowledges, philosophy has nothing to say about the particular
biological process in question, it is reasonable to assume that conceptual clarification
will play a major role in any solution of the problem of consciousness. The author
insists, in particular, on the ontological status of consciousness: it is caused by the
brain, but is also a “feature of the brain”: “consciousness is a state that the brain is
in” (48). When the causal regularities that govern such a realization are properly
understood, a duplication (not a simulation) of conscious states in artifacts might be
considered.
Searle anticipates the objection that conscious states have a first-person, i.e. a
qualitative, experiential ontology, in contrast with the third-person biological and
physical phenomena studied in science. How then could a causal, third-person
approach possibly clarify what consciousness is? His rejoinder consists in developing a
new kind of ontological stance, called “biological naturalism”, that keeps both dualism
and materialism at bay. Dualism is notoriously unable to account for the causal
connection between the mental and the physical. Materialism, on the other hand,
assumes that all existing phenomena are physical; it is therefore unable to
acknowledge, and still less to account for, the existence of subjective qualitative
states. A proper ontology should, according to Searle, recognize that subjective facts
of consciousness can be endowed with epistemic objectivity, which allows them to
constitute bona fide objects of scientific inquiry (23). One might object that the
difficulty of traditional dualism would surface again in the two varieties of objective
facts: granting that the real world encompasses epistemically subjective (mental)
facts and third-person (inter alia: cerebral) facts, the difficulty persists in
1
understanding how they can be both accounted for in one and the same explanatory
framework.
On this issue, a crucial element in Searle’s strategy is to contrast causation and
reduction: conscious states cannot be reduced to lower-level properties of the brain –
otherwise the felt quality is lost; they can only be “causally explained” (34). Now one
might want to object that causal explanation standardly understood is offered in a
detached, third-person, non-qualitative way. Why should a statement such as “X
produces C”, where X refers to biological facts and C to a felt quality, be taken to
provide a causally adequate explanation (causally adequate to the subjective
explanandum)? This objection, associated in the literature with the “hard problem”, is
for Searle just an expression of our present limited understanding of which range of
facts are relevant (24-25). This admission however backfires on the whole
epistemological theory and on the underlying ontology; what is needed is an indication
as to how the causal statement above can be validated in principle; this problem
cannot be solved simply through the discovery of the relevant neural correlations.
Chapter 7 presents in a summarized form the arguments offered in the two final
chapters of The Rediscovery of the Mind 1 against the informational paradigm as
developed in cognitive science. In a nutshell, the line of reasoning is this. Any kind of
causal explanation has to cite “real features of the real world”—this requirement is
called the “causal reality constraint” (107). Any appeal to informational, subdoxastic
states, however, fails to meet this constraint, according to Searle, because in this kind
of case, information is observer-relative rather than intrinsic. Observer-relativity in
turn allows interpretive free-wheeling: “any system of any complexity at all admits of
an information processing analysis” (p. 110). This latter feature, for Searle, shows
that information might not be playing any causal role in observer-relative cases. Only
(potentially or actually) conscious states qualify as intrinsic states, able to have a
causal role qua mental.
Such a claim clashes with a view predominant in work presently conducted in artificial
intelligence, experimental psychology, cognitive linguistics and cognitive neuroscience.
In these fields, it is widely assumed that information processing is one of the most
prominent functions of the brain, whether their associated mental content is in
principle available to the agent or not. It is worthwhile trying to answer Searle’s
objections, because they point to genuine conceptual difficulties.
What is information? And why should it be taken to be observer-relative in all cases in
which the subject is attributed a mental state but is not in a position to report
consciously about it? In Searle’s use of the notion, information is an epistemic notion;
in other words, information is present in a state of affairs (tree rings, neuronal state)
only if a thinker is able to read it off. On this view of information, it is a matter of
definition that an informational state is conscious (in fact or in principle—as for
example, in a conscious perceptual state, or in a belief, an intention or a desire); thus
information can be said to play a causal role because it is part of the intentional
content available to the agent. In contrast, when applied from a third-person point of
view (by the light of an observer), it does not meet the causal reality constraint.
If the summary above is correct, it appears that Searle’s objection to cognitive science
is associated with his defining information in epistemic terms. As a result, any attempt
to understand intentional states in terms of informational content—which is the
project of cognitive science—is considered to be doomed to circularity. This is because
you cannot aim at trying to reduce intentional states to informational states if you
assume that beliefs and desires are needed to extract information.
2
Another concept of information is used, however, in cognitive science. As Searle

acknowledges (p. 119), “in a perfectly reasonable, but a different meaning of
’information’“, ”these tree rings contain information about the age of the tree” can be
rephrased as: “there is an exact covariance between the number of the tree’s rings
and its age in years”. This is a non-epistemic concept of information. Having this non-
epistemic concept is crucial for a cognitive scientist or a philosopher like Dretske who
wants to explain how intentional states can be generated from informational states. In
that alternative sense of the term, it is perfectly possible to attribute an informational
state to an organism in a third-person way and to take information to have a causal
role in the observed behavior. The causal properties of informational states are made
clear in the three conditions that, according to Dretske, have to be fulfilled for a
physical state to have representational content: i) there must be a brain state that
covaries with an external event or property; ii) this internal state must be
systematically triggering a given response to that event (for example flight, or
motivational change); and iii) this state must have the function of carrying that
information: in other terms, the response must be connected in a causally structured
way to the informational state in question. Dretske himself adds to these conditions a
requirement on mental content that might at first blush look similar to Searle’s. To
qualify as mental content, Dretske says, information must be cognitively available to
the subject and not simply present “objectively” in its receptors’ relevant states. What
he means here is that an organism qualifies as intentional only if the information that
is extracted is available to it in some central way in order to control its responses. For
Dretske, an animal able to learn new concepts and categories in order to cope with a
changing environment would thus qualify as having intentional states. In Dretske’s
view, the ability to learn and to exert a global control of behavior through
representations plays the role that consciousness plays in Searle’s view as the
essential feature of mentality. An area in which this divergence is put to the test is the
issue of animal minds.
Animals don’t express their beliefs in a language, but, Searle maintains, they do have
intentional states. Why? Chapter 4 offers two forms of defense: i) Because they are
conscious beings; ii) “Because they correct their beliefs all the time on the basis of
their perceptions” (68). These two lines of argument, however, do not determine the
same set of animal minds. Whether or not animals are “conscious” may depend on
various properties still under debate, for example whether they have a nervous
system allowing them to have reafferent perceptions, or whether they are able to
form metarepresentations about their sensory states. Whether or not they can use
representations to control their behavior, on the other hand, depends on their ability
to extract information, form categories, maintain them in memory over time, and
apply them to new objects. There is no a priori guarantee, to say the least, that the
capacity to feel and to experience, on the one hand, and to think, i.e. to represent the
world in a structured way, on the other, define coextensive classes of beings.
Chapter 4, in connection with chapter 7, raises another difficulty. As we saw earlier,
Searle takes information to be, in itself, observer-relative, and thus not able to
constitute a “real feature of the real world”. But consciousness is attributed to other
animals, Searle acknowledges, because of the overwhelming analogy between animals
and humans in their needs and actions; third-person attribution in this case does not
automatically prevent us from accessing a real feature of the world: “Even if we
assume that there is no fact of the matter as to which is the correct translation of the
dog’s mental representations into our vocabulary, that by itself does not show that the
dog does not have any mental representations, any beliefs and desires, that we are
3
trying to translate” (66). It is surprising that Searle finds it unproblematic to attribute

consciousness to animals from a human viewpoint – for if information is observer-
relative, projection from human to animal consciousness is not only observer-relative,
but also infected with anthropocentrism; as Nagel and McGinn have emphasized, there
is no way to know Â«what it is likeÂ» to be a bat, or even a dog, on the basis of a
simple analogy with our own conscious experience. (Imagining is not the problem.)
The difficulty with Searle’s position is threefold. First, conscious states have been
found, in cognitive psychology, not to exhaust the range of intentional states; in other
words, there are more perceptions and beliefs that control behavior in an effective and
global way than the subject can consciously recognize. A large part of learning occurs
outside consciousness, and such extensive “implicit learning” cannot (’in principle’) be
made conscious. Second, the agent is in no better position than an external
interpreter to tell which perceptions, which beliefs and desires, have been effective in
her selecting a particular course of action. Thus consciousness can be a poor guide for
appreciating the causes of emotional states or of agency. Thirdly, more generally,
conscious awareness cannot constitute a cause of behavior, assuming it does,
independently of the structure of the information that is being used, contrary to what
Searle maintains: “When Ludwig [the dog] wants to eat or wants to drink, for
example, he need not use any symbols or sentences at all to have his canine desires.
He just feels hungry or thirsty” (118). But how can consciousness be so serviceable?
For his objection against a computational view of the mind to be effective, Searle has
to offer a theory of thought in addition to his theory of consciousness.
It may seem a matter of course that Ludwig does not catch a ball because he
processes information, but rather because he wants to catch the ball. But the story for
“wanting” (and for “because”) is a long one, involving the phylogeny of motivation,
action and social interaction. Important steps in this selective history of the will would
involve informational processes such as object-tracking, categorizing, weighing
properties, selecting contexts, etc.. There may, therefore, not be two different kinds
of causation involved in the sentence above. The fact that we, human, language-using
beings, find it easier to take the personal perspective does not imply that a special
kind of expertise is reserved for that level (see p. 123). The “simply conscious” view
can seem to exhaust explanation only if one chooses to apply a common-sense
interpretation to a complex underlying process.
Endnotes
1. 1992, Cambridge, MIT Press.
2003.07.01
Andrew Ariew, Robert Cummins (eds.), Mark Perlman (eds.)
Functions: New Essays in Philosophy of Psychology and Biology
Ariew, Andrew; Cummins, Robert; Perlman, Mark (eds.), Functions: New Essays in
Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Oxford University Press, 2002, 464pp, $24.95
(pbk), ISBN 0199255814.
Reviewed by Graham MacDonald, University of Canterbury
This volume of new essays explores the variety of ways in which functions and
functional explanations have been viewed in recent debates in philosophy of
mind/psychology and philosophy of biology. The volume is divided into four sections:
history of teleology and functional explanation (Ariew, Ruse), functional explanation
today (Boorse, Millikan, Hardcastle, Cummins, Wimsatt, Buller, Schwartz),
teleosemantics (Perlman, Enc, Walsh), and methodological issues (Matthen, Allen, and
4
Neander). In the space available it is impossible to comment appropriately on all these

papers, so I will be selective, the selection perhaps reflecting my interests in differing
accounts of functionality and teleosemantics rather than the quality of the papers. I
have not had space to discuss the interesting contributions of Wimsatt, Schwartz
(both in the section on functional explanation), Matthen (on whether the function of
rationality is to lead us to true beliefs), and Allen (on different characterisations of
biological traits).
The historical section contains an interesting overview of the history of teleological
explanations from Plato to Darwin by Ariew, and a rather more rambling essay by
Ruse. The second section contains confrontations between various analyses and
accounts of what being a function amounts to, and consequently about the nature of
functional explanation. Boorse heroically defends the Nagel-Boorse goal-directed
approach. Basically this account has it that a function is something which contributes
to the goal of that which contains it. The chief objections relate to the resulting non-
explanatoriness of attributions of function, and, relatedly, to the choice of the goal.
The severance from any explanatory task raises the question of what work the
attribution of function is doing; on this account one could replace any such attribution
by simply citing a cause which has a certain effect (contributing to a stipulated ’goal’),
and nothing would be lost. As to unperformed functions, Boorse says that the function
of the normal heart is to pump blood round the body, but in a case in which it doesn’t,
that token doesn’t have that function, since that token is not normal. To think
otherwise, suggests Boorse, is to confuse normal function in a type with actual
function in a token. A consequence of not allowing type-function to dictate token
function is that there can be no malfunctioning heart, for example, since all such
malfunction will signal lack of normality. Boorse bites this bullet, but others may well
think that this is a defect in the goal-directed account.
Specifying a goal comes down to accepting that life “just is a natural kind of goal-
directedness” (p. 76). For organisms the many specific goal-directed ’behaviours’,
such as flying, running, eating, are sub-tasks in the pursuit of an ’apical’ goal, that of
survival and reproduction of the organism: any property whose instancing contributes
to the fitness (thus defined) of the organism thereby performs a function – no matter
how that property came to play this role for the organism. This would have it that if I
chase a fly into the next room, thereby escaping from the truck that crashes into the
room just vacated, the fly has performed the function (has the function on this
occasion?) of getting me into the next room, thus aiding my survival. We may talk in
this loose way, but an account of functions which grounds their attribution in
something more solid is to be preferred.
Etiological accounts try to perform this grounding task by focusing on the role of
natural selection. One rationale for doing this is that with designed objects we can
attribute function via the purpose for which they were designed. Since Darwin, natural
selection has played the role of designer, without our own interests or intentions
getting into the picture. Valerie Hardcastle thinks that natural selection cannot play
this de-anthropomorphised grounding role, because any theory which cites natural
selection as the producer of functional traits just reflects our own interest in natural
selection. This doesn’t do justice to those views; natural selection is emphasised
because it results in the spread of the trait in the population. The neo-teleologists, to
use Robert Cummins apt name for those who support the selectionist strategy, claim
the following explanatory gain: because (some) effects of ancestors of an instance of
a trait helped cause a proliferation of instances of the trait, that type of effect is cited
5
as contributing to an explanation of the existence of this instance, and so as the

function of this trait.
It is precisely this supposed connection between selection and function that is
disputed by Robert Cummins. The problem as he sees it is that selection works on
micro-features of traits, whereas functions are properties of the traits themselves. We
unproblematically say that the function (or a function) of the wings of a bird is to
facilitate flight. If the selectionist story of the grounds of this function-attribution were
right, then wings would have been selected for that effect (facilitating flight), which
means that in the reproduction stakes winged birds had the edge on wingless birds.
Cummins argues that this cannot be how the selectionist story goes; it is
inconceivable that the struggle for survival was one between the wingless and the
winged. Rather, amongst the winged birds, those variants with more efficient wings
were selected. Or something like that. The same goes for any complex feature of an
organism: it is small changes in already present structures that are relevant to how
selection operates. As a consequence, function and selection come apart, and neo-
teleology’s selection-dependent grounding of function is wrong. Another way of
separating function from selection, Cummins notes, is to take cognisance of the fact
that every trait of a ’winning’ organism will spread, regardless of whether that trait
contributes to the winning, so one cannot even say that the spread of a trait entails its
adaptiveness or functionality. And adaptiveness is a matter of degree; of two traits
which perform the same function one may perform it better than another, so be more
adaptive, and thus selected (ceteris paribus). A response to this would be to recognise
micro-selection, but to note that functions can be variously described, from the very
immediate to the more ultimate, and that the micro-changes on which selection
operates provide the resulting traits with proximate functions which improve the
operation of the more distal function.
Cummins claims that it is not having a function that drives selection, but functioning
better. One variation of wing design may be ’better’ – more energy efficient, say -
without improving the flight-function of the wing. Once one has decoupled functional
attribution from selection and adaptiveness one can then ’ground’ such attributions in
functional analyses of complex systems. Is this a ’natural’ enough grounding?
Cummins replies that the naturalising problem was that of grounding teleology
naturally; once function is stripped of any teleological connotation (as it is in
functional analysis) then there is no problem left, or at least not one which requires
the naturalistic solution provided by neo-teleologists. Functions turn out to be simply a
sub-class of (natural) dispositions. However this anti-teleological account now faces
the problem of saying why the notion of function is employed at all – why not settle
for ’dispositional analysis’? The suspicion is that it is because these analyses are of
complex systems, and because such complex systems look designed, or that the
coordinated workings of their parts looks purposeful, that the notion of function seems
particularly appropriate.
David Buller is also concerned to distinguish between functions and a history of
selection whilst defending an historical account of functionality. He does this by
distinguishing weak from strong etiological theories of function. The strong theory has
it that a present token of a trait in an organism has a function iff previous tokens
contributed to the fitness of ancestors of the organism and were selected for because
of this contribution to fitness; the weak theory just eliminates the clause about
selection and adds that the fitness enhancing effect of past tokens thereby contributed
to the reproduction of descendants of those organisms with the relevant trait. One
may wonder why it is that the weak account still needs to be etiological, given the
6
excision of any reference to selection. Given the take on fitness being independent of
selection, the addition of the clause about (relevant) past exercises of the trait
contributing to the reproduction of organisms possessing that trait appears redundant.
Buller’s response is to note that any token of a trait has numerous effects, so one has
to single out those which contribute to the fitness of the organism, and this can only
be done historically. This looks to be an epistemological rather than definitional
concern.
Ruth Millikan defends her theory of proper function, compares it to Cummins’ (causal
role) account, and provides conceptual space for the notion of exaptation to do some
work. Her theory, first elaborated in her Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories, is the most sophisticated etiological account available, providing for a
many layered classification of different types of functions. Here she reprises that
account, simplifying it somewhat and discussing further the role of derived and
adapted functions. She claims that tying functionality to selection does not have the
damaging consequences Cummins alleges it does. In particular she insists that the
(historical) reproductive advantage (arising from a genetic change) accruing to some
members of a species will mean that some (non-advantaged) members of that species
will not survive, even where this change may have just the result that some trait turns
out to work more efficiently.
Millikan proceeds to outline four problems (“leaks”) in the notion of a Cummins’
function where this notion is used as a characterisation of a bio-function: establishing
relevant counterfactuals to the actual properties and behaviour of animals, dividing
the complex causal path leading to reproduction into functional/non-functional causes,
discriminating between various environmental inputs as to those to which the animal
is adapted and those which are used by the animal but are only accidentally
advantageous, and last, how to make sense of the system’s ’repair’ mechanisms,
where these operate to restore the organism to proper working order after, say, a
destructive blow. The problem here is that the blow may not be part of the recognised
or permitted input to any part of the system, so is not included within the scope of a
Cummins’ style functional analysis, or not easily so included. And if it isn’t, then the
’proper’ response to it will not be included either. The criticism is that this will lead to
the exclusion of a considerable number of the bio-functions of an organism. The
conclusion is not that Cummins’ functions are useless as an account of bio-functions,
but that the interesting Cummins’ functions will be those which are adaptations.
Implicitly the suggestion is that the leaks can be fixed by paying attention to the
selection processes which (ultimately) produce the complex systems.
The section on teleosemantics has an article by Mark Perlman in which he argues that
the main teleosemantic theories (advanced by Dretske, Millikan, and Papineau) cannot
do what they set out to do: provide an account of content which allows for
misrepresentation. In this he is pursuing a line of attack pursued elsewhere against
Millikan by Cummins and Godfrey-Smith, both of whom see the teleosemantic
approach as bedeviled by the problem of any ’use’ theory of meaning – distinguishing
’proper’ from ’improper’ uses in a non-question-begging way. In broadening the
criticism to other ’teleosemanticists’, Perlman runs together some very different
approaches. For example, Millikan, in her account of intentionality, uses the notion of
’mapping rules’ as an essential building block, and the notion of misrepresentation is
cashed out in terms of, say, a linguistic device’s failing to map onto its proper target.
Neither Papineau nor Dretske use mapping rules as foundational in this way, so it
would be surprising if the same criticism could cover all three.
7
Teleosemanticists have also been criticised for assuming more determinacy in the
ascription of functions than they are entitled to. Berent Enc argues that the
assumption that there is a unique, determinate function performed by detection
systems is false, so function-talk does not allow for the level of determinacy required
by propositional attitudes, but that this indeterminacy is untroubling for the ascription
of content to sub-doxastic states. Denis Walsh sees indeterminacy as a problem for
the attribution of some functions, but not necessarily those connected to intentional
content. He discusses what he sees as three reductive moves made by teleosemantic
theorists: intentional content to intentional function, intentional function to
evolutionary function, and evolutionary function to causal (selectionist) history. Walsh
attacks the second and third phases of this reductionist strategy, but thinks that this
leaves defensible a naturalistic reduction of intentional content to intentional function.
It is precisely because teleosemanticists have misconstrued the nature of biological
teleology that one can still defend a (weak) reductive strategy which sees intentional
content explained by intentional function. He thinks that the indeterminacy problems
faced by teleosemanticists arise only because these theorists misunderstand the role
of function ascriptions in evolutionary biology. He alludes to an article by Amundson
and Lauder, who have argued that most biologists attribute functions to traits in order
to explain “how their effects contribute to the adaptively significant activities of the
system of which they are a part” (p.322). Given this explanatory aim, determinacy is
unnecessary. And as far as biological classification goes, Walsh claims, this is
determined more by homology than function. He also argues that a mapping rule for
any environmental condition, p, would have to be useful to the agent’s purposes given
any combination of the agent’s beliefs and desires, and he thinks this is a tall order for
any mapping rule. But why he thinks this has to be true for any such rule to be
selected is not clear; he seems to think that the rule would have to guarantee
successful fulfillment of any of the agent’s psychological purposes, which is clearly too
much to ask of any rule, but it is debatable whether the teleosemanticist needs such a
strong requirement. Walsh’s own view relies on the claim that it has been shown that
adaptations arise naturally as a consequence of the dynamics of complex systems,
and can do this without selection. This is speculative: how much “spontaneous order”
there is is a matter of some debate. It is much more debatable whether intentionality
arises from such spontaneous ordering.
Neander (in the section on methodological issues) attacks the claim that homology
determines classification, with functional categorisation reserved for analogous traits
(traits that have evolved independently and serve the same function, such as bird
wings and insect wings). She argues, convincingly, that the notion of function plays an
important role in homologous classification as well, so its importance for biological
classification is not restricted to the (relatively) unimportant analogous categories.
As can be seen from the above, Functions is a richly varied collection of essays which,
despite the variety, provides the reader with the opportunity for a sustained
examination of the central issues concerning functions and their role in biology and
psychology.
8
2003.01.02
Brian Leiter
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality
Leiter, Brian, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality, Routledge,
2002, 323pp, $15.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415152852.
Reviewed by Bernard Reginster, Brown University
The Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks series is designed to introduce students to

classic works of philosophy. Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality does that, and much
more. The book offers a complete commentary of On the Genealogy of Morality, but it
also articulates a comprehensive and original interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of
morality. The product is an exceptionally clear and cohesive account of philosophical
views known neither for their clarity nor for their cohesiveness.
The book may be divided in two main parts. Chapters 1 through 4 develop an account
of Nietzsche’s critique of morality, whereas chapters 5 through 8 focus on the
contribution made to this critique by On the Genealogy of Morality. By way of
conclusion, chapter 9 raises some critical questions. Although the running
commentary on the Genealogy contains a number of interesting interpretations, the
substantial contribution of Leiter’s book is to be found in his account of Nietzsche’s
critique of morality, which will therefore be the focus of my remarks.
The distinction, and the chief merit, of Leiter’s account is its emphasis on the
naturalism of Nietzsche’s approach to morality. Leiter may not quite be the first to
portray Nietzsche as a naturalist, but his characterization of Nietzschean naturalism in
connection with morality is the most systematic and compelling to date. Chapter 1
carefully circumscribes Nietzsche’s naturalism, by way of some distinctions. According
to Leiter, Nietzsche’s naturalism is primarily methodological – he believes that the
methods of philosophy ought to be continuous with the methods and results of the
empirical sciences – and qualifiedly substantive – he rejects any explanation in terms
of non-natural causes (e.g., God), but, in contrast to many contemporary naturalists,
he also opposes “materialism,” i.e. the reduction of all phenomena to physical
phenomena.
In broad outline, Nietzsche’s naturalism implies that all human beliefs, values, and
actions, including moral ones, can be explained by appealing to causal determinants in
features of human nature. At the heart of this naturalistic account of morality, there is
what Leiter calls the “doctrine of types,” according to which “each person has a fixed
psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person” (p. 8).
These type-facts, in combination with environmental factors, such as a prevalent
moral culture, determine the actual trajectory of a person’s life.
According to Leiter, this naturalism supplies the terms for both an explanation and an
evaluation of a morality. All moralities are adopted for prudential reasons, i.e. because
they serve the interests of certain types of people. Specifically, a morality is adopted
because the environment in which it prevails is favorable to the flourishing of people
of that type. Accordingly, a given morality is prudentially good for people of that type,
but may be harmful to other types. Moral values are like nutrients, which are valuable
insofar as they contribute to the health of a body, and whether they do or not
depends on certain facts about that body.
Chapter 2 offers an instructive overview of Nietzsche’s intellectual and historical
background, which aims to establish the influence in his development of broad
naturalistic themes. Particularly noteworthy is the discussion of the pervasive
9
influence of materialism in German culture, throughout the second half of the 19th
century.
Once this background is in place, Leiter turns to the critique of morality. Nietzsche
cannot attack all moralities, since his revaluation presupposes some values in terms of
which others are revaluated, but he does not direct his attack on some historically or
theoretically determinate morality either (such as Christian morality, or utilitarianism).
Nevertheless, according to Leiter, it is possible to find a unity to the conception of
morality Nietzsche attacks and therefore to develop a coherent account of his critique
of it. The morality Nietzsche attacks, “morality in the pejorative sense” as Leiter
proposes to call it (or “MPS”), is characterized by distinctive descriptive and normative
components. Chapter 3 is devoted to the critique of the descriptive components of
MPS, and chapter 4 describes the critique of its normative components.
Although the normative critique remains the most important, Leiter must be
commended for bringing greater attention to Nietzsche’s critique of the descriptive
component of morality. The descriptive component of MPS is the set of descriptive
claims about the nature of human agency, without which moral judgments would not
be applicable to human agents. Leiter identifies three such claims in Nietzsche. First,
agents must have free will, because MPS holds them responsible for their actions.
Hence, if they lack free will, they simply would not be appropriate targets of moral
judgment. Second, the motives from which agents act must be recognizable, because
MPS judges actions by their motives. Hence, if agents’ motives are inscrutable, so is
the moral value of their actions. Finally, all agents must be essentially similar, for MPS
presents one code as applicable to all. Hence, if agents prove relevantly different, then
a single code cannot apply to all.
Nietzsche’s critique of these three claims is closely connected to his naturalism,
particularly his doctrine of types. This doctrine underwrites a kind of metaphysical
fatalism (which Leiter characterizes as “causal essentialism” [p. 83]), which is
incompatible with free will. As Leiter claims, Nietzsche is driven to metaphysical
fatalism by his critique of the doctrine of free will. Of particular interest is Leiter’s
observation that Nietzsche develops arguments not just against incompatibilist
accounts of free will, but against compatibilist ones as well. Thus, Nietzsche defends
epiphenomenalism about consciousness, which suggests that the real motives of an
action are not available to the agent’s consciousness and therefore cannot be, for
example, the object of a second-order endorsement (as they would have to be on
Frankfurt-style compatibilism). Such epiphenomenalism also entails that the real
motives of action are inscrutable, so that no action can ever be morally evaluated.
Finally, Leiter invokes the doctrine of types (especially the implicit idea that there is
more than one type) to debunk the view that all people are essentially similar.
Accordingly, no single moral code can apply to all.
Chapter 4 comes to the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s critique, namely his
attack on the normative component of MPS. Leiter argues quite persuasively that MPS
is objectionable for Nietzsche because it is detrimental to the flourishing of the “higher
men.” The distinctive feature of the “higher men” is their creativity. Leiter’s
characterizes MPS by means of a list of “pro” and “con” attitudes, whose common
feature is that they undermine this creativity (pp. 127 ff.). Central to Leiter’s account,
therefore, is the claim that Nietzsche advocates a substantive ethical ideal (the
flourishing “higher man”), which is alleged to underwrite his normative critique of
MPS. In view of its importance, the reader might wish to know more about this
substantive ideal, and here Leiter’s book is short on important details. In general,
Leiter shares the puzzlement of many concerning some of the central concepts in
10
terms of which this ideal is articulated, such as the will to power, self-overcoming, and
the eternal recurrence, whose importance he proceeds, in my view too hastily, to
dismiss or minimize. But even on the terms of his own interpretation, greater detail in
the description of the higher men does seem necessary.
Consider the following example. Leiter suggests that the condemnation of suffering is
particularly central to MPS. This condemnation of suffering by MPS is objectionable
because, Leiter says, “great achievements (certainly great artistic achievements)
seem to grow out of intense suffering” (p. 132). But this is saying hardly enough: we
need to know more about the relationship of creativity to suffering. Is Beethoven to be
admired because he managed to create in spite of his suffering, or because of it?
Thus, was his suffering an unfortunate impediment to his creativity, which he had the
merit of overcoming, or a source of it? And if suffering was indeed a source of his
creativity, was it necessary for it, or could Beethoven have been equally creative,
though perhaps in other ways, had he been spared such suffering? Without answers to
these questions, it is far from clear how the value assigned to creativity would justify
a rejection of MPS, for suffering might not be necessary at all for creativity.
Leiter does suggest that suffering is a necessary condition of creativity. But we are
offered no explanation of why this should be so. Moreover, even if this is so, it is not
clear that this fact would suffice to justify a rejection of MPS. We might, for example,
imagine Beethoven compelled to suffer for the sake of his creativity because he lived
in a conservative society, in which creative individuals were isolated, or even opposed
and persecuted. This Beethoven could coherently deplore his suffering, even as he
acknowledged its necessity for the sake of creativity, and aspire to a world in which
one does not have to suffer in order to be creative. He could, in other words, continue
to subscribe to MPS’s condemnation of suffering, yet without abandoning his
commitment to the value of creativity. In the last analysis, Leiter’s interpretation
appears to assume that suffering is essentially necessary for creativity. But that
remains to be shown.
Let us now consider the role of the notion of flourishing in Nietzsche’s critique of MPS.
On Leiter’s account, Nietzsche operates with two conceptions of value. In asserting
that creativity is good, for example, Nietzsche makes, on the one hand, a prudential
(or “relational”) claim: creativity is good for an individual of a certain type (the so-
called “higher man”). Nietzsche is a realist with regard to prudential value: there are
objective facts pertaining to the nature of individuals of this type which determine
what counts as flourishing for that individual. On the other hand, the judgment that
creativity is good also expresses a non-prudential claim: it is good (or better) to be a
flourishing “higher man.” Nietzsche is anti-realist with regard to non-prudential value:
in maintaining that it is good (or better) to be a flourishing higher man, Nietzsche is
not describing objective facts, but rather expressing a certain evaluative taste or
sensibility.
In Leiter’s account, the prudential notion of value combines with the “doctrine of
types” to underwrite a kind of pluralism about prudential value. Creativity contributes
to the flourishing of some people (the “higher men”), but not of others (the “lower
men”). And the evaluative contrast between “higher” and “lower” men is, on this view,
nothing more than a matter of taste, and therefore not something the “lower men”
should really worry about.
This interpretation, I am afraid, “democratizes” Nietzsche’s ideas too much. Consider,
first, the so-called “doctrine of types.” The characterization of the “higher” and “lower”
types of men we are proposed (p. 115 ff.) does not suffice to make clear that
Nietzsche intended this contrast to underwrite the prudential pluralism Leiter
11
attributes to him. In fact, Nietzsche himself never relativizes the notion of flourishing,
which is at the core of the prudential conception of the good, to one or another type of
man. On the contrary, he always speaks of “human flourishing” – “the highest power
and splendor actually possible to the type man” (GM P 5-6; my emphases). And the
contrast between “higher” and “lower” men is interpreted quite plausibly as a contrast
between capacities to flourish, not between different types of flourishing. Nietzsche,
therefore, would not be a pluralist, but an elitist with regard to prudential value: there
is one human flourishing and some human beings are more capable of achieving it
than others. This prudential elitism, moreover, allows to make relatively easy sense of
a distinctive Nietzschean claim Leiter finds puzzling, namely that MPS is “hostile to
life” itself: in being detrimental to the “higher men,” MPS would simply be inimical to a
flourishing human life.
None of this, of course, may suffice to resolve the question of non-prudential value:
we might still want to know why there should be flourishing human beings in the first
place. But it dramatically alters the predicament of the lower men, who can no longer
dismiss the superiority of the higher men as an optional matter of taste: it means that
what is beyond their capacity is nothing less than human flourishing.
It is true, as Leiter notes on a number of occasions, that Nietzsche insists that MPS
“should rule in the herd [i.e. among the “lower men”] – but not reach out beyond it”
(p. 147). And this suggests that it is actually not (prudentially) good for the lower
men to live by the code favorable to the flourishing of the higher men. However, the
only unequivocal statement of this position is found in the unpublished manuscripts
(WP 287), which, by Leiter’s own methodology, limits its credibility. More importantly,
even this position is compatible with prudential elitism. It seems incompatible with
elitism because of the assumption that, in claiming that it is not (prudentially) good
for the lower men to live by the code that favors the flourishing of higher men,
Nietzsche must rely on a different conception of flourishing, suitable to the lower men.
Truthfulness, for example, would not be good for the lower men because the
flourishing of men of that type does not include or require truthfulness. But this
assumption is incorrect. It may well be that the unqualified pursuit of truthfulness
could, for certain types of people in certain circumstances, undermine the possibility
of their achieving any measure of truthfulness at all. For example, learning the truth
could, for people of a certain type in certain circumstances, wreak such psychological
havoc as to damage severely their very capacity to be truthful. It is, in other words,
the very ideal of truthfulness, together with a consideration of facts about type and
circumstances, which grounds restraints on its own pursuit: “what do you know,”
Nietzsche once asks, “of how much falsity I shall require if I am to continue to permit
myself the luxury of my truthfulness?” (HH P 4) Hence, a certain ideal of flourishing
can, given certain facts about type and circumstances, require limitations on its own
pursuit. There is no need to invoke a different ideal of flourishing to make sense of
this.
Chapter 5 attempts to determine the contribution a genealogy of MPS makes to this
critique. This critique, recall, is that MPS, and more precisely a culture in which MPS
prevails, is harmful to the flourishing of higher men. Central to the genealogical
method, according to Leiter, is the distinction between practice (e.g., a set of
customs) and meaning (the purpose or value assigned to these customs). Nietzsche
rejects the presumption that the current meaning of a practice tells anything about its
origin. Although Leiter is less than ideally clear on this point, the meaning of a practice
seems to refer to the manner in which the individuals engaged in it think about it. For
example, Kantians will think of benevolence in terms of preservation of autonomy,
12
while Christians might think of it in terms of love for God’s creation. That a practice of
benevolence favors the flourishing of a certain type of men does not seem to be,
however, the meaning or purpose of this practice.
Leiter’s account of the critical significance of genealogy draws on Nietzsche’s
naturalism, according to which a certain moral code is typically adopted because it
serves the interests of a certain type of people. Exposing the origin of MPS is revealing
the interests that presided over its creation. This, in turn, enables us to determine
whose flourishing MPS causally favors or impedes (p. 178). Importantly, for Leiter,
genealogical inquiry also isolates the permanent element of MPS, by distinguishing it
from the various meanings it has received throughout its history. This is important,
apparently, because only that permanent element has a causal influence on the
flourishing of different types of men: “The causal powers belong, as it were, to the
‘permanent’ element of MPS” (ibid.). In contrast, apparently, the meaning assigned to
a given moral practice would play no determinant causal role. This is puzzling. In the
third essay of the Genealogy, for example, Nietzsche distinguishes between the
permanent practice of asceticism and its variable meaning. But he argues that
asceticism is objectionable only when it is granted a certain meaning or value.
Moreover, it seems quite plausible that the manner in which people think about a
given practice would make a difference to its causal influence on their flourishing, and
hence to the prudential value we ought to ascribe to it.
The next three chapters are devoted to the three essays of the Genealogy. Leiter’s
main goal is to establish the substantive unity of the book. He does so by developing
the interesting suggestion that the first two essays notoriously leave open crucial
questions, the answer to which depends on the discussion of the ascetic ideal offered
in the third essay. To make his case, Leiter maintains that each essay examines a
distinct psychological mechanism: “ressentiment (GM I), internalized cruelty (GM II),
will to power (GM III)” (p. 182). However, this way of carving out the issues is not
well supported by the text, and may not do justice to the complexity of Nietzsche’s
psychological views. For one thing, far from being confined to the first essay, the
notion of ressentiment is assigned a crucial role in the other two as well (GM, II 11 &
GM III 11). And for another, Nietzsche characterizes in terms of will to power both
ressentiment (“the will to power of the weakest” [GM III 14; cf. 11 & 15; I 6 & 13]),
and cruelty (GM II 5 & 10). Accordingly, the will to power and ressentiment would
play a more central role in Nietzschean psychology than Leiter’s relatively brief
analyses of these notions suggest.
I should conclude by noting that Leiter’s book contains a number of other stimulating
ideas I have not been able to discuss here. In general, the book offers one of the most
comprehensive and compelling interpretations of Nietzsche’s critique of morality to
date. With its distinctive emphasis on naturalistic themes, it forms a very significant
contribution to the study of Nietzsche, and is poised to become a work of reference in
the field. Indeed, even the criticisms I have raised about this interpretation owe much
to the exceptional clarity and cogency with which it is articulated.
2003.01.03
Thomas Reid
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, edited by Brookes, Derek R.,
introduction by Haakonssen, Knud, Penn State Press, 2002, 666pp, $95.00 (hbk),
ISBN 0271022361.
13
Reviewed by Philip de Bary, Thoemmes Press
Thomas Reid (1710-1796) is the latest of the great Enlightenment philosophers to be

done the honor of a full new critical edition of his writings. Until recently, anyone who
wanted to read the writings of the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense
(and for most of the twentieth century there weren’t very many who did) had usually
to read them in Sir William Hamilton’s edition, The Works of Thomas Reid (1st edn
1846; 8th edn 1880). But the 1980s and 90s saw a major revival of interest in Reid:
The Reid Project was set up at Aberdeen University where most of his manuscripts are
housed, and regular international conferences began to take place there; a journal
devoted to Reid was established and the book-length secondary literature on him
expanded. A ten-volume scholarly edition of primary texts – The Edinburgh Edition of
Thomas Reid – was projected under the general editorship of Knud Haakonssen; the
first volume, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation (ed. Paul Wood) appeared in 1995
and the second, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense
(ed. Derek R. Brookes) in 1997. Five years later we now have Reid’s Essays on the
Intellectual Powers of Man (EIPM) and The Correspondence of Thomas Reid (ed. Paul
Wood). The remaining volumes in the series are due out at roughly one-year intervals
until 2007.
Penn State Press’s dust jacket on the American version of this latest installment of the
Edinburgh Edition describes EIPM as “Thomas Reid’s greatest work”, and many Reid
scholars will agree that it is. (Those whose primary interest is in Reid’s ethics rather
than his epistemology must wait for the Edinburgh Essays on the Active Powers of
Man, expected 2005). As the Preface to this edition explains, these two sets of Essays
were systematic writings-up by Reid in his retirement of the lecture notes he had
developed over long years of teaching at the University of Glasgow. In his earlier
Inquiry Reid had set out his anti-skeptical account of perception in sections dealing
with the five senses in turn. Twenty-one years later in EIPM sense perception is just
one of the Intellectual Powers to which he devotes an Essay, the others being
memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, reasoning and taste. Reid’s broad aim
throughout this body of work is two-fold: negatively, to demolish the claims of “the
ideal theory” in all these domains, and positively to establish a “philosophy of common
sense” which lacks its skeptical consequences for knowledge and morality.
There was only one edition of EIPM published during Reid’s lifetime, in 1785. This was
what Sir William Hamilton called “the only authentic edition”, and it is the text that
forms the basis for that part of The Works of Thomas Reid in all its printings. The
same 1785 edition has been chosen by Derek R. Brookes as the basis for his critical
text, which is said to diverge from the first edition “only by correction of typographical
errors…[which are]…few and marked in the footnotes.” These corrections have been
made in the light of Reid’s manuscript lecture notes which, we are told, “often exist in
several – in some cases five – different versions of which only a few are dated”
(Preface, vi). The Haakonssen/Brookes edition will no doubt be reviewed elsewhere by
those with expert knowledge of Reidian manuscripts and textual history. What follows
here is meant mainly as a preview – a notice of what to expect for those who, like the
present writer, know EIPM through Hamilton, but who haven’t yet set eyes on its new
edition in the Edinburgh series.
What we have here, then, is a two-page Preface by both editors, a five-page
Introduction by Haakonssen, a corrected and reset first edition of EIPM with
annotations jointly by Brookes and Haakonssen, a fifteen-page transcription of
14
manuscript material for three unpublished lectures by Reid ‘on the Nature and
Duration of the Soul’, and name and subject indexes prepared by Åsa Söderman.
At once it should be said how pleasurable it is to read Reid’s words in this new
typography. One needed young person’s eyesight and bright light in order to read the
tiny print of the Hamilton edition without a magnifying glass. If the Hamilton edition
had a virtue, it was perhaps that its biblical double columns made the lengthy EIPM
quite easy to find one’s way around – navigation is relatively simple when an entire
chapter is disclosed by turning a page or two. But the compensating advantages of
the Edinburgh format are great. It is anyway fitting that the work of a philosopher
whose relevance to present-day debate is increasingly recognized be dignified by
uncluttered modern layout. But more specifically the line numbers on every page of
this new text give Reid scholars something very useful that they have never had
before.
The other most noticeable difference for those accustomed to Hamilton is that the
Edinburgh edition has far fewer footnotes. Hamilton was a heavy annotator (especially
of Essays I to IV of EIPM), and sometimes his footnotes, for all their formidable
learning, read like parodies of scholarly persnicketiness. On the whole they have not
been popular with Reid scholars. Ronald E. Beanblossom, for example, said in his note
to the abridgement that he co-edited with Keith Lehrer that “while Hamilton’s critical
and expository footnotes may be of historical interest, they are generally based upon
a misinterpretation of Reid and are primarily a vehicle for presenting Hamilton’s
views” (Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and Essays, Hackett, 1983, lxi). While this judgment
may be a little harsh, it’s certainly true that the sheer frequency of Hamilton’s
interjections (“this is not strictly correct”, “this is a singular misapprehension”) is
distracting. At the same time it’s true that when the crotchety baronet keeps quiet on
a point, that silence is some evidence that Reid is on good ground in what he has just
asserted – or at least that his assertion was uncontroversial in the mid-nineteenth
century.
Brookes and Haakonssen have deliberately gone to the opposite extreme with their
footnotes. “Reid engages in such detail with a large number of other thinkers that a
full annotation of his references would drown out his own text. The guiding principles
have been specificity and obscurity … first reasonably specific references, especially
quotations, and secondly more obscure references” (Preface, vii). The result, by my
reckoning, is that something over half the pages are without any notes. The
remainder have a sprinkling of what are usually simple page references to early and to
standard modern editions of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and others, and to the best
English translations of such as Arnauld and Malebranche (though not, curiously, of
Descartes – in his case we’re referred to Adam and Tannery rather than Cottingham et
al.). Occasionally a departure from the 1785 edition is noted and a reference made to
Reid’s manuscript, but seldom is there any Hamiltonian attempt to correct or
comment on what Reid has said in the text above. This editorial restraint is surely
welcome. Reid is here being allowed to speak for himself directly to his twenty-first-
century readers, as a writer of his unusual clarity can well be trusted to do.
The volume ends with a transcription of the manuscript evidence for three hitherto
unpublished “Lectures on the Nature and Duration of the Soul.” In these fifteen
uneven pages Reid addresses the questions (a) whether the soul (or “mind” – he uses
the terms interchangeably) is immaterial, (b) whether it “has an ubi or place”, and (c)
whether there is reason to think it perishes at death (to which his respective answers
are ‘yes’, ‘we can’t be sure’, and ‘no’). For the first two questions there are only Reid’s
very sketchy lecture notes; for the third there is what seems to be a full-length script.
15
An editorial note says of these lectures “it is not clear why they were omitted [by
Reid] from the Intellectual Powers” (p. 616). This is a point worth pondering. Reid’s
psycho-physical dualism pervades the writings published in his lifetime as a
background assumption, only coming to the foreground in occasional polemical
flourishes like that at EIPM p. 87, ll. 38-39: “There is indeed nothing more ridiculous
than to imagine that any motion or modification of matter should produce thought.”
To find Reid argumentatively supporting his dualism we have had to turn to his
unpublished papers – or rather to some papers that were unpublished until 1995 when
Paul Wood included them in Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation. There Reid attacks
Joseph Priestley’s materialism by defending the doctrine of the passivity of matter, but
he doesn’t put forward any positive arguments for the immateriality of the mind (see
Alan Tapper, “Reid and Priestley on Method and the Mind”, Philosophical Quarterly 52,
no 209, Oct. 2002, 511-525). The interesting thing about these lecture notes now
appended to EIPM is that we can see Reid advancing exactly such positive arguments
– or at least prompting himself on how to examine such arguments in front of his
student audience. From the bare headings given, it is evident that Reid took his
Pneumatiks classes through Samuel Clarke’s version of the Cartesian ‘divisibility’
argument, through various objections to it (from Collins, Martinus Scriblerus and
Hume) and through replies to those objections. Reid also lists two other arguments
that sound more as if they are his own: one is “from the Power of the Soul to begin
Motion or Stop it”; the other starts from the observation that mental powers “appear
so immensely superior to the known Properties of Body” (617, ll. 18-19). That this
superiority is specifically moral superiority becomes clear later when Reid says: “These
Powers or feelings by which we are most nearly connected with Matter appear plainly
to be the Meanner and more Ignoble parts of our frame” (619, ll. 33-35).
Why Reid never wrote up the notes for this lecture or the next (about the soul’s
location) is a mystery – perhaps he did and the manuscripts simply don’t survive. And
whether he wrote them up or not, why he didn’t incorporate the complete third lecture
(about the soul’s survival after death) into EIPM is, as the editor says, unclear. Could
Reid have felt he had nothing importantly new to say in these areas? Might he have
thought there was nothing he needed to say, the truth of dualism being self-evident?
(This last speculation raises various other tricky problems: on the one hand Reid
doesn’t include a principle speaking for dualism in his list of self-evident “first
principles of common sense”; on the other hand, something’s being self-evident
doesn’t in general stop Reid talking about it). At all events the publication of these
manuscripts opens up new areas of debate, and further unpublished material – some
of it germane to EIPM – is promised as a supplement to the new critical edition of the
Essays on the Active Powers. The Edinburgh edition is building into a magnificent
series, and Thomas Reid’s present and future readers have every reason to be grateful
to its editors.
2003.01.04
I. Bernard Cohen, George E. Smith, (eds.)
The Cambridge Companion to Newton
Cohen, I. Bernard and Smith, George E., (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to
Newton, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 500pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521656966.
Reviewed by Zvi Biener, University of Pittsburgh and Christopher Smeenk ,
Dibner Institute, MIT
16
For over three centuries, Newtonian science has provided the backdrop for discussions
of the epistemological and ontological implications of empirical science. Philosophers
interested in the impact of Newtonian science on the development of philosophy thus
face the daunting task of teasing the historical truth from three centuries of
elaborations and myths regarding Newton and his intellectual legacy. The current
volume has the explicit dual goal of peeling away a number of prevailing
misconceptions and introducing Newtonian science to a philosophical audience. In
both regards, it is a success. The Companion is bound to become a standard reference
work, and it is indispensable for scholars and newcomers interested in 17th and 18th
century natural philosophy. Thus it is unfortunate that the volume’s excellent
coverage of some aspects of Newton scholarship does not extend more broadly. There
is a clear division between Newton’s scientific work (roughly two thirds of the volume)
and the work of the “other Newton” – the natural philosopher, theologian, and
alchemist revealed through unpublished manuscripts studied over the last four
decades. The Companion gives a clear overview of the aspects of Newton’s work that
had the greatest immediate impact on his contemporaries, at the cost of neglecting
Newton’s connections with earlier philosophical traditions that are only hinted at in his
published works.
As with other volumes in the Cambridge Companion series, the editors commissioned
original essays (16 in total) and supplemented these with an introduction and
bibliography. The essays regarding the “technical Newton” reap the substantial
rewards of a recent resurgence of interest in careful reconstructions of Newtonian
science and methodology. Below we will follow one of the volume’s threads- –
concerning Newton’s methodology and its philosophical consequences – through the
essays of Alan Shapiro, William Harper, George Smith, Howard Stein, and Robert
DiSalle. These essays carefully and convincingly demonstrate that Newton’s
methodological advances and ontological commitments must be understood in relation
to his attempts to address a set of well-defined empirical concerns. However, we
would like to stress that Newton’s thinking should not be understood as addressing
those concerns exclusively. As some of the remaining, much briefer essays concerning
the “other Newton” show, Newton saw himself not only as tackling the technical
requirements of framing a new physics, but as responding to traditional philosophical
and theological worries. What is missing from the Companion is a clear vision of how
these two motivations dovetail with one another, or an argument that there was in
fact little interplay between these pursuits. Niccolò Guicciardini’s and Maurizio
Mamiani’s essays are of note in this regard, since they suggest how a reconciliation of
Newton’s “Janus faces” may be reached.
Newton first declared that his experimental research embodied a new mode of inquiry
in his early optical publications (1672-76). Critics such as Hooke rejected Newton’s
claims to have established results “without any suspicion of doubts” and argued that
Newton’s results depended upon an unacknowledged hypothesis: that light consists of
small corpuscles. Newton found this misconstrual of his work so infuriating that he
bitterly withdrew from public discussions of natural philosophy for nearly a decade.
Shapiro’s masterful overview of Newton’s optical research focuses on these
methodological debates. Shapiro argues convincingly in Newton’s favor regarding the
early disputes: the central innovation in his theory of color, namely that white light is
composed of rays of differing refrangability, does not depend upon the corpuscular
hypothesis. Although Newton later used the corpuscular hypothesis to account for
dispersion, refraction, and the colors of thin films, Shapiro explains that the
hypothesis met with only qualitative successes and several failures. Newton was
17
keenly aware of its limitations, and thus found his critics’ tendency to blur the line
between it and results “demonstrated by experiments” particularly galling.
Nevertheless, Newton did not always draw such a sharp line between conjectures and
certainties. In 1675 he introduced aether vibrations to account for periodic behavior
he had carefully observed in his study of “Newton’s rings.” In the Opticks this
conjecture was transformed into “fits of easy reflection and refraction” and presented
as an established principle (p. 245). But what legitimated this elevation – or the
elevated status of other ideas, such as the atomic theory of matter? Shapiro’s essay
ultimately raises more questions than it answers regarding the ways in which
conjectures receive sufficient warrant to become established principles.
Newton’s contemporaries and subsequent scholars have long attempted to answer
these and other questions in light of the Principia and Newton’s various
methodological pronouncements. Smith’s contribution draws together a number of
insights regarding Newtonian methodology based on an extremely thorough reading of
the Principia. This essay and Harper’s line-by-line reconstruction of the argument for
universal gravitation both emphasize several contrasts between Newton’s and earlier
“hypothetico-deductive” methodology. The Principia introduces a general
mathematical theory of forces that has few (if any) direct consequences for observed
phenomena without constraints provided by observations. The mathematical
apparatus of Books I and II links characteristics of forces to observed features of
motion, either in terms of specific parameters or general qualitative features. The
theory is not tested by checking directly measurable quantities; instead, observations
are used to “deduce” the features of postulated forces, and then the framework
generates a variety of consequences of the postulated force law. Smith and Harper
both stress that Newton counted agreement between independent measures of a force
as significant evidence in favor of the theory. For example, the famous “moon test” in
proposition III.4 emphasizes the precise numerical agreement between the moon’s
one-second falling distance (measured using orbital parameters) and the same
distance for bodies in Paris (measured with Huygens’ seconds pendulum). Harper’s
leitmotif is that Newton’s argument for universal gravitation proceeds by showing that
independent measures of “causal parameters” for the force of gravity converge on
stable values and that this convergence constitutes empirical success.
Several other aspects of the methodology in the Principia are highlighted in Smith’s
rich essay, of which we will mention only the interplay between approximation and
idealization. Newton clearly stated one of the obstacles to gleaning an understanding
of forces from the phenomena of planetary motion: “But to consider simultaneously all
these causes of [planetary] motion and to define these motions by exact laws
admitting of easy calculation exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human
mind” (quoted on p. 153). Newton responded by carefully ensuring that his arguments
from the phenomena hold even in the face of inexactitude. We can illustrate the idea
with a simple contrast: if a planet sweeps out nearly equal areas in equal times, the
force holding it in orbit is approximately centripetal (as Newton shows in corollaries to
proposition I.3); however, a body can move in an approximately elliptical orbit with a
force law that is not even approximately inverse square (see Smith 2002). The
argument for universal gravitation relies on inferences like the former, whose
consequent holds approximately if the antecedent only holds approximately. In
addition, Newton clearly recognized the importance of approaching the complexities of
real motions via a series of successive approximations. Briefly, Smith argues that at
each stage of approximation remaining differences between observations and the
“exact theory” point the way towards further refinements. Here Smith draws on
18
Cohen’s earlier work on the “Newtonian Style” but adds considerable sophistication:
the successive approximations are not just a matter of ensuring mathematical
tractability; they also allow one to bring further evidence to bear on the theory. As
Curtis Wilson’s essay shows in detail, Newton’s various proposals in Book III for
extending gravitational theory inspired a long process of refinement and reformulation
throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that eventually led to satisfactory accounts of
lunar motion, the inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn, etc. Smith rightly emphasizes this
often unappreciated, progressive aspect of Newton’s methodology: the framework of
the Principia provided fruitful ways of using evidence to refine theory well into the
20th century.
To their credit, these essays clearly rebut quick dismissals of the “mad Newtonian
methodology” of deduction from the phenomena as a “joke” (to quote Lakatos),
dismissals that were prevalent among philosophers of science a generation ago.
However, both Harper and Smith tend towards an unabashedly modern reading of
Newton’s methodology, drawing on recent work in philosophy of science. Although
both essays amply illustrate the fruits of this approach, their utility for historians of
philosophy and science are less clear. For example, Harper’s claim that “those
qualities of bodies that cannot be intended or remitted [Newton’s criterion in the third
rule of philosophizing] are those that count as constant parameter values” (p. 188)
throws doubt on the adequacy of Harper’s notion of “parameter value.” Is the quality
of “solidity” to be taken as a parameter value? Generally, Harper interprets the
Regulæ Philosophandi as “being backed by an ideal of empirical success” as defined by
him (p.185), thereby neglecting the literature (such as Maurizio Mamiani’s essay in
the present volume) on their conceptual genealogy and the metaphysics that, in
Newton’s eyes, backed their usefulness as methodological rules (see also McGuire
1970). The Companion overlooks existing literature on several similar issues. I. B.
Cohen’s essay introduces Newton’s concepts of force and mass through a discussion of
the definitions and laws of motion at the opening of the Principia. At the end of a brief
discussion of vis insita and vis inertia (introduced in Definitions 3 and 4), Cohen
remarks that “Newton never explained why he wrote of a vis inertiae, a ‘force of
inertia,’ rather than a property of inertia and we have no basis for guessing what was
his state of mind” (p. 62). While it is true that from a modern point of view Newton’s
language is extremely puzzling, other commentators have argued that it reflects his
indebtedness to Aristotelian thought and to the associated ontology that regards vis
insita as an internal causal principle that generates inertial motion rather than treating
it as an uncaused “state of motion” (see McGuire 1994, McMullin 1978).
Guicciardini’s essay successfully demonstrates how sensitivity to the conceptual milieu
of the 17th century can be fruitfully combined with attention to technical detail. By
1671 Newton had developed the methods of fluxional analysis to such a degree that
he outstripped all his contemporaries, but rather than publish his work Newton came
to doubt the value of the symbolic techniques he had so thoroughly mastered.
Guicciardini situates Newton’s developing preference for a “geometrical style” against
the backdrop of Newton’s own admiration of ancient knowledge and the broader
“geometrical backlash” against algebraic methods represented by Barrow and Hobbes.
Newton’s preference for a geometrical style had a remarkable impact on his later
work, including the “synthetic account of fluxions” given in the Geometria Curvilinea
and, most notably, the mathematical methods used in the Principia. We hope this
essay will inspire similar research into Newton’s philosophy of mathematics, a topic
that has too often taken a back seat to investigations of Newton’s natural philosophy.
19
In the Companion’s longest contribution and its centerpiece, Stein develops an

account of Newton’s metaphysics rich in philosophical context. Motivated by a careful
reading of an unpublished manuscript known as “De Grav,” Stein focuses on Newton’s
strikingly original conceptions of space, body, and force and illustrates how Newton’s
ontological claims grew out of a need to adequately define the basic concepts of his
physics. One of Newton’s main philosophical innovations, as Stein makes admirably
clear, was to make metaphysics beholden to the findings of physics, thereby inverting
the tree of knowledge as conceived by his contemporaries, notably Descartes. This
emphasis on the . posteriori nature of Newton’s reasoning is one of the overarching
philosophical morals of the Companion. Stein supports this general thesis by showing
how Newton’s concepts of motion, space, and body were defined in relation to the
findings of the senses, not a set of . priori principles. Stein stresses that Newton
develops an account of body as “moving regions of impenetrability” that is meant to
be sufficient to account for experience, while rejecting a Lockean demand for a deeper
understanding of the necessity of this account of the constitution of matter. Stein
characterizes this fundamental conceptual shift as one away from an emphasis on the
substantial unity underlying the various attributes of matter toward a “field”
conception: “in creating a body, God (or in the “constitution” of a body, nature) must
impose, not only the field of impenetrability and the laws of motion appropriate
thereto, but other fields as well, with their laws, characterizing forces of interaction …”
(pp. 288-89). The nature of the laws of motion and their relation to matter has been a
recurring theme in Newton scholarship, and Stein’s essay is certainly an important
contribution to these ongoing debates.
Throughout his essay Stein advocates a reading of Newton’s metaphysics that
downplays the relevance of his theological views; he comments that studies linking
Newton’s ontology to his theological views are “at variance with at least the
epistemological side of Newton’s own metaphysics” (p. 297, f.n. 17, emphasis added).
The emanative nature of space as presented in “De Grav” is taken as a case in point
(pp. 267-272). According to Stein, Newton urges that space be understood as a logical
consequence of the existence of God or any other being, not a causal effect
conditional on His essence. Consequently, deliberations regarding the essence of God
are unnecessary for understanding the nature of space; as Newton puts it: “we have
an absolute Idea of [extension] without any relationship to God” (p.271). Stein is in
agreement here with existing literature on the subject. Other commentators have
defended a similar claim, namely that space is a transcendental condition for any
existent and is thus not dependent on God’s particular essence (see McGuire (1990)
and Carriero (1990)). However, from the thesis that according to Newton the content
of the idea of space does not depend on the content of the idea of God, Stein draws
the conclusion that Newton’s metaphysics of space is independent from his theology.
Although the antecedent is unproblematic, the consequent, which is embodied in
Stein’s denial of the claim that “the basic conceptions of Newton’s natural philosophy,
most especially his conception of space and time, [are] derivative from, or grounded
in, this theology” (quote from McGuire on p.297, f.n. 17) does not follow. We would
like to stress this point, at the risk of sounding overly critical of Stein’s fine essay, in
response to a general inclination of many of the essays in the Companion to
emphasize Newton’s scientific acumen while underestimating his concern with
traditional philosophical debates regarding method and ontology.
Alan Gabbey’s essay on Newton’s relation to the mechanical philosophy stands out as
going against this general trend. Regarding the current topic, Gabbey argues that in
“De Grav” Newton rejects the Cartesian conception of res extensa in favor of an
20
emanationist view of space to preclude the possibility of understanding the existence

of body without reference to an act of God, as well as to account for the possibility of
a coherent mind-body union. Gabbey’s meandering essay describes the disciplinary
context of 17th-century natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics and
argues that although Newton is primarily a natural philosopher and mathematician, he
also addressed metaphysical problems. While it is unclear how Newton himself
conceived the relationship of his research to these problems, Gabbey stresses that
“there are metaphysical aspects of his natural philosophy that are crucial to an
adequate understanding of… his engagement with the mechanical philosophy, and…
his account of the causal interventions of mind and soul in the physical world”
(p.333). On the first count, Gabbey notes that Newton advocated explanations using
non-material agents whose actions did not proceed with the type of “metaphysical
necessity” required by the likes of Boyle, Descartes, and Gassendi. On the second, he
shows how Newton’s belief that an act of human will can create corporeal motions—
possibly violating the 3rd law of motion—colors much of his analysis of space and
body. In either case, Gabbey makes amply clear how Newton’s metaphysical views
bore directly on his natural philosophy. Likewise, the essays of Carriero and McGuire
cited above demonstrate that Newton was concerned with harmonizing his theory of
space with traditional theological concerns regarding God’s essence, His causal
efficacy, and His being in the world.
DiSalle’s essay on the status of Newton’s “definitions” of space and time complements
Stein’s piece by elucidating the way in which these notions were required by
Newtonian physics. Reichenbach once characterized Newton’s absolute space and time
as a “mystical philosophical superstructure,” to be criticized on the broadly
philosophical grounds suggested by Leibniz, Mach and Einstein. DiSalle follows recent
work in philosophy of space and time in rejecting this view, and developing in its place
an “empiricist” account that emphasizes the empirical content acquired by the ideas of
space and time within the framework of Newtonian physics. On this account, Newton’s
main concern in the famous scholium following the laws is not a proof of the existence
of absolute space, but rather an assessment of the definitions of space and time
already implicit in dynamical reasoning about motion and its causes by Newton and
his contemporaries. The scholium presents a series of arguments to the effect that
various properties of motion cannot be analyzed in terms of relative time and space.
(See, in particular, Rynasiewicz 1995 for a careful reading of Newton’s scholium
complementary to DiSalle’s essay.) Newton’s main target here, as in the “De Grav,” is
Descartes, and his attempt to combine a dynamics attributing a unique state of
motion or rest to bodies with a relational account of motion that cannot underwrite
such a distinction. As DiSalle explains, in response Newton introduced more structure
than his physics actually required: the distinction between accelerated and uniform
motion is crucial to identifying forces, but the attribution of forces does not, as
Newton thought, differentiate between states of motion with respect to absolute space
(pp. 40-42). Newton did not introduce “fictitious forces” that are caused by motion
with respect to absolute space; rather, forces and inertial effects define true motions,
in the sense of providing empirical criteria for determining a body’s true state of
motion within the framework of the Principia. However, we are not convinced that this
emphasis on the definitional nature of Newton’s claims regarding space and time will
dissolve the “absolute vs. relational” debate entirely, as DiSalle seems to suggest. We
should further remark that DiSalle’s vocabulary does not follow Newton’s own: DiSalle
often characterizes the Laws as defining “space,” “time,” and even “impressed force”
(p. 45), which is at odds with the Principia’s explicit separation between the Laws,
21
Definitions, and consequences of both conjointly. But we are only pointing out a
missed opportunity: attention to this point would have aided DiSalle’s overall
argument. In any case, DiSalle’s essay is a lucid reconstruction of Newton’s analysis of
space and time.
Two of the remaining essays include more technical detail than the rest of the volume,
and are probably less suitable for the intended audience of the Companion. Bruce
Brackenridge and Michael Nauenberg give a concise account of their recent work
regarding Newton’s use of curvature as a measure of force. This essay advocates a
major change in the understanding of Newton’s development of the concept of force
and the appropriate mathematical tools for studying dynamics. According to
Brackenridge and Nauenberg, curvature played a decisive role in generalizing the
concept of force beyond the case of uniform circular motion in Newton’s thinking from
the mid 60s until the 80s. The curvature measure has been overlooked because the
first edition of the Principia relied mainly on a geometrical measure of force, but
Brackenridge and Nauenberg trace its use through early dynamical works, Newton’s
correspondence with Hooke in 1679-80, and revisions of the Principia. Curtis Wilson’s
contribution describes celestial mechanics before and after Newton, emphasizing the
treatment of Kepler’s so-called laws prior to the Principia and dispelling the common
misconception that the Principia itself fully established the implications of universal
gravitation for celestial mechanics.
Unfortunately we do not have space to discuss the shorter essays from the last third
of the volume in much detail. William Newman and Karin Figala discuss Newton’s
alchemy, emphasizing his indebtedness to a number of contemporaries and the tight
connection between his matter theory and alchemical research. Together the essays
total only 28 pages, providing a very brief introduction to one of Newton’s major
intellectual pursuits. Newman analyzes various texts in which Newton appeals to a
Helmontian “shell theory” of matter to explain chemical phenomena. Figala focuses on
the influence of the overtly theological work of Sendivogius and the German
Rosicrucian Maier on Newton’s alchemical studies. Scott Mandelbrote’s essay recounts
the impact of Newton’s unorthodox theological writings on debates among 18th
century divines. Newton’s growing authority in other matters did not compel the
admiration of the theologians, who seemed to relish the chance to dismantle his
arguments in the (posthumously published) Chronology of Ancient Kingdom’s
Amended (pp. 414-17). Mamiani recounts Newton’s rules for biblical exegesis as set
out in the Treatise on Apocalypse and their relation to dream interpretation. Newton
believed that these domains could be understood through a search for
correspondences between types of actions or structures, i.e., by analogy. For
example, analogy can be found between the chromatic scale and the tonal scale or
between the relationship of tension and tones in a string and the law of gravity. These
correspondences allow Newton to find within the writings of the prophets indicators of
the true structure of the universe, itself a form of God’s “writing”. Mamiani traces the
source of Newton’s method for interpreting scripture as well as his Regulae
Philosophandi to Sanderson’s Logicae artis compendium and takes the (quite tenuous)
similarity between the two sets of rules to indicate that Newton conceived of the study
of scripture and nature as falling under a common methodology. The final two essays
of the volume consider Newton’s disputes with Leibniz. Hall provides a concise account
of how an initially cordial correspondence turned into a full-blown priority dispute
regarding the invention of the calculus, partially due to the actions of Fatio de Duillier,
Keill, and other intermediaries. In the brief final essay, Domenico Bertoloni-Meli
emphasizes two aspects of the context of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence that are
22
typically neglected: first, Caroline’s role as mediator, and second, the primacy of the
theological issues at play in the debate.
On the whole, we recommend the Companion to both scholars and newcomers, even
though it presents an image of Newton based on traditional historiography. The
Companion’s greatest shortcoming lies in its failure to more directly address the
difficulties of integrating Newton’s various intellectual pursuits and of understanding
his relationship to intellectual traditions other than those acknowledged in his
published works. Nevertheless, the overall quality and originality of the essays in this
volume demonstrate that substantial advances can still be made regarding both the
“technical” and “other” Newton. It is certain that many further advances will be
launched from the ground set by the Companion.
References
Bricker, Phillip and R. I. G. Hughes (1990). Philosophical perspectives on Newtonian
science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Carriero, John (1990). “Newton on Space and Time: Comments on J. E. McGuire”, in
Bricker and Hughes (1990), 109–133.
McGuire, J. E. (1970). “Atoms and the ‘Analogy of Nature’: Newton’s Third Rule of
Philosophizing”, in Tradition and Innovation: Newton’s Metaphysics of Nature. Boston:
Kluwer, 3–58.
McGuire, J. E. (1990). “Predicates of Pure Existence: Newton on God’s Space and
Time”, in Bricker and Hughes (1990), 91–108.
McGuire, J. E. (1994). “Natural Motion and its causes: Newton on the Vis insita of
bodies”, in Mary L. Gill and James G. Lennox (eds.), Self-motion: from Aristotle to
Newton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 305–329.
McMullin, Ernan (1978). Newton of Matter and Activity. Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Rynasiewicz, Robert (1995). “By Their Properties, Causes and Effects: Newton’s
Scholium on Time, Space, Place, and Motion.” Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science 26: 133-153 (part I), 295-321 (part II).
Smith, George E. (2002). “From the Phenomenon of the Ellipse to an Inverse-Square
Force: Why Not?”, in D. Malament (ed.), Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the
History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics. Chicago: Open Court, 31-70.
23
2003.01.05
Martin Heidegger
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The
Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus
Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy,
trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, 2002, 216pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826459242.
Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus,
trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, 2002, 252pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826459226.
Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University
The appearance in English of two of Heidegger’s most important Freiburg lecture

courses from the early 1930s—The Essence of Human Freedom, from summer
semester 1930, and The Essence of Truth, delivered in winter semester 1931/32—
marks a major and significant contribution to the accessibility of this pivotal period of
Heidegger’s thought for the English-speaking world. Together, these courses
document the inseparability of Heidegger’s thought from a critical and ongoing
dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They serve at once to illuminate texts of
Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, to clarify the significance and stance of Heidegger’s own
thinking, and to display Heidegger’s unique and meticulous pedagogical style.
Although both volumes have been available in German since the 1980s (The Essence
of Human Freedom was published in 1982, The Essence of Truth in 1988), they have
been largely ignored by Heidegger scholarship outside of Germany. Their publication
in English is a welcome event.
The first volume, The Essence of Human Freedom, presents itself as an introduction to
philosophy as a whole by way of what appears to be just one particular, regional
question: that of human freedom. And yet, Heidegger suggests, the distinction of
philosophical questioning perhaps lies in the fact that it always reveals the whole in
and through—and only in and through—the unfolding of particular questions. This
does not, however, mean that in philosophizing we simply broaden our field of view in
order better to situate and understand our particular theme—in regard to the question
of freedom, for example, also taking God and world into our view as that in relation to
which freedom (as negative freedom, freedom from...) is situated. It means, rather, a
concern with the whole that “goes to our own roots,” that challenges us in the very
grounds of our being. Taking his lead from Kant’s understanding of practical freedom,
as ultimately grounded in transcendental freedom, Heidegger quickly moves from
Kant’s understanding of freedom in terms of causality to argue that causality at once
directs us back to the phenomenon of movement in general, which, as a fundamental
determination of beings that varies in accordance with the kind of beings involved,
directs us toward the question of beings as such—of “what beings in their breadth and
depth actually are”—and thus to the “leading question” (Leitfrage) of philosophy: ti to
on, what are beings? (German 31/translation, 23).
From here, Heidegger suggests that this question, while raised by Plato and Aristotle,
was nevertheless not genuinely or radically unfolded by them; thus, it is our
prerogative, he states, but also our responsibility, “to become the murderers of our
forefathers,” and indeed to succumb to such a fate ourselves: “Only then, can we
arrive at the problematic in which they immediately existed, but precisely for this
reason were not able to work through to final transparency.” (37/27). What follows is
an extensive excursus (of some 50 pages) inquiring into the multiple meanings of
being in Aristotle, starting from the basic Greek word for being, ousia, and culminating
24
in an important interpretation of Metaphysics IX, 10, where Heidegger argues that

Aristotle’s understanding of the most proper being of what properly is (beings proper)
as being true (to on alethes as kuriotaton on), that is, as the deconcealment of what
presents itself in sheer presence, not only constitutes an integral part of Metaphysics
IX (contrary to what some commentators have suggested), but contains “the keystone
of Book IX, which itself is the center of the entire Metaphysics.” (107/75). And yet,
Heidegger notes, this chapter also documents something of the growing exclusion of
the possibility of untruth from truth: the sheer unhiddenness of something
straightforwardly (haplos) or simply given, apprehended by nous, of itself excludes
any possibility of distortion or error, of apprehending what is given as something other
than itself.
Following a very brief discussion of the culmination of this Greek understanding of
being as sheer presence in Hegel, Heidegger, reverting to the problematic of Being
and Time, suggests not only that the fundamental Greek understanding of being as
presence “receives its illumination” from time itself, but that the leading question of
philosophy (what are beings?) must be transformed into the fundamental or
grounding question (Grundfrage), “i.e, into the question which inquires into the ‘and’
of being and time and thus into the ground of both.” (116/81). In little more than ten
condensed, yet incredibly compelling pages, Heidegger then seeks to show that this
ground, which lies “prior even to being and time” and constitutes “the ground of the
possibility of existence, the root of being and time,” is nothing other than freedom.
Freedom, however, is no longer to be understood as a property of man; at most the
converse is the case: “man as a possibility of freedom,” freedom as the “awesome’
(ungeheuerliche) ground wherein the disclosure or deconcealment of beings as such
and as a whole occurs. (133–35/93–94). These pivotal pages of the book not only
retrieve in a transformed manner Heidegger’s analyses of time from 1924 through
1930, but also show Heidegger attempting to take a further, decisive step along the
path opened up by The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, the important lecture course delivered in winter semester 1929–30.
In a somewhat surprising turn, Heidegger, rather than further developing the radical
perspective just opened up, turns back to a consideration of freedom in Kant, and the
last hundred pages of the course are devoted to this task. Heidegger, while intimating
a series of complicated questions that lie ahead, deliberately chooses another path,
one “which forces us into constant dialogue with the philosophers, in particular with
Kant,” who was “the first to see the problem of freedom in its most radical
philosophical consequences” (136–37/95). The entire analysis of Kant’s understanding
of freedom, however, is situated under the question of whether freedom is a problem
of causality (as in Kant), or whether, conversely, causality is a problem of freedom; of
whether, indeed, freedom demands to be conceived more radically than in terms of
causality at all. In the closing pages of the course, Heidegger argues that this is
indeed the case, and that causality is grounded in freedom, not vice-versa. Here,
Heidegger seeks to move beyond the Kantian perspective, which, he argues, fails to
adequately interrogate the ontological character of the possibility and actuality of
freedom. Freedom in a more primordial sense, he indicates, entails an “originary self-
binding” that lies prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge
and comportment.
The second volume, The Essence of Truth, presents a careful, step-by-step exegesis of
two central arguments from Plato’s dialogues. The first, an analysis of the allegory of
the cave from Book VII of the Republic, seeks to return to the original Greek
experience of aletheia (truth) as “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” a sense of
25
aletheia that Heidegger shows is a precondition for understanding truth as

propositional correctness. The analysis of the allegory follows the different stages of
the occurrence of truth as gradations of unhiddenness and of the prisoners’ relation to
what becomes unhidden or revealed at each stage. In interpreting the central themes
of the allegory—themes such as the progressive liberation of the prisoners; their
turning toward the light; the essence of the ideas; the idea of the Good; the
philosopher as liberator; the essence of paideia; and the fate of philosophizing—
Heidegger, however, not only reads the allegory as a testament to the original power
of unhiddenness in Greek existence, but also as an indication of the waning of this
fundamental experience, such that Plato does not, in the allegory, ask concerning the
essence of unhiddenness as such: “Plato equates the unhidden with what is (beings),
in such a way that the question of unhiddenness as such does not come to life.”
(German 123–24; translation, 89). That this is so, Heidegger argues, is evidenced by
the fact that Plato fails to ask about the essence of hiddenness, as that from which
unhiddenness must be wrested. Thus, the theme of unhiddenness has an ambiguous
status in the allegory: “For Plato, therefore, unhiddenness is a theme, and at the
same time not a theme. Because this is the situation with regard to unhiddenness,
an explicit clarification of the hiddenness of beings does not eventuate. But just this
neglect of the question of hiddenness as such is the decisive indication of the already
beginning ineffectiveness of un hiddenness in the strict sense. . . . For the
unhiddenness of beings is precisely wrested from hiddenness, i.e., it is obtained in
struggle against the latter.” (125/90-91).
From here, mindful of this failure to inquire into the essence of hiddenness and, as a
consequence, into the essence of unhiddenness as such, Heidegger moves to the
second dialogue of interest, namely the Theaetetus, for which he makes a striking
claim: This dialogue, he claims, represents “that stretch of the road of the question
concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato
actually trod . . .” (129/93). Here, in his analysis of the Theaetetus, Heidegger takes
us through the various stages of the argument that unfolds from Theaetetus’ initial
answer to what constitutes knowledge (episteme), namely, aisthesis, or sense-
perception, to the problem of how wrong opinion (pseudes doxa) is possible.
Heidegger’s interpretation shows not only how falsity and—as an apparent
consequence—truth come to be conceived as uncorrectness and correctness of the
propositional statement respectively (entailing both a shift away from the original
experience of unhiddenness and a shift in the understanding of doxa), but also how
truth and untruth thereby come to be viewed as mutually exclusive, contrary to the
insight that lies close at hand in the cave-allegory, but is not taken up by Plato
himself: namely, that “unhiddenness ... in itself is simultaneously, and indeed
essentially, hiddenness; a truth to whose essence there belongs un-truth.” (321/227).
Yet Heidegger’s readings should not be seen as simply an indictment of Plato’s
thought: not only do they succeed magnificently in bringing out the experiential and,
one might say, phenomenological, basis of Plato’s thought—breathing new life into
these dialogues; Heideggr’s insights into the essence of truth as unconcealment
(being) are also ever mindful of the implications for his own “question of being.” As he
notes toward the close of this volume: “Untruth belongs to the primordial essence of
truth as the unhiddenness of being, i.e., to the inner possibility of truth. The question
of being is thus thoroughly ambiguous—it is a question of the deepest truth and at the
same time it is on the edge of, and in the zone of, the deepest untruth.” (322/228)
Each of these two volumes makes an important contribution to our understanding of
the development of Heidegger’s own thinking as in constant dialogue with the
26
philosophical tradition. They illuminate not only the philosophers he engages, but the
metamorphoses of Heidegger’s own thinking of being as well. Anyone seeking to
understand the shifting ground of Heidegger’s thinking of being and time from the late
1920s through the early 1930s will have to study The Essence of Human Freedom;
those who are of the opinion that Heidegger has little or nothing to say about the
phenomenon of the human body need to study the analyses of Platonic eros, sense-
perception, bodily dispersion, and desire from The Essence of Truth. The translator
has done a very fine job overall: the translations convey the sense of Heidegger’s
difficult prose in a very readable and generally accurate manner. A few errors or
inaccuracies that I discovered serve as a reminder that one should always consult the
German when undertaking careful study: in The Essence of Human Freedom, the term
existenziellen is rendered as “existential” (instead of “existentiell”) at one critical point
(136/94); in On the Essence of Truth, “authentic” is at one point used to translate
both eigenen and eigentlichen (238/170) although the two are quite distinct for
Heidegger, eigenen really meaning “own”: thus, in this particular context, one’s own
self could very well be at stake without one necessarily being authentic; in another
place in the same volume, “hiddenness” appears instead of “unhiddenness” for
Unverborgenheit (322/228)).
2003.01.07
Stephen J. Pope (ed.)
The Ethics of Aquinas
Pope, Stephen J. (ed.), The Ethics of Aquinas, Georgetown University Press, 2002,
544pp, $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 878408886.
No other area in contemporary philosophy is connected with its past in the way that
ethics is. When it comes to the study of mind, language, or metaphysics, most
scholars feel little obligation to look back more than 100 years or so. In ethics,
matters are quite different. Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and Mill are not just a part of the
curriculum – in many ways, these authors constitute the core curriculum. The study of
ethics, in large part, just is the study of the history of ethics, and many leading
contemporary ethicists are also experts on the history of their subject.
In this light, the case of Thomas Aquinas is puzzling. Though it would be an
exaggeration to say that his ethics has been neglected, it certainly has not received
the same kind of attention that other areas of his thought receive, such as his
metaphysics, theory of soul, or philosophical theology. Moreover, his ethical writings
have had very little influence on mainstream contemporary ethics. Although everyone
knows of his theory of natural law and his adoption of Aristotle’s virtue theory, one
would have to search long and hard at an APA convention to find someone who could
explain what Aquinas’s natural law theory actually is, or who could say very much
about what is distinctive in his virtue theory.
What makes this all the more puzzling is that Aquinas spent more time on ethics than
he did on any other philosophical topic. The whole of the massive secunda pars of the
Summa theologiae (ST 2a) is devoted to ethics – some 20 times the amount of space
he devotes to the topic of human nature, and perhaps 200 times the space he devotes
to proving God’s existence. It is this vast and little-known territory that Stephen Pope
takes on in The Ethics of Aquinas. This large and dense volume collects the
contributions of 28 philosophers and theologians, each of whom has been asked to
27
write a chapter on some aspect of ST 2a. Many of the contributors are leading
scholars in the field, including Leonard Boyle, Servais-Théodore Pinckaers, Bonnie
Kent, Jean Porter, and Ludwig Honnefelder, and the volume as a whole makes a useful
contribution to the study of Aquinas’s ethics.
The most useful parts of Pope’s anthology are those contributions that set out clearly
and succinctly some specific area of Aquinas’s ethics. Pamela Hall’s essay on the old
law and the new law (1a2ae 98-108), for instance, is a model of clarity, as is David
Gallagher’s discussion of the will and its acts (1a2ae 6-17). In another worthwhile
chapter, on vice and sin (1a2ae 71-89), Eileen Sweeney offers a kind of formula for
what every chapter ought to attempt: “seeing Aquinas’s reflections on sin [etc.] not as
a scholastic legalism but as a complex view in dialogue with major ethical thinkers and
confronting major ethical questions” (152a). Unfortunately, not every chapter is so
successful. Indeed, in my view only about half of the contributions are sufficiently
worthwhile for me to recommend them to someone wanting to understand the
particular part of Aquinas’s ethics that they treat.
Moreover, taken as a whole, the book is less than the sum of its parts, inasmuch as
the accumulated chapters never provide anything like a big picture of what Aquinas’s
ethics is all about. Each chapter proceeds down its own path, with its own ideas about
how such an essay should be written. Because of such disparities in approach, there is
not a great deal of repetition (as one might fear); there are, however, many gaps in
coverage. It is hard to get a clear picture of the relationship between natural law and
virtue theory, for instance, or the relationship between the philosophical and the
theological virtues. Nothing is said about the unity of the virtues. No one comes even
close to considering what Aquinas’s metaethics might be, and only rarely do
contributors look at particular cases of “applied” ethics (e.g., homosexuality, suicide,
poverty, warfare).
Few will want to read The Ethics of Aquinas cover to cover. It is best used as a
reference book, and in this regard it has value. Different contributors seem to have
anticipated different sorts of audiences for their chapters, but in general the book will
most benefit students of Aquinas who want a quick summary of some aspect of ST 2a.
By contrast, philosophers looking to see how Aquinas compares with contemporary
discussions of ethics should avoid this book. Virtually none of the contributors makes
any effort to connect Aquinas with later developments – not even with authors like
Hobbes, Kant, and Mill, let alone with contemporary discussions. Moreover, when a
topic like consequentialism is broached, it tends to be treated in caricature, rather
than as a serious alternative view. (The book is perhaps more attuned to recent
developments in theology, which would not be surprising given that the editor and
many of the contributors come from that field.)
Although presumably intended for students, the book is impressively scholarly
throughout. Quotations are translated in the main text but always supplied in Latin in
the notes. Each chapter contains a lengthy list of “selected further reading,” which
specialists should find quite useful. These lists are clearly not geared to students,
however, since a majority of the works cited are not in English. (In one chapter,
indeed, none of the works cited were in English.) Despite this impressive scholarship,
the book is not very in touch with recent developments in the secondary literature.
Although John Finnis’s work comes in for brief discussion, his important recent book
(Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory [Oxford University Press, 1998]) is never
discussed, and gets cited on only one reading list. Moreover, not a single author
mentions any of the first-rate papers published in the recent anthology on Aquinas’s
ethics edited by Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (Aquinas’s Moral Theory:
28
Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann [Cornell University Press, 1998]). No doubt,

Pope and his contributors have been working on this volume for many years, but there
is no reason why the bibliographies, at least, should not be up to date.
The book’s last section is devoted to “the twentieth-century legacy,” but this turns out
to be an exercise in the history of Thomism, mostly devoted to authors whose books
have been gathering dust for some time, such as Dominic Prümmer, Reginald
Garrigou-Lagrange, and Yves Simon. It is hard to see what could justify lengthy
discussions of these authors, in a volume that contains nothing on Hobbes, Locke,
Kant, Mill, Rawls, Foot, or Anscombe. In his discussion of twentieth-century Thomistic
ethics, Clifford Kossel notes in passing that Jacques Maritain was appointed a
professor of philosophy at Princeton, and Yves Simon at the University of Chicago.
Such developments are hard to imagine today. A Thomist at Princeton?! Yet if we
want to understand why that seems so improbable, a good first place to look would be
this very book. Judging from its contents, Aquinas scholars are doing their very best
to make themselves irrelevant to the outside world.
Finally, before discussing some specific examples, one particular oddity of the book
needs to be mentioned. The Summa theologiae consists almost entirely of arguments,
one after another, page after page, interrupted only by the occasional citation of an
authoritative text or the historical background to a particular problem. The Ethics of
Aquinas, so far as I can recall, manages to run through the whole of ST 2a without
ever sullying its hands with any one of those arguments. This is baffling. How can so
many contributors be so interested in what Aquinas has to say, and at the same time
be so utterly neglectful of the arguments that are the backbone of his work? For those
who are adverse to argumentation, there are lots of careers to choose from other than
philosophy and theology. For that matter, there are a lot of philosophers and
theologians out there whose work proceeds without the distraction of careful
arguments. Why choose Aquinas, of all people, to study?
This book is too big and diverse to be fairly represented by specific criticisms of
specific chapters, but I would not wish to review a book on Aquinas’s ethics without
spending at least some time talking about the substance of his views. I will confine
myself, though, to a single topic. One of the most complex and confusing parts of
Aquinas’s ethics is his treatment of “the goodness and badness of human acts” (1a2ae
18-21). Here he attempts to explain, in a general way, exactly what makes an action
bad (or good). Does the badness lie in the interior act of will, or in the external bodily
act? Does it lie in the very nature of the act, or in the consequences? Is it one’s
intention that matters, or what one actually does? The history of ethics is in large part
a story of how philosophers have insisted on highlighting some of these elements to
the almost total exclusion of others. It is characteristic of Aquinas’s ethics, and
perhaps symptomatic of his lack of influence, that he refuses to choose among these
alternatives. Instead, he takes the eminently reasonable view that all of these things
matter.
If this seems sensible in principle, in practice it is enormously confusing. In these
articles, more than anywhere else I can think of in Aquinas’s work, it is tempting to
think that he is not entirely in control of his material. He begins (1a2ae 18.1-4) by
giving us four ways in which the goodness (badness) of a human act can be
considered:
A. In terms of its genus (simply as an action);
B. In terms of its species (determined by the action’s object)
C. In terms of its accidents (the circumstances surrounding the action);
D. In terms of its end (the agent’s intention).
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The first of these can be dropped out of the analysis fairly quickly, because every
action, considered simply as an action, is a kind of being, and so a good thing (18.1).
After this, however, matters become much more complicated. Aquinas thinks that we
can classify actions by species in terms of the object of the action, where the object is
not that which the agent intends but “that which the external action concerns”
(18.6c). So theft is one species of action, defined by the object taking others’ things,
and presumably killing is another, defined by the object taking something’s life. So
far, Aquinas is not making a moral claim – he is talking only about the way that
actions can be put into what we might call natural kinds. This by itself, however, may
look rather dubious: should all kinds of killing be lumped together as a species, for
instance, or should we distinguish killing human beings as a separate species? If so,
should we count suicide as yet a further species?
It would be nice to be able to say that these details don’t really matter, and that we
can distinguish between lower and higher species and genera in whatever ways seem
most convenient. It doesn’t seem that Aquinas can say this, however, because –
having set out this claim about the natural kinds of actions – he proceeds to claim
(18.2) that a necessary condition for an action’s goodness is that it be good (or at
least not bad) in species. This condition will be absolutely meaningless, though, unless
we have some clear way of determining the species of an action. Is it, for instance,
killing, or killing humans, or suicide? Aquinas doesn’t think that the first or second are
intrinsically wrong, but he does think the third is intrinsically wrong. So the theory
crucially depends on having a clear sense of what determines the natural kind of a
given action.
In his chapter on this material, Daniel Westberg sloshes through these issues, aware
that large ethical questions are at stake but unable himself to bring this material
under any sort of control. Aquinas’s most basic principle, through these articles, is
that “an action is not good simpliciter unless all the goodnesses concur” (18.4 ad 3;
cf. 20.2c) – that is, unless it is good in species, in circumstances, and in end.
Westberg doesn’t even mention this principle, and says quite a few things that are
inconsistent with it. He takes seriously, for instance, the suggestion of some recent
moral theologians that no actions are intrinsically bad, independently of intentions and
circumstances. Yet this claim cannot be Aquinas’s view, no matter how it might be
attenuated, because Aquinas insists that (B) above functions independently as a moral
criterion, apart from (C) and (D).
I’ve already suggested that Aquinas faces considerable problems in trying to separate
(B) from (C) and (D). Why, for instance, should taking another’s things be part of the
essence of an action, rather than an accidental circumstance? Obviously, this is a
detail that makes a moral difference. But Aquinas thinks that accidental circumstances
can matter to the moral species of an action – so moral salience gives us no reason to
draw distinctions between the natural species of actions. (Confusingly, Aquinas uses
’species’ to refer to both the natural and the moral species of an action.) However
these issues are to be handled, it seems to me that Westberg goes too far in
introducing elements of (C) and (D) into (B). He remarks that “intention cannot be
separated from object” (96a), and “a particular action does not have its moral
evaluation until it has been evaluated with the circumstances recognized and the
intentions understood” (96a). It is right, of course, that an action cannot be fully
evaluated without taking circumstances and intentions into account. But Westberg
means something more, that an action has no moral status independently of
circumstances and intentions. As he puts it, “the object of an action cannot serve
independently as a datum for moral evaluation” (96a). This runs precisely contrary to
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Aquinas’s project. The whole point of his analysis in 1a2ae Q18 is to isolate the action
itself, in abstraction from the surrounding circumstances and intentions, because he
insists that the action in isolation is morally significant.
Westberg’s line of argument leaves him with the result that no actions, in themselves,
are inherently good or bad. He tries to resist this conclusion, by appealing to action
descriptions that, as he puts it, “have an implied intention” (96b). So ’murder’ and
’torture’ and ’sexual harassment’ describe actions that are intrinsically bad, but only
because these terms imply intentions and circumstances that make the action bad. It
remains true that the action itself is morally neutral. Now, certainly, there are cases
where this seems like the right result. Aquinas himself, moreover, expressly denies
that all actions, just in virtue of their natural kind, must be either good or bad – some
actions, he says, can be morally neutral in kind (18.8). But he does not think that all
actions are intrinsically neutral, and in this article his example is theft. Perhaps
Westberg wants to resist this result because it seems so obviously wrong. Any
freshman, after all, will be able to think of circumstances and intentions in light of
which we would be inclined to excuse the act of theft. Yet Aquinas’s point is surely not
that, all things considered, one should never steal, no matter what the circumstances.
His point is much more reasonable, that no act of theft can be entirely a good thing,
no matter what one’s circumstances and intentions, because theft is intrinsically bad.
Thus he says, as quoted already, “an action is not good simpliciter unless all the
goodnesses concur” (18.4 ad 3).
Here, as in so many other places, it would be easier to understand Aquinas if he were
to use more examples. In their absence, it is hard to know what actions other than
theft should be counted as intrinsically bad. One might suppose that killing would be a
good candidate, but evidently it is not. According to Aquinas,
it is possible for an act that is one in terms of its natural species to be directed at
different ends of will. For instance, killing a human being, which in terms of its natural
species is the same, can be directed as to an end toward the preservation of justice
and the satisfaction of anger. Because of this, these will be different acts in terms of
their moral species, because in one way it will be a virtuous act and in the other way it
will be a vicious act (1a2ae 1.3 ad 3).
This passage, when combined with what we have just discussed, entails that killing is
a morally neutral act. If it were intrinsically bad, then while a good end such as
preserving justice might mitigate the badness of the overall action, there would be no
end that could make killing a positively virtuous act.
Martin Rhonheimer, in his valuable discussion of “sins against justice” (2a2ae 59-78),
considers this very passage. He shows how, for Aquinas, what is intrinsically wrong is
for a private person to kill another person (297a) – thereby leaving room for the
death penalty and warfare, both of which Aquinas thought morally permissible in
principle. In order to accommodate this result within the framework we have been
considering, Rhonheimer proposes that a private person’s killing another person be
considered a distinct species of action from what an executioner or a soldier does, or
from killing in self-defense. If we can get this result, then we can include a private
person’s killing along with theft on our list of actions wrong in terms of their species –
that is, wrong in terms of (B) above.
Yet how can we get this result? Isn’t it just obvious that, in terms of the external act
itself, it’s all just killing? Like Westberg, Rhonheimer proposes appealing to intentions.
He remarks, “human actions and their moral identity can never be defined on the level
of a purely ’physical’ occurrence of an act. It always requires an initial, basic,
intentional content, a basic intentionality” (297b). This immediately looks more
31
promising than Westberg’s approach, because it appeals to intention in only a limited

way, as that which is the immediate object of an intentional action. Rhonheimer is
surely right that it makes no sense to talk about the object of an action without taking
into account the agent’s immediate intentions. This still leaves the agent’s remote
intentions as a distinct category of evaluation – category (D) on the above scheme.
Yet though this looks attractive in principle, the results are rather dubious in practice.
Rhonheimer proposes that killing in self-defense is not even killing, because “the
killing, considered in terms of its intention, is a secondary result, occurring beside the
intention (praeter intentionem)” (297a). Something similar is true for the soldier and
the executioner: the executioner wills that justice be done (294b); the soldier “does
not will the death of the attacker, but only to render him harmless” (296b). With
these results in hand, Rhonheimer concludes, “one never ought to want the death of a
person, either as an intended end or as a means chosen for an end” (297a). This
species of action is always, intrinsically wrong.
That’s an impressive result, but to me it seems based on sophistry. I can understand
the idea that what the executioner really, ultimately wants is justice, and that what
the soldier really, ultimately wants is a just peace. Yet what both are doing, quite
intentionally and deliberately, is killing people. The executioner may take no pleasure
in his job, but he certainly knows what he is doing, and intends to do it. Of course, his
actions may be justified by their consequences, or by the ultimate ends being aimed
at. But then we would once again be conflating the very things that Aquinas wants us
to distinguish. I myself am far from clear about how Aquinas’s account is to be applied
to specific cases, but I do not feel that either Westberg or Rhonheimer tells a coherent
story.1
Endnotes
1. I owe thanks to Theresa Weynand for many stimulating discussions of this material.
32
2003.01.08
Martin Kusch
Knowledge by Agreement: the Programme of Communitarian Epistemology
Kusch, Martin, Knowledge by Agreement: the Programme of Communitarian
Epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2002, 303pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN
0199251223.
Reviewed by David Henderson, University of Memphis
As explained by Kusch, a communitarian epistemology is one that holds (a) that

“’knowledge’ and its cognates, like ‘know’ and ‘knower’, marks a social status,” and
(b) that the fundamental or primary possessor of knowledge are groups of people
rather than the individual. In this “dialogical exposition” of communitarian
epistemology, Kusch discusses a wide range of philosophers, borrowing elements from
various positions while criticizing each. In doing so, he seeks to piece together the
central planks in his communitarian epistemology, to exhibit their interrelations, and
to motivate the choice of just those elements in preference to more familiar
philosophical doctrines. The result affords a firm understanding of the radically
alternative epistemology that he proposes (one can have confidence that Kusch really
does believe what he seems to hold), and why he proposes it (one can appreciate the
motivation for the central planks and how they fit together). The drawback of
discussing many alternative positions and fundamental arguments in the space of one
book is that the reader sometimes feels that the compact discussion of positions and
issues is too quick. This is not to say that Kusch’s presentations of competitors’
positions are unfair—he typically provides fair sketches—rather, it is to say that one
feels that the issues as outlined deserve more sustained give and take than provided.
Such misgivings are perhaps inevitable in such a compact and yet encompassing
presentation.
The book has three parts. The first provides a communitarian epistemology of
testimony. Here Kusch argues that testimony, at least testimony that is a part of a
community agreement, is generative of knowledge. He argues that one should
recognize a kind of “communal performative” testimony (distributed across the
individual instances of testimony), and that communal performatives constitutes
knowledge on the part of the community. The second aspires to a communitarian
epistemology of empirical belief. Here Kusch hopes to demonstrate that the
communitarian epistemology provides superior answers to epistemologists’ own
questions. However, he also recognizes that a significant stumbling block to the
appreciation of the communitarian understanding and answers springs from “certain
‘realist’ or ‘absolutist’ intuitions about language, truth, and objectivity.” Thus, the final
part of the book is devoted to developing a “finitist semantics” supporting a distinctive
form of relativism regarding truth and objectivity.
On a traditional epistemological understanding of testimony, whether an individual is
justified in accepting or forming a belief on the basis of testimony turns on facts about
that individual. Such accounts come in reductionist and antireductionist versions. On
reductionist accounts, an individual is justified in accepting a belief on the basis of
testimony (and can there have knowledge) only when possessing a basis for trust that
employs epistemically justificatory processing of a non-testimonial sort. For example,
such a basis might consist of experientially based reasons for thinking that the person
testifying (or such persons generally) is (are) trustworthy. Alternatively, for an
externalist, it might consist in a reliable sensitivity to such trustworthiness. In either
case, the epistemic footing of (any piece of) testimony is understood in terms of
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epistemic processes that are fundamentally non-testimonial in character—and all this

is understood at the level of the individual epistemic agent. On anti-reductionist
accounts, in contrast, the individual agent need not have any vindication for taking
the interlocutor to be trustworthy—need have no reasons for thinking the interlocutor
trustworthy, need have no sensitivity to trustworthiness, and perhaps need have no
belief in the trustworthiness of the interlocutor. Rather, agents are thought to have
some entitlement to accept testimony—absent undermining reasons and without any
check for such undermining reasons. This entitlement is to be understood as
constituting testimony as a fundamental epistemic channel or modality on a par with
experience. Again, all this has to do with epistemically desirable or justificatory
processes on the part of an individual forming a testimonial belief. Kusch characterizes
the main outlines of such debates. However, his ultimate treatment of reductionism
and antireductionism is remarkably dismissive—he writes off both as fundamentally
misguided insofar as they each are committed to individualism. The problem, as he
sees it, is that what is called for on the part of individuals varies with social contexts,
so that any account at the level of the individual will be a distorting generalization.
Kusch explains that individualistic epistemologies all mistake a stylized picture of
certain epistemic contexts for a general epistemological account—the result being a
distorted understanding of other epistemological contexts. To flesh out his picture of a
range of epistemic contexts and varying contextual demands on the individual he
elaborates a kind of neo-Wittgensteinian contextualist epistemology that found
condensed earlier expression in a well-known piece by David Annis. On such a view,
what is required in order for an agent to be justified is no more or less than what
would enable that agent to induce or command agreement in that agent’s social
context. Justification is thus a matter of what a historically situated community of
inquirers will or would need in order to reach a consensus or agreement on the point
in question. On this view, all epistemic norms are local—norms of some historical
community. Generalizing from those contexts in which members of one’s epistemic
community will not themselves be satisfied until one has produced reasons for
thinking that one’s sources are trustworthy, individualist epistemologists of testimony
have been led to reductive accounts. Generalizing from contexts where one’s
epistemic community is ready to take some testimony at face value, no questions
asked, individualists have been led to construct anti-reductionist accounts. Kusch
insists that communities employ a mix of contextual demands—thereby constituting
what makes for justification—and that neither reductionism nor anti-reductionism is
correct.
The last paragraph related a radical claim, the claim that what makes for justification
is wholly a matter of local social norms—a matter completely of what would induce
agreement within an epistemic community. But, in advancing his communitarian
account, Kusch is committed to a yet more radical claim: that knowledge as well as
justification is wholly a matter of what would induce such agreement, that considered
agreement within a community constitutes knowledge and justification. Such
agreement evinces the satisfaction of local epistemic norms, and such are the only
norms or standards there are—the very stuff of epistemic normativity, on Kusch’s
account. The title, Knowledge by Agreement, is not hyperbole—it reflects the doctrine
developed therein. Knowledge and justification are said to be social statuses—
possessed just when the group agrees. An agent is said to have justification only in a
group that is willing to concede the point on which the agent thereby comes to have
justification. ‘Concede the point’ might be too weak a formulation—borrowing
language from Brandom, the group must, it seems, be in accord in undertaking
34
commitment to the point in question, and to related points of course, and in according
entitlements to others likewise committed. Further, on this account, I know only when
we know—as our agreement reflects satisfaction of the local epistemic norms that are
said to constitute knowledge, which must in the first instance be shared knowledge.
Kusch makes the point vividly and interestingly by insisting that the shared
commitments be understood as constituting a kind of communal performative.
Justification and knowledge (and thus truth and meaning) are bestowed in a kind of
community process that is at least of the same genus as the performatives by which a
couple comes to be married at the performative pronouncement that they are.
At the very least, this much can be said in praise of this book: it unflinchingly
develops various strands that would seem to be needed to defend a communitarian
epistemology of the fairly radical sort suggested. If justification and knowledge are to
be social statuses, then so must be truth, for example, and the author obliges by
advancing accounts of semantics and truth of sorts that would seem to be needed. In
each case, something more than a promissory note and less than a fully elaborated
and defended account is managed. The discussion moves along crisply (sometimes too
quickly, as readers may repeatedly feel that there remains much to say about the
particular issue under review).
I would like to suggest two related misgivings. Let me begin by considering a demand
on an adequate epistemology that Kusch employs against alternatives to
communitarianism. It is one that I believe that he cannot himself meet. All
individualistic epistemology, and even social epistemologies that are not
communitarian epistemologies, are said to be unable to account for the normative
constraints on beliefs. Here, Kusch’s dismissal of foundationalist and coherentist
epistemologies is representative:
Rational constraint cannot be found where both positions are looking for it. It cannot
be found among elements in the depth of the individual mind—whatever the route by
which the elements have entered. It is not that foundationalism or coherentism has
not yet found the appropriate elements. It is that individual-psychological facts or
worldly facts on their own are not normative. No facts or events can constrain a mind;
only norms can (p. 97).
Norms, by which Kusch understands social norms, are here advanced as necessary
(and adequate) to provide or constitute the needed distinction between merely
seeming right and being right—a distinction that is of a piece with real normativity.
This theme that alternative epistemologies cannot provide for real normativity is
sounded repeatedly in the book: for example, regarding Reliabilism (p. 110),
regarding Davidson’s epistemology, where it seems that the normativity must arise
from the interpreter’s community, and this community is not a focus of that
epistemology (p. 129), regarding versions of contextualism, such as Michael Williams’,
that would seek to avoid relativism by appeal to reliability (p. 138).
It then seems fitting to focus on Kusch’s own understanding of normativity in terms of
social norms. Perhaps the starkest formulation comes early: “What seems right to
almost everyone—that is the collective ‘seems right’—is the most we can get in terms
of an ‘is right’” (p. 98). To put it mildly, it is hard to see how this can be right. If the
collective “seems right” is the most we can give to account for “is right,” then
shouldn’t we declare that we have no account of normativity? To say otherwise
reminds one of the famous characterization of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam—
”Let’s just declare victory and go home.” While such a policy may make political
sense, it is difficult to think that it makes for good philosophy.
35
It is noteworthy that others who look for social norms to ground normativity,
Brandom, for example, would insist that the distinction between merely seeming right
and being right must apply at the level of a community at a time. It must be possible
for everyone in a community to agree on a point that is wrong. Brandom attempts to
manage as well as motivate this distinction by pointing out that the commitments and
entitlements undertaken by and accorded by members of a community envision a kind
of correctability that will not allow correctness to be reduced to community consensus
at a time. I am not at all convinced that Brandom’s solution is itself adequate, but I
am convinced that he is right to demand more than Kusch is ready to provide.
A second misgiving has to do with Kusch’s accounts of semantics and truth. On a
communitarian epistemology, both justification (or the rational constraints on beliefs)
and knowledge are social statuses. But, of course, one does not have knowledge
unless one’s belief is objectively correct—true. Accordingly, Kusch needs to provide a
communitarian account of truth according to which it is also a social status. Thus, he
advances parallel understandings of the standards for justified belief formation and
the semantics for concepts: understandings according to which truth and meaning is
wholly determined by a community’s consensual practices at a time. At any given
time, the community will have a set of exemplars for the application of a given
concept, and there will be some consensus regarding the similarity of various cases or
entities with the exemplars. According to Kusch:
What makes an application of a word correct rather than incorrect is that one’s
interlocutors let one get away with, or perhaps even praise, the way in which one
judged the similarity between a shared exemplar and a newly encountered entity.
Only others’ agreement can constitute correctness (204).
Applications, once accepted, can change the set of exemplars and inform the similarity
judgments within the community. Accordingly, the exemplars and similarity bases for
a concept can evolve. It follows from this “meaning finitism” that meanings change
over time as the norms of the community shift. Further, what is agreed within the
community at a time, what one can get away with and get others to follow, is correct,
as it constitutes the semantics of the relevant concepts. What is agreed on is true. The
extension of a concept or term changes with the decisions of the community—it is not
fixed. Applied to the epistemic concept of justification, we get the result that, “the
very meaning of ‘justified’ can—and does—change for a community as the array of
exemplars changes” (155). What is true must change in a parallel fashion.
It is difficult to make this work. What of a consensus judgment of a community at
some earlier time the denial of which seems to be the consensus judgment of folk
today? Suppose the earlier community agreed that the motion of heavenly things is
circular and unchanging and that anything farther away from the earth than the moon
is a heavenly thing. I take it that, on Kusch’s account, these judgments must have
been true. But, of course today we agree on judgments that readily would be
expressed using the denials of the formulations just employed. So, these
contemporary judgments are true as well? The belief of the ancients that heavenly
motion is circular and unchanging and our belief that it is not are both true? Did the
character of the motion of heavenly things change (from unchanging to changing)? Of
course, one might say that meanings have changed—so that the above formulation in
our language does not express what the earlier thinker’s were thinking. One might
insist that they did not believe that heavenly motion was circular and unchanging—
and that to attribute such a belief to them would be bad translation or interpretation.
(There are those who have held this.) The problem is that most of us do not want to
leave the matter there. Instead, we judge that some historical matters of consensus
36
were incorrect, that subsequent investigation has corrected belief on the relevant
matter. Kusch sometimes wants to agree: “judgments found correct at an earlier time
might be reclassified as incorrect at a later time” (p. 207). But, on Kusch’s own
account, would that not be a mistake? So, were the earlier thinkers incorrect in
thinking that heavenly motion was circular and unchanging, or was it true then and
not now, or did they not believe it (believing instead something not so translatable)?
What gives?
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2003.01.10
Katherine Hawley
How Things Persist
Hawley, Katherine, How Things Persist, Oxford University Press, 2001, 232pp, $45.00
(hbk), ISBN 019924913X.
Reviewed by Heather Dyke, University of Otago
How do objects persist through change? In what sense is this chair that I am sitting in
as I write this, and on which I have just spilt some coffee, the same chair that I sat in
yesterday as I read Katherine Hawley’s How Things Persist? In what sense am I, the
person writing this, the same person who, yesterday, was reading that book? There
are, broadly speaking, currently three theories on offer to account for the persistence
of ordinary objects and people. According to perdurance theory objects persist
through time in much the same way as they extend through space. Today’s coffee-
stained chair is the same as yesterday’s clean chair because the chair is a four-
dimensional entity, part of which existed yesterday, and was clean, and another part
of which exists today, and is coffee-stained. By contrast, endurance theory has it that
the way objects persist through time is very different from the way they extend
through space. Objects are three-dimensional, and they persist through time by being
‘wholly present’ at each time at which they exist. Today’s coffee-stained chair is the
same as yesterday’s clean chair because it is numerically identical with it; there is just
one chair that is ‘wholly present’ at each of the times at which it exists, and has
different properties at some of those times. Recently, a new theory of persistence,
stage theory, has been offered and defended (most notably by Theodore Sider, in his
Four-dimensionalism, Oxford University Press, 2001). Stage theory combines
elements of both its rivals. It shares perdurance theory’s commitment to a four-
dimensional metaphysical framework but denies that theory’s account of predication
and adopts instead something like endurance theory’s account of predication. It is not
four-dimensional objects which satisfy predicates like ‘is a chair’ and which change by
having some parts that are clean and some parts that are coffee-stained. Instead, it is
the momentary stages that make up the four-dimensional objects which are chairs
and which are clean or coffee-stained.
How Things Persist is ultimately a defense of stage theory, but it is also a study of a
cluster of issues and problems in contemporary metaphysics that center on the notion
of persistence. As such it would be highly suitable as a text for use in upper-level
undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics. In chapter one, Hawley outlines
the problem of persistence and the perdurance and endurance theories of it. In
chapter two, she introduces stage theory, and begins to develop and defend it in
response to a number of questions and potential problems. In chapter three, she
presents her account of the relations responsible for making some chair-stages stages
of ‘the same chair’, and some person-stages stages of ‘the same person’. These
relations are non-supervenient relations, which is to say that whether or not two
stages are stages of the same object is not entirely determined by the intrinsic
properties of those stages. I shall return to this below. Questions about the
persistence of objects often exhibit vagueness, so it is incumbent on any theory of
persistence to be able to offer an account of vagueness in persistence. Hawley pits the
three theories of persistence against the problem of vagueness in chapter 4. Chapter
5 examines the cluster of problems surrounding the persistence conditions of an
object and of the matter that constitutes it, and chapter 6, under the heading of
‘Modality’, examines a special instance of these problems, viz., cases of complete and
38
permanent coincidence, where an object and its constituting matter seem to differ,
but only in their modal properties.
I mentioned above that this book would make a good text for upper-level
undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics, and I wish to reinforce that
observation. Unlike many monographs in metaphysics, this book is a model of clarity
and crisp prose. The issues addressed in it are deep and difficult, which is one reason
why there is a lack of clarity in much work in this area, but Hawley has a firm grasp of
her material and a talent for relaying it in a manner that sacrifices some of its
difficulty, but none of its depth. Furthermore, the way Hawley structures her
discussions of the issues she tackles lends itself particularly well to use in a teaching
context. The backbone of the book is the issue of persistence and the three theories of
how things persist. Every other issue addressed in the book is introduced by way of
how it relates to the question of persistence. So while many different topics are
covered in this book, rather than being discussed in a piecemeal fashion, they are
covered in a unified and cohesive manner that gives an excellent sense of an entire
area in metaphysics. For example, in chapter 2, Hawley outlines the difference
between stage and perdurance theories. They differ in what they take to be the things
that satisfy sortal predicates and instantiate properties. Consequently, how each of
them gets filled out depends on what one’s account of properties is. It is in this way
that Hawley introduces the different accounts of properties.
Chapter 5 provides a nice example of the general strategy employed in this book. The
three theories of persistence (endurance, perdurance and stage theory) are each
pitted against the problem of the relation between an object and the matter that
constitutes it and assessed on the results they yield. The problem of apparently
coincident objects has a range of different responses available to it, so these are
introduced and discussed by way of the three theories of persistence. For instance,
one response to the question of the relation between an object and its constituting
matter is to embrace the conclusion that, for example, a sweater and the thread that
constitutes it are distinct objects. But this response takes on a different shape
depending on whether one adopts, in conjunction with it, endurance theory or
perdurance theory. According to endurance theory the two objects are distinct, share
all their microphysical parts, but differ in which sortal properties they instantiate.
According to perdurance theory, the two objects are distinct, share all their present
microphysical parts, but differ in their past, and perhaps future, temporal parts.
Another positive feature of the book that is worth mentioning is that at the end of
each chapter the implications of what was discussed in that chapter for personal
persistence are worked out. Each chapter, that is, except the last. This omission is
curious because there the main example under consideration throughout the second
half of the chapter is one involving a person and that person’s temporal extension.
Nonetheless, it is a nice touch to link the issue of the persistence of material objects
with that of the persistence of persons, the two issues too often being examined in
isolation from each other.
Now a few words about what I perceive to be some of the shortcomings of this book.
Firstly, and perhaps least problematically, the view defended in this book is not
radically new, and the book itself does not contain much that is a genuinely original
and novel contribution to the field. This is not to deny that there are some innovative
arguments, observations and discussions. For example, Hawley gives a novel
characterization of endurance theory as “the claim that ordinary objects are such that
(i) they exist at more than one time and (ii) statements about what parts they have
must be made relative to some time or other” (p. 30). This is intended to capture the
39
fundamental idea that ordinary objects exist at more than one time, but without being
temporally extended. Furthermore, it permits an easy comparison with perdurance
theory, which accepts (i) but rejects (ii). However, Hawley’s book is disadvantaged by
the publication (in the same year and by the same publisher) of Theodore Sider’s
Four-dimensionalism. While there is far from complete coincidence in the topics
covered by the two books, there is some overlap, and they both offer a defense of
stage theory. If I were shopping for a book on the metaphysics of time and
persistence that incorporated a defense of stage theory, I have to say that I would
buy Sider’s book. As a research monograph it does more to further debate on these
issues than does Hawley’s book, and as a defense of stage theory it is more thorough
and complete. I describe a particular instance of this below.
A more serious weakness in this book concerns the quality of Hawley’s account of the
relations that bind certain series of stages together into the familiar objects that
surround us. The relations in question, she claims, are non-supervenient relations.
That is, they are relations, which are not wholly determined by the intrinsic properties
of their relata. She gives, as an example of a non-supervenient relation, the relation
of being a certain distance apart. The distance between two objects is not wholly
determined by the intrinsic properties of those objects. But she then goes on to deny
that the non-supervenient relations she is interested in are spatio-temporal ones. So
we are frequently told what these non-supervenient relations are not, but given less of
an indication as to what they are. On a close inspection of chapter 3, I unearthed the
claim that the non-supervenient relations which bind stages of the ‘same’ object
together are “the relations, whatever they are, which underpin the relation of
‘immanent causation’ which holds between stages of the same object, and we can pick
them out by their theoretical role.” (pp. 85-86). I find this proposed account deeply
unsatisfying. Saying that these relations underpin the relation of immanent causation
merely restates the claim that it is intended to explain, viz., that they are relations
which hold between stages of the same object. The corresponding feature of Sider’s
stage theory has it that the stages that make up the ‘same’ object or person are
related to each other by way of a temporal counterpart relation. While this may be
somewhat counterintuitive and may be susceptible to objections, which parallel those
often laid at the door of modal counterpart theory, it is at least a well developed and
defended account.
Lastly, a slightly less serious worry. The last two chapters are characterized by a
feeling that Hawley is simply picking her preferred account from a range of equally
viable accounts. These chapters discuss the cluster of problems surrounding the
apparent coincidence of objects and their constituting matter, where that coincidence
is both (spatially and temporally) partial and where it is complete and permanent. Her
exposition of the problems and of the alternative solutions is eminently clear, and
while she draws attention to the disadvantages of the solutions that rival her own, she
concedes that none of these is damaging enough to rule that account out. Now, this is
partly a function of the nature of the theories on offer in this field. Typically they all
seem to be viable, and which theory one opts for depends on which of our common-
sense assumptions one is prepared to relinquish. This situation does not prevent one
from offering arguments against the theories one thinks to be false, but Hawley does
not do this. Each alternative thus remains a live option, and the reasons motivating
Hawley’s choice of her favored theory have to do with explanatory power, ontological
economy, and intuitive acceptability. These are admirable reasons, but they will not
persuade someone who is not otherwise disposed to adopt stage theory.
40
Having said all that, the case Hawley makes for stage theory is, at times, a persuasive
one. Its solution to cases of apparent permanent coincidence is particularly neat. What
are we to say about a statue of Goliath and the lump of clay which constitutes it, as
these ‘two’ things seem to have different persistence conditions even if they both exist
for the same period of time? According to Hawley, the statement, “That lump of clay is
Goliath” (where the name ‘Goliath’ denotes the statue), is not a statement of identity
but a predicative statement ascribing the property being Goliath to that lump of clay.
The predicates ‘is Goliath’, ‘is lump’, ‘is the statue’ and ‘is the lump of clay’ are all
contingently co-extensional; they are all satisfied by exactly the same stages, but this
might not have been the case. As Hawley says, “We are familiar with the idea that
predicates may be contingently co-extensional---—predicates like ‘has a heart’ and
‘has kidneys’—and stage theory adapts this idea to handle permanent but contingent
coincidence” (p. 184).
Likewise, stage theory’s approach to the question of whether an object is identical
with its largest temporal part is a good one, but it seems not to differ substantially
from Michael Jubien’s, whose account Hawley draws on. What are we to say about a
person, such as Descartes, whom we believe might have had a longer or shorter
lifetime than his actual one, and Descartes’ largest temporal part, which we intuitively
think has its temporal extent essentially? Jubien believes that the world is made up of
four-dimensional objects, which have their temporal boundaries essentially, and he
takes a predicative approach to the proper names of ordinary objects. The statement,
“That four-dimensional object is Descartes”, does not express an identity statement
but attributes the property being Descartes to the four-dimensional object in question.
The object in question has its temporal boundaries essentially, so it could not have
spanned 55 instead of 54 years, but a different, 55-year-long object could have
instantiated the property being Descartes. Hawley’s approach is to say that the
predicate ‘is Descartes’ is satisfied by a certain number of stages that make up a 54-
year long period, but that predicate could have been satisfied by more or by fewer
stages. Hawley claims her account is different from Jubien’s, in particular because he
is a perdurance theorist, and also because she admits fewer properties into her
ontology. But the mechanism is the same. This is another instance of the first worry
that I noted above, viz., the feeling that there is nothing substantially new on offer
here, but rather a theory put together out of a selection of what is currently on offer.
My criticisms of this book mainly concern its contribution as a research monograph,
but they are far from being serious objections to it. My admiration for it is based on its
aptness as an upper-level text. I must emphasize that I believe its strengths firmly
outweigh its weaknesses. How Things Persist is a well structured, well written, solid,
crisp and lucid investigation into the cluster of metaphysical problems that surround
the issue of persistence.
2003.01.11
Daniel Robinson
Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications
Robinson, Daniel N., Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications, Princeton
University Press, 2002, 225pp, $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521011558.
Reviewed by David Sussman, Princeton University
In Praise and Blame, Daniel Robinson sets out to defend an account of moral realism
sturdy enough to sustain ordinary moral responsibility against the encroachments of
41
various sorts of “moral luck.” His main targets are reductive naturalism about
morality, and any sort of Humean theory of action that would dissolve our agency into
the causal relations that hold amongst our various psychological and physiological
states. For Robinson, moral properties turn out to be like other higher-order features
of complex human activity in that they may supervene on natural properties without
being reducible to them. Robinson argues that, as rational agents, we have basic
powers to grasp and direct our action by considerations of such properties, and it is
upon such responsiveness to moral truth that we properly bestow praise and blame.
In a broadly Strawsonian vein, Robinson contends that such judgments presuppose
only that their object is capable of rational reflection and self-governance, but not any
sort of freedom that determinism would deny us. Robinson concludes with an
interpretation of moral praise and blame as a kind of rhetoric, by which we strive to
either reward and encourage someone for her moral sensitivities, or to spur her
through a kind of punishment to be more attentive to the moral reality that is before
us all.
Robinson begins by launching a defense of moral realism against moral relativism.
“Relativism” is understood quite broadly here, including emotivism, error-theory, and
generally any position that betrays some Humean influence. Ayer and Mackie are
Robinson’s principal opponents, and there is no mention of the more sophisticated
forms of expressivism that have recently been developed by Blackburn and Gibbard.
The discussion seems strangely old-fashioned, in that it is directed against a
reductionism that is taken to be motivated by little more than logical positivism. In his
defense of realism, Robinson argues that there is nothing particularly “queer” or
“ineffable” about moral properties, even though moral statements cannot be reduced
to non-moral ones or be given anything like a complete set of empirical verification
conditions. Rather, some moral property (e.g. “sin,” “integrity,” “intrinsic value”) may
be a feature of a naturally constituted situation in much the same way that being a
dwelling or a battle is. We can give no reductive analysis of what a dwelling or a battle
is in the basic terms of physical science, but this does not show that there are no such
things as dwellings or battles or that appeal to them cannot do any real explanatory
work.
Praise and Blame never really comes to grips with some of the more interesting
motivations for anti-realist approaches to morality. The comparison to dwellings and
battles may help to explain how moral properties might supervene on non-moral ones
without being reducible to them, but only if there is some further story about what
sort of explanatory work appeal to these properties might do. Robinson needs to do
more than gesture at this comparison: he needs to say something about how moral
properties function in some understanding of ourselves or of the world that makes
such supervenience as intelligible in their case as it is in that of dwellings and battles.
More important, Robinson seems insensitive to the motivational worries that often
drive anti-realism about morality. For Mackie, moral properties seemed ineluctably
“queer” because he thought that there would have to be something in the nature of
the property itself such that one could not competently ascribe it to something without
caring about that thing in the appropriate way. Moral truths were taken to be such
that their content would have to immediately necessitate some affective and
motivational attitude in anyone who could grasp their meaning. While it is notoriously
difficult to specify the sense of necessity in this internalist demand, there does seem
to be some intimate connection between morality and our concern that is not found in
our basic architectural or military vocabulary. Ultimately, what the internalist wants
may be nothing less than some demonstration of the rationality of morality. Robinson,
42
however, dismisses the internalist’s worry because he takes it to be asking for a

specification of the causal mechanism by which moral judgments produce action:
To suppose however, that the right moral theory has some special obligation to
identify the particular mechanical or biochemical mode of activation is a supposition
that would reach comic proportions in any other sphere of significant human
endeavor. (p.41).
Yet one does not have be a Humean to think that the realist must show how what
makes a moral claim true must also make our concern for it immediately appropriate
or intelligible. Not all worries about moral realism can be laid to a crass and
superannuated scientism.
Unfortunately, it is never entirely clear just what sort of realism Robinson is
defending. His general position seems to be that there are moral truths that are
completely prior to our ways of learning, reasoning, or caring about them. Robinson
appears committed to a kind of strong Moorean realism about moral properties,
although he does not consider the traditional problems of how we could hope to gain
knowledge of such things or why we should care about them. Robinson sometimes
gestures toward a more Aristotelian kind of perfectionism, where moral truths would
be grounded on what human beings need if they are to lead flourishing lives as human
beings. Some such perfectionism may well escape the motivational and
epistemological difficulties of Moorean realism, but it is unclear that it can maintain
the sort of conceptual priority of morality to our attitudes and ways of thinking that
Robinson takes to define realism.
Robinson turns from his general defense of realism to a defense of moral responsibility
against incompatibalist worries about the freedom of the will. It’s not at all clear what
these two topics have to do with each other. Robinson defends the familiar view that
to be properly held responsible, we must have the requisite capacities to perceive,
understand, and act from our judgments about moral truths, capacities that need not
be vitiated by weakness of will, unconscious motivation or self-deception. The view is
quite plausible, but there seems to be no argument as to why the moral realist is
more readily entitled to it than are any of the various “relativisms” under attack.
Robinson seems to be offering a familiar sort of compatibalist account, but he
frequently claims to be defending an “incompatibalist-libertarian” view. The
terminology is muddled, but Robinson seems to equate the compatibalist with anyone
who thinks that it is sufficient for moral responsibility that an agent’s act be caused by
the appropriate combination of her desires and beliefs. Robinson’s view would then be
incompatibalist insofar as it understands the conditions of responsibility in terms of
various powers of rational self-governance that cannot themselves be analyzed into
purely mechanistic relations. It’s hard to see what this might have to do with the
demand for “contra-causal freedom” normally associated with incompatibalism, and
Robinson certainly doesn’t supply any connection. He argues that if determinism
implied that we cannot really exercise reason in action, it would also entail that we
cannot exercise any reason in thought, thereby undermining any grounds we could
have for believing in determinism in the first place. Perhaps Robinson thinks that even
the determinist must ascribe to herself rational powers that involve counter-causal
freedom. Yet the dialectic only shows that the determinist must accept that the active
exercise of reason is something that in general can supervene on processes that are
determined on some level of description. The argument is not a refutation of “radical
determinism” (as Robinson presents it), but a refutation of the claim that real rational
agency would be precluded by such determinism.
43
Robinson construes praise and blame as forms of reward and punishment, bestowed
so as to encourage moral improvement. We are to be praised and blamed not for
purely fortuitous features and consequences of our actions, but for the contents of the
intentions from which we act, in terms of both the ends we aim at and the sorts of
risks to which, if foreseeable, we willingly expose others. The discussion focuses on
blame and guilt, ignoring important asymmetries between blame and praise. Robinson
denies that we might properly praise someone for her native intelligence or beauty,
being apparently unwilling to consider any non-moral forms of praise or blame. He
insists that one can feel shame only for moral failings, leaving us to wonder about the
person who seems ashamed, and not merely embarrassed, by his poverty, stupidity,
or ugliness.
Robinson contends that to act wrongly is to do something that “distorts”, “disfigures”,
or “destroys” some moral property. Punishment serves to “repair moral properties”
and work “toward the restoration of what the perpetrator has forfeited by way of
character.”(p.196). To forgive is to recognize that a wrongdoer has suffered enough
by way of punishment (perhaps merely in the experience of his own guilt), and to
cease inflicting any more punishment through one’s blame (where the mere
assessment of blameworthiness is itself supposed to count as a form of punishment).
The picture here is suggestive, but hard to evaluate without more of a story about
what character is supposed to be, or what it might be to distort or destroy a moral
property. Robinson usually treats character in terms of relatively stable and long-term
behavioral dispositions. However, he also seems to consider any intention or choice
we make to be part of our character as well, no matter how unrepresentative of our
general tendencies it may be. Robinson is similarly unclear as to the sort of moral
damage and repair that is at stake. I am not normally blameworthy if I release
someone from a debt, even though I have removed some sum of the moral property
being owed to someone. On the other hand, A is presumptively blameworthy for
shouting a racial insult at B, even though there doesn’t seem to be any interesting
sense in which any properties are destroyed or distorted in the act. Certain moral
demands have been violated or dishonored, but there is no obvious way to translate
this into the quasi-causal language of destruction and disfigurement. B is entitled to
respect as a rational, autonomous agent, and nothing A has done changes that. All the
moral properties that should have informed A’s action hold in the same way after the
insult as they did before. A has perhaps destroyed his own guiltlessness, but since this
fact is just a logical consequence of his having performed a blameworthy action, it can
hardly serve as an explanation of it. Yet such uninterpreted metaphors of damage and
repair are all Robinson gives us to make sense of just what we are supposed to be
doing when we take up the reactive attitudes toward others or ourselves.
Praise and Blame is a strangely unfocussed work that flits back and forth amongst a
wide array of philosophical topics but fails to sustain any substantive line of argument
for very long. Despite all the ground he covers, Robinson leaves us with conclusions
that are either fairly jejune versions of familiar positions or hopelessly vague if high-
minded gestures. The “moral realism” of the title turns out to be something of a red
herring, as there is no serious discussion anywhere in the book about the objectivity,
rationality, or epistemology of morality so construed. Rather, such realism seems to
be merely an excuse for treating a variety of loosely related (if interesting) topics
together. What results is a farrago that does not advance the current debate about
moral realism and the moral sentiments, and indeed does not even seem to have
caught up with it.
44
2003.01.12
Andrew Newman
The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics of
Predication
Newman, Andrew, The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics
of Predication, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 251pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN
0521811392.
Reviewed by Herbert Hochberg, University of Texas
The book is another item in the recent expanding literature taking up metaphysical
issues in the “analytic tradition.” It comes recommended by blurbs on the jacket
written by significant figures in the revival of metaphysics. Thus it is surprising and
disappointing to find a carelessness and ineptness of argument and critical analysis as
well as a succession of trivial verbal solutions to serious problems.
The author announces he is adhering to a “minimalist” view of propositions according
to which they are different from sentences since they are what is stated or expressed
but are not abstract entities that exist in a Platonic realm (p. 9). This means, “they
are only instantiated when thought by someone.” (How else would they be
“instantiated” one wonders.) G. Bergmann held such a view, carefully articulated and
defended, rather than casually expressed, from the 1950s, and it turns out that
author’s view is simply a version of Russell’s 1913 analysis. What the author really
wants to do is claim, as Bergmann explicitly did and as Russell did in his way, that
propositions are dependent on their “being instantiated” or “thought by” someone,
though, as he states matters, he seems to simply say that for a proposition to be
instantiated is for it to be thought by someone—thus explaining his use of
“instantiates.” Why are propositions then not “abstract”? It will turn out they are,
since they are “instantiated”. So we have a variant of the theme that only instantiated
universals exist.
Criticizing Quine’s problematic criterion of ontological commitment, the author ignores
the two-fold aspect involved: a criterion for determining the commitments of a
schema (language) and the determination of “what there is” via employing such a
criterion for a schema that fulfills certain criteria—being a “minimal” schema that
accommodates the statements of empirical science and mathematics, for example.
Thus it is hardly fair, and far too simple, to speak of determining what there is in
terms of features of language. It ignores the whole point of the “linguistic turn” in
philosophy that took clarifications to be aided by the use of clarified linguistic schema
that could fulfill very definite purposes. Thus, in logic, for example, without dealing
with certain kinds of “formalized” schemata, one could not precisely define “follows
from” (derived from) and investigate properties of that relation nor precisely specify
rules of derivation or proof—nor could one be precise about notions like “true in a
model.” The author’s fusing of Quine’s two-fold views about “ontology” comes out
clearly in two consecutive sentences: “For Quine . . . we reveal which things we take
to be objects . . . by quantifying over them. Others regard as real what our best
scientific theories assume to exist.” (47) These are hardly alternatives, and Quine, in
his way, held to both.
Chapter 3 is typical of the book. It spends the first 13 pages on an elementary
discussion of Russell, Wittgenstein and atomic facts, rehearsing various questions that
have arisen over the years, but dodging, though touching upon, the critical questions
raised by “possibilities” and false atomic sentences for a correspondence account of
45
truth. As history it is skimpy—as analysis it is empty. At best it calls attention to some

issues about nominalistic versus realistic interpretations of the Tractatus—questions
about the meaning of “states of affairs,” “possibilities” and “facts” (one could have
added “possible states of affairs”) without really probing into anything. The next five
pages introduce a symbolic apparatus to make the simple point, made by a Russell in
one sentence (which the author footnotes), that the sentence “aRb,” having three
terms (on a standard reading) in a juxtaposition “relation,” is of a different form than
the purported corresponding fact having two terms standing in the relation R. (But
then there is Sellars’ reading, which is neither raised nor discussed, that purports to
offer a way around the obvious objection—which Russell, but not the author, also
noted and discussed.) The book slides by the interesting issues of logical form and
order in facts with brief footnotes mentioning Russell’s taking them up in the 1913
Theory of Knowledge manuscript.
In a section entitled “Correspondence without Facts” the author sets out, and appears
to endorse, the view that it suffices to hold that a predicative sentence is true if and
only if “The particulars referred to by the proper names in the sentence actually
instantiate the universal referred to by the predicate in the sentence” (76) and the
order “of the proper names in the sentence reflects the order of the particulars under
the universal.” This, of course, raises the obvious issues about “actually instantiate”
and “under the universal,” as well as the less obvious one involving an account of the
“order of the particulars.” Obvious but, when all is said and done, simply dismissed.
More about this below.
Chapter IV deals with Russell’s theory of truth and views on acquaintance. It is
misleadingly stated, “The notion of acquaintance is such that the objects of
acquaintance are limited to things like sense data.” (90) No way—universal relations,
logical forms (whether they are “entities” or not), universal properties, common
qualities (as constituents of bundles of qualities, rather than “adjectives” of
particulars), even mental acts in the years prior to 1919, are also typically “objects” of
acquaintance (possibly even selves in 1912, if one recalls the discussion of Bismarck).
The author proceeds to hold that, for Russell, a belief “appears to be an act of a
person” and that Russell says that he uses the terms “belief” and “judgment” as
synonyms, but “both terms are ambiguous” in that each can “mean either the act of a
person or the content of that act.” Again—not right. For Russell, the terms indicate
universal relations, on the multiple-relation theory (whether the same relation or not
is immaterial—though “understanding” was sometimes used as the generic term,
“judgment” as a determinate form of an “understanding” relation). The “content” is
what is taken as the proposition in the 1913 manuscript and a “person” plays the role
of the traditional act in that manuscript. Though there are numerous statements by
Russell that propositions do not exist, the matter is complicated. Russell’s propositions
are neither Fregean senses of sentences nor Moore’s content properties, but “forms,”
albeit not logical forms, of particular understanding facts. (Being forms, they do not
occur as constituent terms in the analysis of belief facts such as—Believes(Othello,
loves, a, b).) Such forms are not logical forms since they can “contain” non-logical
“constants,” as in what is indicated by “U(S, loves, a, b)” with “U” and “S” as variables
ranging over “intentional” relations and persons, respectively. It expresses the content
(proposition) that a loves b. (Though Russell uses expressions with free variables, he
reads them as existential quantifications.)
The multiple-relation theory marks not only the attempt to dispense with Fregean
style propositions but is probably the beginning of Russell’s dispensing with Moore’s
(Brentano’s) mental acts, which he does in published form in 1921 in The Analysis of
46
Mind, after disposing of the self in 1919 (in 1918 in unpublished papers). Eventually
all basic standard particulars will be dispensed with in 1940—the term “standard” is to
note that in 1940 he will call common qualities of objects (construed as bundles of
qualities) “particulars.”
For Newman, as it turns out, (122 ff) propositions are “real units” since they can be
thought about as well as simply “thought.” They are things that “occur in belief
contexts” and can be abstracted from such contexts (123) and in that sense are
“abstract.” Thus the author repeats, in different words, Russell’s 1913 view taking
propositions as forms (but not logical forms) of belief, etc. facts—since he, like
Bergmann, takes them as instantiated “universals.” Facts, it turns out, are not units.
The discussion of the multiple-relation theory is guided by various recent secondary
sources and not a result of a careful examination of the original texts. It cites three
“most serious” criticisms as problems. Two are not problems at all, on a proper
understanding of the theory, and the third is basically Wittgenstein’s well known
criticism that Russell discussed in the 1918 logical atomism lectures—the problem of a
relation functioning as both a term, in a belief fact, and as a “relating” relation to help
“unify” the content. The author doesn’t grasp the implication of saying that a type
distinction between particulars and relations excludes “grosser impossibilities” (135)—
and thus that only certain nonsensical combinations are “possible.” For then one might
as well say that the terms and their ordering have to be such as to form a meaningful
sentence—thus giving up the theory—which is Wittgenstein’s point, and led to
Russell’s 1918 discussion. What the author also misses is the serious problem raised
by Russell’s transforming the multiple-relation theory, in cases with relational
contents, into one employing a dyadic relation holding between a person and a
purported existential fact (or a purported fact denoted by a definite description). For
such facts do not exist when the belief (judgment) is false.
The book proposes to advance a realist account of universals (and particulars) but to
avoid facts in setting out a correspondence theory of truth. So one is intrigued as to
how it will be done. The answer comes as a ripple in the wave of current talk about
ontological free lunches, supervenience, non-additions to being, fusions that are no
more than what is fused, etc. etc. Here it is even simpler—minimalist one might say.
Consider a red object. There is the particular object, A, and the property red. But
there is no need for the fact that the object is red to ground the truth that A is red.
No, all we need note is that the property is a “way” the object is. That takes care of
facts and all the problems about predication—end of story. The move is familiar from
attempts to deal with the Frege-Bradley regress by taking exemplification to be
dependent on A and red, and hence not really a relation giving rise to a further
relational state of affairs. Thus the fact of A’s being red will purportedly do. Here it
goes one step further. All we need are A and red, since red is a way A is. That is all
there is to it and is why the reader is treated to many words about the need for
instantiation. (Actually, the specific move is also familiar from variants of trope
theories—where a specific red trope (or a specific “instantiated” relational trope) is
“internally” tied or related—hence there is not “really” a connection or relation— to the
particular red object (pair of related objects) it is the quality of (relates).) Thus there
is no need to talk of any instantiation relation or compositional connection—depending
on the kind of trope theory. One can imagine Ryle pointing out the way to a pub if
asked if it were indeed a fact that there was a pub nearby, thus pointedly indicating
that you should have simply asked the way. Newman, in a more explicitly neo-
Wittgenseinian mode than the one he adopts, might proclaim: Don’t say that “A is
red” is true if and only if the fact (state of affairs) that A is red exists!—Assert instead:
47
“A is red” is true if and only if red is a way A is. This recalls Sellars, about a half-
century ago, holding that we don’t have the fact that A is red, we just have “A is red”
correctly picturing A as red (Science and Metaphysics, p. 136), and we don’t have the
fact that A and B exemplify the relation R, we just have A and B in a complex matter-
of-factual relation (Ibid, p. 137). Sellars is in neither the index nor the bibliography
The book is marred by careless phrasing. Thus a “substitutional” reading of “(F)(Fa iff
Fb) iff a=b” is given as what “can be said of a can be said of b” (222). Not really,
since one “can say” anything logically appropriate of a and of b—we are not talking of
what “can be said” about objects but of what “is true of” them. A discussion of identity
takes up numerical identity and what is often called the Russell-Leibniz definition of
“=“. Discussing C. McGinn’s defense of the purported “Fregean Thesis” that identity is
to be characterized by the “unique relation a thing has to itself,” Newman takes up
“Leibniz’s Law” and the issue of whether identity is to be understood, following
McGinn’s apparent view, as primitive, or in terms of the traditional three “laws”
(reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity), or defined by “(F)(Fa iff Fb) df. a=b.” Nothing of
interest is noted nor is it noted that one rehashes old themes (especially Moore’s and
Russell’s distinguishing numerical from conceptual identity going back to Moore’s 1901
paper “Identity”) or that Frege writes: “Now Leibniz’s definition is as follows: ‘Things
are the same as each other of which one can be substituted for the other without loss
of truth.’ This I propose to adopt as my own definition of identity.” (Grundlagen, sec.
65). Instead, the author is concerned with an “opening for a modus tollens” provided
by Frege’s taking “a=b” and “a=a” to have different senses. [The modus tollens he
won’t get; familiar problems with Fregean semantics, going back to “On Denoting,” do
arise.] After a number of pages on identity and difference, much of it hinging on the
difference between “a=a” and “a=b”—which simply amounts to being able to interpret
the latter, but not the former, so that it is false (given standard interpretations and
“=“ being fixed), we are given the author’s “pragmatic” view. It is the purpose of
identity sentences “to license the merging of files of information, or the applying of
two descriptions . . . or the applying of two names to the object referred to.” On the
other hand, “Difference sentences . . . forbid the merging of files . . . .” (228) So
much for the issues of identity, individuation and diversity.
In discussing the structure of a fact, the author finds it helpful to use hieroglyphs like
“[] () ()” to speak of the structure of a relational fact, instead of the more familiar
“Σxy.” He rightly takes a Fregean-style approach to be one that locates the structure
in the incompleteness of the predicative component of a fact or proposition. He also
finds Grossmann’s variant of an “Iowan” (a term he borrows from Armstrong)
approach odd, as Grossmann gives a Fregean account of relational facts but takes the
structure of a monadic fact to be a “real unit.” (I gather that taking it to be a real unit
is to take it to be an entity in its own right in the way Frege and Bradley found
paradoxical.) He doesn’t note that this “peculiarity” was also held at times by Russell,
given Russell’s view that relations do not require being related to what they relate but
that particulars exemplify universal qualities—Bradley was stopped by the first
relation, so to speak. (Sometimes Russell, as Newman rightly interprets him, also
treated monadic properties as unsaturated, along with relations.) The author’s
solution to the problems posed by relational predication, the key theme of the book, is
found in a relation being “both an entity and in one sense the way in which the
particulars are related” (148). [Sometimes the relation is just “doing its job” by
relating particulars (98).] So much for facts.
Moreover, “the specific way the particulars are related” is accounted for by “the mode
of predication and by the insertion of different particulars in different slots in the
48
relation itself.” (148) This is humorous on two counts. First, it happens to be

Grossmann’s Fregean-style view (Newman would like Quine’s Methods of Logic using,
if I recall rightly, holes (little circles) next to predicates). Second, the author lapses
into metaphors and talk of “slots” (places in the relation for Grossmann, and, following
him in recent years, for Armstrong) and “insertion.” This is a “solution” with obvious
holes of its own, and one that basically repeats the Fregean pattern while explicitly
packing the problem of relational order into the “specific way” the particulars “fill” the
slots (is filling another relation? with its own holes?). Though the notions of “truth
condition” and “unit” occupy crucial roles in the book, neither “unit” nor “truth
condition” occur in the index and we are never really told what a truth condition is or
what it is to be a unit (but to think of a unit is to think of a single thing (106), and we
apparently have fictional as well as real units (107)).
2003.01.13
Joachim Kohler
Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
Kohler, Joachim, Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche,
translation by Ronald Taylor, Yale University Press, 2002, 336pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN
0300092784.
Reviewed by Mathias Risse, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University
Writing an ambitious biography that emphasizes Nietzsche’s sexuality, Köhler intends

to show that Nietzsche was gay, and that this insight leads to a reinterpretation of his
work. He claims that “Nietzsche’s intuitive philosophy cannot be understood apart
from his profoundest experience of sexuality” (p xvii), and that a reconstruction of his
hidden life leads to “a radically different picture of his philosophy” (p xi). Köhler
assumes that “received views” of Nietzsche’s philosophy depend on the assumption
that he is “a sexless intellectual with a walrus moustache” (p xii). In support of his
claim that Nietzsche’s philosophy should be interpreted in light of his sexual
experiences, Köhler quotes extensively from Nietzsche. Yet curiously, he does not
address Nietzsche’s exclamation, in Ecce Homo, that his writings are one thing, and
he himself is another (section 1 of Why I Write Such Good Books). Be that as it may,
Köhler purports to discuss philosophy, and thus philosophers should take notice.
This book originally appeared in German in 1989, and the author decided to omit the
second part of the original, a commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Köhler explains
that any reader who followed his account would have no further need for guidance. If
that is true, however, one wonders why German-speaking readers of the original do
still need such guidance. Much in the book indeed prepares the grounds for
Zarathustra: for instance, Köhler tells us repeatedly that Zarathustra draws on
Nietzsche’s nightmares and fantasies as a fatherless child raised first under the strict
regiment of his mother, grandmother, and paternal aunts, and later in the rigorous
prep school of Pforta. Since the Zarathustra commentary is missing, we only learn bits
and pieces about how such references may illuminate that work. There is no extended
discussion of any of Nietzsche’s works, while the short remarks Köhler offers are
sometimes inaccurate. For instance, on p 213, Köhler refers to the oppression of
instincts depicted in the Genealogy, making it sound as if that passage gave an
explanation for a given individual’s feelings of guilt. Yet it does not, at least not quite
the way Köhler thinks; what Nietzsche explains there is something about the process
49
of civilization that occurred in an early era and does lead to the bad conscience as we
know it, but only mediated through other developments. Unfortunately, also, Köhler
quotes the Colli-Montinari edition by volume only, and does not always tell us which
work he is quoting.
So was Nietzsche gay? Personally, I have never cared much about Nietzsche’s
sexuality, and Köhler has not convinced me that I should. But let us explore his case.
Köhler shows that the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay illuminates many episodes in
his life, and that some contemporaries thought that he was gay. What more could one
expect? While it is presumably not true of the European 19th century what Peter
Brown says (in his The Body and Society) of late antiquity, namely, that it is a world
irretrievably closed to us, we must keep in mind that in some regards Nietzsche’s was
a different world indeed: the experience of diversity was limited; sexuality was not
openly discussed, while homosexuality was often punishable by incarceration. (It did
not just happen to Oscar Wilde in England.) Also, in Germany at least, a strong
mentality of duty-bound service prevailed, not to the community, but to the emperor
and to the Obrigkeit. Individual desires and ambitions were subject to an amount of
social control alien to most of us. So it should be unsurprising that no direct evidence
of Nietzsche’s homosexuality emerges. Still, some skepticism remains: there is no
specific person with whom Köhler claims unambiguously that Nietzsche had a
homosexual relationship, or with whom he longed to have one. No reference to a gay
lover appears in Nietzsche’s writings, not even in a note book, although Nietzsche, for
most of his sane life, had little reason to suspect that, one day, scholars would eagerly
publish even material he had discarded. There are no such references even from the
days when he was losing his mind and his grip on propriety to such an extent that he
drafted a letter to the emperor. During those days, however, Nietzsche still thought of
Cosima Wagner.
The evidence, then, is exclusively indirect. Telling, for instance, is a conversation, in
1876, about a self-portrait of Hans Holbein’s, of which Nietzsche said it displayed “lips
made for kissing”—an observation that may not jump to a straight man’s mind. Less
telling, for instance, is the episode of Nietzsche asking his student von Scheffler to
join him for a vacation. Inappropriate as this presumably was, it is no indication of
homosexuality, given that the competing hypothesis is that Nietzsche was a sensitive
if perhaps socially somewhat maladjusted (but at any rate straight) man trying to
connect to like-minded souls wherever he could reach them, and was often rebuked in
that process. The famous episode of Wagner contacting Nietzsche’s physician appears
as well: Wagner sent word to the doctor to inform him that excessive masturbation
was responsible for Nietzsche’s health problems. Köhler interprets Wagner as
lamenting about Nietzsche’s lack of intercourse with women. Köhler displays particular
ingenuity by exploring yet another episode, which has puzzled Nietzsche biographers:
In a letter to Nietzsche on his 33rd birthday, Paul Rée reminded him of an earlier joint
stay in the village Bex, insisting that stay amounted to a picture of perfection “even if
Stella had not been there.” So who is “Stella”? Offering his own answer, Köhler refers
to a passage in Hölderlin’s Hyperion where the hero asks: “Do you know how Plato
loved his Stella”? Stella, the Latin word for star, was a male character. Does Köhler
mean to suggest that Rée and Nietzsche were gay lovers, at least briefly? Presumably,
and then he goes on to say that it was Rée’s Jewish nose that turned Nietzsche off.
This is as close as Köhler comes to actually connecting Nietzsche’s alleged
homosexuality to a particular person.
Very illuminating is Köhler’s suggestion that Nietzsche went to Italy because it offered
refuge to German homosexuals exiled from their own country. Long before Thomas
50
Mann’s Aschenbach encountered the boy Tadzio, German homosexuals ventured south
to find their own Tadzios. Köhler focuses on Nietzsche’s journey to Sicily in 1882, from
which he seems to have emerged unusually well relaxed. We know nothing about
what Nietzsche did in Sicily, but Köhler argues that he could not possibly have gone
for any other reason than to seek homosexual encounters. (Köhler includes
photographs of Sicilian adonises taken by a German photographer who had made a
permanent transition from the cold, Protestant North of Germany to the allegedly
sexually liberated South of Italy. What happened to the supervision of the Catholic
Church down there?) Köhler writes as if that trip had been the culmination of
Nietzsche’s homosexual life, whatever else that life amounted to.
Given this background, Köhler approaches Nietzsche’s failed proposal to Lou Salomé.
Joining Rée and Salomé in Rome after returning from Sicily, Nietzsche was now
seriously concerned about his reputation, says Köhler. “In Lou he found a soul who
legitimized, stimulated and entertained him and who was desperately anxious to
conceal that side of the female psyche which repelled him. She was not interested in
sexual love” (p 205). The ideal match for Nietzsche, apparently, but Lou was not even
interested in a sexless marriage with Nietzsche (useful to both of them to cover up
what was deviant sexuality by the social standards of the time), though that is
precisely what Friedrich Carl Andreas got later. So far from epitomizing Nietzsche’s
failure with women, Lou was appealing to him because she was, as Rilke put it, a
“female youth.” Once again, skepticism remains: if Nietzsche did not love her, why did
this episode cause such agony? The origin of Nietzsche’s syphilis, by the way,
according to Köhler, is to be found in a visit to a male brothel in Genoa, rather than a
female brothel in Cologne.
Still, while there are lingering questions and no conclusive evidence, Köhler’s case is
strong: he makes it a very real possibility that Nietzsche was gay. Yet granting that
much, or more, for the sake of the argument, why should we care whether Nietzsche
was gay if we are interested in his philosophy? After all, we do not have to consult
Rousseau’s Confessions to learn about the social contract, though Rousseau reveals
(in disgusting detail) precisely the kind of information that Köhler painstakingly
reconstructs about Nietzsche. The best reason why we should care is Köhler’s claim
that his approach throws light on Zarathustra, but, again, he omitted the part in which
he would make good on that claim. As it is, the climax of Köhler’s book is chapter 12,
like the book itself called “Zarathustra’s Secret.” That chapter, however, is
unsatisfactory.
The core of chapter 12 is Köhler’s reflection on Nietzsche’s revelation-like experience
in August 1881, when the thought of the eternal recurrence came to him. Köhler asks:
“Whatever happened to Nietzsche by the lakeside on that August day in 1881 – why
was he convinced that his vision had objective validity?” (p 233). He continues:
The answer is quite simple: it was not the recurrence as depicted on the shield that
persuaded him but the recurrence of the shield itself. It had penetrated his
consciousness long ago but he saw it as though for the first time. It seemed to be not
an image preserved in his memory but a vision both unique and familiar from time
immemorial. Something that had been forgotten for ages past but that now, like a
flash of lightning, reappeared, recognizable down to the last detail (p 234).
This “shield” is the “shield of necessity, the tablet of eternal things” (p 232), the shield
of Achilles, as Homer describes it in the Iliad. That shield, for Nietzsche, symbolized
his Greek ideal at the purest. “Standing on the shore of the lake at Silvaplana . . . he
suddenly found himself confronted by a vision of perfection, his beloved Arcadia.”
From there Köhler continues to explain that the reoccurrence of that vision (both on
51
that shield and in Nietzsche’s vision when standing on that lakeshore) persuaded
Nietzsche of the “objective validity” of eternal recurrence.
I can offer no alternative account of what happened on that day in Silvaplana, but I
hope it was not what Köhler claims it was. For if Nietzsche jumped to conclusions
about the “objective validity” of the idea of eternal recurrence, which at any rate is
about the repeated occurrence of everything, from the repeated appearance in his life
of images that reminded him of classical Greece, his powers of inference would have
been seriously impeded already in 1881. Fortunately, we have no reason to believe
that this was so. Köhler’s reconstruction is the product of wildly implausible
speculation. In a different approach Köhler traces the origin of eternal recurrence to
Hölderlin’s Hyperion. The character Diotima (borrowed in turn from Plato’s
Symposium) says there: “What is everything that men have thought and done over
the centuries compared with just one moment of love?” (p 239). While there is a
connection to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, Köhler seems to overreach by
suggesting that this idea “grew out of” Hölderlin’s “metaphysics of friendship” (p 239).
Philosophers have asked different questions about eternal recurrence: is this most
plausibly understood as a cosmological thesis, or a decision test, or an affirmation
test, or something yet different? Can it replace the Categorical Imperative, the Ten
Commandments, and the utilitarian calculus? While Köhler is not required to address
these questions, his suggestions even fail to make eternal recurrence interesting. We
never even learn just what Köhler thinks eternal recurrence is. He sometimes talks as
if it had something to do with the return of an individual’s own past, but it is certain
that that is not what it is.
Chapter 12 also deals with Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God, which
Köhler interprets in light of the death of Nietzsche’s father. Nietzsche’s deepest
problem, throughout his life, was to come to terms with that death, says Köhler, and
he never outgrew the nightmares triggered by this event. The language of the death
of God finally enabled him to diagnose his condition—and the therapy was to endorse
the eternal recurrence and the value of friendship allegedly captured therein. Yet at
this stage, Köhler abandons philosophy altogether. While it is one thing to argue that
ideas articulated only decades later resonate with a philosopher’s childhood
experiences, it is quite another to write as if there were nothing more to them. What
is philosophically interesting about Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is
whether there is anything left to do for moral philosophy in the absence of the
omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent deity of Christianity. Are Kantian ethics and
utilitarianism, most prominently, only pale imitations of fragments of moral thought
that are ultimately bound to collapse if the notion of God is discarded for justificatory
purposes? Once again, Köhler is not required to address such questions, but he
reduces Nietzsche’s writings to mere autobiography if he thinks the death of
Nietzsche’s father is all there is to his reflections on the death of God.
This, then, is Zarathustra’s secret: Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s “son,” talks in cryptic
terms about Nietzsche’s life itself, his experiences as a fatherless son, and his
subsequent experiences as a homosexual condemned to hiding his inclinations. It is
also Zarathustra who suggests the therapy: the pure ecstasy of friendship. Yet in
addition to the concern articulated in the last paragraph, we are now also wondering
what the connection is between Nietzsche’s alleged homosexuality, which seems to be
part of what Zarathustra reveals, properly understood, and the eternal recurrence, or
the superman (whom Köhler brings a bit too much in connection with Nietzsche’s
Sicilian encounters, saying that Nietzsche “saw” the superman in Sicily (p 255)).
Köhler insists that Nietzsche’s philosophy must be rethought once we come to terms
52
with his homosexuality, but fails to explain why Nietzsche’s homosexuality even
informs his idea of eternal recurrence. Just how do philosophers have to modify their
thinking about eternal recurrence if that idea is proposed by a gay man with
nightmares and fantasies, rather than a “sexless intellectual with a walrus
moustache?” Would we have to rethink the Categorical Imperative if new research
revealed that Kant and Lampe were gay lovers? It might well be possible that
Nietzsche’s hidden homosexuality helps explain passages in Zarathustra; if so, it is so
much more unfortunate that the Zarathustra commentary was excluded from the
translation. For at least this reader is incapable of applying Köhler’s insights
rewardingly to Nietzsche’s most notorious work without further assistance. But at any
rate, the connection between Nietzsche’s hidden homosexuality and central themes,
such as the death of God and eternal recurrence, remains obscure. Thus we still do
not know why we should care about Nietzsche’s sexuality. This remains Köhler’s
secret, and he guards it well.
Such dissatisfaction with Köhler’s book, I believe, is not motivated by philosophical
esotericism. Surely, authors like Nietzsche must be kept accessible to the educated
public, and no harm is done if such popularization sacrifices philosophical depth. Yet
the doubts we have raised are not primarily philosophical doubts. They are doubts
that arise just by asking straightforward questions about what Köhler is up to. Köhler’s
book makes for a great read because it is fascinating and thought-provoking for what
it is: a well-written biography about Nietzsche emphasizing his sexuality. But it does
not force us to reconsider what matters about his philosophy.
2003.01.14
Matthew B. Ostrow
Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation
Ostrow, Matthew B., Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation, Cambridge
University Press, 2002, 175pp, $20.00 (pbk), ISBN 0-521-00649-X.
Reviewed by Christopher Pincock, Purdue University
This study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [TLP] builds on and, in several important

respects, goes beyond recent, controversial reinterpretations of the early Wittgenstein
by Cora Diamond and Juliet Floyd. The most welcome innovation that Ostrow offers is
a careful consideration of the details of the text itself, including Wittgenstein’s
discussion of states of affairs, facts, pictures, logical analysis and the essence of the
proposition. These discussions allow Ostrow to clarify one way in which we can take
seriously Wittgenstein’s remark towards the end of the Tractatus that “My propositions
serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually
recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up
beyond them” (TLP 6.54). Despite his considerable innovations, however, I believe
that much more work is needed to show that Ostrow’s interpretation is correct.
Ostrow’s “Introduction” helpfully situates his interpretation of the Tractatus in the
range of major interpretations offered to date. On the one side are the more
traditional interpretations of the Tractatus given by writers such as Pears, Anscombe
and Hacker. They all attempt to downplay the significance or the scope of the book’s
peculiar conclusion. According to Ostrow, Pears interprets Wittgenstein as offering a
philosophical account of the world, language and logic, and so Pears must completely
dismiss 6.54 as a mistake or misguided. Others, such as Anscombe, take 6.54’s use of
the term “nonsense” in a peculiar way. “Nonsense” indicates only that what is
53
communicated in the book goes beyond what can be said, where “said” is understood
in terms of the previously developed theory of saying and showing. While such an
approach can accommodate 6.54, it still faces the challenge of articulating exactly
how this kind of nonsense can communicate something that cannot be
straightforwardly said.
Ostrow rejects both of these interpretative strategies and sides with the more radical
proposals of Cora Diamond. Beginning with her paper “Throwing Away the Ladder”,
Diamond argued that 6.54 requires that we take all of the Tractatus leading up to 6.54
to be “just so much gibberish” (p. 5).1 The burden on this proposal is, of course, to
explain why someone would spend so much time writing and publishing something
that was complete nonsense. Diamond, and other interpreters such as Floyd and
Conant, have argued that the Tractatus has a “therapeutic intent” (p. 7) to bring the
reader to see the hopelessness of traditional philosophy and its problems. These
readings do have the salutary effect of downplaying the divisions between the early
and later Wittgenstein, but to date have yet to present a fully satisfying picture of how
straightforward nonsense can be philosophically therapeutic.
Ostrow can be seen as taking the next step along the road set by Diamond as he
claims, paradoxically, that “a sentence like “’The world is everything that is the case’
is nonsense” is itself nonsense” (p. 10). Thus, his interpretation is a ‘dialectical’
interpretation because he reads Wittgenstein as taking up a host of philosophical
terms, and showing for each of them how what appeared to be a clearly understood
term was in fact nonsensical. There are no significant exceptions to this critical
project, though, and so terms like “nonsense” themselves are eventually criticized.
The point of all this for Ostrow is to liberate the reader from philosophy by vigorously
engaging in a range of philosophical projects and showing that they are futile. He
reads the Tractatus, then, in a way that many of us have learned to read
Wittgenstein’s later Philosophical Investigations. In both texts, at each point a
philosophical position or problem is shown to be based on confusion or error.
Ostrow’s book is divided into four chapters, where his interpretation is supported by
considering some of the major topics of the book. Chapter I, “Pictures and logical
atomism”, focuses on the metaphysics of objects, states of affairs and facts that
Wittgenstein presents in the opening sections of the Tractatus, and some parts of the
explanation of picturing. Chapter II, “What is analysis?”, considers Wittgenstein’s
account of logical analysis, e.g. when a proposition is analyzed into its logical
components. Chapter III, “The essence of the proposition”, concerns the general form
of the proposition and the connection to Wittgenstein’s explanation of logical
inference. Finally, chapter IV, “The liberating word”, summarizes the aim of the book
in light of the previous chapters’ investigations. Ostrow argues for a fundamentally
ethical aim for the Tractatus by connecting philosophy with an alienation from the
world: “If, for the Tractatus, philosophy comes to stand for our fundamental
estrangement from the world, it is then in the disappearance of philosophy that our
redemption lies” (p. 133).
A summary of chapter II will hopefully convey the flavor of Ostrow’s general
approach. Wittgenstein says
In a proposition a thought can be expressed in such a way that elements of the
propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thought.
I call such elements ‘simple signs’, and such a proposition ‘completely analysed’.
The simple signs employed in a proposition are called names.
A name means an object. The object is its meaning. (‘A’ is the same sign as ‘A’.)
54
The configuration in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs in the

propositional sign. (TLP 3.2-3.21)
No propositions of ordinary language are completely analyzed in this sense, and this
has led many commentators to see Wittgenstein as making a substantial philosophical
claim here about the possibility of either constructing a logically perfect language or
carrying out a complete analysis of the propositions of ordinary language. Ostrow
argues for a quite different purpose in these remarks through a consideration of the
ordinary claim “The watch is lying on the table”. An analysis of this proposition would
initially lead to an existentially quantified statement:
if the watch in the above example could be completely characterized in terms of a
description of the color (C) and shape (S) of its parts, then the analysis of the
proposition asserting that the watch is lying on the table – assuming the phrase “lying
on the table” (L) could be understood as indicating a form – would begin with an
existentially quantified statement of the form: “ x (Cx & Sx & Lx).” (p. 56)
This, in turn, would yield a series of propositions for each of the possibilities
compatible with the truth of the original claim.
Such an understanding of logical analysis is only the first step for Ostrow. For a
complete analysis must terminate in names, and a reflection on what names are and
how they are exposed in analysis greatly complicates the whole project. Here
Wittgenstein’s version of Frege’s context principle is crucial, as it shows us that names
are signs that appear in a whole collection of propositions: “We understand a meaning
only when we look at how the propositional sign functions within a whole class of
propositions” (p. 62). And, this in turn leads us to see that a complete analysis will
involve rewriting a proposition in terms of various coordinate systems where names as
traditionally understood designate a place within these systems. The systems
themselves make naming possible, but they cannot themselves be named. For
example, in the watch case “The forms of color and spatial position are thus absorbed
into my method of representation; they become part of the means by which I can
describe the world rather than further elements that themselves have linguistic
representatives” (p. 68).
This leads Ostrow to see in “The sign determines a logical form only together with its
logical-syntactical application” (TLP 3.327) an invocation to focus primarily on the use
of propositional signs by individuals. The correct analysis of a proposition depends on
the use that we put it to. Here, though, we do not have a traditional philosophical
claim about language, but rather only an attempt “to make evident the nature of the
logico-philosophical inquiry itself” (p. 70). For in getting us to realize that logical
analysis is dependent on our use of language, and not on any deep metaphysical facts
about the world, Wittgenstein is seen to be undermining the kind of logico-
metaphysical investigations associated with Frege’s rigid division between concepts
and objects or with Russell’s elaborate theory of types. Both of these approaches are
rejected by Wittgenstein because they fail to take seriously the problematic character
of philosophical investigation itself. Instead, for Wittgenstein,
what begins as an attempt to specify the necessary features of the world ends with
the recognition that these extend as far as our language itself, that the “specification”
can be no more than an acknowledgement that we speak, sometimes with sense,
sometimes nonsensically (p. 72).
The project of logical analysis is itself undermined and with it the whole cadre of
philosophical terms such as “object”, “fact”, “complex” and “number” that go along
with it.
55
In several instances, then, what appear to be straightforward philosophical claims

about the world, language or logic are argued to be rather invitations to reflect on
traditional philosophical claims and projects. In each case Ostrow finds in the text the
materials to show how these philosophical projects are frustrated. He is thus able to
handle not only 6.54, but also Wittgenstein’s programmatic remarks about philosophy
such as “Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (4.112). By working
through several key stages of the text, and by extending the scope of what is
nonsensical to ascriptions of nonsense themselves, Ostrow has made an important
contribution to the interpretative line occupied by Diamond, Floyd and Conant.
Despite these advantages, Ostrow’s book suffers from several flaws. To begin with a
minor one, the book will be all but incomprehensible to someone who has not worked
through the Tractatus and several commentaries. Ostrow often launches into intricate
rereadings of key passages of the text without discussing the context in which these
passages appear. While alternative interpretations of the Tractatus are discussed in
the introduction, in the text itself there is little or no argumentation against other
interpretations. Ostrow’s book, then, is certainly not suitable as an introduction to the
Tractatus, and will be of use only to specialists in the Tractatus.
A narrow intended audience alone is not a serious flaw, though. What is more
unsettling are the frequent interpretative leaps that Ostrow makes in his discussion.
For example, it is quite difficult to accept both that 3.327 is an invitation to focus on
our use of language and that Wittgenstein made this recommendation to get us to
reflect on philosophy itself. Wittgenstein’s solipsism seems to preclude any serious
concern with our use of language, and there is little evidence in the text that this
remark is meant to have any kind of metaphilosophical purpose. Rather, Wittgenstein
seems to be making a technical distinction between a sign and a symbol and noting
that we can only determine which sign is which symbol if we include how it is used to
represent to world.
This leads me to Ostrow’s admittedly frank confession to have given “short shrift to
the Tractatus’ discussions of number, probability, scientific theory, the propositional
attitudes and solipsism” (p. 16). These topics are crucial because they are discussed
in the 5s and 6s that lead up to 6.54, the lynchpin of Ostrow’s entire interpretation. It
is a remarkable consequence of Ostrow’s interpretation that mathematics, scientific
laws and philosophy are all nonsense. Given Wittgenstein’s longstanding interest in
the philosophy of mathematics and science, it simply defies belief that claims such as
The propositions of mathematics are equations, and therefore pseudo-propositions
(TLP 6.2)
If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way: There are laws of
nature.
But of course that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest. (TLP 6.36)
have no meaningful philosophical content.2 These are the most difficult parts of the
Tractatus for Ostrow to handle, and until he does so his interpretation cannot be
accepted.
An alternative interpretation of the Tractatus might take seriously the various roles
that Wittgenstein attributes to mathematical, ethical, psychological and law-like
claims. While each of these types of claims falls short of saying anything in the
restricted sense of “saying” described in the Tractatus, they all have some genuine
use. Furthermore, Wittgenstein appears to present philosophy as the activity of
separating out the different kinds of uses of language when he says, “Philosophy aims
at the logical clarification of thoughts” (TLP 4.112).3
56
This point highlights a more fundamental difficulty with Ostrow’s methodology, and
this difficulty extends, I believe, also to the work of Diamond, Floyd and Conant. In
attempting to link 6.54 with the later Wittgenstein’s supposedly anti-philosophical
methodology, they have given up any attempt to take the Tractatus’ own historical
context seriously. The views of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries besides Frege and
Russell are scarcely mentioned and the possible sources of Wittgenstein’s own views
are never explored. Rather, we are given an investigation of a disembodied text. I fear
that until we situate the Tractatus better in its own time and place, we will make little
progress in reconstructing its intended content.
Endnotes
1. See Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, MIT Press, 1991.
2. See Mathieu Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics,
Clarendon Press, 1998 for a discussion of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics.
3. This approach was suggested in Hans Sluga's lectures on Wittgenstein in the fall of
2001.
57
2003.02.01
Nicholas White
Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics
White, Nicholas, Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2002,
382pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0198250592.
Reviewed by Paula Gottlieb, University of Wisconsin-Madison
On the front cover of Nicholas White’s new book, Individual and Conflict in Greek
Ethics, is a picture of William Blake’s rendition of the famous statue of Laocoon and
his sons in violent conflict with two gigantic snakes.1 White describes how the
influential eighteenth century German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw in
this statue (which Winckelmann mistakenly thought to stem from the time of
Alexander the Great) the harmony and serenity which he associated with the ancient
Greeks, in contrast with the disharmony of his own age.2 According to White, modern
philosophers are equally ridiculous when they look to the past and suppose that the
main aim of ancient Greek philosophers was to show that all worthwhile human aims
are in harmony with each other, in contrast with moderns who are far more aware of
conflict. White’s aim is to debunk the idea that there is a homogeneous group, “the
Greeks”, who held such a contrasting view, and to present “something like a
prolegomenon to a history of Greek ethics—a piece of ground-clearing” (p. xiii) to
show how the idea gained currency and why it is mistaken. By tracing views about
ancient Greek philosophy from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, White also
aims to convince his readers of the importance of historiography. The book addresses
a broader readership than specialists in ancient Greek philosophy.
According to White, the historical story goes as follows: Europeans of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, disillusioned with what they saw as the modern condition of
disharmony and fragmentation, had uncritical admiration for what they considered to
be the harmony of ancient Greece, its culture, art, sculpture, architecture and political
institutions. Modern philosophers are unwittingly heir to this tradition when they
attribute to all the ancient Greek philosophers a matching philosophical view aimed at
minimizing conflicts in practical reasoning. According to this view, which White calls
“harmonizing eudaimonism”, (a) each human being has a single ultimate rational aim,
happiness (eudaimonia) and (b) all worthwhile aims are harmoniously subsumed
under this one aim in such a way that (c) happiness cannot conflict with any other
(rational) aim beyond itself. On White’s account, when Kant suggested that happiness
may indeed conflict with something beyond itself, reason, and that inclination and
duty may provide conflicting considerations, those who opposed him, notably Schiller
and Hegel, relied on a harmonizing eudaimonist interpretation of ancient Greek
philosophy to make their case. In the nineteenth and twentieth century the debate
continued: According to White, Kantians, for example, Sidgwick and Prichard, argued
that Greek eudaimonism is mistaken, and hegelians, for example, Green and other
British idealists, thought that Greek harmonizing eudaimonism is correct. In White’s
view, discussion of Greek ethics has now come to be dominated by Kantians and
Hegelians, with Hegelians gaining the upper hand. There are two modern Hegelian
strategies developed in response to the Kantian view, according to White, the fusionist
strategy according to which one’s own good just is identical with the good of others,
and the inclusivist strategy according to which one’s own good includes the good of
others. White argues that Hegel’s views on harmony in the Greek polis spawned both
these views. Finally, there are other modern philosophers, for example, Anscombe,
Williams and MacIntyre, who think that ancient philosophical thought is significantly
58
different from our own. According to White, none of these philosophers have a correct
view of what the ancient Greeks thought, and they all, like Winckelmann, mistakenly
treat classical Greek thought as homogeneous and paradigmatic.
In order to pave the way for his thesis that the Greeks could and did recognize
conflicts between different rational considerations, and to show that this occurred
more in the classical period than later, White discusses imperatival language in
ancient Greek poetry, drama, history and philosophy. There then follows a chapter
apiece on Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophers. White argues that, while it is
unclear whether Socrates is a harmonizing eudaimonist, neither Plato nor Aristotle is,
but for different reasons. Finally, White argues that Hellenistic philosophers, in
particular Epicureans and Stoics, are harmonizing eudaimonists, but, he claims, this
marks the ultimate irony, since those moderns who favor harmonizing eudaimonism
are not at all partial to Hellenistic philosophy.
In the following I shall first make a few comments on White’s historiography and then
raise some points about the Greek philosophers.
The Historical Story
It is unclear why White begins with eighteenth-century scholarship, since
Winckelmann himself relies heavily on Roman authors, especially Pliny, for his views
about Greece and Greek art. (Even so, Winckelmann disagrees with Pliny that Greek
art ended with the death of Alexander the Great, arguing that it continued in Sicily
and was kept alive by the Romans.3 ) Not all of the major philosophical figures fit
White’s trajectory. White himself notes Nietzsche and G. E. Moore as exceptions.
Hegel, according to White, did not think that classical Greek thought was
homogeneous. White also downplays the influence of Utilitarianism on the British
philosophers, with the strange result that Sidgwick is classified as a Kantian, because
he distinguishes egoistic and universal reasons. In discussing Anscombe’s and
Williams’ comparisons between modern and ancient philosophy, White only briefly
mentions that their animus is directed as much towards utilitarianism as it is towards
Kant.
White classifies many twentieth-century commentators as Hegelian inclusivists, but
’inclusivism’ in Aristotelian scholarship, as White himself notes, is a term of art. The
modern debate about inclusivism concerns whether Aristotle thinks that happiness
includes all goods and good activities or whether instead he thinks that happiness
consists in only one activity, for example, contemplation. Hardie, Ackrill and Cooper,
leading inclusivists on White’s account, are not debating other philosophers who share
their view that Aristotle is an inclusivist, but disagree about whether inclusivism is
correct; the present debate concerns what Aristotle’s view actually is. To complicate
matters further, the participants disagree about whether Aristotle is consistently an
inclusivist or not. Hardie thinks that Aristotle is confused. Ackrill and early Cooper
think that Aristotle is an inclusivist in the bulk of his Nicomachean Ethics, but not in
book X.4 More recently, increasingly sophisticated and more far-reaching versions of
non-inclusivism and inclusivism have been propounded, for example by Kraut and
Irwin respectively, but the dispute remains a dispute about the interpretation of the
Greek text.
Finally, as a result of a new turn in Kantian scholarship, according to which Kant’s
ethics differs from the version attacked by Schiller, Aristotelian commentators now
see the relationship between Kant’s and Aristotle’s ethics in a new light. White is
dismissive of this trend, but it is gaining ground. In short, modern commentators on
Aristotle do not easily fit White’s Hegelian versus Kantian classifications, and their
views are no more homogeneous than those of his ancient Greeks.
59
The Philosophers
First, Plato. White’s main argument centers on Plato’s claim that it is just for the
guardians of the ideal city to stop contemplating the Forms in order to rule in the city.
According to White, they face a conflict between their happiness and a broader aim,
and they are required to make a sacrifice in order to rule. On the face of it, White’s
interpretation means that Plato has not fully answered the challenges posed early on
in the Republic to show how justice is not just somebody else’s good, and is of
intrinsic value to oneself. The alternative “harmonizing eudaimonist” interpretation,
according to which the guardians’ ruling is in their own interest after all, would appear
to be more promising. To combat this view, White returns to the beginning of the
Republic and argues that it contains another important challenge that the harmonizing
eudaimonist interpreters have overlooked. White points to Thrasymachus’s description
of justice as “high-minded foolishness (gennaia euEtheia)” (Rep I 348C) and argues
that Thrasymachus is posing the following challenge, “. . . why does it make any
sense to follow the belief, which many people in fact hold, that one rationally should
do certain things because they are “just”, even though one sees that they are inimical
to one’s own good?” (p. 171) This is an ingenious suggestion, but the text tells against
it. Thrasymachus says that he thinks that injustice is not a vice because it pays. When
Socrates asks him whether he therefore thinks that justice is a vice, Thrasymachus
says no, it is “high-minded foolishness”. To see what Thrasymachus means, we need
only turn back a few pages. There Socrates is arguing that rulers, like shepherds, look
after their flocks, rather than fleece them. “Oh, most foolish Socrates (O euEthestate
SOcrates)” exclaims Thrasymachus before he launches into his famous tirade, “you
must see it in this way, that the just man is in every circumstance worse off than the
unjust man” (Rep I 343D).
Let us suppose, though, that White’s interpretation of deliberative conflict is correct.
Consider the following passage, Republic VII 520E-21. White, following Grube,
translates the first part thus (p. 204):
If you can find a way of life which is better than governing for the prospective
governors, then a well-governed city can exist for you. Only in that city will the truly
rich rule, not rich in gold but in the wealth which a happy man must have, a life with
goodness and intelligence.
The next part of Grube’s translation runs,
If beggars hungry for private goods go into public life, thinking that they must snatch
their good from it, the well-governed city cannot exist, for then office is fought for,
and such a war at home inside the city destroys them and the city as well.
A harmonizing eudaimonist can interpret the passage to mean that the rulers will view
harmony among themselves and the citizens as necessary for their own happiness; if
there is war in the city there will be no happiness, contemplative or otherwise, for
themselves. On White’s view, however, the passage can only mean that the rulers’
better way of life must conflict with ruling, so that they will not be like Thrasymachean
rulers, fighting for office, and so that harmony among the rulers and the citizens will
prevail. On the harmonizing eudaimonists’ account, harmony serves eudaimonia; on
White’s interpretation, it is the other way round. Harmony therefore turns out to have
an even more important role in White’s version of Plato’s Republic than in the
harmonizing eudaimonists’ account.
Next, Aristotle. White’s version of book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is similar
to Kraut’s.5 Both White and Kraut distinguish happiness and the happy life and think
that happiness consists in one activity, contemplation, although other goods are also
included in the happy life. They also agree that contemplation and ethically virtuous
60
activity can conflict. Here is where they part company. According to Kraut, the
Aristotelian will give up contemplating to do ethically virtuous action, and so Aristotle
is not a eudaimonist (or an egoist, in Kraut’s terms). According to White, the
Aristotelian will prefer contemplation and so Aristotle is a eudaimonist, but not a
harmonizing one, after all.
A full and fair discussion of White’s interpretation would require a thorough account of
Aristotle’s ethics including the ethical virtues, practical reasoning, friendship (which
White discusses at length) and the doctrine of the mean. Instead, I wish to consider
White’s conclusion, “[i]t cannot rightly be said that modern ethics lacks an important
deliberative harmony that Aristotle’s view supplies.” (p. 282) Even on White’s own
account, though, there are two important differences between Aristotelian and modern
conflicts. First, contemplation and exercising ethical virtue are two types of happiness,
according to Aristotle; there is no conflict between happiness and something else of a
different kind, as there is on the Kantian view. Secondly, Aristotelian deliberation does
lack one important type of conflict that moderns envisage, namely, irresolvable
conflicts. These are non-trivial conflicts between rational considerations that are not
rationally adjudicable in one way or another.
Finally, Epicurus and the Stoics. On White’s interpretation, they are “deliberative
monists”. Not only do they espouse one ultimate rational aim in life, but also they
think that there are no other worthwhile aims at all. White claims that it is ironic that
they are not admired, given their harmonious views. Yet if their views are really as
crude as White suggests (and his discussion of other commentators suggests that they
are not), it would be no wonder if they were not as highly regarded as Plato and
Aristotle. More importantly, if these are their views, they are not promoting
deliberative harmony at all. To borrow an idea from Aristotle’s Politics, harmony is not
the same as unison or monism; it requires disparate elements to be harmonized.
What, then, should we make of Winckelmann’s ideal? For anyone living in a world of
war, strife, regime changes and faction, for example, ourselves, Europeans of the past
three centuries, and the ancient Greeks, harmony would seem to be a worthwhile aim.
Even Kant, to whom White attributes the crucial distinction between happiness and
broader aims, was not averse to harmony. His reasoners are to think of themselves as
belonging to a kingdom of ends in which all legislate and obey the same universal
laws together.
When Socrates finishes describing the rulers of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon comments
that Socrates has made them “very beautiful, just as a sculptor would” (Rep VII
540C). Winckelmann’s sensibility may not be so different from the classical Greeks’
after all.
Endnotes
1. Blake’s rendition can be viewed at http://www.betatesters.com/penn/blakelao.html
. The statue seen by Winckelmann can be viewed at
http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/encyclopaedia-
romana/miscellanea/museums/laocoon.html.
2. In order to see what Winckelmann means, compare El Greco’s version of the myth
at http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=33269+0+none or click on Blake’s own
version of the Laocoon struggle in section 4 of
http://www.mindspring.com/~jntolva/blake/line.html . Blake shares Winckelmann’s
evaluation of classical Greek art, but not his admiration.
3. Winckelmann History of Ancient Art tr. G. Henry Lodge, (Boston: James R. Osgood
and Co., 1880) vol 2 esp. p. 240. One of White’s main sources for Winckelmann’s era
is Eliza Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (London: Macmillan, 1935) (repr.
61
Boston: Beacon, 1958). For a less tendentious account, see, for example, Ronald
Peacock, Hölderlin (London: Methuen, (1938) repr. 1973) pp. 6, 15, 88.
4. White is referring to Cooper’s book Reason and Human Good in Aristotle
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975) (p. 33). An important part of Cooper’s
argument was that Aristotle identified a human being with his nous or theoretical
intellect. After the publication of Whiting’s argument that nous also has a practical
side (“Human Nature and Intellectualism in Aristotle” Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie 68, 1986: 70-95), Cooper changed his mind about his interpretation of
book X (“Contemplation and Happiness: A Reconsideration” Synthèse 72, 1987: 187-
216). White resurrects Cooper’s original argument in his own discussion (p. 247).
5. R. Kraut Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989).
62
2003.02.02
David Howie
Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early
Twentieth Century
Howie, David, Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early
Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 273pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN
0521812518.
Reviewed by Colin Howson, London School of Economics
‘This is a study of two types of probability’, the Introduction to this book informs us.
The two types of probability are frequentist objective probability, and the more
subjective epistemic, or Bayesian, probability. What immediately marks this book off
from other discussions of the same topic is the author’s device of personifying the
tension, if not outright conflict, between these two ideas of what probability is, in
terms of a historically extended dialogue between two historical protagonists, and
antagonists, R.A. Fisher and Harold Jeffreys. In the nineteen thirties, when the
controversialists were principally engaged with each other, Fisher was the great
champion of frequentist, and Jeffreys of Bayesian, probability. Both were themselves
eminent mathematical scientists: Fisher a statistician and geneticist, Jeffreys a
geophysicist. This book charts the course of their debate.
Allegory and its more restrained relative, the Dialogue, are devices of ancient pedigree
for dramatizing conflicts of ideas. It is a pity that they have almost died out. To revive
them, and moreover to revive them in the context of an actual historical conflict, is a
genuine coup. Not only that: it must be said that the result in this case is a pleasure
to read and will certainly become an indispensable scholarly resource. Apart from any
other consideration, the Jeffreys-Fisher conflict is a most important episode in the
(fairly) recent history of scientific ideas, which has not been systematically
investigated before. Howie has uncovered some fascinating information, not only
about these two men themselves, but also about some of the other notable figures of
twentieth-century statistical science who either took part in or continued the debate,
like J.B.S. Haldane, Karl and his son Egon Pearson, and Jerzy Neyman, among others.
The controversy itself is also placed in a historical context. The book starts well before
Fisher and Jeffreys crossed swords, at the dawn of the mathematical theory of
probability itself, makes some interesting observations about Laplace and other great
pioneers, discusses the contribution of C.D. Broad to the problem of induction to laws
(a problem which preoccupied Jeffreys, and in response to which he and Dorothy
Wrinch produced their Simplicity Postulate), and continues, after Fisher and Jeffreys
ceased to be active contributors, with a discussion of how more recent developments
impinged on their controversy. The Second World War, and its demands for efficient
quality control, saw the leadership of the frequentist camp passing to Neyman, with a
concomitant emphasis away from considerations of valid scientific inference and
towards the development of reliable methods for minimizing the frequency of
erroneous decisions. Coincidentally, the Bayesian position also shifted in the direction
of decision theory, with the publication of Savage’s influential Foundations of Statistics
(1954) reestablishing the theory on an explicitly utility-theoretic foundation (an idea
that Jeffreys explicitly repudiated).
The author’s use of an actual historical debate as the focus of his discussion of
Bayesian versus frequency probability is no mere rhetorical device, however. It
subserves another purpose of Howie’s, which is to illustrate a general claim about the
importance of context for understanding the dynamics of scientific ideas. In this case,
63
Howie argues, once the respective intellectual and scientific contexts within which
Fisher and Jeffreys were working are fully understood, much of the appearance of
conflict disappears: both were to a great extent talking past each other, not
appreciating that what each took to be decisive objections to the other largely
reflected their own failure to grasp the other’s purposes and background assumptions.
An example of such mutual misunderstanding was the dispute over the probability
that a third of three observations would lie between the first two. Jeffreys used an
elementary argument for the probability being one third. Fisher disagreed, claiming
that it would depend on how far apart the first two observations were. As Howie
shows, however, both were making different assumptions: Fisher was implicitly
conditioning on two fixed data points and a presumed fixed model, while Jeffreys was
appealing to a completely unconditional probability. Given their separate assumptions,
both were correct.
Howie reaches a more general conclusion, that overall neither of Fisher and Jeffreys
was wrong and the other right: ‘each of Fisher’s and Jeffreys’s methods was
coherently defensible, and … the clash between them was not a consequence of error
on one side’ (p. 171). Is this true? The principal bone of contention between the two
men was the role that probability and probabilistic reasoning play in science, and here
the two positions do seem, at any rate at first sight, mutually incompatible. According
to Fisher, the only scientific concept of probability is that of frequency in hypothetical
infinite populations. The task of the scientist is to identify the latter and use the
battery of random-sampling techniques Fisher had himself developed to assess the
population-parameters or to reject the null hypothesis when a difference between
populations is hypothesized. Principal among the estimation criteria was that of
maximum likelihood. Where such estimates exist they automatically satisfy other
important frequentist desiderata, principally those of asymptotic normality and
minimum variance; more importantly, Fisher saw in likelihood a measure of rational
belief, and it was a crucial characteristic of likelihood for him that it is not formally a
probability, for it does not satisfy the addition principle (the likelihood of ‘A or B’, for
disjoint possibilities A and B, is meaningless). Later, he was to exploit a formal
symmetry, which can arise in suitable contexts between parameter and random
variable to develop what he believed to be a class of allegedly frequentist probability
distributions, called fiducial distributions, over parameters. For Fisher, the combination
of significance tests, maximum-likelihood estimation and fiducial probability was a
sufficient foundation of inference from data. Bayesian, or ‘inverse’ probability as it was
traditionally called, was not only unnecessary, but worse, it was subjective where
science demands objectivity, and, because it used the Principle of Indifference to
generate uniform prior distributions which do not in general survive reparametrisation,
it was a profligate generator of inconsistencies.
Jeffreys, by contrast, believed that only a systematically developed theory of Bayesian
probability could furnish an adequate theory of valid uncertain inference from data.
Jeffreys contested Fisher’s own theory at every point. He claimed that significance
testing is unsound since, based as it is on the probability according to the null
hypothesis of data at least as extreme as that observed, it involves the consideration
of data that have actually not been observed. In his Theory of Probability he showed
that the objection is not merely academic: the use of tail-area probabilities can create
considerable bias, particularly in large samples (a feature now known as Lindley’s
Paradox). He also believed, with a good many other people at the time and even more
later, that fiducial probability was based on a formal confusion, and he argued,
plausibly, that maximum likelihood could not give a determinate inference since any
64
group of data can be exactly fitted by an infinity of alternative laws (this is the
phenomenon we now know as underdetermination, and Jeffreys himself, long before
Goodman and grue, gave in his Theory of Probability a simple formal algorithm for
generating such an infinity of alternatives). He also pointed out, against Fisher’s
insistence that probability must be identified with frequencies in hypothetic infinite
populations, that we necessarily observe only single, even if multidimensional, data
points, not indefinitely repeated samples from an in-principle unobservable population.
As to Fisher’s charge of subjectivism, Jeffreys believed that some subjective element
is always present in any inference from data, but that it could and should be
minimized by ensuring that the prior distributions, where the subjectivism was
typically located by critics of the method, represent the total relevant background
knowledge possessed by working scientists (like himself).
All this, and more, is faithfully retailed by Howie, with a wealth of documentary and
interview-based evidence, including the many letters exchanged between Fisher and
Jeffreys themselves, and between them and third parties with an interest in the issue
and who also contributed to its discussion, like the contemporary statisticians Bartlett,
Lindley and Barnard. Prima facie, the dispute seems a fundamental one. Nevertheless,
Howie supports with some interesting details his case that much of the disagreement
was merely at the sound-and-fury level. For example, Fisher himself did not rule out a
subjective element in the choice of statistical model (i.e. the presumed population),
but he believed that (a) this was a matter for the scientist’s personal judgment, and
not representable by any simple-minded and universal system of rules like those of
inverse probability and (b) once the model had been settled on, his own evaluative
criteria provided a completely sound and objective way of determining its parameters.
Secondly, the two apparently competing methodologies were actually in agreement in
an extensive class of cases, in particular those where the data set was large: Jeffreys
himself proved that for large independent samples posterior probability asymptotically
agrees with maximum likelihood estimation (i.e. the maximum likelihood estimate
approximates the mean of the posterior distribution independently of the prior
distribution). Thirdly, the types of scientific problem each faced were typically very
different, and their methods, according to Howie, to a considerable extent reflected
the peculiar features of each. Fisher, working at Rothampstead, could rely on highly
controlled data, which could be safely assumed to come from a single population,
whereas Jeffreys had to make do with sometimes sparse, and often unreliable, data
from several different sources characterized by possibly quite different structural
characteristics. Thus Fisherian methods were naturally confined to parameter
estimation and testing without having to consider alternative underlying models (a
feature still present, typically without any accompanying explanation, in introductory
textbooks of statistics), while Jeffreys faced uncertainty, sometimes radical, at every
level of the theoretical ascent from the data.
Whether Howie is right or wrong in his overall conclusions the reader will have to
judge. But it’s a good story and he tells it very well. Indeed, he tells it like it is (or
was), simply and clearly, steering clear of portentous philosophizing on the one hand
and a too-minute attention to mathematical and biographical detail on the other, an
approach to intellectual history now relatively uncommon but most welcome where it
occurs. There are some blemishes that a careful reading by the publisher’s referees or
Howie’s research supervisor should have spotted, though they can be easily
eliminated in the (hopeful) event of a reprinting. Thus, there are references to
‘transinfinite series’ on pp.86 and 109, and to the possible ‘fractions’ of black balls in
an infinite urn (though this admittedly follows Laplace’s own account) on p.24. Bulwer
65
Lytton becomes Lytton Bulwer on p.36, and de Finetti’s well-known representation

theorem is described on p.227 as his ‘representation theory’. It is not mathematically
accurate, or even meaningful, to say that Kolmogorov ‘defined probability as a
measure property of a set within a field constructed according to a series of axioms’
(p.219), while to refer to Popper’s much-discussed and arguably seminal propensity
theory only with a footnote remark that it ‘was a half-baked attempt to apply the
probabilities of von Mises’s collectives to individual events’ (p.221) is irresponsibly
flippant.
That said, this is a timely and valuable contribution to our knowledge of the period
and its great figures. There is a wealth of incidental, but always relevant and often
fascinating, historical detail. Probability of course also has a role to play outside
statistics, and Howie devotes some space to this, with brief but informative
discussions of its use in the social sciences, biology and especially physics. Another
distinctive feature of his book is that, though it concerns a highly technical subject
matter, his own discussion is anything but technical in any overtly formal sense: in
fact, there are hardly any formulas in the book. Yet he succeeds in conveying, in
words, the technical ideas both precisely and clearly (the lucid discussion, on pp.129-
132, of the Jeffreys-Haldane prior and its relation to the treatment of error is a
notable case in point). Its thoroughness, combined with an assured informality and
lightness of touch, make the book an enlightening and entertaining read.
2003.02.03
Mark Timmons, (ed.)
Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays
Timmons, Mark, (ed.) Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays, Oxford
Reviewed by Pawel Lukow, Warsaw University
One of the more perplexing aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy is the relationship
between his earlier works in moral philosophy, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, and The Metaphysics of Morals. Part of the
difficulty stems from the different methodological status of the latter work. In the
Metaphysics, Kant builds a theory of justice and virtue, whereas in the earlier works
he explores the rational basis of morality.
Since the Metaphysics is about principles of action and the earlier works put forward
(various versions of) the principle of justification of principles of action (i.e. the
categorical imperative), the crucial question for an adequate understanding of Kant’s
practical philosophy is about the relationship between the principles of right and virtue
and the categorical imperative. First, an interpreter needs to be clear whether the
fundamental principles of right and virtue are derived from or justified by the
imperative; or whether they are, or can be seen as, relatively independent from it.
Secondly, a related question concerns the role of the imperative in Kant’s practical
philosophy as a whole. According to the textbook interpretation, Kant believed that
the imperative can by itself answer all central questions about morals. The
Metaphysics, by contrast, suggests that the imperative is one, although central,
among many elements of moral thinking.
It is the relationship between Kant’s earlier works in practical philosophy and the
Metaphysics that is the leading theme of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative
Essays edited by Mark Timmons. In this collection of excellent essays, some of which
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were presented at the 1997 Spindel Conference commemorating the bicentennial of

the publication of The Metaphysics of Morals, leading Kant scholars discuss various
aspects of this work and Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole.
The seventeen essays collected in the book can be divided into two large groups.
Papers of the first group address questions of political and legal order and the place of
Kant’s political philosophy in his practical philosophy. The topics of most other essays
are related to the fundamental question of practical deliberation and motivation. As
mentioned above, all essays explore in their own ways the relationship between Kant’s
metaethical and ethical views. In my presentation of the essays, I shall follow this
leading theme, diverging from their order in the book, where they are organized
according to the sequence of topics in the Metaphysics.
Allen Wood’s opening essay challenges the dominant picture of Kant’s moral
philosophy as reducible to the test of the categorical imperative from which all
principles of justice and virtue are to be derived. Wood points to those aspects of the
Metaphysics of Morals which question the typical rigorist and anti-teleological
interpretation of Kant’s practical philosophy, according to which matters of moral
value are centered around action in abstraction from emotions, consequences and
character. In particular, stressing the analyticity of Kant’s principle of right (from
which principles of justice derive), Wood argues for the independence of the principle
from the categorical imperative. This claim is the subject matter of the next three
essays.
Thomas W. Pogge agrees with Wood and defends Kant’s political philosophy as
independent from transcendental idealism and critical practical philosophy, with a view
to making Kant’s liberalism acceptable to citizens of modern political societies. Pogge
argues that Kant’s argument for political society can be seen as based on an analysis
of the idea of a juridical order. This analysis generates rules of interaction of beings
each of whom has an interest in the greatest possible freedom. Pogge adds that the
independence of the argument for the juridical order from the rest of Kant’s critical
philosophy is consistent with Kant’s claim that the principle of right is entailed by his
practical philosophy. Kant’s liberalism can be arrived at by an analysis of the idea of
juridical order, apart from his critical practical philosophy.
Paul Guyer rejects this interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. Guyer convincingly
argues that the analyticity of a proposition does not imply that it does not need
justification or derivation. The logical correctness of an argument does not prove the
objective reality of what is proven. Drawing on textual evidence, Guyer says that the
principle of right is derived from the concept of freedom (which is accessible to agents
in the form of the categorical imperative). Deduction of this principle belongs to Kant’s
practical philosophy, which is embedded in his transcendental idealism.
Bernd Ludwig draws a similar conclusion. Using Pogge’s analytic approach, Ludwig
explains that Kant’s political theory cannot be separated from transcendental idealism.
To see the juridical order as based on an analysis of the concept of such an order, one
has to have an understanding of who the “units,” i.e. persons, that participate in that
order are. Since Kant thinks of persons as free causes, his understanding of persons
must be rooted in transcendental idealism’s idea of causation. A similar dependence,
Ludwig says, can be found in Kant’s argument for property rights, which rely on his
idea of practical reason.
The subject of property rights is addressed to a greater extent by Kenneth R.
Westphal who focuses on the contradiction in the conception test of the categorical
imperative (in its version as the Universal Law of Right). Westphal argues that
property rights are necessary for finite beings who live under the conditions of scarcity
67
of space and resources and who attempt to achieve rationally their ends. Property
rights are means of protecting human beings’ pursuit of their ends.
The exchange of arguments among Woods, Pogge, Guyer, and Ludwig is fascinating.
It shows how the ideas of an influential philosopher of the past can provoke a genuine
debate that is relevant to citizens of contemporary societies. In this respect, Thomas
W. Pogge’s proposal seems particularly interesting since – despite the difficulties
posed by the conceptual, if not argumentative, dependence of Kant’s theory of justice
on his critical philosophy – it is an effort to include Kant’s philosophy in what Rawls
called overlapping consensus.
The chapters discussed above address the most fundamental questions of justification
of the principles of justice. Sarah Williams Holtman and Sharon Byrd discuss particular
theses of Kant’s political philosophy. Holtman argues against Kant’s often-criticized
claim that revolution is never permissible. She explains perceptively that Kant’s own
thesis that the point of the state is to secure the carrying out of justice by providing
an impartial interpretation of principles of justice requires that revolution be justifiable
when state institutions and laws are obviously unjust, i.e. when the state does not
perform its proper function. Holtman’s argument is especially important because of its
“global” character. She takes into account not only Kant’s particular theses but also
the spirit of his philosophy of right.
Sharon Byrd in turn discusses Kant’s theory of contracts but her approach differs from
that of Holtman’s. She provides a detailed analysis of some key concepts of Kant’s
theory of contracts to clarify his division of rights transferable through contracts as
based on his general theory of contracts. For Kant a contract consists of two “sub-
contracts”: the obligation-generating agreement to transfer something in a specified
way from one party of the contract to the other, and the agreement to transfer rights
to the thing contracted from one party to the other. Byrd also draws analogies
between the division of rights transferable through contracts and the table of
categories from Kant’s first Critique.
Papers by Marcus Willaschek and Katrin Flickschuh concentrate on the question of
motivation and performance of duties of justice. In his insightful paper, Willaschek
notes that according to Kant juridical laws require compliance irrespectively of the
agent’s motives. This, however, generates a paradox: if obedience to an unconditional
law presupposes no other motives than willingness to do what the law requires, then
juridical laws cannot be unconditional or, if they are, they cannot prescribe actions.
Willaschek proposes to solve the paradox in a very ingenious way. He considers Kant’s
thesis that juridical laws represent the rightful condition of society and concludes that
they contain only an authorization of agents to use coercion against those who upset
this rightful social condition.
Katrin Flickschuh contrasts Kant’s account of desires with their modern understanding
as subjective and unreasoned units in practical deliberation and links it to the
ancients’ view of the matter. She suggests that, according to Kant, desire formation in
political and economic contexts is constrained by the requirements of practical
rationality, so that it is neither unreflective and beyond agents’ control, nor morally
neutral. This conception of desires is closer to its ancient forerunners and provides an
alternative to the modern view known from the economic and political literature.
The remaining essays of the book discuss Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue but they are
significant for the interpretation of Kant’s entire practical philosophy. Onora O’Neill’s
thoughtful paper addresses the central topic of Kant’s view of practical deliberation
and the role of judgment in it. Commenting on Kant’s treatment of moral conflict,
O’Neill argues that practical deliberation does not involve only mere application of
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principles but also designing appropriate responses to particular situations. This is due
to the fact that the constraints of principles of action require satisfaction in all
situations, even though it may sometimes be impossible to satisfy them all. Since the
appropriate moral response to a situation should satisfy the constraints of all
principles, or of as many of them as possible, practical judgment should be seen as
inseparable from deliberation. O’Neill’s paper is especially valuable since it locates
Kant’s moral philosophy in recent debates concerning the role of judgment in moral
life. O’Neill provides both arguments and textual evidence that support the thesis that
a Kantian view of practical deliberation is much more nuanced and in agreement with
moral experience than it is usually supposed.
Robert N. Johnson discusses a comparably fundamental question of the relationship
between some of Kant’s claims about human nature and his view of practical
rationality. Having considered a number of interpretations, Johnson says that it is
impossible to reconcile Kant’s thesis that happiness is a natural or pre-reflective end
of human beings with his thesis that rational beings always choose the ends of their
actions.
Papers by Thomas Hill, Jr., Mark Timmons, and Stephen Engstrom discuss more
specific questions of moral motivation. Hill examines Kant’s claim that motivations for
obedience to the law do not affect the moral worthiness of action. Hill brilliantly
argues that in Kant’s philosophy conscience should be seen as a way in which agents
become aware of moral requirements. By drawing parallels between Kant’s conception
of conscience as an internal moral “tribunal” and Kant’s view of punishment, Hill
proposes to understand the threat of punishment for unlawful behavior not as a
motive for compliance but as a way of reminding citizens of their duty to abide by the
law.
Mark Timmons argues that in order to preserve a central Kantian distinction between
morality (moral worthiness) and legality (rightness) of actions, the motive of duty
should not be seen as a condition of rightness of actions. Timmons also argues that
Kant rejects the thesis that rightness of actions is independent of agent’s motives
because motives are elements of act descriptions, which are taken into account in
moral assessment of actions.
Engstrom convincingly shows a way to reconcile Kant’s understanding of virtue with
the traditional view of it as a habit. By focusing on Kant’s thesis that agents’ practical
freedom is proportionate to their virtue, Engstrom links Kant’s idea of virtue as moral
strength in opposing passions to his notion of freedom and self-governance. On this
account virtue involves a harmony of motives, which makes the agent resistant to
determination by affects and passions. The advantage of Engstrom’s line of argument
is that it has strong textual support, makes Kant’s conception of virtue close to the
common understanding, and at the same time shows the historical links of this
conception to the views of the ancients and Kant’s contemporaries.
Essays by Andrews Reath and Nelson Potter present two different interpretations of
Kant’s conception of duties to oneself. Reath holds that Kant’s notion of duties to
oneself should be seen from the perspective of the idea of self-legislation by agents
who recognize that the principles they propose must satisfy certain deliberative
requirements (universalizability). Reath interprets universalizability in an unorthodox
way as a requirement that has to be satisfied by actual members of societies, which
presupposes a conception of morality as a common enterprise of a plurality of agents
in which duties to oneself are requirements of membership in society. In opposition to
Reath and closer to the textual evidence, Potter argues that for Kant ethical as
opposed to legal duties are relatively loosely linked to the social character of human
69
action. Potter emphasizes Kant’s thesis that duties to oneself are the foundation of
morality because they express and preserve the moral capacities of human beings.
This centrality of duties to oneself can be appreciated by noting the moral-educational
aspect of some violations of duties to oneself, as can be seen in the corrupting effect
of self-deception on the agent’s moral personality.
In the final chapter, Marcia Baron discusses Kant’s account of love and respect as
opposed to each other and compares it to the modern-day understanding of the two.
Baron suggests that the large discrepancies between Kant’s and contemporary
understandings of love and respect for others are due to the importance he attached
to agents’ freedom and self-direction.
Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals is an extremely valuable book. First, it is devoted to one
of the most neglected of Kant’s works. It examines various aspects of his practical
philosophy and often shows it in a new light. Despite the variety of topics and
approaches, the book’s chapters are surprisingly complementary, giving the reader a
fairly comprehensive view of Kant’s theory of morals. Although the book is often very
demanding, anyone interested in Kant’s practical philosophy will certainly want to
learn from it. Secondly, the book’s value is not only exegetical. All the authors treat
Kant’s practical philosophy as more than a bit of history. They devote a lot of effort to
arriving at an adequate understanding of Kant’s ideas, but at the same time they test
the relevance of his theory to the realities of contemporary societies. For this reason,
the book is not only an invaluable contribution to Kant scholarship. It is also important
reading for all those who are looking for philosophical resources to address moral
problems of today.
2003.02.04
Byeong-uk Yi
Understanding the Many
Yi, Byeong-Uk, Understanding the Many, Routledge, 2002, 140pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN
0415938643.
Reviewed by Jim Hardy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Byeong-uk Yi’s Understanding the Many is a collection of five essays designed to

convince us that we ought to take plural subjects seriously and also presenting several
forays into the theory of plurality. The essays comprised Yi’s 1995 dissertation at
UCLA and are presented in that form with only “stylistic changes”. Yi’s primary thesis
is that there is a fundamental difference in what one says by uttering, “Tom is a child
and Jane is a child” versus “Tom and Jane are two children.” Yi maintains that the
second sentence commits us to a logic of plurals, that accounts of its meaning which
appeal only to singular subjects cannot explain its logical significance. He goes on to
present a logic of plurals and to argue that taking plurals seriously provides various
philosophical benefits over more traditional accounts.
I will spend most of my time commenting on Yi’s arguments for plurality. I won’t
address Yi’s presentation of the logic of plurality beyond a few brief remarks in this
paragraph. Yi’s development of the logic proceeds largely as one would expect. He
does a good job of setting out the choices one needs to make in formalizing out such
a logic, e.g. should predicates which seem to admit both plural and singular subjects
be treated as two predicates (one singular and one plural) or as a single predicate? He
explains why he makes the choices he does, but is careful to allow that the logic might
be constructed somewhat differently should there turn out to be reason to make the
choices differently. Beyond those choices, there is little that will surprise the reader in
Yi’s logical system. This is not to say that the system is trivial; it is not, but it is a
70
fairly natural and, I suspect, uncontroversial spelling out of Yi’s intuitions in a formal
system. Once those intuitions are granted, the logic follows. While the development of
the system may have been no easy chore, in retrospect there is little to wonder at.
One of the difficulties with the book’s being five essays rather than a single extended
treatment, is that Yi never fully develops an argument that we must accept plurality
as bona fide. Instead, each essay contains a small argument, often much the same as
the previous essay. The result is that at least this reader remained largely
unconvinced that admitting plurality is logically required. The most extended
argument occurs in the first chapter, but echoes of it are seen throughout the book. Yi
notes that not all plural constructions can be routinely expressed in standard predicate
logic. The only viable options thus seem to be taking plural constructions as bona fide
in their own right, or reducing them to set theoretic constructions. Thus the statement
“Russell and Quine are two philosophers” must be taken either as asserting that the
property [being two philosophers] is instantiated by the plural subject [Russell and
Quine], or as asserting that the set {Russell, Quine} is two membered and that each
of its members is a philosopher. Yi argues that the latter interpretation must be
rejected and hence the former must be accepted. Yi’s argument for rejecting the set-
theoretic interpretation is essentially that the set-theoretic interpretation logically
implies “there is something of which Russell is a member” whereas the original
sentence does not. Thus, the set-theoretic interpretation is not logically equivalent to
the original sentence and cannot be taken as giving its meaning. Since it is
uncontroversial that the set-theoretic interpretation does imply the existence of a set
with Russell as a member, Yi’s argument hinges on his claim that the original
construction carries no such implication.
Yi gives two basic arguments for this claim. The first is that the implication is not
supported by elementary logic, and thus anyone who accepts the implication must
reject elementary logic. The second is that the existence of certain sets is a matter of
metaphysics rather than logic. Thus, even if it is metaphysically necessary that Russell
is a member of something if he is a philosopher, it is not logically necessary. But this
means that the implication is not logically valid. As this is primarily a review, I won’t
give detailed responses to each of these arguments, but I do want to give some brief
indication of why I think they are insufficient. In the first case, it seems odd to me
that Yi considers the rejection of elementary logic as a reason for not accepting the
implication. After all, one only need reject elementary logic in the sense of
maintaining that there are some valid inferences, which are not captured by
elementary logic. But almost everyone already rejects elementary logic in this sense.
Specifically, Yi himself rejects elementary logic in this sense. His entire book rests on
the premise that elementary logic is insufficient to capture all valid inferences
regarding plurals. So, if this argument is effective, then it is also effective against Yi’s
major thesis. In the second case, Yi is certainly right to distinguish metaphysical from
logical necessity. However, unless Yi has some fairly clear account of logical necessity
that doesn’t depend on a prior notion of logical validity, this argument begs the
question. But Yi presents no such account, nor, to the best of my knowledge, is such
an account readily available in the literature. So, it seems that Yi’s second argument is
also insufficient to ground his claim.
Still, if philosophy investigated only those subjects which were forced upon it, it would
be a poor discipline indeed. I now turn to Yi’s arguments regarding the benefits of
plurality. These are harder to catalog, and not the least of them is the simple
argument that we have, courtesy of Yi’s work, a coherent and fairly natural account of
plurality. This account allows our semantic analysis of certain kinds of sentences to
71
more closely follow the surface structure of those sentences. In general, there is a
presumption in favor of semantics that follow surface structure more closely. This
presumption is especially strong if the semantic theory can mirror surface structure in
an elegant fashion without introducing excessive complexity. I think that Yi’s theory
meets the criteria for this presumption. Yi’s account provides a fairly intuitive
extension of first-order semantics, one that brings our interpretation of natural-
language sentences more in line with their surface structure. It does so without
radically changing the nature or complexity of the semantics, and indeed one might
argue that the resulting interpretations are less complex than they would be on a
more traditional account. So whether or not we are logically compelled to accept
something like Yi’s theory, I think there is a lot to be said for it. We do, after all, use
plural constructions in natural languages. Given the syntactic similarity between “John
is a child” and “John and Mary are two children”, it makes sense that there should also
be a close similarity between their semantics. By treating [John and Mary] as a plural
subject and [being two children] as a plural predicate, the latter sentence is of
subject-predicate form in both its syntax and its semantics. Thus, the syntactic
similarity between the two sentences is mirrored at the semantic level.
But Yi believes there are other benefits to be gained by his theory. Specifically, he
claims that his account of plural properties yields a more acceptable notion of number
than does the traditional view. In addition, he claims that it provides a more coherent
account of how sets depend on their members. I think that this latter claim is among
the more interesting in the book, though the argument for it raises some general
questions about the interpretation of Yi’s theory.
Yi claims that numbers are best seen as properties. Specifically, the number 1 is the
property [being one thing], the number 2 is the property [being two things], and so
on. Thus on Yi’s account numbers just are plural properties. Thus any argument which
favors Yi’s account of numbers would eo ipso be an argument in favor of plurality. But
why should we accept that numbers are properties? Yi begins by arguing that
numbers cannot be set-like objects. His reasoning is that “John and Mary are two
children” carries no implication about the existence of set-like objects containing John
as a member, but the traditional set-theoretic accounts of numbers do carry such an
implication. Because the “two” in “John and Mary are two children” is best understood
as marking a property, we cannot interpret “2” in “2+1=3” as referencing a set-like
object without undermining inferences such as “John and Mary are two children, Robin
is another child. Thus John, Mary, and Robin are three children because 2+1=3.” The
inference can only make sense if “two” and “2” have the same semantic content. Of
course, Yi cannot accept the surface structure of “2+1=3” as giving its semantic
structure since the numerals occur as terms rather than as predicates. Instead, he
offers the following gloss: “ If some things are two things and if something is one
thing that is not one of the former, then the former and the latter are three things
(and vice versa).” Now clearly Yi’s interpretation preserves the validity of the
inference. But it is less clear how Yi’s interpretation will scale to more complex
numerical statements. For example, what is it, on Yi’s analysis, for a number to be
prime or negative or complex? His account of complex numbers must take them as
properties or we will lose the validity of other inferences. But what kind of properties
might they be? I don’t mean to claim that such an account is impossible, but it is at
least unclear how it would go. And if it cannot be cashed out, then Yi’s argument does
not stand, regardless of its prima facie plausibility.
Finally, Yi proposes that his account provides a better understanding of how sets are
related to their members. Given a population of ur-elements, the question arises,
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What sets of ur-elements are there? Yi argues that the answer, “Any collection of ur-
elements is a set thereof”, begs the question. After all, we might go on to ask, “What
collections of ur-elements are there?” Collections are just too much like sets to be of
any use in really answering the initial question. Yi proposes instead that we answer
the original question by saying, “Any number of ur-elements forms a set”, which is to
be cashed out as “If there are some ur-elements, then they form a set.” This in turn
can be put into semi-formal language as “If there are some us such that us are ur-
elements, then there is a set x such that us form x.” Here “us” is a plural variable and
“there are some us” is a plural quantifier. If Yi’s account can withstand rigorous
application to set theory, then it would offer an advantage over more standard
accounts in that it could better answer the important question “What sets are there?”
However there are substantial worries about whether it can withstand rigorous
application. For example, what of the empty set? The existential nature of Yi’s
formalization means that it cannot account for the existence of the empty set. So, the
empty set will have to be added separately. But this means that Yi’s theory does not
give a complete answer to the question. A deeper problem—and one that threatens
Yi’s theory as a whole—is the nature of plural quantification. It cannot be understood
substitutionally since the number of sets will generally outstrip the linguistic resources
available to refer to them. (This is because sentences must be of finite length, and
there are more subsets of natural numbers than there are finite strings of a finite
alphabet.) But neither can Yi appeal to model-theoretic accounts of quantification. Yi
uses a typical set-theoretic model, so this would have the quantification depending on
some prior notion of set. Essentially, Yi must tell us what satisfies the open formula
“us form a set.” But his answer cannot be just a listing of the ur-elements since that is
the answer to what satisfies the singular form of the open formula. If plural variables
are to be understood as really distinct from singular variables, the question of what
satisfies open formulas containing them must be different. Neither can he give a
substitutional answer since not every set of us will have a finite string that uniquely
picks it out. Neither can he appeal to satisfaction in the model, as this would involve
tacit appeal to sets. Finally, he can’t simply say that the formula is satisfied by the ur-
elements taken any number at a time, as this would clearly beg the question. It is
unclear what answer is left.
In short, Yi’s book is a good first foray into the issues surrounding plurality. Readers
wanting to begin thinking about the subject should find it interesting and provocative.
However it lacks the depth of analysis that one would want in a complete treatment of
the subject. This is in part due to its being a collection of semi-independent essays
and in part due to it’s brevity, just 103 pages of main text. It is a provocative and
interesting first step towards a theory, but leaves too much unanswered and
uncompleted to be seen as a full treatment.
2003.02.05
Jurgen Habermas
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity
Habermas, Jurgen, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity,
edited by Eduardo Mendieta, MIT Press, 2002, 176 pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN
0262582163.
Reviewed by Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame
73
This is a time to take stock, especially for intellectuals on the (traditional) Left. The
end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union have brought to the fore two
major conflicting tendencies: on the one hand, the upsurge of religious faith in many
parts of the world, sometimes in the guise of a dogmatic fundamentalism; on the
other hand, the triumphant rise of liberalism—now in the form of capitalist neo-
liberalism—as a corollary of globalization. These developments have a peculiar bearing
on the Frankfurt School, which by now spans at least two generations. While many
members of the first generation were sympathetic to religion (though not to any kind
of dogmatism) in the form of a subdued Jewish messianism, the basic initial impulse
of the School—as an “Institute of Social Research”—was the critical analysis of late
capitalism and bourgeois-liberal society. These tendencies were nearly reversed
during the second generation. Under the guidance of Jürgen Habermas, “critical
theory” showed little or no interest in religious faith, preferring instead to champion a
purely rational discourse (inspired in part by neo-Kantianism and linguistic
philosophy). At the same time, again under Habermas’s influence, critical theory has
steadily moved closer to political liberalism, to the point that the distinction from
Rawlsian proceduralism sometimes appears as a mere nuance. Small wonder that
many observers have detected a gulf separating the two generations. Eduardo
Mendieta, the editor of this collection, seeks to counteract and correct this perception.
In his view (p.2, p.12), the second generation of the Frankfurt School has “without
equivocation” continued the agenda of the first. With regard to religion, a central
thesis of his introduction is that Habermas’s work “is not correctly characterized by
the image of a temporal rupture between an early positive and a later negative
appraisal of the role of religion.”
The essays collected in Religion and Rationality are meant to “constitute evidence”
(p.14) of Mendieta’s claim of undisrupted continuity. As it happens, several of the
selected essays date from the earlier period of Habermas’s career—prior to his full
“linguistic turn” to discourse theory—when he was still relatively close to first
generation thinkers; and while chapters taken from a later period—including a recent
interview with Mendieta—mitigate the harsher connotations of “temporal rupture”,
they can hardly be said to provide evidence of a smooth continuity. The impression of
discontinuity is confirmed even by Mendieta’s own (otherwise informative)
“Introduction” to the volume. Here one finds first of all a sensitive discussion of the
religious leanings of the first generation, especially of its “Jewish utopian
messianism”—in which Mendieta detects four main ingredients (p.4): restorative-
anamnetic, utopian, apocalyptic, and messianic. Aspects of this outlook are illustrated
in the writings of Bloch, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno. In the case of
Horkheimer, reference is made (p.5, p.7) to his appeal to “an entirely Other (ein ganz
Anderes),” his yearning for something “wholly other” and “absolutely unrepresentable”
through which the injustices of history could be redeemed. Similar motifs are found in
the writings of Adorno (p.8-9), especially in his treatment of the otherness of the
Other as “irreplaceable and unrepresentable singularity,” and his refusal to accept “the
assimilation of the singular into the concept” (without dismissing concepts as such).
Mendieta also quotes Adorno’s statement: “If religion is accepted for the sake of
something other than its own truth content, then it undermines itself,” and his
addendum (in Negative Dialectics) that attempts to capture the Other immanently
always put otherness “in jeopardy.” What was common to most first-generation
thinkers was the assumption (p.11) that religion remains a reservoir “of humanity’s
most deeply felt injustices and yearned for dreams of reconciliation.”
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Seen against this background, the following discussion devoted to Habermas gives the
impression of a sea-change—despite Mendieta’s assurance (p.11) that the notion of an
anti-religious bias is “misleading.” Rather than explicating this assurance, the
Introduction turns to Habermas’s pronounced social-scientific endeavors, especially his
embrace of a mode of “functionalism” (inspired by Parsons and Luhmann) and his
elaboration of evolutionary models of social and individual development. In large part,
as Mendieta observes (p.14), these endeavors were prompted by “dissatisfaction” with
the first generation’s treatment of rationality, and especially its refusal to take
seriously Weber’s thesis of progressive societal “rationalization,” secularization and
disenchantment. Borrowing from Weber and functionalists, Habermas at this point
developed a comprehensive theory of social life, comprising “system” and “lifeworld”
dimensions and moving through the stages of archaic, primitive, traditional, and
modern societies. From a social-scientific vantage, religion fulfills basically an
immanent societal “function” whose meaning changes over time. Habermas comes
close to this view in his statement (p.18) that “the idea of God is transformed
[aufgehoben] into the concept of a Logos that determines the community of believers
and the real life-context of a self-emancipating society” and in the notion that “God is
the name for the substance that gives coherence, unity, and thickness to the life-
world.” Mendieta also elaborates on Habermas’s “linguistic turn,” especially his
formulation of a “discourse morality” and a “universal pragmatics” of speech acts
(totalizing all modes of linguistic interaction). Crucial in this context is the thesis of the
progressive “linguistification of the sacred,” the latter seen as the “catalyst of
modernity.” Religion at this point remains relevant (only) to the extent that it can be
translated or assimilated into discursive language. Illustrative here are Habermas’s
assertion (in The Theory of Communicative Action) that “the aura of rapture and
terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy, is
sublimated into the binding/bonding force of criticizable validity claims,” and his
parallel statement that “only a morality, set communicatively aflow and developed into
a discourse ethics, can replace the authority of the sacred” (p.24).
At the end of this overview, Mendieta reaffirms his conviction of continuity, stating
(p.24) that, while “certainly a secularist,” Habermas is by no means an “anti-religion
philosophe.” The point here, however, is not being for or against religion, but whether
there are sufficient antennae to respect the difference, and respective integrity, of
reason and faith, discursive validity and redemptive hope. In a functionalist (or quasi-
functionalist) systems theory assigning a place or role to everything under the sun,
where can there still be room for the “wholly other” and “absolutely unrepresentable”
invoked by Horkheimer? Likewise, in a theory of universal pragmatics comprehending
all possible speech acts, where can there still be room for any language beside that of
discursive validity claims? Moreover, in a conception of linguistic intersubjectivity
construed (with Mead) as “ego-alter-ego” relation, is there still a loophole left for the
Other as “irreplaceable and unrepresentable singularity” in Adorno’s sense? As
Mendieta points out (p.12), Habermas repeatedly acknowledges the debt owed by
Enlightenment and modernity to the Judeo-Christian legacy. But this can be read as a
simple developmental scheme. Here the “linguistification” thesis needs to be
pondered. Does the thesis mean that, before discourse theory, religion or the sacred
lacked language and was “speechless” (p.28)? But then how were its teachings
transmitted? Or does the thesis mean that, in modernity, religion will be sublimated or
absorbed without a remainder into discursive rationality? In this connection, how is
one to read Habermas’s statement (in Postmetaphysical Thinking): “As long as no
better words for what religion can say are found in the medium of rational discourse,
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it [communicative reason] will even coexist abstemiously with the former”? Does this
leave to religion only the options of absorption (in rationality) or exclusion? Does faith
always have to “accommodate itself” (p.150) and bend to modern reason, and never
the other way around? But how does this respect their differential integrity? More
specifically, given the fact that “universal” pragmatics is necessarily timeless, holding
good at all times and places, how can it allow for the distinct temporality of salvation
history and the redemptive hope for a messianic future animating the early Frankfurt
School?
Limitations of space do not permit a detailed review of all the essays assembled in the
volume. For present purposes, I restrict myself to a few brief comments. Readers
interested in Jewish thought may find most appealing the first and the last of the
selected essays, where Habermas displays his more sensitive-empathetic qualities.
The first is titled “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers” and ranges
broadly (and insightfully) from Buber and Rosenzweig via Cohen and the Marburg
School to Cassirer, Bloch, and Benjamin. The last deals with Habermas’s friend
Gershom Scholem and his search for “the other of history in history” (a search
focused on Isaak Luria, Sabbatai Sevi, and the kabbalistic tradition). As distinguished
from this amicable treatment, the other chapters tend to accentuate more the
tensional/conflictual nexus between reason and faith or Athens and Jerusalem. Thus,
an essay “On the Difficulty of Saying No” illustrates, in Mendieta’s words (p.25), the
“relationship between rationalization and mythological or religious world-views, in
which the latter must submit to the transformative criticism enacted by the former.”
Another chapter, “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World”, goes
back to a conference held in Chicago on “Habermas and Public Theology” (in 1988).
There, responding to theologians and non-theologians, and defending “methodical
atheism” as the only acceptable option for “postmetaphysical” philosophy, Habermas
asserts among other things (p.76) that “whoever puts forth a truth claim today must,
nevertheless, translate experiences that have their home in religious discourse into
the language of a scientific expert culture” (or at least into the language of discourse
theory). He also questions (p.81) whether the “superadditum” of religion is required if
we “endeavor to act according to moral commands.” Another essay, “Israel or
Athens”, deals with the Judeo-Christian theology of Johannes Baptist Metz, and
especially with the latter’s notions of “anamnesis” and a “polycentric world church.”
There, while appreciating some of Metz’s leanings, Habermas comes to the defense of
Athens, arguing (p.133, p.136) that “profane reason must remain skeptical about the
mystical causality of a recollection inspired by the history of salvation” and that “the
idea of a polycentric church depends in turn on insights of the European
Enlightenment and its political philosophy.”
Perhaps the distance separating Habermas from the first generation of Frankfurt
thinkers is most clearly illustrated in an essay devoted to the work of Michael
Theunissen, “Communicative Freedom and Negative Theology.” As it happens,
Theunissen’s writings—under Christian auspices and with a focus on Hegel
transformed by Kierkegaard—recapture in many ways the Jewish religious aspirations
of that first generation. As Habermas acknowledges (p.113), Theunissen maintains
trust in “an eschatological turning of the world” and tries to show philosophically “why
profane hope must be anchored in eschatological hope.” To buttress this view,
Theunissen transforms Hegelian subjectivity into a Kierkegaardian “unrepresentable
singularity,” and Hegel’s lateral conception of intersubjectivity into a much more open-
ended, vertical relation to radical otherness. In Habermas’s words (p.116), “he is
convinced that every interpersonal relation is embedded in a relation to the radically
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Other, which precedes the relation to the concrete Other” and “embodies an absolute
freedom”—a conception that “can be traced back to elements of Jewish and Protestant
mysticism.” In this perspective, God as the “radically Other” is present in human
history “in the form of a promise, the ‘anticipatory’ present of a fulfilled future” which
alone can redeem human suffering and despair. Countering this outlook, Habermas
brings to bear a battery of considerations: first of all the “anthropological fact” (p.122)
of human self-maintenance (despite despair); and secondly the Kantian notion of .
priori conditions of possibility (saying that “the mode of successfully being a self can
only be employed in a hypothetical way in the transcendental clarification of its
conditions of possibility”—on which basis “faith could only be justified in functional
terms”). Finally, the essay chides Theunissen for ignoring the basic tenets of formal or
universal pragmatics, which “all subjects must accept insofar as they orient their
action towards validity claims at all” and which alone “can provide the normative basis
for a critical theory of society” (p.118). Regarding Theunissen’s trust in “a
transcendence irrupting into history” and his attempt to provide arguments supporting
this trust, Habermas concludes (p.123): “I am unable to accept these reasons.”
My task here is not to arbitrate between Athens and Jerusalem or to judge the
respective merits of rational-philosophical and religious-theological arguments. My
point here was simply to cast doubt on Mendieta’s claim of a smooth, uninterrupted
continuity between the two generations of the Frankfurt School. This doubt is further
reinforced by developments in another arena for which Habermas has shown little
sympathy: French philosophy, especially in its deconstructive variant. As it seems to
me, many of the motifs of the first generation—appeals to eschatology and a “radically
Other”—have resurfaced in recent decades in the writings of French Jewish and
Christian thinkers, from Levinas to Derrida and Marion. Habermas’s essays make no
reference to Levinas, and his comments on Derrida are almost uniformly dismissive.
Have motifs of the first generation thus emigrated from Frankfurt into new terrains?
Whatever the answer here may be, the concern is that other issues may likewise have
traveled elsewhere. I mentioned at the beginning the progressive accommodation of
“critical theory” to American liberalism—a trend acquiring ominous portents under the
auspices of a globalized neo-liberalism. To Habermas’s credit, there are passages in
Mendieta’s book showing awareness of these portents, as when, in the essay on Metz
(p.30), he castigates “the barbaric reverse side of its own mirror” which Western
Enlightenment has ignored for too long and which has encouraged the rise of “the
stifling power of a capitalistic world civilization, which assimilates alien cultures and
abandons its own traditions to oblivion.” However, in the later interview with
Mendieta, we learn (p.153) that the current state of the world is really “without any
clearly recogniziable alternative” and that “there is no reasonable exit-option left to us
from a capitalist world society today.” Although deploring the “unjust distribution of
good fortune in the world,” redress for this situation belongs for Habermas to politics
and economics, “not in the cupboard of morality, let alone moral theory” (p.166). As
he reiterates, the “burning issue of a just global order” is basically a “political” (that is,
a tactical or strategic) problem, and “not a question for moral theory” or discourse
ethics. Does this mean that the poor and marginalized populations of the Third and
Fourth World can no loner expect intellectual and ethical support for their plight from
Frankfurt? In this case, the rupture between the two generations would indeed seem
unbridgeable.
2003.02.06
Benjamin Morison
On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place
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Morison, Benjamin, On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place, Oxford University Press,

2002, 202pp, $45.00, ISBN 0199247919.
Reviewed by Mohan Matthen, University of British Columbia
Most philosophers can recite the one-sentence summary of Aristotle’s theory of place:
the place of x is the first (i.e., innermost) motionless boundary of the thing that
contains x (Phy IV 4, 212a20-21). How did Aristotle arrive at this view? What is the
entity of which he was trying to give an account, and what are the (supposed)
phenomena that he was trying to accommodate? How did he deal with the obvious
difficulties that plague his conception? Benjamin Morison’s admirably clear and
comprehensive monograph offers the untutored reader an excellent entry into such
questions. Morison is well-schooled in both the interpretative literature on Aristotle’s
theory and the analytic literature on place and related concepts, and anyone who is
not quite up to speed either on how to read Physics IV, 1-5 or on how to assess the
philosophical worth of the theory articulated there will find in this book a self-
contained and relatively painless crash course. The expositions of the “six dimensions”
in chapter 1, of location in chapter 2, of Zeno’s paradox of place in chapter 3, and of
matter and form in chapter 4, are models of sound exposition of difficult texts. Even
for the expert, these commentaries are useful records from which relevant Aristotelian
references can be recovered without much effort.
Let us turn now to Aristotle’s famous definition, quoted above. What is the thing that
contains x? Surely there are many, for I am, at this moment, in Vancouver, Canada,
North America, and so on. Morison argues, persuasively, that Aristotle’s unique
container is what he (i.e., Morison) calls the “maximal surrounder” of x, the “body
which surrounds x such that all the other bodies which surround x are parts of it” (p.
138). This maximal surrounder is, of course, the universe, which turns out, therefore,
to be the common container of all bodies. The place of x is an interior surface of the
universe, the interior surface that is created by x. This inner surface fits x exactly:
“the inner limit of x’s surroundings marks the beginning of the outside world . . . it is
the first thing in which x is” (p. 142).
But consider now a boat in a river. The water of the river is moving, and the boat is
moving with it in such a way that it is always touching the same water. It seems that
the inner surface of the universe created by the boat stays the same in this case. So it
seems that the boat stays in the same place. Since Aristotle defines movement as
change of place, this has the unwanted consequence that the boat is not moving. By
the same token, a stationary boat in a flowing river would constantly change its place,
and thus be moving according to Aristotle’s definition. Morison interprets Aristotle’s
response to this puzzle (at Phy IV 4, 212a14-21) as follows: the inner limit that
constitutes the boat’s place is not the inner limit of the river water, but the inner limit
of the river itself (p. 152). There is a difference between these limits, Morison claims:
the inner surface of the river itself is, at any given moment, constituted by the inner
surface of the water that happens to coincide with it. But constitution is not identity,
since at another moment the same surface of an immobile thing like the river, or of
the universe, could be constituted by a different surface of the moving water. “The
inner surface of the universe at which it is in contact with the [boat] (as long as [it]
remains stationary) remains the same,” he says, “even though it is constituted at
different times by different surfaces of water” (p. 154). In order to identify the place
of a thing, one has to identify some motionless container. There is always such a
container because in the last instance everything is in the universe, and the universe
is stationary.
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Morison’s interpretation is clever, but it is open to a seemingly damaging objection. In

his conception, place turns out to be immaterial (or so it seems to me): it is
constituted by matter, of course, but it is not itself identical with any material body.
But (as we shall see in a moment) Aristotle wants place to be causally significant. Can
a bare location – an entity that is one despite the multiplicity of bodily entities that
constitute it at different times – be causally significant? (Cf. Can the Ship of Theseus
be causally active except in virtue of the matter that constitutes it at any given time?)
This question goes right to the heart of Aristotle’s conception of place, and also draws
together a number of threads in Morison’s discussion. For these reasons, it is worth
discussing in some detail. As it happens, I do not think that Morison gets these
matters exactly right, though in the end his interpretation is sustainable despite small
missteps.
Is place real? One of Aristotle’s reasons for thinking that it is real is his insistence that
(some?) places have “a certain potency,” (dunamis) since each of his elements is
“carried to its own place, provided that nothing interferes” (Phy IV 1, 208b10-12). For
example, earth is carried to the centre of the universe; this shows that the centre of
the universe has potency, and must hence be real. The definition of place must
accommodate the causal potency of at least this particular place. What is the nature
of the “potency” of the centre of the universe? Many commentators answer in a way
that is seemingly influenced by Newton’s theory of gravitation: Ross, for example,
supposes that the centre of the universe exerts an “attractive influence” on earth (see
Morison, p. 50 n). This is an anachronism, as Morison rightly points out, for in
Aristotle’s theory, the centre is not the efficient cause of earth’s motion (as an
attractive influence would be), but a constituent of its formal cause. In other words, it
is causally significant because the centre of the universe forms a part of the definition
of earth. Morison gives this definition as follows: earth is defined as that which goes
down, or towards the centre.
Morison is quite right to invoke definitions (and formal causes) in this context, but he
does not get Aristotle’s definition of earth quite right. He suggests that Aristotle
defines earth in terms of a direction and destination of movement; but in fact Aristotle
defined it in terms of stasis. It is certainly true that downward motion is part of the
nature of earth (cf. De Caelo I 2, 268b28). But this natural motion is in turn explained
by the place at which earth is naturally at rest (DC III 2, 300a20-b8). The explanation
runs as follows. Suppose that the defining essence of earth is to be at the centre. Now
consider a clod of earth that is displaced from the centre. This clod is not fully
actualized: it is not at the centre, as its defining essence demands. In order to realise
its essence, it needs to move toward the centre. Thus it has a potency to move to the
centre; this potency is actualized if nothing hinders the movement of the clod. The
actualization of the potency is the falling motion of the clod. Note that earth’s motile
tendency is not the ultimate cause here; the ultimate cause is rather the end of the
motion – and this end is a resting state. This reliance on the end of motion is
characteristic of Aristotle’s teleological explanations in science.
Now, how does this theory show that place has a “certain potency”? On the face of it,
the theory seems to show only that earth does. Suppose that I am a sceptic about the
existence of places. Then I would be inclined to think that although
(1) I live at a location 49.5 degrees north,
it is nonetheless the case that
(2) Nothing is a location 49.5 degrees north.
Given my reluctance to concede that (1) implies the reality of place, I will surely not
be inclined to concede that my tendency to return to a location 49.5 degrees north
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shows that this location has a “certain potency” and is hence real. For whatever
strategy I use to make (1) and (2) consistent, that strategy will surely suffice to make
(3) I have a tendency to return to a (particular) location that is 49.5 degrees
north whenever I am away
consistent with (2).
It seems, therefore, that Aristotle’s argument must have some hidden premises. What
are these? Here again, Morison does not get Aristotle’s theory exactly right. He
suggests early in his exposition that a certain place (namely, the centre of the
universe) is predicated of earth, and he argues that the doctrine of predicables
articulated by Aristotle in the Categories will therefore assign some reality to this
place, albeit a reality that is subordinate to the reality of earth. (See p. 4; note that
the complication introduced on p. 5 is irrelevant to this point.)
This is inaccurate. Consider:
(4) I am in Vancouver.
Is Vancouver predicated of me in (4)? Not at all. What is predicated of me above is
being in Vancouver, or disregarding the copula as Aristotle customarily does when
specifying predicables, in Vancouver. Vancouver is not the same as in Vancouver; the
doctrine of the Categories shows only that the latter is (subordinately) real, not that
Vancouver, or 49.5 degrees, is. Aristotle is perfectly well aware of this. In Categories
4, the relevant category is not place, but where. Where am I according to (4)? The
proper non-elliptical answer is not “Vancouver” but “in Vancouver”. Thus consider:
(5) Earth is fully actualized in the centre of the universe.
(5) attributes a “where” to earth not a place, and the argument of the Categories
shows that this where has (subordinate) reality, but not that the place implicated in it
is also real. By the same token,
(6) Earth naturally moves to the centre of the universe
implies that a particular whither has causal significance, and perhaps that this whither
has a “certain potency”; it does not directly imply that the centre of the universe has
any potency.
Now, Morison does recognize the difference between locatives (i.e., wheres and
whithers) and places. But he thinks that there is some easy transition from one to the
other. This is not right. He is simply off-base in the suggestion he conveys when he
says, “’place’ would be the abstract noun corresponding to ‘where’, as ‘quantity’
corresponds to ‘how much’” (p. 4). For in fact, as Ackrill notes in his Clarendon
Aristotle Series commentary on Categories 6, Aristotle “uses no abstract noun for
‘quantity’ but employs everywhere the interrogative-adjective [how much].” Exactly
the same holds true for ‘where’ – he never uses ‘place’ in the Categories to reify
‘where’. (Does he do this anywhere else?) True, Aristotle does identify non-substantial
entities such as points, lines, numbers, and the like as quantities. And places fall into
this category as well. And so one might think that the causal influence of a where is
transferable to place. But this transition is not straightforward. Note first of all that
locatives fall into one category, the category of “where,” and places into another, the
category of “how much”. And as we have noted, wheres are predicated of substances,
while places are not. Thus, there is no obvious way in which an account of the causal
potency of place can be extracted from an account of the causal potency of locatives.
Secondly, Aristotle does not say in the Categories that there is a place for every bodily
location (though he does imply this in the Physics). As far as the Categories is
concerned, all that can be drawn from (6) is that earth has a certain potency in virtue
of its defining where, not that the centre of the universe has any potency. The reality
of place cannot be proved by logic. One cannot simply assume that corresponding to
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every “in x” predicate, there is a real x, or, as Morison puts it, that “our practice of
saying where something is depends on the existence of proper places” (p. 80).
Aristotle holds that (5) and (6) imply that the centre of the universe has a certain
potency. We have seen that Morison’s way of explicating this claim is on the wrong
track: the causal potency of a place is not simply transferred from the causal potency
of a where or whither that implicates that place. What is the right way of
understanding Aristotle’s claim? Obviously, a brief review is not the place to get into
this question in depth. (I have, however, dealt with it in detail in “The Holistic
Presuppositions of Aristotle’s Cosmology,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XX
[Summer 2001].) Very briefly, one has to take seriously that Aristotle holds that the
universe itself is a natural substance with natural movements, and that places like the
centre and the periphery play a role in this entity akin to that played by organs –
functional parts – in an animal. My lungs have a certain potency that suffices to
explain some of the things I do, and so they are real. However, because they are
parts of me defined by their function in the whole, they are ontologically subordinate
to me. The same can be said about the centre of the universe with respect to the
universe. It too has a certain potency defined by its role in the whole. Note that this
way of explaining how Aristotle attributes causal potency to place does not assume
that every place has potency. There is no direct route from the truth of (3) to the
causal potency of a location that is 49.5 degrees north.
Let us return then to the question of whether Morison’s way of interpreting Aristotle’s
definition of place allows for places, as distinct from locatives, to have causal potency.
I have been arguing that it does not, and that there is no easy transition from the
causal influence of locatives to the causal influence of immaterial places. This might
not defeat Morison’s interpretation, however. Aristotle’s theory does not demand that
all places be causally significant. It only demands that some places be so, for instance
the centre of the universe. Even these places are immaterial in the sense given above,
that is, they retain their identity despite the fact that they are constituted by different
material bodies at different times. However, places like the centre of the universe are
identifiable by a formal property of the universe itself. Not all places can be so
identified: there is no geometrical property of the spherical universe that enables me
to identify my proper place, for example. It seems to follow that there are some
places that have no causal significance: 49.5 degrees north has none, even though I
keep returning there. These places might nonetheless be real. It is possible that
immaterial surfaces are real members of the category of how much even though they
are causally inert: it is possible, for instance, that their reality is implied by
“replacement”, i.e., the possibility of something now occupying the same place as was
occupied before by something else.
2003.02.07
Theodore Kisiel
Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts
Kisiel, Theodore, Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts,
edited by Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, 272pp, $29.95 (pbk),
ISBN 0826457363.
Reviewed by Richard Polt, Xavier University
Anglophone scholarship on Heidegger is sometimes marred by its inattention to

textual and cultural history. There are scholars who build an academic career on their
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analysis of a few sections of Being and Time without seriously investigating the
process by which Heidegger composed his masterwork, its place within the world of
Weimar Germany, or its relation to his many other “thought experiments,” as
Theodore Kisiel calls them (29). This procedure is actually antithetical to the thought
of Heidegger, who always insisted that philosophy emerges from a particular site and
age; it cannot be understood ahistorically, as a sterile set of propositions. Meanwhile,
some English-speaking Heideggerians of a more postmodern bent imitate Heidegger’s
rhetorical and linguistic mannerisms without engaging sufficiently in the old-fashioned
labor of philological research.
In contrast, Kisiel has spent nearly four decades investigating Heidegger’s thought in
all its complexity and historical specificity. His magnum opus, The Genesis of
Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993), is an invaluable account of this development. The
present volume, Heidegger’s Way of Thought, collects a number of previously
published texts by Kisiel that supplement his Genesis and will prove to be a very
helpful resource for readers of Heidegger.
The first chapter, “Heidegger’s Apology,” tackles the perennially controversial topic of
the philosopher’s alignment with Nazism. Employing interesting comparisons to
Socrates, Kisiel provides a blend of biographical, psychological, ideological, textual
and philosophical interpretations. He rightly argues that this approach does not reduce
Heidegger’s thought to his life, but “allows for the freedom of both life and thought”
(23). Kisiel finds some links between Heidegger’s thought and his politics: Heidegger’s
“regress to a pre-theoretical abyss as the moving force of history” has a “potential for
fanaticist exploitation” (31). The point here is not to condemn Heidegger for this flaw
but rather to open avenues for the further exploration of a disturbing topic that, Kisiel
suggests, will always be open to reinterpretation (35).
Kisiel has been an unsparing critic of the Gesamtausgabe or “collected edition” of
Heidegger’s writings. The directors of the project, he claims, demonstrate “contempt
for philology” (6) and “still have not mastered and truly ‘overseen’ their holdings to
the degree needed to manage the publication of an archive with some degree of
scholarly competence” (8). For example, Kisiel reports that, while translating the
lecture course History of the Concept of Time, he found numerous errors in the
Gesamtausgabe edition which had to be corrected with reference to the original
manuscript (203). Furthermore, the occurrences of the term Existenz in the typescript
of this 1925 lecture course were interpolated by Heidegger after the delivery of the
lectures, probably during the composition of Being and Time (39). This fact cannot be
gleaned from the German printed edition, for the directors of the Gesamtausgabe
insist on producing an “edition of the last hand”—that is, an edition that makes no
distinctions between the original text and later emendations—and an “edition without
interpretation.” Kisiel denounces these principles as “devastating fictions totally at
odds with Heidegger’s lifelong thought” (150). Surely Kisiel is right: a philosopher who
insisted that existence itself is essentially hermeneutic could hardly endorse the ideal
of an edition free of all interpretation.
As a result of the Gesamtausgabe’s editorial policies, Kisiel was not allowed to publish
an index or a substantial introduction in his translation of History of the Concept of
Time. The introduction is printed here (chapter 2) and the index is included as an
appendix. These items alone make this volume very valuable, as History of the
Concept of Time is an important text that provides an extensive discussion of Husserl
and a draft of the first division of Being and Time.
Kisiel collaborated in the 1996 publication of Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Being
and Time by preparing the “Lexicon” or index to the volume. His judgment on
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Stambaugh’s work, however, is stern: the text is “not yet sufficiently polished and
equipped for use in the undergraduate classroom” (65). Kisiel’s review of the
translation (chapter 3) is recommended reading for all who work with English versions
of Being and Time as scholars or teachers.
Other essays here focus on Heidegger’s early development: his evolving views on
categories (chapter 4), his debt to Emil Lask (chapter 5), his Freiburg lecture courses
of 1919-23 (chapter 6), his reluctant adoption of the terminology of Existenz (chapter
7), and his “transposition” of Husserlian phenomenology—centered on intuition—into
hermeneutic phenomenology—centered on interpretation (chapter 8). These chapters
overlap to various degrees with Kisiel’s Genesis, but they are still worth reading as
self-contained investigations of these themes.
The last article (chapter 9) is the earliest in order of composition: “The Mathematical
and the Hermeneutical: On Heidegger’s Notion of the Apriori” (1973). Here Kisiel
provides a lucid account of Heidegger’s interpretation of modern thought as
“mathematical,” as presented in texts such as What is a Thing? (1935-36).
In his review of Stambaugh’s rendition of Being and Time, Kisiel quotes Henry Aiken’s
remark that reading the first English translation was “like swimming through wet
sand” (80). Unfortunately, one occasionally has the same experience reading Kisiel:
Accordingly, a whole referential chain of the noetic ‘with . . . in, to’ (nexus of
intimately habitual human applying), or the noematic ‘in-order-to . . . for’ (nexus of
applied tool handiness), where the same action within the series turns from being the
to of an inter-mediate end ‘into’ the following with of means, can now come to its
terminating end of closure . . . [71]
This passage is an extreme example of Kisiel’s predilection for packing his sentences
with conceptual connections and etymological allusions at the price of clarity. Some
readers may also object that his essays do not always defend clear theses, but tend to
meander through a forest of textual interpretations (a style more typical of German
than of English philosophical writing).
In Kisiel’s defense, one can argue that the density and complexity of his essays does
justice to Heidegger’s fundamental thought: being is “inexhaustible” (198) and
permanently mysterious. To distill unambiguous theses from one’s experience of being
is to do violence to it, unless we constantly remind ourselves of the context and
history from which such theses grow. In its less extreme manifestations, Kisiel’s style
gives the reader pause in a way that is not confusing but enlightening. As he nicely
puts it in a discussion of Husserl:
In a world that has already been talked over, words have been worked into things and
remain impaled on things. On the other hand, by means of the proper reductive
procedures, it is possible to loosen the grip that our customary words have upon
things and thereby glimpse how the things themselves articulate their own structures.
[99]
At their best, both Kisiel and Heidegger help us perform this difficult trick: by drawing
on “the full amplitude of resources secreted in the English [and German] language[s]”
(77), they enable apparently familiar phenomena to become surprising and fresh.
Some of the older essays in this volume, although they were cutting-edge scholarship
when first published, naturally no longer reflect our current knowledge of Heidegger’s
writings and should be used with caution. There are also occasional typographical
errors throughout the volume, and some unidiomatic phrases in the introduction by
the two German editors. Despite these minor flaws, this is a book that deserves to be
owned by all Heidegger connoisseurs and anyone who wishes to become one.
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2003.02.08
Will Dudley
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom
Dudley, Will, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom, Cambridge
University Press, 2002, 344pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 052181250X.
Reviewed by Robert Williams, University of Illinois at Chicago
This book challenges the contemporary consensus that Hegel and Nietzsche are
opposites. Gilles Deleuze, who helped to shape that consensus, believed that between
Hegel and Nietzsche no compromise is possible. But there have been dissenters from
this consensus, including Walter Kaufmann, Daniel Breazeale, Stanley Rosen, Elliot
Jurist and Stephen Houlgate. Now Will Dudley weighs in with a fine study that perhaps
can be added to the Kaufmann camp.
Dudley has produced well-researched and documented interpretations of two of the
most difficult philosophers. He begins by situating Hegel and Nietzsche as critics of
Kant. This is an important tactical move: by demonstrating a common philosophical
opponent and by showing that they present similar criticisms of Kant’s position,
Dudley demonstrates a possible convergence. According to Dudley, Hegel and
Nietzsche both believe that Kant’s concept of moral will is formal and empty, and they
identify different ways in which the Kantian conception of freedom must be modified
and enlarged. He seeks to show that their responses are not opposite but
complementary.
It is a commonplace that freedom is a central concept and motif in Hegel’s thought,
but most studies of freedom tends to be confined to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and
Philosophy of History. In contrast to Allen Wood, who dismisses Hegel’s logic, Dudley
believes that, without an understanding of the logic, Hegel’s position is not sufficiently
appreciated or understood. Dudley begins with Hegel’s analysis of freedom in the
Encyclopedia logic, which refers to Kant’s third antinomy of freedom versus necessity,
but gives it a dialectical twist. Freedom is the “internalization” of externality so that
things remain bound, but their being bound to each other is constitutive of what they
are. The bonds are now understood to be internal to the nature of things so that each
is what it is only by being part of a whole. Thus, freedom is necessity comprehended,
posited and surpassed (aufgehoben). Although abstractly formulated, Hegel’s
conception of freedom is a social infinite: to wit, a finite thing’s internalization of its
connection to its other, and its recognition that it and its other are reciprocally
constitutive produces genuine, rather than spurious, infinity. Freedom is a genuine
infinite which consists in remaining at home with self in its other, or expressed as a
process, of coming to self in its other. Being at home with self in other is a holistic
conception of freedom which is embodied in Hegel’s account of ethical life and its
institutions.
However, the social infinity of freedom is only partly realized in Hegel’s objective
spirit. Put simply, the state, as the objective realization of the will in the world, does
not exhaust Hegel’s conception of freedom. The state is an institution limited and
opposed not only by other states but also by nature. This means that the full
manifestation of freedom lies deeper (or higher) in absolute spirit, the sphere of art,
religion and philosophy.
Dudley wishes to examine the Philosophy of Right from a logical point of view. But
which logical category corresponds to the will and the point of view of morality? The
general question concerning correspondences (or the lack thereof) between logical
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categories and real philosophical Gestalten has been debated without success or
consensus. Some have maintained that the logic of essence underlies the philosophy
of right. Dudley believes that the category of judgment corresponds to and grounds
the account of the will. Common to both of these proposals is the issue of incomplete
mediation, which means that spirit remains bound by and limited by another and
consequently does not obtain its proper infinity. As Dudley shows, the copula, the “is”,
of judgment, is an incomplete mediation because the terms S and P remain external
to each other. Hence in the moral will, as in judgment, universality, particularity and
individuality are both divided and held together, known to be different, but
nevertheless assumed to be identical. The dualism or antinomy of the moral will
shows that it is not the locus of freedom but is rather a perversion of it. Dudley
concludes that it is the logical limitations of judgment that limit the moral will, that
make it conceptually incapable of being the actuality of freedom. The moral will is
always in the position of having to specify the content of the good, but is unable to do
so. The moral will is a mere Schein, a hopelessly self-contradictory concept that
conceives freedom in a way that makes freedom impossible. Dudley’s discussion is
brilliant and far more complex and subtle than can be indicated in the space of a
review.
However, while the logic of judgment undoubtedly casts a long ray of light on the
problems of the moral will, it is far from clear that this category illumines or underlies
the entire Philosophy of Right, including the institutions of ethical life. As Hegel shows
in the logic, the double-sided middle term of syllogism replaces the copula of
judgment, and syllogism completes the incomplete mediation of judgment. The
institutions of ethical life are conceived organic totalities that reflect and embody
richer logical categories such as syllogism, chemism and teleology. Dudley
acknowledges that ethical life overcomes the abstract dualisms and antinomies of
morality, but he does not provide an analysis of their categorical deep structure
comparable to his analysis of judgment and moral will. This leads him to downplay
and underestimate the elements of reconciliation recently stressed by Hardimon and
others, not only in Hegel’s account of punishment but also in his account of ethical
life. Dudley acknowledges that these reconciliations and mediations are present in the
texts, but leaves them without foundation or clarification from the logic. It is not clear
whether he believes that judgment underlies the entire objective spirit and
Rechtsphilosophie or whether his account of its logical deep structures is simply
incomplete.
This puzzle is deepened by the fact that Dudley discusses syllogism as the successor
category to judgment. However, he correlates syllogism with absolute spirit. The
reason for this narrow reading and application of syllogism is not evident. Dudley is
correct that the objective spirit and institutions of ethical life remain finite, and that
objective spirit and its institutions are surpassed by absolute spirit. However from this
it does not follow that the mediating institutions of ethical life—punishment, marriage,
corporations and state—are all hung up on the incomplete mediations of the category
of judgment. If that were so, then there would be no reciprocal recognition, and no
concept of spirit or ethical life and its leading institutions. These important mediating
institutions are obscured if they are viewed simply through the lens of the logical
category of judgment.
Dudley’s discussion of absolute spirit begins with the observation that the will, as the
second, oppositional mode of the dialectic, remains limited by what it negates and
thus cannot account for the unity of spirit and nature. Thus, Dudley believes that the
subject cannot become truly infinite on the level of objective spirit and the level of
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will. The will, as the second, oppositional moment of the dialectic, has to be
aufgehoben, and this occurs in the move to syllogism and purposiveness. The will
depends on and presupposes another logical category in which the unification of the
spiritual subject and natural world is always already the case prior to their being
judged (divided) as independent. Such a unification is not achieved through willing,
not forged by the subject, but is always already true in itself. (p. 90) Thus, the will
presupposes this unification.
This reversal continues Hegel’s critique of Kant’s view that religion and theology are
derivative from morality. Kant reduces the existence of God (what is true in itself) to a
merely subjective postulate. This subjective form of the postulate contradicts its
objective content. In maintaining that the true in itself is prior to will, Hegel reverses
Kant’s order of dependence, and this reversal is Hegel’s version of the ontological
argument and the transition to absolute spirit. It removes the illusion that the
supreme good is not realized, or that it is dependent on the will for its realization. If
the supreme good is always already realized, or eternally realizes itself, then the world
is as it ought to be. With this realization the will lets go its striving and is overcome.
This reversal is a higher realism, which embodies a higher form of freedom than the
will, namely freedom on the level of absolute spirit.
Dudley seems unsure how to present this higher standpoint of absolute spirit. Is the
final overcoming of the will somehow produced by willing? Does the will lift itself to
absolute spirit by pulling up its own bootstraps? Or does it rather discover a presence
and limit to its striving that is always already there, the sought-for eternally realized
reconciliation—the good itself? Dudley seems to want to have it both ways. His
suggestion, made in the concluding chapter, that truth at this level should be
formulated in the middle voice, may point a methodological way out of one-sided
dichotomies. But it leaves the substantial issue, the reversal inherent in the
ontological argument, unclarified.
Dudley rehearses and defends the well-known Hegelian view that philosophy is the
final arbiter of the truth of absolute spirit; this means that in his view philosophy is
the ultimate form and shape of freedom. Dudley tells us that art and religion, like
willing, are dependent for their content on something external to themselves.
Philosophy, in contrast, depends for its content only on its own form, conceptual
thought, and has no external other, and is not finite in either of the senses in which
willing is (107). Hence, Dudley regards philosophy as absolute spirit because it
overcomes the externality that persists in the images of art and the representations of
religion.
If Hegel is philosopher of the system, Nietzsche is anti-system. But this does not
mean that there is no order and organization to his thought, and one of the merits of
Dudley’s reading is to bring out and express Nietzsche’s ordered concept of freedom.
Dudley concedes that Nietzsche is not usually thought of as a philosopher of freedom.
Indeed, it is not even clear that Nietzsche possesses a concept of freedom. However,
Dudley proposes that Nietzsche’s account of freedom is implicit in his discussion of
decadence, nobility and tragedy. So he engages in a hermeneutics and reconstruction
of Nietzsche’s account of freedom. Dudley’s thesis is that the decadent (servile or herd
morality), the noble and the tragic represents three stages of increasing degrees of
freedom. He proposes to read these as stages of liberation. This not only reads
Nietzsche against the grain of his elitism, but also brings him into proximity to Hegel.
Dudley distinguishes three ways in which, according to Nietzsche, humans can fail to
be free. Two are types of decadence: 1) The peculiarly modern sickness arising after
shedding the constraints of tradition and being open to everything, of being unable to
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forge an independent will, and thus being turned over to one’s instincts. 2) The
premodern sickness of decadent herd morality, with its reactive willing that depends
on an external stimulus (thus a form of heteronomy) and is accompanied by the
ascetic ideal and the metaphysics of weakness. The third unfreedom is noble morality,
which has forged an independent will but in a parochial way that excludes everything
other and alien to its standards of measure; thus its measure is parochial, and the
noble is limited by what it excludes. Consequently, even though it is more free than
herd morality by virtue of its affirmative willing, it too remains a form of heteronomy.
Dudley’s account of herd morality and its accompanying metaphysics of weakness is
illuminating. Too weak to forge a will of their own, decadents don’t act, but react to
what they regard as the evil ones. Since their actions are reactive and negative, full of
ressentiment, these very practices are a flight from the actual world towards an
imaginary ideal world where there is no suffering. This imaginary world is the true
world, and the actual world is devalued to the status of a mere distorted appearance
of the true world, or finally devalued to nothing. The metaphysics of weakness arises
on this soil of ressentiment and world-devaluation. Its leading concepts, the true
versus the false worlds, the concept of God as moral lawgiver and judge, the immortal
soul that confers equal moral worth on everyone, free will as a postulate to hold noble
types accountable for their alleged injustice, all are part of a package: the moral
vision of the world in which the actual world stands condemned. Since the
metaphysics of weakness originates in ressentiment, its affirmations are
fundamentally negative and empty. This is Nietzsche’s emptiness charge parallel to
Hegel’s critique of morality as formalism.
Yet the metaphysics of weakness is also an attempt to forestall nihilism by saving the
will and protecting against its own self-negation and inability to will. The aim of the
metaphysics of weakness is to provide an interpretation of suffering and to hold out
the hope of the end of suffering. The ascetic ideal holds that real life and real
happiness are found only in the true world. Suffering is thus given an explanation. The
metaphysics of weakness and its ascetic ideal are improvements over total nihilism:
the willing of the void is better than no will at all. Thus, the will itself is saved and
total nihilism is avoided.
This solution does not overcome decadence and weakness, nor is it the achievement
of genuine freedom. The moral vision of the world succeeds in producing the herd
morality, a cultural condition in which individuals lack independent wills but conform
to the herd and its values. Individuals are reduced to being functions of the herd and
herd values.
The moral will has to be overcome. Or rather, it overcomes itself: the moral
commitment to truth undermines morality and its real world. The metaphysics of
weakness is exposed as “lies”. The commitment to truth ultimately destroys the herd
morality and leads to a displacement of the herd perspective. The true world where
there is no suffering is disclosed as a lie. But in the aftermath of the death of God,
how is it possible to forge a will without a ground, without an eternally valid
perspective? How is it possible to forge a will apart from herd community and
conformity? Yet an attempt to forge a will must be made, because the alternative is
radical nihilism.
Nietzsche turns to the noble type, the opposite of decadence, and whose morality is a
life affirming self-apotheosis. Its fundamental features, Dudley maintains, are its
selfishness, its ability to be indifferent to the suffering of others, and its hardness, its
willingness to reduce others to expendable slaves for the sake of its own affirmations.
It is a creative, sovereign morality, according to which to forge a will is equivalent to
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becoming an independent individual and standing out as an exception to the herd.

This independence is due to the sheer vitality and differential character of authentic
self-affirmation. Thus the noble type leads to a radical, individualistic autonomy and
the creation of plural noble moralities. There is no single moral code; no one-size fits
all morality—as maintained by the herd.
Dudley suggests that noble moralities can be communicated and shared. However,
noble cultures, to the extent that their moralities and values are shared and
communal, are also herdlike. And to this extent they also fail to liberate their
adherents from the herd, and rather reimpose herd aspects. For Nietzsche all
community is common and herdlike. And because this is the case, Dudley argues that
noble morality is not finally free, and its measure is parochial. Thus noble morality
remains caught in its own measure and perspective. There is a higher freedom,
namely, tragic freedom.
The tragedy-affirming Übermensch overcomes the noble, self-affirming will. On the
one hand, there is a forgetting, a practice of oblivion in which the determinacy of the
noble is forgotten, laid aside. Thus, the measure of the will is laid open to the
otherness which it had previously excluded. The will becomes unsittliche, i.e., it is not
attached to any customs---in contrast to both the herd and noble moralities. Only now
is it able to become the free and changeable being that it is. In overcoming the noble
type, the will is liberated, released from any measure that could define or be required
by any stable community. (183) The result is a spiritual nomadism and
experimentalism, in which the self adopts a particular set of values and convictions
when they fit the situation or needs of the self, and eventually abandons these
convictions because no set of convictions can contain or measure the self. (185) This
nomadic experimentalism contradicts the basic tendency and will of spirit, its will to
assimilate and grow, namely, the will to power. According to Dudley, Nietzsche’s final
liberation involves the overcoming of the will to power.
Tragedy both acknowledges the necessary existence of pain and suffering and
approves and consents to their existence. The tragic spirit takes pleasure in both
creation and destruction. And so the tragic spirit is marked by the love of fate which
requires that we must love what has been to the point where it justifies all that
preceded it, while yet recognizing that all of our efforts will one day be undone.
Eternal recurrence is a kind of tragic redemption in which the past—”all the it was”—is
transformed into a “thus I willed it” which is a refusal of the condemnation of
existence and rather a restoration of the innocence of becoming. Nietzsche’s view is a
tragic, worldly, self-redemption. (207) Instead of redemption implying a separation of
the true world from the actual world, tragic redemption proceeds from the recognition
of the abyssal character of the world and the fact that there is no possible escape
from it.
Dudley claims that tragic experience cannot be wholly private and individual, but must
be shared, and it must develop a tragic culture. (216) The reason is that the tragic
redemption of the past requires more than a single tragic individual, for a single
individual cannot suffice to affirm the present in such a way to redeem the past even
in Nietzsche’s sense of redemption. However, Dudley does not show how the sharing
of tragic experience avoids degenerating into herd community.
Dudley’s book is really two relatively independent monographs expounding the
themes of freedom in Hegel and Nietzsche. He argues that these philosophies are not
incompatible: he wants to have both Hegel and Nietzsche. But how can this “and” be
supported and justified? Dudley argues thus: he distinguishes universal categories
(Hegel) from non-universal, non-categorical concepts (Nietzsche). Categories in
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Hegel’s sense are necessary to thought because they make possible all conceptual
activity, including thinking via non-categorical concepts. The latter are not necessary
to thought, but develop contingently out of mundane experience. This distinction
allows Dudley to make the following proposal: the philosophical practices of Hegel and
Nietzsche are compatible, because Hegel’s insistence that thought be self-determining
applies to categories but not to non-categorical concepts, and Nietzsche’s insistence
that systems of thought must be open to transgression and transformation can be
understood as applying to non-categorical concepts but not to categories. This
resolution is a two-level approach and requires reading Nietzsche against the grain of
his skeptical position.
Dudley observes that Nietzsche is not quite sure whether categories are in fact
exposed as bogus by genealogical critique, or only that they may be exposed as non-
categorical, bogus universals. The Hegelian categories and system are certainly
suspect; genealogy might be able to show that they are in fact non-categorical and
subject to transgression and transformation. On the other hand, Dudley acknowledges
that if Nietzsche’s project as he understands it were successful, genealogy would
undermine the Hegelian system, and no reconciliation with Hegel would be possible.
However Nietzsche has not made a serious study of Hegelian categories, nor has he
dealt with the obvious self-referential problems in many of his skeptical and polemical
pronouncements. Dudley proposes to combine the two positions, at least
methodologically, so that the tensions between them may be put to creative use. But
it is not clear how this combination could come off if Nietzsche and his followers reject
categories in Hegel’s sense.
This is a dense, closely reasoned, textually documented book from which there is
much to be learned. At the same time it calls for critical questions. The first is that the
“and” in the title is underdeveloped. The question of substantive convergence is
deferred to the final chapter. When the question of convergence is addressed, the
focus is not on Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s substantial views of freedom, but rather on
their philosophical methodologies of logic and of genealogy. The argument is that their
philosophical methodologies are not necessarily incompatible. But this does not add up
to substantial convergence on freedom.
Second, I noted above that Dudley fails to provide logical grounding for and
downplays the logical significance of reconciliation in Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie.
Dudley passes over it completely in his discussion of the concept of the will in
Philosophy of Right §§5-7, and presents an apparently individualist account of the will.
He ignores Hegel’s example of friendship as the will’s being at home with itself in its
other. If Dudley underestimates recognition as a form of reconciliation in Hegel, he
may overestimate the possibilities of intersubjectivity and community in Nietzsche.
Eliot Jurist and Murray Greene have claimed that Nietzsche has no equivalent to
Hegel’s concept of recognition, and it would seem he has no affirmative conception of
intersubjectivity. For Nietzsche all community is herd community. How then can noble
values or tragic experience be properly and authentically communicated or shared?
Third, both Hegel and Nietzsche are interested in tragedy, but are both tragic
thinkers? What is meant by tragedy? Is there a tragic liberation or redemption?
Liberation appears to be a herd value. The decadent herd may long for liberation;
however, liberation would seem to be something alien to the noble type, or to the
tragedy-affirming Übermensch. For the noble type acts out of fullness, self-
glorification and self-affirmation and would not experience a need for liberation. On
the other hand, since ethical experimentalism accepts and affirms the tragic and
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eternal recurrence, it sees itself as liberated from the need for liberation and
redemption.
The deeper issue is whether either liberation or reconciliation is possible within the
tragic point of view or rather requires its Aufhebung. Following Ricoeur’s typology,
tragedy identifies evil with finitude. Existence is flawed and finitude is the problem.
Hence the conditions of finite freedom are at the same time the conditions of tragic
conflict and destruction, and no redemption or reconciliation within the tragic can
occur. That is why it is tragic.
Dudley observes that, in Nietzsche’s narratives, concepts such as redemption, whose
ordinary use and genealogy are Biblical, continue to be used, but are deconstructed,
turned on their heads, co-opted within a wholly new valuation. But this emptying
redemption of Biblical content and replacing it with tragic content still leaves us with
the question: if Nietzsche’s ultimate perspective is tragic eternal recurrence, and if
Ricoeur is correct that the tragic identification of evil with finitude renders
reconciliation and redemption within the tragic framework impossible, with what
justification does Nietzsche, or can Dudley, speak of tragic redemption?
This book engages fundamental, difficult questions, and this is one of the best reasons
for recommending it. It repays careful study and should be on the ‘must read’ list of
everyone interested in Hegel and Nietzsche.
2003.02.09
Nick Bostrom
Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy
Bostrom, Nick, Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and
Philosophy, Routledge, 2002, 224pp, $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415938589
Reviewed by Neil Manson, Virginia Commonwealth University
Is the fact that life evolved on Earth evidence that life is abundant in the universe?
Does the fact that many of the free physical parameters of the universe require “fine-
tuning” in order for life to be possible support the hypothesis that there is a vast
multitude of physically real universes? Are we entitled to conclude from our being
among the first sixty billion humans ever to have lived that probably no more than
several trillion humans will ever come into existence – that is, that human extinction
lies in the relatively near future? Answering these much-discussed questions involves
reasoning from observations that are conditioned by “anthropic bias” or “observational
selection effects.” A selection effect is a bias introduced by limitations in one’s data
collection process; for example, the method of telephone polling used by Literary
Digest in the 1936 U.S. presidential election was biased against Roosevelt supporters.
An observational selection effect is a selection effect that arises from the very
preconditions of observership. In this lively and topical book (to my knowledge it is
the only book-length treatment of the topic), Bostrom claims to give an account of
how to reason in light of observational selection effects that is both more rigorous and
more general than any other in the literatures on fine-tuning, the anthropic principle,
and the Doomsday Argument.
After giving an introductory overview in Chapter 1, Bostrom devotes Chapter 2 to the
case of fine-tuning in cosmology – the need for the free parameters to be “just right”
in order for there to be life. As he properly notes, the distinctive claim the problem of
fine-tuning makes on our attention is not that the basic features of our physics appear
to be arbitrary, but that the universe would have been lifeless if those arbitrary
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features had been slightly different. His primary concerns are to establish that the
latter fact is relevant in deciding if fine-tuning calls out for explanation and that fine-
tuning supports the multiverse hypothesis. He skillfully exposes the flaws in the
argument (advocated by Ian Hacking, Phil Dowe, and Roger White) that the
multiverse hypothesis does not raise the probability that this universe is fine-tuned for
life.
I am less satisfied when he turns to fine-tuning’s need for explanation and to the
difference between surprising and unsurprising improbable events. He rightly
acknowledges that it cannot be in light of its improbability that fine-tuning is
surprising, because if it were, then the existence of any other possible universe
(including one possessing some equally improbable yet boring set of characteristics)
would be just as surprising. Upon reaching this conclusion, however, Bostrom says we
should abandon “vague talk of what makes events surprising” (p. 32) and proceeds to
develop an analysis of how the multiverse hypothesis serves to make fine-tuning call
out for explanation. Yet the account of surprising improbable events he sketches does
allow that fine-tuning is surprising – if fine-tuning is considered in light of the design
hypothesis. I don’t see why Bostrom abandons the well-established “surprisingness”
analysis of need for explanation, especially when it is about to lead to an intuitively
plausible answer to the question of why cosmic fine-tuning for life stands in need of
explanation. According the design hypothesis this status opens the door to some
provocative questions. For example, what business do scientists and philosophers
have letting the desire to provide an alternative to the design hypothesis drive their
theory-construction? I would have liked to hear Bostrom’s answer, but his disavowal
of the “surprisingness” analysis of need for explanation cuts off that line of inquiry.
In Chapter 3, Bostrom surveys the history of “the anthropic principle” – a term coined
by Brandon Carter in 1974 to identify a principle to be used for reasoning in light of
observational selection effects in the cosmological case. The term has since gone out
of control; not only are there dozens of inconsistent formulations of it in the literature,
but it now is often used to refer to the data of fine-tuning themselves or to pro-
design/pro-multiverse arguments based on those data (rather than to an epistemic
principle). Bostrom claims that, in addition to being a source of confusion, the
anthropic principles heretofore articulated all fail to solve the problem of “freak
observers” – the problem that, since every possible observation is consistent with a
cosmological theory according to which the universe is sufficiently vast (or infinite), no
observation could rule out or favor any given vast-world cosmology. (For example, in
a sufficiently vast universe, it is likely that a black hole someplace in spacetime will
produce a brain making any given observation.) Bostrom rightly abandons the term
“anthropic principle” and seeks to develop a principle that is clearer, more general,
and capable of solving the freak-observer problem. He starts with “the Self-Sampling
Assumption.”
(SSA) One should reason as if one were a random sample from the set of all observers
in one’s reference class.
The rest of the book tracks SSA as it applies to cases, with Bostrom ultimately
concluding that SSA must be replaced with “the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption.”
(SSSA) One should reason as if one’s present observer-moment were a random
sample from the set of all observer-moments in its reference class.
In Chapter 4, Bostrom leads the reader through a variety of thought experiments that
lend intuitive support to SSA. We see that SSA leads to the right answer in all of the
cases so long as we manage to settle on the right reference class. Identifying the
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appropriate reference class turns out to be the key problem in applying SSA,
particularly when different hypotheses entail different numbers of observers.
In Chapter 5, Bostrom seeks to show that support for SSA also comes from the
indispensable, if not explicit, role it plays in scientific reasoning. He claims SSA leads
us to the right results with respect to puzzling cases in cosmology, thermodynamics,
evolutionary biology, traffic analysis, and quantum physics. In applying SSA to the
problem of freak observers in cosmology, Bostrom says the solution is to construe the
evidence not as “Such and such observations are made” (E) but as “We are making
such and such observations” (E’). Given that we are the ones making the
observations, it is improbable that, amongst all those making relevantly similar
observations, we would be in the tiny (“freak”) minority that is doing so as a result of
having been produced by a black hole.
Bostrom is saying that the problem of freak observers derives from the fact that,
when we existentially generalize from E’ to E, we needlessly deprive ourselves of
important information – namely, indexical information. I agree that the indexical
element in observation is crucial to solving the problem of freak observers. However,
an element in Bostrom’s argument – he uses the phrase “rationality requirement” –
needs clarification. He says what makes it right to reason from E’ in this case is “the
rationality requirement that one should take all relevant evidence into account,
[which] dictates that in case E’ leads to different conclusions than does E, it is E’ that
determines what we ought to believe” (p. 74). His endorsement of the rationality
requirement seems at odds with his rejection (in Chapter 2) of the objection that the
multiverse hypothesis fails to explain why this universe is fine-tuned for life. If the
multiverse hypothesis doesn’t raise the probability that this universe is fine-tuned
(where we treat ‘this universe’ as a rigid designator), then even though the multiverse
hypothesis raises the probability that some universe or other is fine-tuned, the
rationality requirement will dictate that we ought not to take the fine-tuning of this
universe as evidence in favor of the multiverse hypothesis. Yet (based on my reading
of Chapter 2), Bostrom never denies that the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t raise the
probability that this universe is fine-tuned; he simply thinks this isn’t relevant.
The problem, it seems to me, is that Bostrom has tied together into one principle both
a true claim (“one should take all relevant evidence into account”) and a false one (“in
case E’ leads to different conclusions than does E, it is E’ that determines what we
ought to believe”). This latter claim, which we can call “the total-evidence
requirement,” is mistaken, as the following example shows. Let us suppose a
demographer seeks to determine the death rate of current or former Hollywood movie
stars. She reads her newspaper’s “Entertainment” section during a particular week
and sees that (D’) stars Susan Sweetheart, Mark Matineeidol, and Humphrey
Heartthrob died that week. Using existential generalization, she derives that (D) three
Hollywood stars died last week. From D our demographer proceeds to calculate the
movie-star death rate. Yet the death rate of Hollywood stars (whatever it is) is
probabilistically independent of the deaths of Susan Sweetheart, Mark Matineeidol,
and Humphrey Heartthrob, so D’ doesn’t confirm the death rate the demographer
derived from D. What are we to believe? According to the total-evidence requirement
we ought not to believe the demographer’s calculation, because D’ contains more
information than D. Something’s gone wrong here; to fix it, the total-evidence
requirement will have to be modified or abandoned.
“The Doomsday Argument” (DA) – the argument that the human race is more likely to
go extinct sooner than we previously thought – is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7. In
these chapters, Bostrom seeks to articulate DA and explain why the current objections
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to it fail, thus establishing a need that SSA will fulfill. There’s a lot of inside baseball
here, but two key points emerge. The first is the problem of the reference class: what
are the classes from which one ought to reason as if one were randomly selected from
them? The second is the falsity of “the Self-Indication Assumption.”
(SIA) Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things being equal) favor
hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few
observers exist.
While SIA promises to nullify the probability shift DA engenders (SIA favors
hypotheses according to which there are a great number of future humans over
hypotheses according to which there are not), that’s about all SIA has going for it. As
Bostrom deftly argues (both in Chapter 7 and Chapter 2), the fact that we exist
certainly disconfirms hypotheses according to which it is unlikely that any observers
exist, but that’s not what SIA says. If SIA were a good rule of reasoning, the question
of whether the universe is infinite/open rather than finite/closed (which surely is an
open scientific question) could be settled by SIA on purely a priori grounds. That can’t
be right.
Having argued in Chapters 4-8 in support of SSA, Bostrom brings out some potential
inadequacies with SSA in Chapter 9: “Paradoxes of the Self-Sampling Assumption.” In
all of the paradoxes, humans are put in odd situations such that their actions can
bring it about that they are exceptionally early humans (by ensuring that there are a
tremendous number of future humans). For example, in the case Lazy Adam, Adam
and Eve form the firm intention that, unless a wounded deer walks by their cave in
the Garden of Eden, they will procreate. (They know that if they procreate, they’ll be
kicked out of the Garden of Eden and their progeny will number in the billions.)
Although the prior probability that a wounded deer walks by their cave is low, the
posterior probability of the nonoccurrence of this event can be made arbitrarily lower
as the number of future humans goes up. So it is rational for Adam to believe that a
wounded deer will walk by his cave. Thus it seems that SSA leads to the
(counterintuitive) result that Lazy Adam can cause wounded deer to walk by his cave.
In this case (and similar ones) Bostrom goes to great lengths to show that the
counterintuitive results don’t hold – for example, that Lazy Adam can rationally
believe a coincidence will occur even though (almost certainly) no coincidence will
occur. Having argued for that, however, Bostrom seeks to develop a version of SSA
whereby it does not take people like Lazy Adam to the wrong conclusion.
This leads Bostrom to set out the SSSA in Chapters 10 and 11. SSSA, remember, is
couched in terms of “observer moments” – that is, temporal parts of observers. By
shifting the problem of the reference class from that of deciding what observers are
relevantly similar to oneself to that of deciding what observer moments are relatively
similar to one’s present observer moment, anthropic reasoners get more options
regarding which reference class to adopt. This means that a rational anthropic
reasoner is free to reject a choice of reference class that leads to a paradoxical result
of the sort discussed in Chapter 9. Bostrom tries to formalize these insights in “the
Observation Equation” (OE), which he says spells out “the probabilistic connection
between theory and observation that enables one to derive observational
consequences from theories about the distribution of observer-moments in the world”
(p. 172).
Anthropic Bias is a synthesis of some of the most interesting and important ideas to
emerge from discussion of cosmic fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the
Doomsday Argument. It deserves a place on the shelves of epistemologists and
philosophers of science, as well as specialists interested in the topics just mentioned.
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2003.02.10
Peg O'Connor
Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices
and moral theory
O'Connor, Peg, Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian approach to social
practices and moral theory, Penn State University Press, 2002, 167pp, $35.00 (hbk),
ISBN 0271022027.
Reviewed by Alessandra Tanesini, Cardiff University
In this book Peg O’Connor employs a broadly Wittgensteinian methodology to offer an

account of various forms of political oppression and to develop a theory of moral
responsibility. O’Connor recognizes that Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy was
intended to be purely descriptive, and on this matter she quickly parts company with
him. But she believes that some of the concepts he explored, especially those of
practice and of background, prove themselves to be extremely fruitful in the context
of an investigation of those central issues in feminist moral and political philosophy
with which O’Connor is concerned in this book.
One of O’Connor’s main contentions is that some forms of political oppression are
largely invisible because they are part of a background of practices and assumptions
which are hardly ever noticed or questioned (p. 6). Backgrounds provide the frame or
worldview against which any of our doings and sayings acquires its significance. For
instance, it is only in the context of complex practices, assumptions, habits and
institutions that marking a piece of paper with a cross constitutes an instance of
voting (p. 13). In a different context, a cross on a piece of paper could be a signature
or a doodle. Backgrounds, for O’Connor, are multiple and partly overlapping. They
also comprise ‘sets of power relations’ (p. 4) which can give rise to political
oppression.
O’Connor’s analysis of oppression in terms of practices and backgrounds is often
illuminating. For example, it succeeds in bringing out the full racist import of the
burnings of African-American churches in the 1990s. Quite rightly, O’Connor points
out that an act can be racist even though the agent had not fully articulated racist
motives to act in the way she or he did. It is quite possible to act in a racist manner
without being aware that this is what one is doing. One might fail to fully grasp one’s
motives. Importantly, one could also fail to appreciate the significance of one’s actions
within one’s current socio-cultural context.
The same analysis, however, also raises several questions that O’Connor does not
address in sufficient detail. For instance, O’Connor writes that backgrounds are among
the ‘conditions of possibility and intelligibility of actions’ (p. 2). The example of voting
mentioned above helps to understand what such a claim might mean. Unless some
practices and institutions are already in place, nothing I can do could possibly count as
an instance of voting. This line of thought seems to lead to dangerous conclusions
when we consider a different kind of case. O’Connor mentions marital rape (p. 37),
but one could also think of the case of sexual harassment. In the context of many
traditional understandings of the institution of marriage, marital rape seems to make
no sense. If we take backgrounds to determine the significance of actions, then it
would seem legitimate to say that in such traditional contexts nothing a husband could
do to his wife would count as rape. Yet, I assume that O’Connor would agree with me
when I say that simply because people at that time could not fully appreciate the
significance of their actions, it does not follow that what they did was not rape.
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There is a response to this objection which is available from within the Wittgensteinian
framework adopted by O’Connor. It requires that one provide a normative account of
practices. Practices, so conceived, are ways of doing things about which there is a
right and a wrong. In other words, practices are rule-governed activities, although in
some cases, as in children’s games, the practitioners make up the rules as they go
along. Once we keep in mind this feature of practices, it becomes apparent that
practitioners might make mistakes. They might fail to acknowledge the significance of
their actions, and such failures could be due to the fact that they lack any means to
make intelligible to themselves the meanings of their actions.
On these matters O’Connor is not sufficiently clear. On the one hand, she adopts a
normative understanding of practices since she invokes the notions of rules,
understanding and precepts to characterize them (p. 11). On the other hand,
however, she claims, ‘the common agreement in action of a community fixes the
meaning of a rule’ (p. 14). This account of rule-following ultimately reduces norms to
facts about what the community as a whole implicitly takes to be correct. Given such
an account, however, there could be contexts in which it would be correct to say that
it is conceptually impossible for a husband to rape his wife. What O’Connor needs to
avoid this unsavory conclusion is to reject the view that the meaning of an action is
ever fixed by what anybody takes that meaning to be.
O’Connor provides her account of linguistic meaning in a chapter in which she
addresses the topic of hate or assaultive speech. Meaning, she claims, is not
determined by speaker’s intentions (p. 74, 78). Rather, words acquire their
significance in the context of our discursive and non-discursive practices (p. 73). Thus,
if we want to understand the meaning of an epithet—‘queer’, for instance—we are well
advised, in the first instance, to look at the point of uttering this word on a given
occasion. We need to ask about the purposes it serves in the context of our ways of
life rather than search for the class of people the word might name or try to find out
the intentions of the speaker.
O’Connor holds that this Wittgensteinian account of linguistic meaning helps us to
appreciate the full import of hate speech because ‘it does not allow for the easy
separation of the content of speech and its effects’ (p. 73). I am not altogether sure
what O’Connor means by this claim. Wittgenstein himself makes it quite clear that not
even all the intended effects of an utterance are relevant to its meaning (Philosophical
Investigations § 498). Perhaps, O’Connor’s point is that a Wittgensteinian approach to
language encourages us to consider the overall significance of many speech acts in
the context of our lives rather than narrowly to focus on their linguistic meanings. Be
that as it may, O’Connor’s insightful thesis is that advocates of free speech who rely
on the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas are deeply mistaken about the nature of
the backgrounds that make speech possible and intelligible.
O’Connor does not make her thesis entirely transparent, but what she suggests is
along the following lines. Supporters of free speech do accept that when words are
direct threats or incitements to riots, so that they cause immediate harm to others,
one is not free to utter them (p. 70). They also agree that other forms of speech could
be odious, but they claim that state censorship of ideas is a much worse ill than
allowing hateful utterances to be heard (p. 70). They reach this conclusion, in part,
because they assume nobody else is silenced by this form of speech. The metaphor of
the marketplace of ideas encourages the thought that nothing anybody can say can
make it impossible for other ideas to be thinkable. It encourages the thought that the
only way of silencing opponents is physically to prevent them from speaking or their
ideas from being circulated. What O’Connor’s Wittgensteinian approach demonstrates
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is that there are backgrounds against which some ideas cannot be made intelligible.
Hate or assaultive speech restricts and shapes the range of thoughts that can be
articulated today. It is more harmful, and more directly so, than supporters of free
speech assume.
Whilst these considerations are important and succeed in showing the obfuscating
nature of the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, they do not in my opinion settle
the issue at hand. It is perfectly possible that, despite the harm caused by assaultive
speech, state intervention in the form of legislation about which forms of speech are
permissible would nevertheless be more pernicious. Although in general we want our
legislation to prohibit immoral acts, political considerations sometimes dictate a
different stance. For instance, it is plausible to claim that pornography harms women,
yet it is in my opinion unadvisable to depend on the state to ban it, since the most
likely effect of such a ban would be the confiscation of gay erotic material. This is
precisely what happened in Canada. Similarly, although it is clear that hate speech
causes much harm, I don’t believe that a situation in which the state is given the
power to monitor what citizens are allowed to say would be much better. The state is,
after all, hardly a staunch defender of powerless minorities. Were legislation to be
introduced, I would not be surprised if some hip-hop lyrics were the first form of
speech to be banned.
This last point brings me to my only complaint about this engaging and well thought-
out book. O’Connor subsumes politics to ethics. This is particularly in evidence in the
second half of the book where she develops her account of moral responsibility and
argues for the claim that white people qua white are responsible for racism (p. 112).
O’Connor is aware that in the current climate it is not possible for any person not to
have racist attitudes (p. 120). Since attributions of responsibility normally presume
that one could have acted otherwise, O’Connor’s position appears odd.
There is no problem with attributing responsibility to people for some of the things
they might have done unintentionally. But, these are always cases in which they could
have acted otherwise than they did. And, perhaps, they should have known better.
The example we are asked to consider is different, since there is nothing each one of
us can do to avoid holding racist attitudes.
O’Connor’s position could be made to square with the requirement of autonomy, if we
take her to be concerned exclusively with collective responsibility. The whole group of
white people is responsible, and as a group they could have acted otherwise; had they
done so, history would have been different. But no individual is responsible, because
no single person could have significantly changed the way things evolved. O’Connor
seems at times to endorse this reading of her position (p. 131), but since she
explicitly rejects the autonomy requirement (pp. 119-20), this interpretation cannot
be correct. Instead, she appears to hold the view that each one of us is responsible for
any attitude, action, or practice which he or she holds, causes, brings about or
sustains. In other words, each individual is responsible for anything whose coming
into being or whose preservation is caused either intentionally or unintentionally by
that person. This view sounds odd to modern ears, but it was held by the Greeks.
Oedipus famously was considered responsible of parricide even though he did it
unintentionally, and he could not have acted otherwise than he did.
Suppose now that we accept O’Connor’s claim that white people qua white people are
morally responsible for racism. How does it help? It is of course important that
individual white people do not think of themselves as immune to pervasive pernicious
attitudes. It is also important that they reflect on the undeserved benefits they are
recipients of purely in virtue of the perceived color of their skins. But the focus on
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ethics and the responsibility of individual white citizens also hinders the cause of the
fight against racism. It focuses attention away from the responsibility of the state, and
of giant corporations. It obscures the fact that political problems require political
solutions.
2003.02.11
Alan Malachowski
Richard Rorty
Malachowski, Alan, Richard Rorty, Princeton University Press, 2002, 202pp, $17.95
(pbk), ISBN 069105708
Reviewed by David Dudrick, Colgate University
Alan Malachowski’s Richard Rorty is an introduction to the work of the philosopher of

its title, one on whom the titles bestowed include “most interesting philosopher in the
world” (Harold Bloom) and “The Professor of Complacence” (Simon Blackburn).
Malachowski is firmly in the Bloom camp; his book is “written on the premise” that
Rorty’s work may constitute a “’quantum leap’ in philosophy” (9). As a result, his
introduction maintains the heady sense of being in on something that characterizes
much of Rorty’s own work. However, his characterization of Rorty’s project is largely a
result of an emphasis on views that smack of irrationalism, ones that Rorty has
(thankfully) largely come to reject. While acknowledging Rorty’s development would
allow for an exposition of his work that addressed the worries of his critics,
Malachowski’s reading leads him to dismiss these critics (e.g., as akin to “solid,
soulless critics of progressive music” (163)). That said, Malachowski claims to present
only a “particular Rorty” (10) and he does so in a book that is both clear exposition
and spirited defense.
Malachowski’s account is “’comprehensive’ in that it deals with texts spanning the
whole” of Rorty’s career (10). The book’s “narrative” (as opposed to a “topical”)
approach allows the central themes of Rorty’s writing to emerge in the context of the
works in which they were formulated. Malachowski’s first chapter, “Platonic
yearnings,” begins with a discussion of Rorty’s brief intellectual autobiography,
“Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” Rorty came to philosophy in search of an “intellectual
or aesthetic framework” that would exhibit the consistency of his aesthetic values (the
“orchids”) and his ethical values. Having become convinced of philosophers’ inability
to provide non-circular justification of their views, Rorty considered his search a
failure. Without a nongainsayable foundation, Rorty concluded, philosophy is
ultimately “a matter of out-describing the last philosopher.” While philosophy as
practiced since Plato is a failure, the skills associated with it may be put to good use:
they can be used to “weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society”
(27).
Now, Rorty’s rejection of philosophy since Plato appears more than a little hasty. One
would be hard-pressed to find any contemporary philosophers who take themselves to
be involved in a search for “nongainsayable foundations.” Even so, Rorty thinks that
the search for such foundations is somehow implicit in the tradition of which these
philosophers are part. Malachowski’s second chapter, “Conversation,” explains that
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is Rorty’s attempt to show that this is so.
Malachowski provides a clear account as to how Rorty, through that book’s
Geistesgeschichte of modernity, argues that the representationalism that
characterizes the philosophical tradition leads to the search for nongainsayable
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foundations. In Malachowski’s perspicuous formulation, Rorty shows that traditional

philosophical concerns with knowledge and mind are “problematic” – “in the sense
that they are pragmatically unfruitful” – and “optional” – in that they are a product of
assumptions that, while deeply imbedded, are not rationally “inevitable” (38).
In his third chapter, “Pragmatism,” Malachowski’s discusses Rorty’s views on the
realism- antirealism debate and the nature of truth, as well as his appropriation of
Dewey and other philosophers, as presented in The Consequences of Pragmatism.
Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is the main focus of the following chapters,
“Contingency” and “Liberalism.” In his discussion of Rorty’s notion of contingency,
Malachowski points out that the fact that a problem is contingent (in that it’s dictated
not by the nature of reason or some such) does not imply that the problem ought to
be abandoned. His use of the distinction between hypothetical and absolute necessity
is helpful here. While Rorty sometimes writes as though philosophers think
confrontation of, say, the Problem of Free Will is “absolutely necessary” (dictated by
the nature of reason), it is more plausible to suppose that they regard it as a
“hypothetical necessity” (given our firmly entrenched – though contingent – concerns,
this is a problem we must face). Why then should we turn away from these problems,
even if we may do so? Malachowski tells us that “the combination of a lack of
historical progress and the internal tensions” that characterize our attempts to solve
these problems leads Rorty to suggest that we “take a crack at something else” (115).
While Rorty does sometimes talk like this, at other times he offers a potentially more
compelling reason: the vocabulary that produced these problems should be
superseded by one “better suited for the preservation and progress of democratic
societies” (109). Malachowski’s account of Rorty’s discussions of contingency and
liberalism would be strengthened were it to explain and evaluate this reason more
fully.
I claimed above that Rorty’s critics will find little here to persuade them; there is an
important sense in which Malachowski would be unperturbed by this result. He decries
what he calls the “hyper-critical approach” characteristic of mainstream Anglo-
American philosophy and claims that Rorty’s work should be approached from “an
initially sympathetic vantage point” (7). But if this admonition is to amount to
anything beyond the obvious, will it not constitute a kind of “special pleading”? It
won’t, Malachowski says, because such sympathy is made necessary by the fact that
“Rorty is attempting to launch philosophy on a path that takes it into new territory
incommensurable with present-day ‘hyper-critical philosophy’” (7). But
incommensurability cannot be a reason for sympathy – in fact, it seems to render
sympathy by definition impossible. Malachowski is right that a list of philosophers will
reject the possibility of such “new territory,” but not, as he says, because they believe
their “methods have universal jurisdiction” (whatever that may be), but because they
follow Davidson in his rejection of conceptual schemes. But if that’s so, this list should
include Rorty himself. It seems, then, that “incommensurability” does not insulate
Rorty from criticism in the way Malachowski suggests it does.
Malachowski contends that to take the “hyper-critics” seriously would be to push
Rorty’s innovations “back into the dusty bottle of conventional standards” (10). There
may be an interesting point lurking here concerning the propriety of norms (one would
not, for example, be warranted in rejecting a theorem of theoretical physics because it
would make bad poetry), but Malachowski does not pursue it. For it sometimes seems
as though he considers any standard by which Rorty might be effectively criticized
“conventional.” He calls “small-minded” those critics who think that a “’contradiction’
or anomaly” in Rorty’s work would cause “his whole pragmatist sky [to] fall in” (28).
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But he later says that his critics are unable “to state their denial in terms that do not
beg the question or tacitly assume what Rorty himself denies” (168). But if criticisms
that point to an inconsistency among propositions Rorty accepts are inadmissible and
criticisms that point to an inconsistency between a proposition Rorty accepts and
other propositions which he doesn’t accept (but which the objector thinks are true)
are inadmissible, then no criticisms are admissible.
It seems Malachowski ought to admit that if Rorty is, in fact, committed to a
contradiction, then the “sky” in question does indeed “fall in.” He should also indicate
that there is little reason to think his views are, in fact, inconsistent. Further, the fact
that critics often “tacitly assume what Rorty himself denies” is cold comfort: the same
might be said of those who criticize radical skeptics, flat-earthers, or convinced Nazis.
And Rorty himself has argued (famously, in the case of the Nazi: see the introduction
to CP) that the absence of a non-circular argument against such positions provides no
reason to doubt one’s warrant in denying them.
This book is generally dismissive of Rorty’s critics – they most often “simply fail to
understand what he is trying to do” (163). What they fail to realize, apparently, is that
“Rorty’s ‘claims’ … are not designed to instill a fresh set of beliefs derived from the
literal content of the statements they encapsulate.” That is, Malachowski thinks
Rorty’s ‘claims’ are not claims at all. They are rather attempts “to prod us, by way of
‘edification’ … into exploring fresh ways of describing things.” His statements function
simply on a “performative level” (20). Under the heading “Philosophical propaganda,”
Malachowski likens Rorty to “Madhyamika philosophy,” saying that
Rorty’s views, and hence his ‘position-free position,’ are ‘edifyingly’ presented ‘to
achieve an effect,’ that they should not be ‘tastelessly’ interpreted as further, if
oblique and controversial, contributions to philosophy’s age-old quest for the final,
truthful picture of reality. (22)
According to Malachowski, then, Rorty makes no claims to truth; he simply offers
redescriptions in an effort “to achieve an effect.”
Now, it is undeniable that Rorty has endorsed such views. (Malachowski quotes
bizarre passages in PMN to show that this is so.) But it is also undeniable that Rorty
comes to reject this understanding of his project. In “Charles Taylor on Truth,”1 Rorty
says that PMN was marked by an unhappy tendency to make existentialist noises,”
one that resulted from a prior tendency to make
the unhappy distinction between “demonstrating that previous philosophers were
mistaken” and “offering redescriptions in an alternative language” instead of briskly
saying that to say that one’s predecessors used a bad language is just to say that
they made a certain kind of mistake. (TP 92)
But it becomes evident that Malachowski’s endorsement of this “unhappy distinction”
on Rorty’s behalf is central to his interpretation of Rorty’s work. To be sure we don’t
miss the point, Rorty adds: “I am also happy to say that when I put forward large
philosophical views I am making ‘claims to truth’ rather than simply a
recommendation to speak differently” (TP 92). Malachowski’s failure to account for the
changes in Rorty’s views over the years leaves him defending positions Rorty was
right to leave behind.
This failure causes Malachowski to interpret Rorty as being far more suspicious of
argument than the above quotes suggest. For instance, he assures us that Rorty
“does not believe there is anything wrong with arguments as such” (43); this is, of
course, anything but reassuring. Why say this? Because Malachowski takes Rorty to
regard as important the fact that “practices, customs, habits, and conventions” play a
role in determining a person’s beliefs. Why is this obvious fact significant? Because, he
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says, many philosophers deny it: though they may not admit it, they believe the
following:
When philosophers believe something philosophically significant (say P) they believe it
because it is true (and for no other reason). When, over time, they – or their
successors – change their minds and come to believe Q instead (where Q now
obviously implies that P is false) it is again the truth of Q that does the persuasive
work: they come to believe Q because it is true (and for no other reason) (53)
While Malachowski attributes this position to Rorty’s critics, the principle of charity
mitigates against attributing this position to anyone, since it’s not simply false, it’s
incoherent: one cannot believe P “because it is true” if, in fact, P is not true. At most,
one could believe P because one thinks (possibly falsely) that it is true. But this too
makes little sense, since to think that P is true just is to believe P, and cannot thereby
serve as a reason for (or a cause of) the latter. These concerns aside, the notion that
many (most?) philosophers hold that the truth of P can serve as a reason for the belief
that P is far-fetched at best. To hold such a position would be to think that when
asked “why do you believe P?” a perfectly good answer is “because P is true.”
Malachowski rightly claims that Rorty does not take his rejection of metaphysical
realism to imply the rejection of “the vocabulary of critical assessment,” including the
distinction between “what is accurate” and “what is inaccurate” (5). However,
Malachowski goes on to argue that such distinctions must be made according to
“pragmatic criteria.” As an example of what he means, he claims that one account
may be judged to be more accurate than another “because it more effectively satisfies
certain desires or fulfils such and such a purpose” (5). But something has gone wrong
here. Imagine a scenario in which my wife and I are trying to determine how a vase in
our house was broken. She suggests that our daughter Emma might have knocked it
over this afternoon, and I disagree. If she asks me, “Why is that account inaccurate?”
I may respond “Because Emma was with me at the bookstore when the vase was
broken.” If, however, I respond, “Because your account isn’t very useful,” then I
would deserve her puzzled look. That answer is no more appropriate than “Because it
fails to represent the nature of reality as it exists independent of human concerns” or
“Because it is inaccurate.”
I take this to show that the language of critical assessment is tied no more to a
pragmatic theory of truth than it is to metaphysical realism. To think otherwise is to
fail to recognize the significance of the distinction between the first-person and third-
person perspectives. To see this, imagine that I relate the above conversation with my
wife to a student interested in questions about the nature of truth. If, as we discuss
the nature of truth, I am to ask the student, “Why is that account inaccurate?” she
might well respond, “Because it isn’t very useful” or “Because it fails to represent the
nature reality as it exists independent of human concerns.” When we take up her
perspective – not that of an inquirer trying to figure out who broke the vase, but of a
third-person reflection on the inquiry – it becomes appropriate to offer theories of
truth. As we saw above, however, to do so from the first-person perspective would be
nonsensical – to think otherwise would be to regard “because it fails to represent the
nature of reality” or “because it is useful” as justifications for a belief. The first-person
perspective presupposes only what Gary Gutting calls “humdrum realism” or what
Arthur Fine calls “the natural ontological attitude.”2 Metaphysical realism and the
pragmatic theory of truth are at home only in the third-person perspective; that is,
only when one takes up a standpoint outside that of the engaged inquirer, the
perspective of theory or explanation.3 While Malachowski recognizes at one point that
pragmatism and metaphysical realism function at the level of “explanation” (81), this
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recognition is not pervasive. Rorty – by his own best lights – can and should use the
language of critical assessment without notions like “usefulness” or talk of “coping.”
Such notions are appropriate only when he takes up the third-person perspective.
While Fine and Gutting might counsel him to eschew the third-person perspective on
truth, Rorty regards it as crucial to the realization of a liberal utopia that
the image of thoughts or words answering to the world … be replaced by images of
organisms coping with their environment by using language to develop projects of
social cooperation. (RC 263)
Malachowski’s efforts would be better spent were he to explain why Rorty think this is
so and whether his position has any merit. His failure to do so leads him to call Simon
Blackburn’s suggestion that “the rejection of questions [is] the distinctive theme of
what [Rorty] calls pragmatism” a “silly accusation” (141). In fact, this is neither silly
nor an accusation. Insofar as Rorty is committed to maintaining a first-person
perspective, he will reject the many philosophical questions – especially those about
the nature of truth –that arise only from a third-person perspective.
Lack of attention to these perspectives is one reason that Malachowski’s discussion of
Rorty’s critics is unsatisfying. For example, Thomas Nagel says that Rorty seems to be
able to modify his beliefs, not due to the force of argument, but “because it might
make life more amusing … less cluttered with annoying problems” (164) – that is,
because doing so would be useful. If Rorty (or his readers) do sometimes confuse the
first and third-person perspectives, Nagel’s attitude is not inexplicable. To Nagel’s
request for arguments for Rorty’s views, however, Malachowski states that anyone
who understands Rorty will see no reason to offer arguments, since “metaphors,
images, and all sorts of historical contingencies” are better explanations of intellectual
change (166). But even if this account of intellectual change is accurate, only a
confusion of the explanatory with the justificatory would lead one to eschew
arguments in favor of “metaphors and images.”
Malachowski’s emphasis on views Rorty came to reject makes the resulting position
less plausible than it ought to be. When he decides against what could have been a
helpful discussion of Rorty’s views on science, he imputes to Rorty the claim that to
say that “science captur[es] the truth about the world” is “no more intellectually
justified than the rhetorical pats on the back modern politicians tend to award
themselves” (16). He quotes approvingly Rorty’s statement that truth is “a
compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with
other sentences that do so,” and attributes to Rorty a position he calls “pragmatism
without truth” (73). While these statements may reflect views Rorty held at one time,
they are among the views we have reason to think Rorty includes among the “dumb
things” he “said in the past” (TP 92). Malachowski’s introduction to Rorty’s work – with
its fine discussions of contingency, liberalism, and its subject’s “Platonic yearnings” –
would have done well to leave them there.
Endnotes
1. In his Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Henceforth TP.
2. See Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp 3ff and Arthur Fine, "The Natural Ontological
Attitude" in J. Leplin (ed.) Scientific Realism, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984. Gutting’s account is particularly interesting in this connection, since it comes in
the midst of an illuminating critical discussion of Rorty’s work.
3. The importance of the distinction between the first-person and third-person
perspectives in Rorty’s work is forcefully argued in Akeel Bilgrami’s "Is Truth a Goal of
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Inquiry?" which can be found, along with a response by Rorty, in R. Brandom (ed.)
Rorty and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Henceforth RC.
2003.02.12
Trudy Govier
Forgiveness and Revenge
Govier, Trudy, Forgiveness and Revenge, Routledge, 2002, 205pp, $80.00 (hbk),
ISBN 0415278554.
Reviewed by Mary Sigler, Arizona State University
Trudy Govier’s thoughtful examination of forgiveness and revenge considers the moral
and practical implications of choosing forgiveness rather than revenge in the context
of both personal and political wrongdoing. Focusing on South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in particular, and intranational ethnic and political conflict
more generally, Govier makes a case for forgiveness among groups in the political
realm that is meant to draw strength from—and strengthen—the case for forgiveness
among individuals. Relying on a mix of scholarly literature, intellectual journalism, and
vivid historical and contemporary examples, Govier rejects what she takes to be the
conventional view that some moral wrongs are so egregious that their perpetrators
are absolutely unforgivable. According to Govier, there are no “moral monsters”: “It is
both dangerous and unethical to write off a human individual or group as permanently
and incorrigibly evil.” (140) Likewise, Govier rejects even the qualified defense of
revenge offered in recent scholarly and popular works. “The fundamental objection to
revenge is that it is founded on the cultivation in ourselves of a desire [to delight in
the suffering of another] which is morally evil.” (13) Regardless of whether one
accepts her conclusions, Govier presents a compelling—if overly sanguine—vision of a
more humane and constructive approach to forgiveness and revenge.
Apart from her strong conclusion that no one is, in principle, unforgivable, the most
distinctive aspect of Govier’s work is the application of forgiveness to the political
domain. This requires Govier first to establish that a group as such can forgive—can
form beliefs, experience harm, and act. Toward this end, she argues that a group may
act or be affected both distributively and collectively. Thus, harm to an individual
based on his membership in a group may be experienced as a harm by other group
members distributively, in feelings of insecurity or vulnerability, for example.
Additionally, a group may experience harm collectively if group resources, such as
land or other possessions, are taken or destroyed. Further, Govier challenges the
claim that only individuals—indeed, direct victims—possess the requisite moral
standing to forgive wrongdoers. She argues plausibly that because a wrongdoer’s
misdeeds will often affect secondary and tertiary “victims,” such victims are likewise
positioned to extend (or withhold) forgiveness. Govier offers the example of slain anti-
apartheid activist Steve Biko, whose murder represented a grievous loss to his family
(secondary victims) and to his community (tertiary victims). (93) “Even if we grant
the assumption that victims have a special prerogative to forgive, there remains moral
space for groups to forgive, because—distributively and collectively—groups can be
victims.” (94)
In addition to post-apartheid South Africa, Govier examines the dynamic of
forgiveness and revenge in the Balkans, in the context of various African civil wars,
and during and after the Holocaust. In a chapter entitled “The Unforgivable,” Govier
analyzes the responses of various public figures to Simon Weisenthal’s wartime
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dilemma, related in “The Sunflower,” whether to forgive a dying SS officer for

appalling atrocities against Jews. Distinguishing forgiving from forgetting, excusing,
and condoning, Govier demonstrates that some of the respondents’ arguments against
forgiveness reflect conditional, rather than absolute, unforgivability. That is, doubts
about the officer’s sincerity and about Weisenthal’s standing to forgive atrocities
against other Jews constitute obstacles to forgiveness that, in principle, could be
removed.
Govier’s own rejection of absolute unforgivability is premised on a “broadly Kantian”
(64) respect for persons as responsible moral agents: “To regard human agents as
capable of redemption is the morally appropriate attitude to adopt towards them, an
attitude that is a kind of secular faith.” (137) (In two brief appendices, Govier
discusses various religious perspectives on forgiveness and offers a secular,
essentially Kantian, justification for an ethic grounded in respect for persons.) Govier
does not deny that some acts are unforgivable, though she rejects this formulation as
misleading; it is actors, not their deeds, who will (or will not) be forgiven. Accordingly,
“[t]o claim that because he has committed terrible deeds a moral agent is reducible to
those deeds and is thus absolutely unforgivable is to ignore the human capacity for
remorse, choice, and moral transformation.” (112) Relatedly, Govier emphasizes the
fact of universal human fallibility as a basis for forgiveness, observing that cases of
even brutal wrongdoing—by violent inner city gang members or low-level participants
in ethnic cleansing, for example—should be understood in their particular context.
“These cases illustrate the phenomenon of moral luck and offer a humbling reminder
that those of us who lead fundamentally decent and comfortable lives might have
done otherwise, had our luck been different.” (129)
Govier’s often persuasive analysis is not without notable shortcomings. As an initial
matter, she builds a case for forgiveness on an incomplete account of the alternatives.
Thus, the victim who withholds forgiveness is depicted as “clinging to a resentful
sense of her own victimhood and dwelling on the past” (63), paralyzed by self-
destructive emotions. Although forgiveness presumably entails overcoming
resentment, anger, and bitterness, Govier has not established—or even addressed
whether—forgiving is the only way to overcome these emotions. Common experience
suggests otherwise. An individual may overcome resentment, yet decline to forgive.
One may sever ties with a disloyal friend or an unfaithful lover, for example, without
forgiving or harboring feelings of resentment and anger. Sometimes we just move on.
Govier acknowledges that “[r]evenge and forgiveness do not . . . exhaust the
possibilities in terms of attitudinal responses to wrongdoing” (vii), but her analysis
consistently ignores this complexity. Groups and individuals are portrayed as either
healthy, constructive forgivers or bitter, debilitated resenters. The moral universe is
more complex—and often less dramatic—than Govier’s discussion suggests.
The sharp dichotomy between forgiving and resenting, which seems out of place in
various personal relationships, may nevertheless have a special applicability in the
context of political forgiveness. Govier’s primary focus, after all, is the prospect for
forgiveness between antagonistic ethnic and political groups within a single nation or
region. In these contexts—South Africa, Rwanda, the Balkans—disengaging is unlikely
to be a viable option because “abused peoples and their enemies or former enemies
have little choice but to live together in geographical proximity.” (107) In these
circumstances, victims and perpetrators face issues of “transitional justice”—
”rebuilding together a society in which they will live and work together on a daily
basis.” (106-07) In the absence of forgiveness, Govier worries that mere “[n]on-
violent co-existence is unlikely to be sustainable if past wrongs are unexamined and
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feelings of hatred and alienation persist.” (143) While this political reality strengthens
the case for group forgiveness, it exposes the limitations of the analogy between
personal and political forgiveness on which much of Govier’s analysis relies.
Govier’s particular focus on political forgiveness may also explain her otherwise
curious observations about the nature of victimhood: “It seems likely that most
situations of wrongdoing feature wrongs by both or all involved parties,” rendering the
“absolutist tones of the victim/offender and victim/perpetrator terminology . . .
regrettable.” (176) Indeed, Govier showcases many political conflicts in which mutual
wrongdoing blurs the distinction between victim and perpetrator groups. However,
while the “no innocent victims” mentality may be appropriate in certain political
contexts, and even some personal relationships, it has no constructive application to
most instances of serious criminal wrongdoing. For example, it would be morally
repugnant to urge a rape victim to contemplate forgiveness of her attacker based on a
recognition of her own culpability. In the criminal justice context, where Govier
suggests issues of forgiveness and resentment may have important policy
implications, her casual rejection of the victim/offender terminology seems utterly
misplaced.
Govier, in fact, traces some of the criminal justice policy implications of her conception
of forgiveness. “For a state or society to support policies implying that some human
beings are beyond redemption and deserve to be put away or thrown away, for good,
is for that state and society to demonstrate a lack of respect for those persons, as
persons.” (137) Accordingly, Govier rejects capital punishment and life sentences
without the possibility of parole because they treat offenders as “so much moral
garbage.” (138) Kant, however, famously argued that respect for persons may require
such harsh penalties in order that individuals receive their just deserts. That is, if the
human “capacity for autonomous rational choice [is] our most morally significant
feature” (165), as Govier (following Kant) maintains, then respecting that capacity
may require the imposition of harsh—even irrevocable—punishment commensurate
with an offender’s wrongdoing. Far from establishing that capital punishment is
immoral, the Kantian “respect for persons” that Govier invokes would seem to endorse
it. Although Govier is entitled to reject Kant’s strict retributivism, her failure to
address it altogether blunts the force of her own “Kantian” policy prescriptions.
Finally, despite Govier’s sensitivity to the perils of moral equivalence (50; 156), she
assimilates a wide range of conduct under the general heading of wrongdoing.
Lamenting the tendency of groups to dwell on their own sense of victimization, for
example, Govier notes that “Jews are victims of the Holocaust but oppressors of the
Arab population within Israel.” (155) Likewise, a “black American soldier may be the
descendant of enslaved and brutalized peoples, yet also a willing participant in the
deaths, due to the destruction of infrastructure in the Gulf War of 1991, of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi children.” (156) While Govier hopes that “[a]cknowledging
respects in which we are perpetrators may allow us empathy and a flexible
understanding of those who, individually or collectively, may have wronged us,”
(157), these examples are too controversial to make the point. Although reasonable
people can disagree about Israel’s policy toward its Arab population or the United
States’s decision to liberate Kuwait, to link this conduct with the attempt to annihilate
European Jewry or the brutal exploitation of African American slaves seems morally
obtuse.
Perhaps the failure to appreciate such distinctions results from Govier’s belief that
neither groups nor individuals are truly evil. Thus, “[t]o brand an entire nation or
group—whether Iraqis, Serbs, Germans or Muslims—as incorrigibly evil is to make a
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deep mistake boding ill for future relationships.” (139) But aren’t there some groups—
Nazis (not Germans), Al Qaeda (not Muslims)—we rightly deem evil precisely because
they are incapable of constructive relationships? A group whose raison d’etre is the
perpetration of evil cannot be redeemed; it can only be resisted.
On balance, Govier’s book represents a significant contribution to our understanding
of the dynamics of forgiveness and revenge, especially in the political context.
However, having structured her analysis in terms of a particular challenge—to identify
and defend the elements of a personal ethics of forgiveness that can be constructively
applied to the political realm—Govier makes a case for political forgiveness that
depends less on the moral virtues of forgiveness than on the undesirable practical
consequences of the alternatives. Indeed, despite Govier’s appealing vision of
forgiveness among individuals, she has not established that the Kantian respect for
persons entails a rejection of absolute unforgivability. Moreover, by neglecting to
consider alternatives that lie between forgiveness and resentment, Govier overstates
even the practical urgency of individual forgiveness. In these limited respects, Govier’s
otherwise fine effort falls short of the mark.
2003.02.13
Stanley Rosen
The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy
Rosen, Stanley, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of
Philosophy, Yale University Press, 2002, 327pp, $37.50 (hbk), ISBN 0300091974.
Reviewed by Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College
Well on in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Marlow consults the German expatriate trader
Stein about Jim’s case. Stein offers these thoughts:
Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man
who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people
endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht war? . . . No! I tell you! The way is to the
destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in
the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.
Something like Stein’s attitude is the dominant theme of Stanley Rosen’s new book.
“We have,” Rosen worries, “either lost touch with or become detached from ordinary
experience… The pursuit of the ordinary is a sign of decadence, not of simplicity” (p.
5). It is not clear that ordinary experience is either quite wholly available to us or
quite wholly coherent, yet it is all around us, and nothing else can serve as the point
of departure for the exertions of the philosopher. Rosen understands doing philosophy
to involve an ‘erotic’ effort to “keep oneself up” from within the ordinary.
Various other philosophers have of course held quite different conceptions of
philosophy, including conceiving of philosophy as a strict science, or as a
transcendental investigation of underlying “conditions of the possibility” of the
ordinary, or as an embrace of a coherent ordinary life, in such a way that
philosophical desire is stilled. Rosen develops his own conception of philosophy by
describing and criticizing these alternative conceptions, each of which—he argues—
involves either denying or inappropriately resolving what Rosen himself sees as a
standing tension between ordinary life and philosophical desire and thought.
As envisioners of a strict science of ordinary life and human experience, Rosen
considers first Montesquieu and then Husserl. Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws is
described as a founder father of the modern mathematical social sciences that fail
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really to grasp the basis and meaning of human, political life. Montesquieu, according
to Rosen, holds both (a) that human beings have innate traits, as a result of which
their actions fall under laws that are analogous to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,
and (b) that human beings are free to deviate from these laws. This incoherent stance
indicates that Montesquieu has failed to grasp exactly how human nature is expressed
in political practice. No coherent political science can result from commitment to both
(a) and (b). “The substitution of Cartesian or Newtonian for Aristotelian physics
radicalizes the problem, already visible in Aristotle, of the natural basis for politics” (p.
51). We are worse off, according to Rosen, when we face this unavoidable, even
unsolvable problem by conceiving of human nature (as Montesquieu undertook to do)
along the lines of Cartesian-Newtonian material nature, where material bodies fall
under exceptionless laws. First, we are just not like that in our actions, and, second,
so conceiving of ourselves threatens to deprive us of all norms for political life.
Perhaps we would be better off, at least in political philosophy, to hold to a Platonic-
Aristotelian conception of even material nature. “The shift from construing nature as
the ancient philosophies did to understanding it as do modern physicists deprives
political philosophers of a standard by which to validate traditional or customary
standards” (p. 25). Absent Platonic-Aristotelian conceptions of physical and human
nature, we may be forced to see political life as either just ‘what simply happens’ or
just what individuals wholly arbitrarily ‘choose to do’. Either way, compelling norms
seem unavailable.
Husserl somewhat similarly undertook “to make philosophy truly scientific as well as
to restore the human relevance of science” (p. 59). In pursuit of this aim, Husserl
proposes a science of conceptual consciousness. He “demands that we see mentally
the structures of subjectivity, but also that we see ourselves in the act of seeing” (p.
68). This effort, too, founders, in that it cannot take account of the erotic drive,
arising mysteriously from within ordinary life, that alone can motivate scientific
efforts. “It is innerworldly philosophical eros that drives one to phenomenology. But
phenomenology depends upon the neutralization of innerworldly eros” (p. 88). Hence,
though motivated by ordinary experience, it fails to grasp what goes on within
ordinary experience.
The transcendental investigations of Kant and of Heidegger are likewise incoherently
both rooted in ordinary life and dismissive of its significance. Kant, in describing the
categorical imperative as a law of pure practical reason laid down within the structure
of each deliberative consciousness, produces a moral theory that is “cut …off from the
common moral understanding to which he initially appeals” (p. 117). Rosen concludes
that Kant’s “desire to preserve freedom and morality was enacted in such a way as to
accelerate the advent of antirationalism, or of spontaneity severed from law, and so
the destruction of morality” (p. 116). Heidegger, too, incoherently repudiates
ordinary, lived, deliberative experience. He proposes a “transformation of phronesis
into fundamental ontology” (p. 120), but in doing so he “empties [phronesis] of all
specific content” (p. 123).
Wittgenstein and Strauss attempted to put an end to philosophy: Wittgenstein by
arguing that it is impossible and urging a “return to common speech” (p. 139);
Strauss by arguing that philosophy is nothing more than knowledge of ignorance (p.
151). Neither stance is coherent, according to Rosen. Speech and concepts change in
ordinary life, and we need to and can think about what to say and think. Simply to
endorse one version of everyday language at a particular moment, as Rosen takes
Wittgenstein to do, is already itself to do philosophy, not to put an end to it. Rosen
criticizes Moore, Austin, and Grice similarly. Strauss’s practice of reading philosophical
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texts as themselves parables of our standing failure transparently to know absolutes

fails itself to resolve the issue that we must face of whether revealed knowledge
(religious or philosophical) is possible. In the quarrels between Athens and Jerusalem
and between the ancients and the moderns, Strauss “never clearly identified the
victors” (p. 158).
After rejecting the strategies of philosophy as science, philosophy as transcendental
investigation, and of a return to the ordinary/acceptance of ignorance, Rosen turns to
sketching his own metaphysics of ordinary experience and his own account of
philosophy in relation to ordinary experience. His guiding thoughts here are that “we
have to start with our vision of the world” (p. 201) and that “the program of
philosophy …is to go beyond ordinary language, and to show how the ordinary
develops into the extraordinary, not how the extraordinary collapses into the ordinary”
(p. 203). His precursor heroes in this program are Plato and Aristotle, each of whom
begins by talking about “unitary wholes” that are present in ordinary experience—this
cow or that chair—and that are grasped by “seeing the looks” (p. 214) of things. But
they do not stop with this thought. Instead, and moved, respectively, by philosophical
eros and by a desire to know, Plato and Aristotle each go on to develop metaphysical
accounts of what realities underlie unitary wholes and their looks.
Largely following Aristotle, Rosen himself endorses hylomorphism. The unitary wholes
that we see are substances (space-occupying particulars) that are informed by a
blueprint or model (essence). A cow, for example, is “a substance having an essence”
(p. 280). In developing his hylomorphist metaphysics, Aristotle “straightens out” (p.
187) ordinary experience, therein showing us that a deeper, more insightful, more
passionate stance toward it is possible, beyond simple acceptance. In moral and
political philosophy, we can cultivate expert phronesis or practical wisdom in dealing
with the things of ordinary experience, rather than either collapsing back into the way
things are done or turning to pseudo-human sciences or moralities of pure ‘inner’
conscience. “Philosophy”—theoretical and practical—”is extraordinary, but the
meaning of ‘extra’ is unintelligible in detachment from the word ‘ordinary’ that it
modifies” (p. 303).
In developing both his criticisms of others and his own conception of philosophy as
passionate, extraordinary thinking beginning from within the ordinary, Rosen has two
main, interrelated concerns. He is worried about vulgarity, consumerism, and drift in
modern life, and he is worried about the dominance of constructivism and
technological-instrumental thinking in modern thought. His endeavor to call us back to
a reflective mode of engagement with the ordinary is designed to address both these
worries. Receptive engagement with the ordinary will rein in subjective-instrumental
theorizing, making it responsible to something real; reflection on our engagements
will pull us out of ordinary consumerism and toward something higher. These are
interesting and important worries to address, both in doing philosophy and in thinking
about how to do it. The problem of achieving intelligibility and genuine practical
accessibility, on the one hand, along with exemplary pursuit of objective value, on the
other, is genuine, both in thought and in life, and it is perhaps especially pressing in
modernity.
Yet Rosen’s way of addressing this problem is not consistently successful or satisfying,
in two closely related ways. First, his address to this problem remains on the whole
too methodological, too concerned with how to get started in doing philosophy at all,
rather than with particular problems of inquiry, ethics, politics, religion, or art. One
wants to know more than one gets about exactly what epistemic, ethical, political,
religious, or artistic stances, norms, or principles follow from actually practicing
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philosophy according to Rosen’s conception of it. The metaphysics that Rosen offers of
unitary wholes and their looks is (as he would concede) compatible with any number
of practices of inquiry, ethical life, political life, religious life, and practices of art. So
exactly where—toward what specific fruitful engagements and orientations (other than
a lot more worrying about how to do philosophy)—is Rosen pointing us? I am not clear
that Rosen offers much of an answer.
Second, Rosen’s readings of the figures whom he criticizes are not as generous as
they might be, particularly in failing to note how these figures did address
substantive, particular problems. Recall, for example, that Rosen’s charge against
Kant is that his moral theory is “cut . . . off from the common moral understanding to
which he initially appeals” (p. 117)—as the sort of updated but unspecified phronesis
that Rosen prefers presumably is not. But is this right? It is true that Kant claims that
the categorical imperative is a self-legislated command of pure practical reason, laid
down within each individual conscience. It is true that this command can, sometimes,
call us to reject “the way things are done.” But is this command either empty of
content (so that it encourages empty narcissism) or inaccessible from and inapplicable
within ordinary life? Perhaps it is. But Rosen here does not stop to take account of the
work of numbers of important recent commentators who have addressed these
charges in detail, including Onora O’Neill, Christine Korsgaard, Barbara Herman,
Marcia Baron, Paul Guyer, Richard Eldridge, and Felicitas Munzel, among others. It
would have been good to know in particular what Rosen makes of Munzel’s elegant
study, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, given that Munzel traces Kant’s
conception of an Umkehrung (reversal, transformation) in character that results in
commitment to principle, against the grains of egoism and habit, as that Umkehrung
may be nourished, but not controlled, from within ordinary educational and religious
life.
Similarly, Rosen fails to take on the most powerful and persuasive readings of
Wittgenstein and Austin that bring out their substantive commitments, preferring
himself to focus instead on methodological issues alone. Here it is important that
Wittgenstein worked specifically to challenge the intelligibility of representationalist
conceptions of conceptual consciousness and understanding, so as to call into question
all programs of scientistic or quasi-scientistic ‘research’ into the mind (as a container
of representations), from Cartesianism to cognitive science to central state
materialism. This work of Wittgenstein’s on clearing up our conceptions of human
understanding and human life has clear consequences for inquiry (and for ethics—
where we are pointed toward an investigation of ethical conversation and interaction,
rather than toward ethical knowledge in individual minds). Wittgenstein’s work is not
here either quietist or inconclusive. Rosen, however, remains silent about this.
Likewise, Austin in writing on action explicitly set himself against (neo-Augustinian)
conceptions of volition as an ‘inner act or event’ that might (or might not) accompany
any particular bodily motion. Here Austin undertook to point us in the style of Aristotle
and Hegel toward a conception of voluntary and responsible action as rooted in
progressive, socially-enabled mastery of a style of intelligibility in one’s doings and of
a language of assessment for them. This stance too has consequences for the
philosophy of mind, for ethics, and for how we actually conduct ourselves in our
courses of education and legal dispute.
Rosen’s work is always provocative, here so as much as ever. The worries that
motivate it are significant. His own investigations of philosophical methodology are
often eye-opening. Against a background of considerable learning, he has thought
hard about what serious, passionate, orientation-seeking thinking might be or be like.
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But one can also wish for more specific substance of thought than Rosen here
provides.
2003.02.14
Tad M. Schmaltz
Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes
Schmaltz, Tad M., Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, 302pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521811341
Reviewed by Peter Anstey, University of Sydney
Most historians of early modern philosophy are familiar with the writings of
Malebranche, La Forge, Cordemoy and of course Arnauld, but there is another seam in
late seventeenth-century Cartesianism which to date has received very little attention,
at least among Anglophone scholars. It is this more radical branch of Cartesianism,
the Cartesianism of Robert Desgabets (1610-78) and Pierre-Sylvain Regis (1632-
1707) that Tad Schmaltz has expounded for us in his splendid new book Radical
Cartesianism.
The book is largely one of exposition, containing extensive treatments of the radical
Cartesians’ contributions to the eucharistic debates from the 1660s, the Cartesian way
of ideas, the nature of mind and its relation to body and the doctrine of eternal truths.
Yet there is an additional agenda in so far as the book is an apologia not simply for
the intrinsic value of radical Cartesianism, but also for its significance in late
seventeenth-century French philosophy.
So what was radical about these little-known Cartesians and what were their central
doctrines? By positioning Desgabets and Regis in relation to Spinoza and Malebranche,
Schmaltz argues that there is a niche that these two philosophers filled in the
theologico-philosophical debates from the 1670s until the end of the century. Unlike
Spinoza, who after all was never truly championed in France during this period,
Desgabets and Regis saw themselves as disciples of Descartes; they saw themselves
as “moderns” perfecting the system of philosophy first propounded by their master.
And unlike Malebranche, who developed the latent Platonic elements in Descartes’
philosophy, they developed the master’s philosophy of mind and ideas in a direction
more compatible with the Aristotelianism of the schools. It is interesting to speculate,
though this is beyond Schmaltz’s agenda, as to why the more Platonic development of
Descartes eventually triumphed and why this more “Aristotelian” Cartesianism was
almost totally eclipsed. But regardless of what the historiographers might have to say
on this issue, it is indicative of the maturation of recent Cartesian scholarship that this
lost seam in Cartesianism is now being brought to light.
The central doctrines of Desgabets and Regis (eliding subtle but important differences
between them) are as follows. First, they transformed the basic metaphysical
categories of Descartes’ ontology by positing that extended objects consist of an
atemporal essence with temporal modal determinations. It is the atemporality of
extended substance that enabled them to argue for the indefectibility of matter and,
in Desgabets’ case, for a somewhat radical account of transubstantiation. Desgabets
claimed that the real presence of Christ is to be explained by Christ’s soul being united
to the Host. Second, this modified Cartesian ontology enabled them to argue that our
clear and distinct ideas of external substances actually correspond to mind-
independent objects. Third, the notion of atemporal essences plays a role in their
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elaboration of Descartes’ doctrine of eternal truths. Eternal truths are those truths
about the atemporal substances that God has created with complete indifference,
substances that were unknown to God before he created them. Fourth, Desgabets and
Regis argued that human thought requires an embodied soul. This is not just a denial
that there are purely intellectual thoughts because all thought derives from the
senses; it also involves the positive thesis that thought involves duration and is
necessarily linked to motion. This is clearly the most Aristotelian of their distinctive
doctrines.
Schmaltz expounds the development and deployment of these doctrines in a way that
is closely argued, like a tightly-knitted garment with well-integrated references to
debates within the secondary literature and unobtrusive quotes and references to
primary sources. A real strength of the volume is that it is not weighed down by
superfluous references and the trappings of scholarship, but rather follows the
contours of philosophical arguments and develops the often sophisticated positions of
Desgabets and Regis and their contemporaries. It must be said however, that this
style forces the reader to work hard and there are sections where I had to “come up
for air” every few pages for fear of losing the thread of the argument. This is due as
much to the philosophical methodology of the radical Cartesians as to Schmaltz’s
style, for Desgabets and Regis dealt with such issues as the doctrine of
transubstantiation in a manner similar to the late scholastics, with a complex set of
ontological distinctions and self-conscious polemical posturing.
My only caveat on the general design of the book is that it fails to give the reader a
sense of the broader sweep of the radical Cartesians’ commitment to a Cartesian
natural philosophy. Yet this surely must have informed and even motivated their
rigorous application of Cartesian principles to such problems as the Eucharist,
perception and the nature of mind. We know that Desgabets was intimately involved
in the first French blood-transfusion experiments, that Regis was strongly influenced
by the Cartesian experimentalist Rohault, that Locke’s discussions with Regis included
natural philosophy, that Pierre Coste (translator of Locke’s Essay) regarded Regis as
one of the leading contributors to Cartesian physics through his Système and that he
was eventually admitted to the Académie des sciences in 1699. Moreover,
contemporaneous with defenses of Cartesianism on the doctrine of transubstantiation
there was a plethora of defenses of Cartesian cosmogony. From Amerpoel’s Cartesius
Mosaizans (1669) and Cordemoy’s Copie d’une lettre écrite à sçavant Religieux (1669)
to Barin’s Le Monde Naissant ou La Creation du Monde (1686) we find defenses and
elaborations of Cartesian cosmogony which parallel the eucharistic controversies in so
far as they attempt to show that Cartesianism is consistent with Scripture, even if it
was on the Eucharist that the condemnations of Cartesianism were most explicit.
Yet Schmaltz seems very much to take as his starting point the traditional construal of
Descartes’ philosophy and that nest of philosophical issues that surrounds it (the
cogito, dualism, the nature of ideas, etc.) rather than to start from a broader
conception of Descartes’ project and that of his followers. Thus, apart from a brief
treatment of Desgabets’ rejection of Cordemoy’s atomist interpretation of
Cartesianism, there is almost no mention of natural philosophy in the book. Nor is
there any discussion of the radical Cartesians’ moral or political philosophy. There is
however, a brief treatment late in the book of the relation between faith and reason
as the issue arose in the exchange between Pierre-Daniel Huet and Regis.
Interestingly, this debate seems to be a kind of Jansenist analogue of the debates
over the roles of faith and reason in the Socinian controversies across the Channel in
the writings of Locke, Stillingfleet and others.
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Of course one cannot do everything in a monograph of this size and Schmaltz has
furnished us with a thorough, even meticulous, and admirably clear exposition of the
quite fascinating and distinctive doctrines of the radical Cartesians. However, this
reader at least would have liked the focus of the book to be more clearly set within
the full compass of late seventeenth century Cartesianism. Nevertheless, Tad
Schmaltz has performed a real service to Anglophone philosophers and intellectual
historians by filling in an important gap in the broad spectrum of Cartesianisms in the
late-seventeenth century. While preparing this review I realized that my own
university library lacks any editions of the works of Desgabets and Regis. It is
testimony to the persuasiveness of Schmaltz’s exposition of their views that these
works are now on order.
2003.02.15
Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, Routledge,
2002, 261pp, $22.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415942195.
Reviewed by R. M. Berry, Florida State University
Geoffrey Harpham’s Language Alone is an ambitious attempt to critique the “linguistic

turn” of 20th-century thinking and thereby transform it. His provocative thesis is that
while various intellectual disciplines and artistic fields sought throughout the century
to make themselves more systematic through reliance upon the study of language,
language as an object of knowledge became increasingly problematic. Harpham sets
out both to document this reliance and to reveal its self-defeating character. Partly,
his project is a debunking, a demonstration that language as the organizing center of
modernist and postmodern thought is an illusion. As he states in his preface, “Nothing
meaningful . . . can be said about language as such, both because language ‘as such’
is not available for direct observation and because the features, aspects,
characteristics, and qualities that can be attributed to language approach the infinite”
(ix). Beginning with 20th-century philosophy—both continental (Heidegger, Derrida)
and Anglo-American (Russell, Wittgenstein, Rorty)—and working through linguistics
(Saussure, Sapir, Whorf, Chomsky), critical theory (Foucault, Kristeva, Lyotard,
Irigaray), Marxism and Post-Marxism (Volosinov, Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe),
cultural criticism (Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall), and ethical philosophy (Hume to
Levinas), Harpham argues that the “linguistic turn” was essential to the modern
development of each field, while proving ultimately a source of incoherence. The
reason for this double bind, according to Harpham, is that language is “an
imponderably vast, contradictory, and amorphous mass that defeats rational inquiry
by its unsorted immensity” (56), necessitating a “reduction” to a limited subset of
features in order to be studied. “This reduction then serves as the actual object of
inquiry, even while the general term language is retained.” The result is a logical
circularity that attempts both to preserve its constricted object and to make it appear
all-inclusive. Wherever language is the object of study, there remains a large question
of what, if anything, is being studied.
At times it is unclear whether Harpham’s book is itself a clarification of this confusion
or a symptom of it. Although Harpham claims to be analyzing a problem posed by
language as such, not merely by one reductive characterization of it, his provocative
claims appear most obviously right for Saussurean linguistics and the intellectual
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projects developing from it. The heart of Saussure’s influence, according to Harpham,
was his requirement that linguistics must begin with “an absolutely ruthless
delimitation of its field” (20). This elimination of everything putatively external to
language (e.g., biology, political history, culture) became the constitutive condition for
all linguistic knowledge, for a science of language. “Considered as a system of signs,
language was rational structure, a complex but orderly game, a vast grid of relational
positions” (22), and this pure systematicity, abstracted from all accidental or historical
contingencies, was the quality that other fields found attractive in Saussure’s work.
Although Harpham wishes to cast doubt on this delimitation of language, arguing that
it necessarily provokes a return of language’s repressed exterior, his most sweepingly
skeptical claims seem applicable only to language delimited in just this way:
“language—considered as a limited entity with a determined essence that can be
revealed by observation and inference—does not exist and has been invented” (216).
This produces a peculiar wobble in Harpham’s account. Harpham stresses that he is
aware, as literary criticism in general is not, of Saussure’s long obsolescence in the
field of linguistics, recurring repeatedly to Chomsky as the field’s formative influence
and devoting considerable attention to linguists, such as Roy Harris, who consider
Saussure’s langue sheerest mythology. There are even moments in which Harpham’s
book sounds almost like an apology for Chomskian linguistics, especially for its return
to the vexed question of language’s relation to human nature. Harpham gives special
attention to Chomsky’s dismissal of language as such, emphasizing his remark that
“there is nothing in the real world corresponding to language” (55) and concluding
that “language is not in fact the subject of Chomsky’s linguistics” (224)—sentences
that suggest a deep consonance between Chomsky’s thought and Harpham’s own
thesis. However, Harpham is in the end no more satisfied with “universal grammar”
than with Saussure’s langue, accusing Chomsky of a reduction as ruthless as his
predecessor’s. As a basis for linguistic investigation, human nature turns out to be just
as amorphous and uncircumscribed as language itself, threatening in Harpham’s
concluding chapter a similarly disastrous invasion by its repressed outside, non-
human nature.
This recurrence in Chomskian linguistics of the problematic Saussurean delimitation
seems uncanny. It is as though Saussure’s “ruthless” gesture, with its predictable self-
defeat, had somehow insinuated itself into the very nature of reality. But what
necessitates this recurrence is Harpham’s unwavering acceptance of Saussure’s
epistemological requirement. For Harpham, just as much as for Saussure, the pre-
modern study of language extracts itself from disorder and undisciplined speculation
only by constituting language as “an object of external and objective knowledge that
cannot be confused with the knower” (223). Nothing without this sharply delimited
and self-identical fixity will count for Harpham as the subject of linguistics: “If
language were the sort of thing that could be changed at will, it would not be worth
changing: and any segment or dimension of it that can be altered at will does not
deserve the general name of language” (215). As a result, Harpham’s book is at its
most strained and unconvincing when discussing figures such as Heidegger, Gadamer,
or Wittgenstein who have investigated the limits of this epistemological requirement,
and at its least tendentious and most insightful in treating figures such as Derrida or
Laclau and Mouffe whose reliance on Saussure is explicit. Although Harpham’s own
model of absent center and repressed margin seems Derridean, he is not reluctant to
expose Derrida’s account of language as itself a paradigmatic instance of his “law of
return.” Harpham points out that Derrida’s early writings attempted to overcome
metaphysical illusion, not through rigorous theoretical critique, but rather through “the
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antitheoretical, antimetaphysical properties of language itself” (35). In Husserl’s

analysis of language, Derrida believed he discovered an “irreducible complicity” that
continually resisted the very clarity Husserl sought. On the one hand, Harpham
believes this complicity served as “a warning to any who would attempt to impose a
false clarity on language by attempting to define and delimit it” (35), but on the other,
it suggested a peculiar quality internal to language that enabled this resistance. This
quality was différance.
Developing as a radicalization of Saussure’s system of differences, Derrida’s neologism
seemed to represent both the ultimate reduction, a linguistic object wholly without
positivity, and also the maximal inclusion, an internalization of the external as such.
In this way différance did the work of a linguistic essence without any of its repressive
consequences. But Harpham points out that what différance managed to avoid in
concreteness and objectivity, it reacquired as force. Cataloguing the numerous active
verbs Derrida used to describe différance, Harpham suggests that Derrida’s vision of
language is characteristic of 20th century thought generally, reflecting a tendency
among modern intellectuals (e.g., Heidegger, Whorf, Foucault, de Man) to subordinate
their own agency to a vision of language as self-governing, autonomous power. As
such, language functioned for modernism “as an exemplary fetish” (66). As a quasi-
magical object capable of substituting for painful realities the 20th century preferred
not to acknowledge, “language has ‘protected’ human beings from full self-recognition
and shielded us from the consequences of our own behavior,” specifically, from those
human and environmental catastrophes with which the century has been strewn. By
fetishizing language in this way, “we are refusing to confront not just the human
capacity for rapacity, destruction, or cruelty, but also the disturbing possibility that
there is ‘nothing’ there, that there is no special human being or character, no divine
species dispensation, no metaphysical difference between human nature and the rest
of nature” (66).
It is this emphasis on repressed moral and political knowledge that introduces the two
long excurses on ideology and ethics which make up the bulk of Harpham’s book.
Harpham is at his most interesting in explaining how confusions in the Marxist theory
of ideology were from their inception bound up with the specific account of language
that Saussure inherited. Beginning with the “ideologues” of the French Enlightenment,
Harpham recounts the various ways in which ideology and language were each
conceived as “a socially determined system of meanings, a collective invention that
informed the consciousness of the individual without ever itself, being fully conscious
in any individual” (89). This unstable mélange of organic consciousness and false
consciousness, of a signification system wholly immanent in society but somehow
functioning autonomously through laws of its own, was the nineteenth century model
of ideology that Saussure took over and renamed “linguistics.” As a result, when the
vagaries and self-contradictions of Marx’s materialism became insurmountable,
Saussure’s putative breakthrough seemed to offer the perfect solution, a scientific
account of ideology’s material basis that seemed already to embody ideology’s
contradictory characteristics. “After Saussure, it became all but impossible to think of
ideology without thinking of language, and of language as Saussure defined it” (89).
Harpham’s interpretation of post-Marxist theory turns on the centrality of Saussurean
linguistics to the efforts by Volosinov, Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall,
Althusser, and Laclau and Mouffe to preserve ideology from Marx’s mechanistic
determinism. Predictably, Harpham discovers in their work the same problem of
delimitation that he earlier discovered in philosophy, but with this difference, that now
the limits of Saussure’s reductive model are what the theory of ideology explicitly
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seeks to escape. For Volosinov and Williams, Saussure’s theory of an autonomously

functioning sign system suppressed language’s role as, in Volosinov’s formulation, “an
arena of the class struggle” (quoted, 92). Conceived instead as “a material social
practice,” language reveals, not independently operating laws, but a dynamic relation
between itself and the historical and cultural factors Saussure excluded, one in which,
according to Williams, “social processes (are) at the heart of signification itself” (94).
In this way, the self-identical clarity of Saussure’s linguistic object becomes
fundamentally dispelled. The problem with the resulting blurriness, according to
Harpham, is not just that it sacrifices the politically crucial distinction between
ideology and meaning per se, but that it jettisons the very concreteness on which
Volosinov and Williams’s critique of Marx depends. Williams’s attack on Marx’s attempt
to reduce mind to matter turns on the necessity of thought’s expression in
“unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, sounds” (quoted, 98). It is this
hardening of thought into language, now conceived not as a dynamism or process but
as so many material objects, that enables Williams to speak of class consciousness
and cultural systems “as if they were concrete and observable entities” (98).
Harpham locates a similar self-defeating vagueness in the linguistic foundation of
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, while in Laclau and Mouffe’s explicitly Saussurean
reinterpretation of Marx, he uncovers an exemplary instance of his own “law of
return.” Attempting to theorize society in terms of Saussure’s “laws of language,”
Laclau and Mouffe argue that the split between signifier and signified necessitates a
purely relational democracy, one in which the only reality is positional, the center is
absent, and no identity is ever identical with itself. Their problem thus becomes the
mirror opposite of Volosinov and Williams’s. They must preserve language as itself “an
unsubverted, unconstructed, intelligible object” (116) so that it can produce effects
that are as dynamic and indeterminable as Williams’s “processes.” In other words,
deriving an essential non-identity from Saussure’s “law” requires, “in a world of
antagonistic relations, one shining, fully integrated thing—language alone” (116). This
paradoxical necessity, not merely in Laclau and Mouffe but in all accounts of ideology,
of a linguistic object that will take upon itself the organic-autonomous contradiction,
remaining simultaneously concrete and ubiquitous, immanent and distinct, systematic
and ever-changing, seems a perfect—almost too perfect—exemplification of
Harpham’s thesis.
What seems missing is any consideration of the conditions necessitating this
contradictory characterization, not just in Marxism, but also in Harpham’s own book.
For Harpham, of course, what necessitates such contradictoriness is simply the nature
of language itself, that “imponderably vast, contradictory, and amorphous mass,” but
this conviction seems increasingly tendentious and unconvincing when the topic shifts
in Harpham’s final section to ethics. Harpham is again helpful and insightful in tracing
the ways that the discussion of language, from the Enlightenment through
postmodernity, has been bound up with critical investigations of morality, so bound
up, in fact, that a deep and mutually implicating relation of the kind his thesis
imagines seems all but inevitable. However, it is his attempt to establish this relation
as inescapably contradictory and self-defeating that exposes the seams of his
argument. Again and again in writings of both continental and Anglo-American
philosophers, Harpham locates either an unvoiced requirement of linguistic
delimitation or, wherever a thinker is indifferent or hostile to such a requirement, a
naive and unsystematic undertaking. So, noting Bernard Williams’s characterization of
R. M. Hare’s focus on explicitly moral language as too narrow, Harpham accuses
Williams of an unacknowledged reduction of the same kind, merely one that focuses
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on another equally narrow subset of language. But the absence of any suggestion by
Williams that his selected words (treachery, promise, courage, et al) represent the
essence of language, or even that they represent a clearly demarcated system of
ethical meaning, indicates to Harpham a failure of ambition, and he concludes by
roundly criticizing Williams for abandoning the search for “any truly universal aspect of
language” (152).
In this way, Harpham insinuates into the writings of such figures as Levinas,
Gadamer, Habermas, Charles Taylor, and others, the irresolvable contradiction that
his own analysis uncovers there. The obvious difficulty he faces is the scant influence
of Saussurean linguistics on the field of ethical philosophy. Confronting thinkers for
whom the notion of language as “an object of external and objective knowledge that
cannot be confused with the knower” is not merely incoherent but superfluous,
Harpham must try to demonstrate, against their stolid indifference, both the
fundamental necessity for such a delimited object and also the impossibility of ever
obtaining it. The result is a much weightier burden of argument than his inquiry is
prepared to uphold. Despite the intelligence, erudition, and lucidity of Harpham’s
readings of the canon of late 20th century critical theory, what remains inadequately
described throughout Language Alone is the problem for which Saussure’s langue
could actually be a solution. The amorphous and protean nature of this originating
occasion allows Harpham to proceed as if the confusions Wittgenstein sought to
elucidate and the violence Heidegger sought to dispel were both difficulties of more or
less the same kind as that confronting the professionalization of linguistics. Without
this haze about its origins, the delimited, concrete, and autonomous essence of
language could not acquire its fetishistic power. Wherever such a delimited linguistic
object has functioned as an implicit or explicit requirement of knowledge—that is,
wherever words have been conceived as signifiers—Harpham’s thesis proves incisive
and illuminating, but where no such requirement is in evidence, it becomes Harpham’s
own. Language Alone can remain instructive in such cases, but only by exemplifying
the critical fetish of modernity, not by exposing it.
2003.03.01
Peter Carruthers, Michael Siegal, Stephen Stich, (eds.)
The Cognitive Basis of Science
Carruthers, Peter; Siegal, Michael; and Stich, Stephen, (eds.) The Cognitive Basis of
Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 422pp, $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521011779
Reviewed by Nicola Lonsdale , University of Sheffield and John M. Doris ,
University of California, Santa Cruz
The notion that modern science – particularly natural science – is a paradigmatically

successful inquiry has, at least in some philosophical quarters, the status of a truism.
Methodologies that do not bear substantial affinities to scientific methodologies are
often considered suspect, and disciplines – such as philosophy – that cannot point to a
record of advance like that evident in the natural sciences are often viewed as deeply
problematic.
Even if one eschews constructivist or other postmodern objections to such
comparisons, it must quickly be admitted that rather more could be known about how
scientific inquiry proceeds. Despite a large and often excellent literature in science
studies, there remain substantial lacunae in our understanding of how human
capacities and cultures interact to eventuate in the institution of science. A refreshing
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and provocatively eclectic new collection, The Cognitive Basis of Science, produced
under the auspices of the Hang Seng Center for Cognitive Studies at the University of
Sheffield and Rutgers University’s Evolution and Higher Cognition Research Group,
and edited by Carruthers, Stich, and Siegal, aims to fill some of these gaps.1
Especially since Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1993), much work in the philosophy of
science is historically oriented. Indeed, familiarity with the history, theories, and
recent findings of particular fields is increasingly taken for granted; instead of
identifying as philosophers of science simpliciter, those working in the area often
identify as philosophers of social science, or biology, or physics, or even quantum
mechanics. But while their sophistication about the ways of the special sciences has
steadily increased, philosophers of science have paid relatively little attention to what
has recently been learned in cognitive science, the empirical study of cognitive
capacities that enable scientific investigation.
To a considerable extent, the situation in philosophical epistemology is reversed:
While many epistemologists have, after the fashion of Goldman (1986, 1992) and
Stich (1983, 1990), productively interacted with the cognitive sciences, epistemology
has been very substantially ahistorical, focusing more on the circumstances of
individual “epistemic agents” than the history and development of human inquiry.
At the same time, cognitive scientists have typically focused on “everyday” human
cognition to the exclusion of the “higher” cognition embodied in scientific research.
The result is that understandings of science, despite the extraordinary literature
science inspires, have tended to be rather fragmentary, with relatively little attempt to
integrate the various methodologies and insights found in the philosophy and history
of science, epistemology, and cognitive science.
The present volume exemplifies ways in which this atomism may be ameliorated.
Broadly organized around the question “What makes science possible?” (Carruthers,
Stich, and Siegal, 1), the collection boasts contributions from anthropology,
archaeology, philosophy, and psychology, drawing on a striking breadth of material
from philosophy of mind and science, epistemology, developmental psychology,
cognitive psychology, brain science, evolutionary biology, and more.
A good example of the collection’s range is Carruthers’ (74) appealing to the practice
of animal tracking by human hunter-gatherers in arguing for a “continuity hypothesis”,
asserting “there is a fundamental continuity between the cognitive processes of
scientists and those living in pre-scientific cultures.” On Carruthers’ (74) view, the
“innate human cognitive endowment” need only be supplemented by “extrinsic”
factors such as favorable cultural, economic, environmental, and ideological conditions
in order for distinctively scientific inquiry to occur, while on the opposing discontinuity
hypothesis, which Carruthers (76) associates with Dennett (1991), the cognition of
pre-scientific peoples is “radically distinct from our own,” so that most of the
“cognitive materials” necessary for science must be “socially constructed and learned
before science can start its advance” (74-5).
Carruthers (81, following Liendenberg 1990) contends that tracking game involves
various distinctively scientific elements, such as hypothesis testing and inference to
unobservables. In a related article, Mithen (20) argues that archaeological evidence of
foraging activities, tool-making, and early communicative devices suggest a strong
continuity in cognition and reasoning abilities from pre-scientific to scientific cultures.
Whether or not one is convinced by arguments like Carruthers’ and Mithen’s (we
ourselves are), they do make a compelling case to the effect that the status and
origins of science can be better understood by reference to sources that are not
traditional philosophical fare.
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Essays by Thagard, Hookway, and Kitcher deal with another under-discussed issue,
the role of emotion in scientific practice. Many philosophers, particularly those working
in ethics (e.g., Gibbard 1990; D’Arms and Jacobson 2000), have evinced a strong
interest in emotion and have taken some pains with the psychology of emotion. (We
should note that we dispute Thagard’s (235) assertion that most philosophers since
Plato have assumed that emotions “have nothing to contribute to good reasoning.” For
instance, this would be a misleading characterization of the Aristotelian and Humean
ethical traditions, both of which have very substantial philosophical followings.)
Recently, Griffiths (1997) has applied conceptual resources from the philosophy of
science to problems in the philosophy and psychology of emotion. But there have
been few applications of the philosophy and psychology of emotion to the philosophy
and history of science.
Thagard uses an analysis of emotion words in Watson’s The Double Helix to argue that
scientists’ emotions play an important role in shaping their investigative trajectories.
This seems to us a fruitful line of thought. (We are rather more doubtful about the
analogy Thagard reports (243) between scientific explanations and discoveries on the
one hand, and orgasms, on the other.) That interest and curiosity can initiate scientific
agendas, and hope and happiness can sustain them (Thagard, 240), seems
unproblematic, but it is rather more “radical,” as Thagard (244) acknowledges, to
suggest that the justification of theories has an “emotional component.”
Thagard (244-5) asserts that many scientists have “identified beauty and elegance as
distinguishing marks of theories that should be accepted,” appealing to stories such as
Watson’s report that he and Crick remarked of the double helix, “a structure this
pretty just had to exist.” We’d like a fuller account of the emotions implicated in such
aesthetic response, but that is not our main concern. Rather, we worry that an
account like Thagards’s may, for the incautious reader, obscure a distinction between
acceptance and justification. For example, one may come to accept a gun-control
policy because of one’s emotional reaction to a vivid account of a victim’s suffering,
but it is quite a different thing to say that the policy is justified by reference to that
reaction; for that, we might think, we must do the hard work of evaluating ethical
arguments and empirical evidence. Acceptance is a causal notion and justification a
normative one, we might say, and the two notions do not always travel together.
One might make more headway for Thagard’s radical suggestion by arguing, with
Hookway (252-3), that emotional responses may figure in epistemic evaluation just as
they do in practical deliberation. Take a quick and dirty version of ethical
sentimentalism, where wrong actions are those that the appropriate sorts of judges
would feel angry at others for performing. Analogously, one might argue that it is
grounds for rejecting a theory if the appropriate sorts of scientists feel, say, aesthetic
distaste for it. However stilted, this analogy is in the neighborhood of some important
questions in the history and philosophy of science, both descriptive and normative.
Can we uncover anything like this “epistemic sentimentalism” in scientific practice? If
so, what are the emotional habits at issue, and how are they inculcated in members of
the scientific community? Supposing these habits are uncovered, should they be
accorded justificational status? Once again, these questions cannot be answered
without genuinely interdisciplinary work, ranging over epistemology, philosophical
ethics, philosophy and history of science, psychology of cognition and emotion, and
beyond. Indeed, they could not have been raised without the provocation of
interdisciplinary studies like those contained in this collection.
While the essays in The Cognitive Basis of Science can for the most part be read as
sharing a methodological commitment to genuinely interdisciplinary work in the study
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of science and cognition, there are, as one would expect, substantive disagreements
between various contributors. One disjuncture centers on the developmental model of
the child-as-scientist, most prominently associated with Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997).
This model identifies the hypothesis-revision processes children utilize in developing
theories about the world with those occurring in adult scientific cognition. An
understanding of hypothesis testing and revision in children, it is argued, will reveal,
by analogy, hitherto concealed processes guiding the development of science. In this
spirit, Gopnik and Glymour (117-132) attempt to elucidate and extend the possible
learning heuristics at the core of the theory-formation theory. They propose that
Bayes Nets – representation and inference algorithms – may supply enough
constraints on learning to make plausible the reduction of cognitive development to a
computational level.
While the proposed causal maps are encouragingly pertinent to the Gopnik model, it
has proved difficult to fully explicate such heuristics, and since application of Bayes’
theorem has not been uniformly successful in the philosophy of science, it does not
seem uncharitable, at this early stage, to be a little circumspect about its prospects in
cognitive science. As Dunbar (168) observes, causal reasoning is only one aspect of
scientific cognition: “When researchers such as Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl (1999) have
claimed that infants are scientists they have merely plucked out one feature of the
scientific mind and made that equivalent to the whole discipline.” Dunbar suggests
that the same “cognitive components” – comprised variously of causal reasoning,
categorization, induction, deduction, analogy and socio-cognitive interaction – are
involved in many different reasoning tasks, from scientific, to artistic, to infants’
learning of object-concepts. This allows us to acknowledge the prima facie appeal of
the child-as-scientist model, while also illustrating an important disanalogy: Scientific
reasoning results from a characteristic combination of cognitive components, “rather
than being one type of cognitive activity such as having a theory or having a causal
reasoning module” (Dunbar, 165).
Several contributors (notably Giere; Harris; Faucher et al.) take issue with Gopnik’s
conception of the developing child as a “stubborn autodidact”. For example, Harris
(316) argues that the developmental trajectory of the child involves more epistemic
reliance on others than is allowed by Gopnik’s individualistic approach. Drawing on
work in cross-cultural psychology by Nisbett and colleagues (2001), Faucher et al.
(361) argue that while working scientists are subject to various normative constraints,
Gopnik neglects such social and cultural sensitivity in her account of “theory-revision
mechanisms.” Therefore, they conclude, Gopnik and colleagues’ model of the child-as-
scientist is at best seriously incomplete.
This debate highlights the need for individualist psychological approaches to become
more deeply informed by cultural and historical processes, a theme picked up
throughout most of the collection. In an engaging discussion, Giere (285) emphasizes
the collective or social nature of everyday cognition, attempting to bridge the “often
perceived gap between cognitive and social theories of science.” Regarding the child-
as-scientist model, Giere argues that inasmuch as scientific advance has been
characterized by the invention of and reliance on elaborate technological aids to
observation and manipulation, the cognitive development of children in less
“scaffolded” contexts is not directly relevant to understanding the development of
science.
We won’t attempt to adjudicate this dispute; we instead remark on the disciplinary
emphases the opposing positions reflect. It is unsurprising that a developmental
psychologist like Gopnik would focus, as developmentalists tend to do, on individual
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functioning; neither is it surprising that philosophers like Giere and Faucher et al.,
steeped in an historically based philosophy of science, would emphasize the role of
social and cultural dynamics. We expect that there is more than a little that is right
about each perspective; what we wish to stress is that a suitably textured account of
human cognitive development in relation to science will draw on both sorts of
resources. Both the philosophical and psychological work will be enriched by
correctives drawn from the other discipline.
Philosophers have lately been gravitating to interdisciplinary work, especially that
engaging the social and behavioral sciences. This tendency has for some time been
evident in philosophy of mind (Churchland 1984, 1989; Stich 1996) and epistemology
(Goldman 1986, 1992; Stich 1983, 1990), and has more recently been emerging in
philosophical ethics (Flanagan 1991; Becker 1998; Doris 1998, 2002; Harman 1999).
By applying allied methodological perspectives to the philosophy of science, The
Cognitive Basis of Science will help reinforce this salutary trend.
References
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Churchland, P. M. 1984. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Churchland, P. M. 1989. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and
the Structure of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
D’Arms, J., and Jacobson, D. 2000. “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of
Emotions.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61: 65-89.
Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane.
Doris, J. M. 1998. « Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. » Noûs 32: 504-30.
Doris, J. M. 2002. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Feyerabend, P. 1993. Against Method (3rd edn.). New York: Verso Books.
Flanagan, O. 1991. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Gibbard, A. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment.
Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Goldman, A. I. 1986. Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Goldman, A. I. 1992. Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences.
Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
Gopnik, A., and Meltzoff, A. 1997. Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Gopnik, A. Meltzoff, A., and Kuhl, P. 1999. The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains,
and How Children Learn. New York: William Morrow.
Griffiths, P. E. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological
Categories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harman, G. 1999. “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the
Fundamental Attribution Error.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99: 315-331.
Kuhn, T. S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd. edn. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Liebenberg, L. 1990. The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. Cape Town: David
Phillip Publishers.
Nisbett, R., Peng, K., Choi, I., and Norenzayan, A. 2001. “Culture and Systems of
Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition.” Psychological Review 108.
Stich, S. P. 1983. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case against Belief.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
119
Stich, S. P. 1990. The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of

Cognitive Evaluation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Stich, S. P. 1996. Deconstructing the Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Endnotes
1. All parenthetical citations not marked by date refer to essays in this volume.
120
2003.03.02
Nicholas S. Smith, (ed)
Reading McDowell on Mind and World
Smith, Nicholas S., (ed), Reading McDowell on Mind and World, Routledge, 2002,
312pp, $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 041521213
Reviewed by A. C. Genova, University of Kansas
Reading McDowell is one thing; understanding his sometimes cryptic prose is quite
another. Perhaps the most fascinating, if not entirely surprising, feature of Reading
McDowell is that the papers in this collection are of consistently very high quality,
critical of some integral component of McDowell’s thought, and are philosophically
persuasive, and yet, McDowell, in his rejoinders, argues that each, in some significant
respect, has misread his recent work.
This suggests that there are some relevant distinctions applicable to Mind and World
that are not entirely transparent and are easy to miss. Indeed, this is precisely the
focus of McDowell’s succinct responses, where he manifests a striking philosophical
virtuosity in taking on all comers. In this reviewer’s judgment, aside from the value of
the anthology itself, this added bonus is the most rewarding benefit of this superb
volume edited by Nicholas Smith. It consists of thirteen essays by distinguished
philosophers from across the philosophical spectrum, plus the illuminating responses
from McDowell. Smith divides the collection into four basic parts: Philosophy After
Kant (Richard Bernstein, Michael Friedman, Robert Pippen); Epistemology (Barry
Stroud, Robert Brandom, Charles Taylor); Philosophy of Mind (Gregory McCulloch,
Crispin Wright, Hilary Putnam); and Toward Ethics (Charles Larmore, Rüdiger Bubner,
J. M. Bernstein, Axel Honneth)—followed by McDowell’s responses.
Smith also provides a very brief Introduction in which he states the upshot of each of
the contributions, but gives no assessments and takes no account of McDowell’s
rejoinders. This is consistent with his goal “to enable readers to reach an informed,
balanced judgment on the nature and extent of McDowell’s achievement.” On the
other hand, what are those often missed, crucial distinctions alluded to above? It
would help to have two things before us: first, albeit risking initiation into the ranks of
the purported misreaders, a clear statement of the message of Mind and World; and
second, following White’s lead (and borrowing in part from his summary), a brief
account of the highlights of the collection.
I
McDowell’s argument is deceptively simple. In pre-Galilean thought, the Medieval
philosophers enchanted the natural world with “spooky” ingredients of meaning and
telic determination. With the advent of the new science and the epistemological turn
to a theory of representational perception beginning with Descartes, a certain picture
of experience emerged. We now had the perceiving subject on one side and the
disenchanted world on the other, and experience was now construed as both an
externally caused effect on our sensibility and an occurrence having epistemological
relevance for empirical belief. But how can this be? It appears that there is an
incommensurability between the normative space of reasons (spontaneity) and the
scientific domain of blind causal relations (nature). How can experience be a passive
receptivity while also having rational relations to belief? But for McDowell, this is a
wrong picture productive of a pseudo-problem; he wants to exorcise the picture and
dissolve the pseudo-problem.
The philosophical response to this pseudo-problem yielded two successive, misguided
dilemmas. The first is reflected in the oscillation between coherentism and the Myth of
121
the Given. The former acknowledges an irreducible dichotomy between the rational
relations of spontaneity and the causal relations of nature (no justification, only
exculpation) and opts for what McDowell characterizes as a frictionless system of
normative relations among beliefs (only beliefs justify beliefs), thereby avoiding the
problem but at the cost of no objective, external constraints—a disconnect between
mind and world. The latter construes experience as a foundational given that it has a
non-conceptualized content in virtue of which it can somehow warrant empirical belief,
thereby again avoiding the puzzle, but now, for McDowell, we have a desideratum that
cannot be satisfied. This situation can (and has) given rise to a second dilemma as
embodied in the competing options of “bald naturalism” and “rampant Platonism”. The
former either dispenses with spontaneity talk entirely (eliminativism) or pursues a
reduction/redescription of such folklore talk in terms of purely scientific discourse, a
hopeless project. The latter posits an ontologically transcendent, sui generis space of
reasons separable from nature, but at the unacceptable price of supernaturalism. We
are in a muddle.
The mental block is due to a false picture shared by all of the above—the confused
scientistic notion that nothing natural (including sensibility) can be shaped by sui
generis conceptual capacities because nature is exhausted by the realm of law. But
this is a dogmatic superstition. Relying on Kantian insights, McDowell construes
experience as an inextricable combination of passive receptivity and spontaneity
wherein external states of affairs can be directly presented. Experience is already
conceptually informed; spontaneity extends all the way out to the world—it is
unbounded. Experience has conceptual content as a natural phenomenon. Thus, we
recapture the correct picture via a modest re-enchantment of nature—a naturalized
Platonism. The problem for McDowell is not an epistemological one, but rather, a
transcendental one, viz., how is empirical content possible? Once we have been
“reminded” of the correct picture, the objective purport of experience becomes
transparent and unmysterious because, as he says, the conscious spontaneity we
freely express can also be operative in passive receptivity where objective reality is
directly present, and this is secured by the actualization of our natural conceptual
capacities in sensibility. Direct Realist? Naturalized Platonist? Post-modern
Aristotelian? Linguistic Idealist? Wittgensteinian Quietist? Perhaps. But certainly, as he
acknowledges, a transcendental empiricist.
So we have naturalized spontaneity. But how is this possible? It is here that McDowell
issues a “reminder” to the effect that there is nothing new or unfamiliar in this
conception. It is a perfectly obvious presupposition of our daily practice and
evolutionary history. Indeed, it was recognized by Aristotle in his account of the
natural attunement of humans to the normativity of virtue—our habitually engendered
“second nature”. The point is that human virtue is a specific response to reasons that
naturally develops via maturation and socially structured training/practice. Similarly,
responsiveness to reasons in general is a function of Bildung— our background culture
and education which is not only compatible with our natural capacities, but is itself
natural. But none of what McDowell says is to be construed as a philosophical theory
of mental content. His project is purely diagnostic, therapeutic, non-revisionary, and
non-constructive, directed to the exorcism of a wrong picture; and his appeal to the
notions of an unbounded space of reasons, second nature, Bildung, and a
preconceptual, holistic, socially shared background in which humans are essentially
engaged with the world, etc., integrates McDowell’s message with comparable themes
by so-called “continental” thinkers like Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno,
Habermas, and others.
122
II
R. Bernstein, in his illuminating “ McDowell’s Domesticated Hegelianism” assimilates
McDowell’s views to the Hegelian tradition and relates this to the pragmatism of C. S.
Peirce. He argues that McDowell has not sufficiently shown how to rethink the
disenchanted picture of nature (as presumably Hegel had done). Michael Friedman’s
“Exorcizing the Philosophical Tradition” presents a different interpretation of the
relevance of past philosophy to McDowell’s concerns, questions whether McDowell’s
position constitutes a significant advance beyond Davidson, and suggests that
McDowell’s making the objectivity of experience depend on the application of concepts
by the perceiver leads straight to traditional idealism. But for Robert Pippin, McDowell
isn’t idealist enough. In his “Leaving Nature Behind” he contends that the appeal to
“second nature” needs an ontological foundation (along Hegelian lines), not just a
“reminder”.
Barry Stroud, in his “Sense-experience and the Grounding of Thought”, provides a
compelling analysis of perceptual experience and focuses on the adequacy of
McDowell’s account of justified belief. In “Non-inferential Knowledge, Perceptual
Experience, and Secondary Qualities: Placing McDowell’s Empiricism”, Robert Brandom
is primarily concerned with observational knowledge. He invokes the legendary
chicken-sexers to distinguish stimulus-initiated, non-inferential knowledge from
immediate awareness of secondary qualities, and places McDowell’s notion of
experience in an intermediate locus. This yields reservations about the explanatory
work of McDowell’s notion along with several penetrating questions. In
“Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction”, Charles Taylor, similar to Pippin
and R. Bernstein, argues that McDowell loses sight of the holistic, ontological
background in which conceptualized thought is embodied, as developed famously by
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others.
Craig McCulloch’s interesting contribution, “Phenomenological Externalism”, challenges
McDowell’s resolution of the traditional empiricist problem concerning the impact of a
purely causal world on mind and argues for the centrality of a phenomenological
notion of intentionality. He eschews McDowell’s emphasis on justification, because the
possibility of mental content concerns intentionality and is essentially a
phenomenological matter. Crispin Wright, the only participant with two contributions,
his “Human Nature” and “Postscript,” provides the most formidable challenge to
McDowell in the collection. According to Wright: McDowell’s conceptualized experience
is counter-intuitive to our intuitions about infants and animals; McDowell must accept
an extended coherentism in order to motivate the next step (invocation of second
nature) in his argument—otherwise idealism; McDowell has a “quasi-inferential”
conception of non-inferential justification and has not accommodated theoretical
beliefs about unobservables; the appeal to second nature to reconcile normativity with
nature doesn’t help. Hilary Putnam, in “McDowell’s Mind and McDowell’s World”,
provides a valuable review of contemporary functionalist views that aspire to achieve
an alternative approach not considered by McDowell. Although Putnam is no longer a
functionalist, he faults McDowell for not addressing whether a contemporary
functionalism that reduces spontaneity to the language of the “special sciences” is not
a viable third option between bald naturalism and McDowell’s re-enchanted
naturalism.
“Attending to Reasons” shifts the focus to ethics and moral realism, and Charles
Lamore argues that McDowell needs to develop an ontology of reasons. After all, how
can spontaneity or reasons have a locus in space and time? Invoking Bildung is
insufficient to explain this and actually stands in the way of an adequate solution. And
123
then we have the paradox of McDowell’s Wittgensteinian “quietist” methodology: “for

how, we must ask, can showing up the mistaken assumptions underlying some
philosophical problem amount to anything other than putting better views in their
place?” Rüdiger Bubner contributes an instructive account of the historical career of
the concept of Bildung in the German tradition, and brings a hermeneutic orientation
to the problem of rationality in nature. He devotes his attention primarily to
McDowell’s claim that spontaneity must be sui generis and yet be unified with the
world, and relates McDowell’s project to the hermeneutic perspective of Gadamer and
the continental notion of situatedness in the world (Dasein). But the main point of his
“Bildung and Second Nature” is his contention that McDowell’s view of second nature
is too narrow in contrast to the modern conception of Bildung because the latter also
applies to human personality and reflective individuality, not just epistemic
justification and a socially shared uniformity. J. M. Bernste in’s “Re-enchanting
Nature” correlates McDowell’s thought with Adorno’s, i.e., Adorno’s claim that the
possibility of knowledge presupposes the displacement of disenchanted nature and the
cultural domination of modern science. But Adorno’s wider project has the advantage
because genuine re-enchantment requires a transformation of society/politics, not just
the individualized, narrowly intellectual move advocated by McDowell. Axel Honneth
closes the collection with his “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell
and the Challenge of Moral Realism”. He contends that although McDowell
acknowledges our socialized, perceptual access to moral factors, his Aristotelian
conception of virtue does not suffice for the context of moral conflict or where pre-
reflective certainties are suspended—situations that demand governing moral
principles that mediate conflict and doubt.
Iii
What follows, in an unrelated but seriatim order, are the more prominent distinctions
(reminders?) McDowell offers: He tells us that his central concern is not that of
reconciling nature as a realm of law with an unbounded space of reasons, but to
dissolve the prejudice of assuming that the realm of law exhausts the concept of
nature, in which case there then is no difficulty concerning how spontaneity can be sui
generis while also being natural (Response to R.Goldstein, 269). Elsewhere, he says
that it is not that passively perceived impressions become experiences of the objective
world by being taken as such by our cognitive faculty, but that actualizations of
conceptual capacities in receptivity already can reveal the objective world—not turned
into objective experience via some cognitive action of being so taken (Response to
Friedman, 272-273). Further, it is not that the individualized perceiver’s grasp of
reality is an alternative to Hegelian talk of wide ranging social bases for normativity,
but there is a reciprocity and interdependence of these two dimensions. Answerability
to the world and answerability to each other stand or fall together (Response to
Pippin, 275). Also, it is not that Sellars has no place for non-judgmental justifiers, but
that his “sense impressions” fail on this count, not his notion of experience which
closely approximates McDowell’s (Response to Brandom, 279). We learn that the
picture to be exorcized is not an inside/outside picture wherein the epistemological
problem concerns how knowledge of the outside realm is possible if it requires,
impossibly, that events of the boundary conform to laws of causality while also
manifesting allegiance to rational norms, but rather the unintelligible picture of a
supposedly externally caused unconceptualized experience imposing objective
constraints on the space of reasons, where the problem is one concerning the
possibility of empirical content in general (Response to Taylor, 281-282).
124
Again, it is not that a person who perceives, say, that it is raining, thereby
believes/judges so, but as McDowell states, “Certainly, one will not say that one sees
that p unless one accepts that p. But one can see that p without being willing to say
one does”—e.g., one may have not trusted one’s vision in the original setting but
nevertheless come to recognize that one did see that p (Response to Stroud, 277). It
is this sense of “seeing [or perceiving] that something is the case” that is the correct
one for McDowell. Further, the problem of traditional empiricism is not that it
construes the world’s impact on mind in merely causal terms, leaving no room for
warrant, but that it desires experience to provide rational basis for belief and falls into
the Myth of the Given which precludes satisfaction of the desideratum. That is the
hitch (Response to McCulloch, 284). Moreover, it is not that there is a gap or further
step required between experience and the objectively given, but rather, that
experience reveals or embodies facts as such (Response to Wright, 289). Further, it is
not that subsuming mental occurrences in a functionalist way under the non-strict
laws of the special sciences would contrast relevantly with physicalist reductions under
strict laws—in neither case would we have a sui generis space of reasons—and hence,
this is not a “third option” but only a species of bald naturalism (Response to Putnam,
292-293). And it is not that an efficient cause cannot be a justification (as Davidson
has shown, reasons can be efficient causes that warrant actions), but that non-
conceptual input cannot justify anything— it is the non-conceptual character, not the
efficient causality, that is the rub (293).
He also reminds us that it not that the seductive picture to be dislodged is a false
theory to be replaced by a true one, but that the unwanted picture results from non-
rational influences (superstition? confusion?), not a theory at all, and reminding
ourselves of what is obvious and already in place is not promoting a revisionary view,
but a remedy for a philosophical affliction (Response to Lamore, 204); and it is
decidedly not that the reasons made known to us by our second nature are queer
spatial-temporal entities that have causal effects on sensibility, but that “reasons can
be causes” means that someone’s having a reason can be causally relevant for belief
and action (205). Further, it is not that McDowell no longer accepts Dummett’s thesis
that philosophy of language is foundational for philosophy, but that McDowell also
accepts the Gadamerian insight regarding the role of language as a repository of
tradition (Response to Bubner, 296-297). Next, it is not that bald naturalism is the
opposite pole to coherentism—that is the locus of the Myth of the Given. Nor is bald
naturalism (the alternative to rampant Platonism) equivalent to scientism; but given
the latter, then bald naturalism contends that only the conceptualization of things as
natural has a shot at truth (Response to J. Bernstein, 297). Another confusion: it is
not that McDowell’s notion of conceptualized experience is meant to bring all the fine-
grained aspects of what is experienced into focus (problematic), but that the whole
content of whatever experience we have is due to the actualization of conceptual
capacities (298). Moreover, it is not that (pace Adorno) spontaneity “all the way out”
excludes dependence on objects “all the way in”—on the contrary, the latter is a
corollary of McDowell’s view precisely because in experience, the world exerts
constraints on empirical thought (398). Finally, in response to Honneth (301-302), it
is not that a neo-Aristotelian invocation of second nature implies that unreflective
perception is sufficient to resolve cases of doubt or moral conflict, but that ethical
reflection based on deliberation and practical reason leading to the recognition of
moral principles is a natural extension of McDowell’s conception of experience as
responsiveness to the space of reasons.
***
125
To be sure, it would be quixotic to think that McDowell’s recent distinctions will garner
agreement, but they should help avoid misunderstanding. But beyond the
particularities recounted above, there is something else: McDowell’s message also has
a metaphilosophical import. Pace Crispin Wright (who deplores what he construes as
the non-analytic style of McDowell’s book [157-158]), and Rüdger Bubner (who
applauds what he thinks is McDowell’s turning his back on the Analytic school [213]),
the truth is that neither sentiment applies to McDowell. Mind and World does much to
dispel the increasingly outdated, anachronistic “Analytic vs. Continental” dichotomy of
the twentieth century and points to a new style of philosophizing that has its roots in
the past and its culmination in the future, wherein the common factor is the
eradication of the radical split between mind and world.
2003.03.03
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Practical Reason
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, intro. Stephen
Engstrom, Hackett Publishing Company, 2002, 352pp, $12.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-87220-
617-3.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kinlaw , McMurry University
This most welcome publication of Werner Pluhar’s translation of Kant’s Critique of

Practical Reason completes his translation of the three main texts of Kant’s critical
system. Pluhar is a veteran and highly accomplished translator whose work
consistently has exhibited an equal mastery of German and English as well as the
arguments of the texts he has translated. Those who have profited from his earlier
translations of the First and (especially) Third Critiques will not be disappointed with
this text. The translation is remarkably consistent, highly readable—in this respect, in
this reviewer’s judgment, an advance on the Beck and Gregor translations (for the
Gregor translation I refer to the recent 1997 Cambridge University Press edition)—and
exceptionally well edited (I found only a single typographical error in the entire text:
“instrutive” for “instructive” on page 52). Accompanying the text is a fine introduction
(by Stephen Engstrom), an extensive glossary (ten pages), a twenty-seven-page
bibliography, and an index (the final three not found in the Beck and Gregor editions).
Pluhar appears to view the task of the translator as follows: provide the reader with
an as linguistically and philosophically accurate, smooth, and readable rendering as
possible while keeping the reader, when advisable, close to the original German. In
both respects, Pluhar succeeds admirably. Contributing in no small measure to this
success is his consistent practice of providing justification for every controversial or
difficult rendering of words and expressions, particularly when the translation departs
from the Beck or (especially) Gregor editions. I found myself agreeing with Pluhar on
almost every occasion, and some of his “corrections” of the Gregor translation are, in
this reviewer’s judgment, important.
For instance, Gregor follows many translators in rendering Vermögen as “faculty” and
thus Begehrungsvermögen as “faculty of desire.” Translations of other late eighteenth
century texts often have followed this lead (e.g. Albert Blackwell in his highly regarded
translation of Schleiermacher’s unpublished and unfinished treatise Über die Freiheit,
Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). And yet, “faculty” is a highly misleading equivalent for
Vermögen, and not simply because “faculty” intimates an association with faculty
psychology. “Faculty” suggests an entity or mechanism that executes a given function,
126
whereas Vermögen indicates a capacity, power, or ability. “Faculty” thus omits the
focus on the activity of autonomous moral agency associated with the entire subject
and thus fails to capture the pro-active nature of practical rationality wherein reason
itself is the motivational force in human action. The later Fichte uses Vermögen
similarly to express one’s power or ability to become an image of the divine and
connects this with one’s general ability to be self-formative (he attempts to capture
the immediacy of this power of self-formative activity with the term Sein-Können
which he ties directly to Vermögen). With one exception (139) where “ability” is
preferable (the alternative “power” is acknowledge in footnote), Pluhar uses “power”
and thus renders Begehrungsvermögen as “power of desire.” Related to this
translation of Vermögen is Pluhar’s choice of “power of choice” as the equivalent for
Willkühr (Gregor uses “choice” exclusively) in contexts where there is a contrast with
“power of desire” and thus Vermögen is implied. This reviewer judges these changes
to be most welcome and overdue correctives.
The translation of these standard terms not only is more consistent with what Kant
means but also brings the reader closer to the original text. Consider, similarly, a few
additional examples. Gregor almost exclusively translates both Empfindung and Gefühl
with the generic “feeling”, thereby in some instances obscuring, as Pluhar correctly
indicates, subtle distinctions Kant intends to make. For instance, Kant sometimes
maintains that pleasure informs practical reasoning only to the extent that one can
sense—that is, with one or more senses—the gratification one will receive from a
certain desirable object. If one renders Empfindung in these contexts as “feeling”, one
does not capture with the same poignancy the sharp distinction between rational and
non-rational determining grounds of the will. Though Kant often (and much more
often than not) uses Empfindung and Gefühl interchangeably (as Pluhar notes),
Pluhar’s decision to preserve for the reader Kant’s terminological distinctions when
applicable is well advised and, as I have stressed, keeps the reader close to the
precise meaning of the German original. Note also in this regard Pluhar’s translation of
Bewegursache as “motivating cause”, as opposed to simply “motive”, in contexts in
which Kant discusses causes.
Pluhar’s meticulous effort to justify or argue for controversial translations, renderings
of opaque passages, and departures from previous translations makes for a highly
annotated text in marked contrast to Gregor’s and Beck’s far more economic use of
annotations and references. Add explanations of historical references (sometimes
quite obscure and difficult to track down) in Kant’s text and Pluhar’s extensive cross-
references to the First Critique, the Groundwork, and the Metaphysics of Morals—the
first missing altogether in the Beck and Gregor editions and the other two used by
them much more sparingly—and the footnotes accumulate quickly. In all, there are
nine hundred eighty six footnote references to the translation. Some readers no doubt
will find this excessive and a distraction, which, if not simply ignored, makes an
otherwise reader-friendly translation cumbersome to work through. I think, however,
that this assessment should be resisted. The payoff far exceeds any annoyance to the
reader.
The extensive cross-references to other works of Kant provide a good study guide for
those whose knowledge of Kant is less than that of a seasoned scholar. Identification
of Latin roots for some Kantian terminology informs the reader when certain
expressions have legal connections or connotations. Furthermore, supplying the
German original for certain terms and expressions offers a reader with some
command of German a guideline for deciding when it might be necessary to refer back
to the original German text and the context in which the term or expression appeared.
127
Those returning to the German text along with the translation are also aided by
Pluhar’s occasional clarification of obscure pronoun antecedents, especially when a
proper English rendering requires some departure from the German (as noted, in all
instances Pluhar argues thoroughly for these departures). In sum, this reviewer does
not find the use of footnote references over-indulgent; on the contrary, they
contribute to the overall effective study of the text.
As noted above, Stephen Engstrom’s introduction accompanies the translation. Since
the publisher has an admirable tradition of marketing relatively inexpensive editions of
philosophical classics for classroom and general use, the introduction is an important
component of the overall success of the book. Engstrom’s introduction is very clearly
presented and readable—his examples, in my judgment, consistently helpful—
especially for the undergraduate who has some grasp of modern philosophy and thus
some familiarity with Kant. As expected, Engstrom attempts to set the Critique of
Practical Reason in the context of Kant’s moral theory (that is, its relation both to the
Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals) and of the critique of metaphysics carried
out in the First Critique. Engstrom attempts to initiate the reader by means of a
distinct point of entry into the text, one that becomes an organizational theme for his
introduction and one that contrasts with Andrews Reath’s introduction to the Gregor
translation. This reviewer does not judge Engstrom’s introduction as significantly
superior or inferior to Reath’s, but the orientation and emphases are clearly different.
If one relies upon introductions to texts for classroom use, one should be aware of the
Engstrom’s and Reath’s contrasting approaches to the Second Critique.
Suppose one teaches an advanced undergraduate course on Kant’s ethics or, better, a
course on practical rationality and freedom in which one chooses to devote a unit to
the Kantian position. In these cases, I recommend the Reath introduction over
Engstrom’s for the simple reason that Reath concentrates on Kant’s theory of rational
agency as the organizing principle for introducing Kant’s moral theory. His background
discussion of Kritik is accordingly set in the context of Kant’s attempt to establish the
basic principles of practical rationality. As a result, there are closer inspections than
the reader receives from Engstrom of Theorems I-III and of the way in which Kant
explains how reason can be a genuine motivational force in human decision and
action.
Engstrom’s introduction attempts to situate the Second Critique in the broader scope
of Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics and his attempt to reconstitute a
foundation for metaphysics. This theme is evident early in the introduction as
Engstrom places Kant’s central question—can reason determine the will directly?—in
the context of whether reason of itself can be a source of practical knowledge. As
such, Engstrom’s piece has, in my judgment, a wider appeal, not only an as
orientation to Kant’s theory of practical rationality and the foundation for morality, but
also to the role of the Second Critique in Kant’s work as a systematic philosopher. To
this end, Engstrom provides a more comprehensive assessment of the First Critique
background than does Reath, and notably gives far more attention to the historical
sources of Kant’s moral theory and the historical debates between rationalists and
sentimentalists Kant attempts to resolve (Reath, for instance, ignores Leibnizian
perfectionism presumably because that moral theory was seen by Kant to have an
impoverished moral psychology and thus to offer little that might inform a theory of
agency). The attention to historical background, concisely and effectively summarized
by Engstrom, is a helpful aid to the less initiated reader and, in this reviewer’s
judgment, important. An additional asset is that the student can more readily discern
that Kant is attempting to overcome two forms of reductionism (rationalism and
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sentimentalism) along with two forms of skepticism about the rational foundation for
morality (skepticism about rationalism being associated with standard suspicion about
moral perfectionism and its theistic underpinning). Engstrom captures these themes
quite well. Finally, Engstrom’s approach results in a more comprehensive presentation
of the role of the ideas of reason in Kant’s moral theory and critical philosophy.
In sum, this reviewer highly recommends this translation. Its achievement can be
placed easily alongside Pluhar’s earlier very successful Kant translations. The
bibliography, essential for classroom use, is well edited, and the glossary provides a
concise introduction to a translator’s general approach to the text. I find Engstrom’s
introduction to be a thorough and effective balance of history and analysis, in short, a
fine piece of work. Those, particularly scholars of Kant’s ethics, more interested in
practical rationality and moral psychology likely will prefer the Reath introduction.
Engstrom’s piece, on the other hand, is preferable for a wider undergraduate
audience.
2003.03.04
John Haldane
Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions
Haldane, John (ed.), Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical
Traditions, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 260pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN
0268034672.
Reviewed by Jeffrey E. Brower, Purdue University
Until recently, Anglo-American philosophers—even those interested in the history of

philosophy—tended to take a dim view of medieval philosophy, supposing that
because of its close connection to theology, it had little to contribute to areas outside
of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. But after years of neglect,
medieval philosophy has become a focus of attention, as a growing number of
scholars have begun to recognize its value for illuminating areas of purely
philosophical concern—areas such as metaphysics, logic, language, mind, ethics,
action theory, and moral psychology.
The current volume reflects some of the vigor of this new trend in medieval
philosophy. And its editor, John Haldane, who stands at the center of a movement
known as ‘Analytical Thomism’, offers it with the following two-fold ecumenical aim:
(1) to foster continuing interactions between medieval and analytic philosophy,
especially with regard to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and (2) to encourage
intellectual exchange between the parties of different traditions of Thomistic
scholarship. As Haldane says in the introduction: “the time is overdue for a broad
movement bringing together the interests, knowledge, and expertise of traditional
Thomists, analytical philosophers, and others appreciative of both traditions” (x).
The volume consists of twelve essays and a short introduction. With the exception of
Haldane’s essay, which is largely reprinted from an earlier article, the essays all
appear to be published here for the first time. In his introduction, Haldane emphasizes
the dangers of attempting to explain the motivations or character of an edited volume,
and thus excuses himself from the task of describing its content and organization. This
is unfortunate since it can leave the impression that the essays are only loosely
connected. Indeed, Haldane himself suggests at one point that the volume is more
“like a buffet contributed to by several chefs, than an extended meal prepared by a
single cook” (vii). Contrary to such appearances, however, the essays are in fact
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tightly organized around the three themes identified in the title: Mind, Metaphysics,
and Value. Chapters 1-4 focus on issues in philosophy of mind and cognition,
specifically the acquisition of knowledge or concepts; chapters 5-11 focus on issues in
metaphysics, specifically action theory, individuation, and modality; and chapter 12
focuses on an aspect of Aquinas’s ethics, indicating its connection to his views about
mind and metaphysics.
With respect to the second of its two aims, that of bringing together different
traditions of Aquinas scholarship, I think the volume is unsuccessful. The bulk of its
essays—chapters 2-11—are all written from a broadly analytic perspective and make
no attempt to connect with the themes or literature of more traditional Thomistic
scholarship. Moreover, the only two essays falling outside the analytic tradition—
chapters 1 and 12—seem largely uninterested in interacting with this tradition. Thus,
most analytically minded philosophers will, I suspect, find little of interest in Fergus
Kerr’s comparison (in chap. 1) of Wittgenstein and Aquinas on the question of how
one passes from the private to the public world, despite Kerr’s taking certain remarks
of Anthony Kenny as his starting point. And many readers will be surprised by the fact
that M.W.F. Stone’s essay (in chap. 12), which draws on important Thomistic
discussions of natural law, contains no mention of Eleonore Stump and Norman
Kretzmann’s influential work on Aquinas’s ethical naturalism, despite Stone’s explicit
aim to examine the extent to which Aquinas’s moral theory can be accurately
described as naturalistic. It is fair to say that the only sense in which this volume
brings together different traditions of Aquinas scholarship is by collecting pieces
representative of them under a single binding.
With respect to its other aim, however, that of advancing the current level of
interaction between medieval and analytic philosophers, the volume is much more
successful. Haldane sets an extremely high standard for the volume by inviting
comparison to “the genuinely pioneering work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach,
and Anthony Kenny, and the fine scholarship and argumentation associated with the
Cornell group, with the late Norman Kretzmann at the centre of it” (x). None of the
essays quite live up to the best work in this tradition, though no doubt part of the
explanation is that the contributors appear to be working under significant length
restrictions. Apart from Haldane’s essay, none of the others exceeds 20 pages (and
Haldane’s is only 22). The result is that even the best essays feel overly compressed
or rushed. Gyula Klima, for example, provides an extremely provocative and
interesting comparison of Aristotelian essentialism, as understood by Aquinas, with
the doctrine that goes by that name in contemporary philosophy. Because of its
compression, however, it will be tough-going for anyone lacking at least some
acquaintance with contemporary formal semantics.
Even so, the volume must be regarded as entirely successful in showing the potential
value of medieval Aristotelianism, and Aquinas’s views in particular, for advancing,
and in some cases even resolving, important debates in contemporary analytic
philosophy. Almost all the essays are written by authors in command of analytic tools,
methods, and problematics and their topics could not have been better chosen (e.g.,
“Aquinas and the Mind-Body Problem”, “The Breakdown of Contemporary Philosophy
of Mind”, “Hylomorphism and Individuation”).
As a nice addition, the volume also includes two essays by relatively well-known
analytic philosophers, David Braine (chap. 2) and David S. Oderberg (chap. 8), both of
which are striking for the light they shed on particularly dark aspects of Aquinas’s
metaphysics. Braine’s essay, for example, contains some tantalizing suggestions
about the proper interpretation of intelligible species, and in particular the verbum or
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species expressa, and Oderberg’s essay contains a number of provocative suggestions

about how to understand designated matter as a principle of individuation.
Among the most interesting, and accessible, essays of the volume are those by C.F.J
Martin (chap. 5) and Stefaan E. Cuypers (chap. 6). Both deal with aspects of
Thomistic action theory: Martin aims to identify the difference between voluntary and
non-voluntary action in terms of the different types of causality associated with each,
and Cuyper develops and defends a Thomistic theory of agent causation, taking as his
point of departure some important recent work on Thomas Reid. Also interesting, but
slightly more difficult, is Jonathan Jacobs’ treatment (chap. 7) of Aquinas’s
contribution to an aspect of the current realism/anti-realism debate—namely, his
account of the normativity of concept use. Here, as elsewhere, one gets a sense of
just how fruitful the application of medieval views to contemporary debates can be—
especially when the debates in question are currently at a standstill.
It is to be expected, in a volume of this sort, that individual essays will be stronger in
some respects than others. Nonetheless, there are certain flaws that might have been
avoided. Perhaps the most noticeable occur in the essays by Braine and Oderberg,
which for all their interest, contain some surprising omissions or mistakes. In the case
of Braine, these are primarily restricted to his treatment of philosophy and theology in
Aquinas (18-22). Here he ignores a great deal of recent scholarship in assuming that
Aquinas’s conception of philosophy and theology match our own. Because of this, he
mistakenly concludes that the Summa Theologiae, along with other works that
Aquinas would regard as theological, ought not to be included “among our starting-
points for evaluating Aquinas as a philosopher” (19). In the case of Oderberg, the
main problem concerns his understanding of the development of later medieval
philosophy, and in particular the place that Aquinas’s views occupy in it. Thus, at one
point he asserts (without qualification or defense) that “all schoolmen [were] obliged
to hold the Thomistic opinion on all matters of philosophy as their default position”
(126). This is a startling claim, one that no scholar I know of has undertaken to
defend.1
These sorts of worries aside, the volume will appeal to anyone interested in seeing the
value of reflecting from a contemporary point of view on the best of medieval thought.
Because of their compression, the essays tend to be more successful at showing the
promise that Thomistic principles hold for resolving longstanding difficulties, than they
are at showing in detail how these principles in fact resolve them. Even so, they go a
considerable distance toward bridging that gap which makes even the best known
medieval philosophers, such as Aquinas, seem intellectually more remote than much
earlier philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle. At the same time, moreover, these
essays demonstrate the type of work that must be done if medieval philosophy is ever
to achieve the kind of recovery and appreciation already enjoyed by the neighboring
fields of ancient and early modern philosophy.2
Endnotes
1. Since the publication of this review, David Oderberg has informed me that when he
speaks of 'schoolman' in the passage just quoted, he means to be referring, not to the
medieval scholastics themselves, as I had assumed, but "to all those in the present
who consider themselves in one way or another to be upholding, reviving, or
enhancing the tradition of the medieval scholastics". I think my original reading is still
the natural one, and that Oderberg's claim is false even on his intended reading (since
there are many today who qualify as schoolmen in his sense but feel no obligation to
start from the Thomist position). Nonetheless, I appreciate his intention and see that
it does make a difference to the plausibility of his claim.
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2. I am grateful to Michael Bergmann and Susan Brower-Toland for helpful comments

and suggestions on an earlier draft.
2003.03.05
Paul Crowther
The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History
Crowther, Paul, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, 218pp, $55.00 (hbk). ISBN 0521811147.
Reviewed by Daniel Herwitz , University of Michigan
This book attempts an analytic reconstruction of how picturing takes place in painting.
Ranging from mediaeval figuration to contemporary abstraction, the book argues that
the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane can be understood to provide
something like the basis for a set of distinctive logical spaces through which picturing
can happen. These logical spaces are what allow the varieties of picturing which the
history of art has exhibited. They are the condition of the possibility of such styles of
picturing. Terms like ‘logical space’, ‘pictorial syntax’ and ‘pictorial content’ or
‘semantics’ are liberally applied throughout this book, with comparatively little (if any)
discussion of what would be at stake in thinking of painting as a kind of visual
language. Indeed, these terms tend to run together without notice, leading the reader
to wonder whether what is at stake is pictorial syntax, a theory of meaning for
pictorial content, or just plain discussions of the grounds of style, and to question the
entire force of the analogy between style and language.
It is best to get at Crowther’s view by considering the starting point of the book,
namely Panofsky’s theory of perspective. Panofsky attempts to understand how
certain styles are undergirded by specific categories of form and (relatedly) how
changes in pictorial style can be accounted for through changes in these categories.
Crucial to Panofsky’s account is that categories of form—for example the geometrically
based theory of perspective which grounds (much) renaissance art—define pictorial
schemes through which style becomes iterable (capable of repetition and variation
according to the pattern), but also that these categories are achieved through history.
While forms arise historically, their analytic reconstruction is transhistorical, like the
synchronic reconstruction of language. Art history gives rise to transhistorical forms
that can be given analytic reconstruction. It is this project (variously denoted as
syntactic, semantic and logical) that Crowther is involved in elaborating. He is in this
respect Panofsky’s student.
A style is bounded: a closed universe of types admitting of no alternatives. Crowther
is, through Cassirer and Panofsky, neo-Kantian, and (to state what I take the key to
this book to be) it follows that he is emphatically not Aristotelian or Wittgensteinian
about style. Style is no loose aggregate of forms, linked together in terms of multiple
criss-crossings or family resemblances, with potentially innumerable additions. A style
is a systematic schema through which a two-dimensional surface can project figure-
and-ground relationships, and thus signify pictorially. What is boldly and emphatically
behind this book’s opposition to many current tendencies in art historical thought (and
the humanities generally) is its claim to limn these various closed schemata, once and
for all, and to prove that the variations one in fact finds within styles (renaissance,
abstract, etc.) are encompassed by the determinate categories that comprise each
schema. Schemes are stylistic essences, even if they are achieved through history and
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may have in some cases historical endpoints (meaning they have passed out of actual
art-making).
The second component to Crowther’s style of analytic reconstruction is the claim that
the determination of a stylistic essence (i.e. a schema for a type of picturing) allows
for the reconstruction of the field of actual pictorial examples (of perspectival painting,
abstraction—whatever) to show how this field can be clearly denoted and explained as
falling under the stylistic type. The kind of analytic reconstruction offered in this book
is closer in spirit to German idealism (the Hegel of the Logic whose reconstructions of
empirical history prove them logically/dialectically necessary as fields of thought) than
to analytical philosophy. It is fascinating to see such analysis resuscitated and, in
some places, expertly employed.
The problem with this book for a reader like myself is that one comes away from it
with the nagging suspicion that many of Crowther’s attempts to provide a determinate
set of categories (logically necessary for a kind of pictorial style) are ad hoc. One felt
this about his idealist predecessors as well. This is the kind of book that does not
solicit engagement but accord. It is as if Crowther is lecturing on the basis of having
solved everything, and one feels that his choices of categories and examples always
conceal alternatives—and do so without adequate acknowledgment. For example the
author claims that abstract picturing comes (and must come) in exactly four kinds,
corresponding to four logical possibilities:
(1) The visual details of possible things, states of affairs, or like forms, which are
unavailable to perception under normal circumstances . . . .
(2) Possible objects, events or life forms from or existing in alternative possible
physical and perceptual environments to our own.
(3) Configurations arising from radical modes of schematizing, decomposing or
recomposing material bodies or states of affairs.
(4) Possible visual traces of an item’s or state of affairs’ past, future or counterfactual
appearances or positions. (148)
From this logically given set of possibilities, Crowther then derives (again without
argument) the kinds of abstract pictorial styles that these possibilities analytically
generate, and these (don’t you know it) turn out to more or less range over the
history of abstract art in the twentieth century. He ends the chapter by claiming he
has provided a theory of meaning for abstract art (even though nothing about actual
content is specified in what he has putatively done). There is a certain obsessive
elegance in his position. However, it is not difficult to imagine other ways, beyond
Crowther’s canonical four, in which abstract picturing is possible. For example,
consider a possible schema for the abstract picturing of human moods, another (or is
it the same?) for poetic correspondences, another for sublimity, etc. Crowther could
retort that these modes of picturing fall under (or are derivatives from) his list of 1-4.
But I think he could only assert this on pain of making each of his propositions so
vague as to encompass everything at the price of saying little or nothing.
Earlier in the book Crowther argues that the fundamental categories of art history
encompass form, history and psychology, but his elaboration refuses ideology, society
and economy for no particular reason that I can find, beyond his own explanatory
preferences. It is an odd sin of omission given that the field of art history has (as he
knows well) been highly preoccupied with demonstrating the importance of ideology,
gender and the like for pictorial forms. What is right and indeed excellent in
Crowther’s work is the return to the thought that forms as general as perspective
cannot be reducible to ideological analysis, and that such forms do cry out to be
understood along the lines of linguistic schemes, even if these analogies might not go
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the whole distance. However, it is not right to exclude economy, ideology and society
without at least a serious exploration of what is at stake in style formation (especially
while including psychology and history). What one misses in this book is the
philosophy: the hard questioning of linguistic analogies, the hard thought about what
counts as a style formation and its analytic reconstruction. One has the feeling
Crowther had already made up his mind before writing the book, and that he is simply
informing the reader of his opinions.
About twenty five years ago Kendall Walton wrote a paper called “Categories of Art”,
which argued that categories of art arise and change in accord with temperaments of
interpretation and indeed, new art-making. For this (and other) reasons, such
categories are contingent and provisional—Aristotelian if you will. Some categories are
far more central than others; others are perhaps essential (for this or that). But (and
here is the Wittgensteinian element) all are revisable, insofar as their scope, and their
place in a system or relationship with others can shift. Crowther says in passing that
to understand a category is to understand it against the fabric of comparative
categories, but little is made of the remark. Its implications are, in my view, vast. The
concept of perspective shifts with Michelangelo and mannerism, it shifts against
German expressionism and abstraction, and it shifts as concepts of theory in
relationship to practice shift. The category also shifts as formal invention becomes
increasingly recognized as an activity that takes shape in contexts of power and
economy. The significance of these shifts is debatable. To mark a style is not to mark
a system of determinate relationships between a fixed and complete number of
categories (this precludes the crucial facts of revision and dissensus); it is, rather, to
present a holistic representation which is always liable to change. A failure of
Crowther’s book more than superficially related to his puristic, reconstructive style, is
its near total absence of reference to about twenty-five years of debate in aesthetics,
art history and art criticism (not to mention the philosophy of language and
linguistics) about style, art, syntax and semantics. He writes against the ghosts of the
19th century, and this places him, curiously, in an anachronistic vacuum, even if it has
the benefit of allowing him to pinpoint some of the ongoing importance of these great
art historians from the past.
2003.03.06
Susan Neiman
Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
Neiman, Susan, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,
Princeton University Press, 2002, 370pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0691096082.
Reviewed by Fred Rush , University of Notre Dame
‘The Knight and his squire ride across a heath which stretches towards the horizon.
Beyond it lies the sea, calm and shimmering in the morning sun. Close by, a scrawny
dog is whining, crawling towards its master, who is sitting asleep in the hot sun. A
black cloud of flies clusters about his head and shoulders. The squire, Jöns, dismounts
and approaches the sleeping man. He addresses him politely. When he does not
receive an answer, he walks up to the man in order to shake him awake. He bends
over the man’s shoulder, but quickly pulls back his hand. The man falls backward on
the heath, his face turned towards the squire. It is a corpse, staring at the squire with
empty eye sockets and blanched teeth. Jöns remounts and overtakes his master.
Knight: Well, did he show you the way?
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Jöns: Not exactly.

Knight: What did he say?
Jöns: Nothing.
Knight: Was he mute?
Jöns: No, sir. I wouldn’t say that. As a matter of fact, he was quite eloquent.
Knight: Oh?
Jöns: Yes, eloquent enough. The trouble is that what he had to say was most
depressing’.
The Seventh Seal is set during the Black Death. The Knight and squire are traveling
back to the Knight’s hold after a decade fighting in the Crusades. The Knight has also
encountered Death, is probing his purposes in a game of chess, and has likewise
found him eloquent, if a bit more loquacious. The Knight and Jöns have vastly
different views on death and suffering. For the Knight they are objects to question for
which one seeks reasons; Death is, in personified form, a conversant. For the squire
suffering and death are brute and factual, precisely not mysteries to probe and not
matters to justify. As it will turn out, it is the naturalistic Jöns, and not the
metaphysical Knight, who is capable of true compassion for those who suffer. When
the travelers encounter a town girl about to be burned for witchcraft, it is the squire
that offers her water and comfort. The Knight is bent solely on discovering whether
her visions of the devil, of evil, are true. She is, for him, an ecstatic proxy.
Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought is a sustained meditation on the importance of
death and suffering as themes for the development of modern philosophy. Neiman’s
leading thought is that the history of Western philosophy from, roughly, the sixteenth
century to the present should be reoriented in terms of the various reactions to the
question of theodicy. A theodicy is a demonstration that the world is good for
humanity in spite of what seems to be widespread suffering. In the modern era there
are two main strands of theodicy. The first attempts to argue that what finite
creatures within the world view as evil is really only evil when viewed ‘locally’. Evils
are necessitated by the overall requirements of the ‘best possible world’, a product of
God’s will to create the most diverse world consistent with the requirements of
parsimony. Because such creation is a perfection of God, it is good in itself and
anything necessarily flowing from it is good as well. It is argued that finite creatures
can be reconciled to the world, and be generally optimistic about it, on this basis.
According to theodicies of the first sort, all phenomena of the world are candidates for
the ascription of ethical terms, including natural events. Evil is present in the world
both in terms of natural disaster and human wrongdoing.
The most prominent historical representative of the first line is, of course, Leibniz—the
theodical Knight par excellence. The immensity of the destruction caused by the
Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, coupled with the expanding confidence of Newtonian
science, made theodical projects like Leibniz’s questionable, to put it mildly.
Intellectual reaction to the earthquake undercut the category of natural evil and
shifted the focus of theodical justification to squaring the existence of moral evil (i.e.
evil caused by human agency) with the idea of providence. This approach spares
divine will the reproaches of nature, but it introduces the unsettling idea that nature is
indifferent to human purposes. We might master such nature to a degree by
understanding it—by developing scientific theories about it which have predictive
power, etc.—but nature cannot be demonstrated to be a set of purposes uniquely
attuned to our well-being.
Thus, the second branch of modern theodicy, which denies the reality of natural evil
and argues that the possibility of moral evil is concomitant to that of free will. Since
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human freedom is a very important good (in fact, the good) a world that permits its
existence, even if partly evil, is good overall. Because evil is limited to events that are
in principle within at least some degree of human control, one can be optimistic about
at least the potential for moral progress and thus for an overall diminution of evil. One
characteristically modern way to carry forth this form of theodicy is to make nature
carry the brunt of human happiness and virtue as nature, as one finds in Rousseau’s
conception of human history. Moral evil is present according to Rousseau because of
humankind’s descent into unnaturalness. Even though history so far is a story of a fall
away from the natural because of socialization, Rousseau believes that humankind
(and history) can be redeemed within history by an arduous process of re-education.
Hegel adopts and expands upon elements of Rousseau’s optimism in his famous offer
of a ‘true theodicy’, arguing that suffering is the unavoidable engine of our dialectically
progressive self-consciousness. Marx in turn re-naturalizes this line of thought in
terms of the development of species-being through economic revolution.
Neiman does a fine job of fleshing out both lines of development and relating them to
the contemporaneous, and much more negative, views of Bayle, Voltaire and Hume.
The book makes the first of two decisive turns, however, with its discussion of Kant.
Kant’s account of both the impetus to construct theodicies and of their permissible
philosophical role is of fundamental historical importance. For the most part he is
negative and his being so involves the special and restricted role God (or, more
precisely, the idea of God) can play in the critical philosophy. Traditional theodicies
demand that virtue be ultimately rewarded with happiness, and Kant holds that this is
beyond philosophical proof. Moreover, as Neiman rightly emphasizes (pp. 67-70),
Kant thinks that such a demonstrable connection between virtue and happiness would
undermine morality. Kant recognizes the unity of virtue and happiness as an object of
hope and argues that the best we can do is strive to be worthy of happiness. He is
realistic enough to see that this hope is very hard to maintain if one restricts the
possibility for happiness to life and so he believes that we must posit an afterlife and
God in order to carry through the thought of worthiness. But this is just an idea whose
truth is beyond proof. Unlike his predecessors in either line of theodicy under
consideration, Kant does not credit any version of the ontological argument and this
seals the case on any traditional theodicy. However, a de-ontologized version of the
argument from design does figure importantly in Kant’s aesthetic theory, and Neiman
is right to look there for Kant’s ‘positive’ answer to the question of the prospects for
theodicy (pp. 82-83). Her earlier book, The Unity of Reason (Oxford, 1994) is a very
subtle treatment of many of the issues having to do with the systematic impact of
Kant’s account of reflective judgment. It is a bit disappointing, therefore, that Neiman
does not spend much time on the theodical content of Kant’s aesthetics. Kant’s
guiding thought—that ‘being at home in’ the world can be, at best, a matter of a
feeling that is a product of wanting to see oneself in that light—sets later theodicy
firmly on an aesthetic course.
Neiman next explores the nineteenth century fall-out from the Kantian re-orientation
in Schopenhauer, Sade, Nietzsche and Freud. Each is resolutely against the idea that
moral evil can be justified or finally eliminated, and each denies the existence of God
that Kant had already relegated to mere regulative moral importance. Now, one might
think that this would mean that these thinkers are untouched by the project of
theodicy. If God does not exist, what point is there to a project centered on justifying
His will? Although each in his own way rejects theodicy, his positive philosophical
views are essentially formed by that rebellion. It is the propensity to engage in the
deceptions of theodicy that calls for diagnosis—in its own right and as a precondition
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to any consideration of whether there might be ‘good’ non-theological ways to express

the impulse to theodicy. Schopenhauer is a remorseless enemy of any traditional
account of transcendent purpose. Life has no purpose, at least not for us
(Schopenhauer does seem to think that life has a blind drive to proliferate and sustain
itself, but that it has nothing in particular to do with any one of its finite
‘objectifications’). Suffering is all there is to the life of a finite, reflective being and
Schopenhauer resists at all costs the idea that suffering is redeemed, a mainstay of
theodicy. Neiman hints that Schopenhauer finally slips back into a theodicy of sorts
(an a theodicy?) in holding that suffering has value for what underlies the experience
of entities, the undifferentiated stuff that Schopenhauer calls ‘Will’ (pp. 198-99). I
take her point to be that, even though we are inconsequential bits of perturbating Will
the coming into and going out of being of which Will neither celebrates nor mourns,
the general process of Will’s objectification requires some such fodder and being it is
to be part of the cosmic balance or ‘justice’ of the world.
It is Nietzsche who marks the second turning point in the history of modern
philosophy under the aspect of theodicy—he is the true Jöns of Neiman’s story.
Following Schopenhauer Nietzsche argues very strongly against traditional theodicy.
And he provides a diagnosis of the false appeal of the project in terms of flight from
the truth that evil is not a real category at all, a view that is even more stringent than
Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s. His project is to understand that deeply-rooted tendency in
light of his ‘affirmative pessimism’ or, alternatively, in light of the need for a ‘rebirth of
tragedy’ (an early formulation of the idea). Although Nietzsche has a very dim view of
traditional theodicy, he does believe that one can exercise the theodical impulse in a
way that is not entirely delusional. Theodicy for Nietzsche, as he says over and over
again, is an aesthetic matter. A precise formulation of this thought is quite difficult,
but stating its core content is not. Nietzsche thinks that one can ‘justify’ the world to
the extent that one can put oneself in its place by enjoying the sheer creation and
destruction of images or representations. He identifies the experience of art (of a
certain type) as at least one way of entering into this frame of mind. Although
Nietzsche comes to reject tragedy as the compass according to which one’s views on
life must be set, the idea of aesthetic theodicy never loses importance for him.
Neiman only treats the idea superficially, however (p. 225). This means that she
misses the main thrust of Nietzsche’s views on theodicy, but this inattention has
repercussions beyond the specific treatment of Nietzsche. The idea of an aesthetic
theodicy begins with Kant and tracing the descent of that idea from Kant to Nietzsche
is a very important way to reconstruct the pertinent history. Neiman’s cursory
treatment of Nietzsche’s aesthetic views combines with the scant attention she pays
to the third Critique to make the Kant-Nietzsche line of reaction less compelling than it
is. This deficit also has substantial effect on the last chapter of the book, where
Neiman traces theodical thought and reactions to it into the twentieth century. Two of
the thinkers that figure prominently there, Adorno and Arendt, have important ties to
programs of aesthetic theodicy. A more substantial discussion of aesthetic theodicy is
also important for ‘negative’ reasons. One thinker very drawn to theodicy whom
Neiman does not mention at all, Heidegger, is very closely connected to the problem
of the ‘aesthetization of politics’ that is often thought to have contributed to the
intellectual climate that encouraged the development of Fascism. Given the evil of
that, which Neiman discusses at length later in the book, it might have been
interesting to bring the theodical impulse into connection with the creation of evil,
rather than concentrating solely upon its explanatory potential.
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Before she turns to the twentieth century treatments of evil, Neiman discusses the
question of what effects the horror of Auschwitz have had on conceptions of evil and
the possibilities of moral responses to it. Much contemporary literature on the topic of
evil centers upon these issues. Neiman’s primary aim is to show how the four
twentieth-century reactions she considers fare against the reconception of the nature
of evil that the Holocaust requires. Her main point is a familiar one by now, that the
theoretical and moral inscrutability of the human evil of the Holocaust outstrips any
pre-Holocaust way to understand it. Traditional theodicy was an attempt to penetrate
the rational structure of the world in order to be optimistic about one’s prospects for
well-being. Understanding the Holocaust fails because in its wake one can no longer
make sense of even human intention—evil threatens to have no structure at all.
Neiman also devotes a section of the chapter to weighing this thought in terms of
September 11. This material is the least successful in the book, extraordinarily under-
developed and opinionated. Its presence takes away from the argumentative force of
the book at a crucial point and gives the impression of rushing in to say something,
anything, about the events of that day. This reaction is certainly not Neiman’s alone,
but it is one that should be resisted.
Neiman’s consideration of specific twentieth-century reactions to twentieth-century
evil is uneven. One gets the feeling at this point in the book that she simply has too
many balls in the air. The discussion of Camus is the best part of this chapter. It is
lively and pushes the material in interesting directions. The treatment of the critical
theory of Horkheimer and Adorno is, on the other hand, not much above the run-of-
the-mill. Her discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s treatment of Kant cum Sade in
Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp. 192-93) is not very convincing, nor is her account of
Adorno’s statements concerning the evil of Auschwitz especially telling. Her true
Hausgötter are Arendt and Rawls. Given the theme of post-Holocaust evil, Arendt is a
natural focus. Neiman defends Eichmann in Jerusalem as having serious philosophical
potential. The leading idea here is that a good start can be made on reorienting
philosophical reflection on evil after Auschwitz by allowing for non-intentional action
and evil (pp. 271-77, 301-03). Evil is ‘banal’ in Arendt’s famous formulation, not
because it is boring, lackluster, or ordinary. Rather, it is banal because of its lack of
the sort of intention or purpose one usually attributes as a cause for action. Perhaps
there is some sense in which Eichmann (and others) didn’t ‘mean to’ murder Jews, but
I am skeptical. That said, there is no doubt important work to be done in developing
models of non-intentional agency (Neiman does not discuss the rich contemporary
French sources in this area). But Arendt does not develop anything of the sort, at
least not in detail. That is what makes her remark about ‘banality’ so potentially
objectionable—there is no real theoretical context for it. Thus the phrase ‘banality of
evil’ remains a bon mot, all the less bon because uttered in the realm of the
unspeakable. Perhaps a more substantial theoretical context can be assembled by
going through Arendt’s work in more depth, e.g. her work on totalitarianism, her book
on the third Critique and politics and, especially, The Human Condition. The inclusion
of Rawls is forced; the connection with theodicy is simply too attenuated.
Evil in Modern Thought not aimed solely at a professional philosophical audience, and
its tone and manner of presentation reflect that fact. I found the less academic style
welcome and engaging, others may not. On the negative side, the breadth of intended
audience does mean that Neiman sometimes short-changes argument and detailed
exposition. Notwithstanding this, the book is full of specific remarks that are very
insightful. And the driving historiographic idea of the book—that one basic way of
conceiving of the development of modern philosophy is along theodical lines—is very
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promising. Finally, whether one identifies more with the Knight or Jöns, evil is a
standing philosophical problem. It is important to see that problem in the broader
philosophical context that Neiman has opened for investigation.
2003.03.07
Thomas Nickles, (ed.)
Thomas Kuhn
Nickles, Thomas (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 312pp,
$21.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521796482
Reviewed by Howard Sankey, University of Melbourne
This volume of essays about Thomas Kuhn contains new work by key figures in the
area of Kuhn-studies. The essays treat Kuhn primarily as a philosopher rather than a
historian of science. They analyze the background setting of Kuhn’s ideas, and cover
such topics as his account of scientific practice, cognitive aspects of scientific
reasoning and conceptual change, and Kuhn’s influence on feminist philosophy of
science. While the volume is principally conceived as an introduction to Kuhn for the
generalist, it contains much that will be of interest to specialists. The essays combine
criticism with exposition. But the volume also has a prospective orientation. For it
seeks to place Kuhn’s ideas within the frame of ongoing and future developments in
the philosophy of science. The volume opens with an Introduction by the Editor,
Thomas Nickles, and closes with a select bibliography of English-language literature
relating to Kuhn.
Background coverage is provided by the Editor’s Introduction and the first three
essays of the volume. In the Introduction, Nickles presents a summary of the account
of science presented by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as well as an
overview of Kuhn’s life and academic career. As Kuhn’s work has had some influence
on postmodernist tendencies in Science Studies, Nickles devotes several pages to the
question of whether Kuhn’s account is a postmodernist theory of science. In the
opening essay of the volume, Michael Friedman notes substantial commonalities
between Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy of
linguistic frameworks. Friedman traces these commonalities back to the common
influence of early twentieth century neo-Kantianism, while noting an underlying
tension between realist and idealist elements within the neo-Kantian tradition to which
Kuhn explicitly acknowledges an intellectual debt. In his contribution, Gary Gutting
draws parallels and contrasts between Kuhn and French philosophy of science, but
notes that no real influence or interaction took place. By contrast, Kuhn engaged in a
more significant exchange with Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, which forms the subject
of John Worrall’s essay. Worrall analyzes the Kuhn-Popper controversy, as well as
Lakatos’s attempted synthesis of the two, while emphasizing that a number of Kuhn’s
methodological claims may be derived from a Duhemian analysis of the logic of
theory-testing.
Philosophical reception of Kuhn has been largely conditioned by the dominant outlook
within the philosophy of science. Philosophers have tended to conceive of science in
broadly epistemological terms. Thus, they have taken Kuhn’s account of science to be
relevant to questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, such as the relation
between theory and evidence, and the rationality of scientific theory-choice. A number
of commentators, by contrast, have understood Kuhn’s account of science as an
account of scientific practice, rather than as an account of scientific knowledge.
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In this volume, the essays by Joseph Rouse and Barry Barnes exemplify the practice-
orientated interpretation of Kuhn’s account of science. In his essay, Rouse contrasts
the standard interpretation of Kuhn’s account as an account of scientific knowledge
with his own reading of it as an account of scientific practice. While Rouse allows that
the standard interpretation of the account is defensible, he argues that it is better
read as an account of science as a practical activity based on analogical extension of
exemplars. Barnes, for his part, contrasts the “large” view of Kuhn with the “small”
view. The large view emphasizes the overthrow of “entire scientific worldviews”,
whereas the “small” view emphasizes “the mundane details of everyday scientific
practice” (pp. 123-4). According to Barnes, Kuhn’s work contains the basis of an
account of the nature of social order amongst scientists, since “it displays science as
the continuing open-ended elaboration of exemplars, and thereby expresses its
continual dependence on the sociability of scientists and the mutual deference they
accord to each other in their social relations” (p. 132).
Somewhat more than a third of the volume is taken up by essays that deal with
Kuhn’s work in relation to cognitive science. In his own essay, Nickles argues that a
new model of scientific cognition is suggested by Kuhn’s account of normal science.
Rather than methodical application of explicit rules, Kuhn claims that scientists solve
puzzles guided by similarity relations that are learned by exposure to scientific
exemplars. Such an account of cognition in the absence of rules derives support,
Nickles claims, from computational research on case-based and model-based
reasoning. The next two papers address Kuhn’s account of conceptual change from
the perspective of cognitive science. Nancy Nersessian demonstrates significant
overlap between Kuhn’s family-resemblance account of concepts and the prototype
model of conceptual representation proposed by cognitive psychologists such as
Eleanor Rosch. Nersessian also sets Kuhn’s views of concept-acquisition within the
context of cognitive studies of physics education, and goes beyond Kuhn to explore
the creation of concepts by means of mental models. In their contribution, Barker,
Chen and Andersen further develop the connection between Kuhn’s account of
concepts and prototype theory. They provide detailed analysis of the
incommensurability of conceptual taxonomies on the basis of Lawrence Barsalou’s
dynamic-frame representation of concepts, demonstrating that incommensurability
does not preclude rational comparison of such taxonomies.
One of the most controversial themes of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is
Kuhn’s repeated suggestion that, in some sense, the world changes when there is a
change of paradigm. This is the topic of Richard Grandy’s contribution. Where some
have taken the image of a world-change as the basis for a full-blown metaphysical
position, Grandy adopts a more cautious attitude. He emphasizes the ambivalent and
tentative tone of Kuhn’s talk of world-change, as well as the incomplete and partially
developed character of Kuhn’s philosophical position as presented in Structure. For
Grandy, the world-change image need not be understood in ontological terms.
Instead, it may be taken to express the complex nature of the relation between
observation and theory, as illustrated by the theory-dependence of observation. As
Grandy notes, though, the point might be better presented as a psychological one,
rather than in the linguistic terms that Kuhn later tended to employ.
In the final paper of the volume, Helen Longino explores Kuhn’s impact on feminist
approaches to science and science studies. Kuhn’s critique of empiricist philosophy of
science helped clear a space within which feminist critique of gender bias in science
could be undertaken. “Kuhn’s ideas of theory-ladenness”, Longino writes, “gave
feminist scientists and scholars a language in which to express their perception that
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even methodologically impeccable science could nevertheless incorporate social bias”

(p. 265). But, in the end, excessive emphasis on theory-ladenness only serves to
undermine empirically based critique of sexism in science. Hence, Longino argues that
theory-ladenness is to be rejected in favor of a “contextual” form of empiricism,
according to which variant background assumptions may determine difference in the
“evidential relevance” attached to theory-independent empirical data (p. 276). Such
an account would be compatible with a broadly Kuhnian view of scientific change,
while permitting an empirically based feminist critique of science.
As indicated above, the volume approaches Kuhn from a philosophical rather than
historical perspective. One result of this is a lack of historical scrutiny of a number of
key empirical claims about the nature of the historical development of science made
by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn made a number of distinctive
claims about the single-paradigm domination of normal science, the precipitation of
crisis by anomaly and revolutionary displacement of paradigms that have not always
proven easy to reconcile with the history of science. Yet surely the historically
problematic status of Kuhn’s claims about the development of science is an important
issue that should be presented to a generalist readership.
A number of alternative interpretative orientations toward Kuhn are represented in the
volume. The essays of Barnes and Rouse, for example, focus on Kuhn’s account of
scientific practice, while Worrall places Kuhn’s methodological views within the context
of Duhem’s account of theory-testing. Friedman relates Kuhn’s ideas to early
twentieth century neo-Kantianism, while Nickles, Nersessian and Barker et al explore
those ideas in relation to current research in the cognitive sciences. The overall
picture that thus rightly emerges is one of Kuhn as an author whose work is subject to
multiple interpretations and appropriations. Yet, in spite of this, a number of the
interpretative approaches found in the volume do tend to reflect a common
perspective on Kuhn. For there is a tendency to focus on the “middle” Kuhn, the Kuhn
of about 1970 who emphasized the role of exemplars and similarity relations, to a
somewhat greater extent than on the “later” Kuhn, who was more concerned with
semantic problems of reference and translation generated by his view of conceptual
change. This tendency combines with the emphasis on scientific practice in the papers
by Barnes and Rouse to suggest a view of science that downplays the role of
methodological factors in choice of theory. A particularly clear example of this is
Nickles’ own discussion of non-rule-based cognition in his treatment of Kuhn’s account
of reasoning in normal science.
Nickles remarks in his Introduction that the volume has a bias in favor of cognitive-
scientific approaches to Kuhn. This bias seems entirely appropriate, given the forward-
looking nature of the volume. It has been difficult to discern a positive philosophical
research program that stems from Kuhn’s work. While Kuhn’s influence is pervasive,
and Kuhn exegesis flourishes, there is no specifically Kuhnian project that is being
pursued in contemporary philosophy of science. However, as the articles by Nickles,
Nersessian and Barker et al illustrate, a significant exception may well be found
amongst cognitive approaches to science, where Kuhnian ideas are proving to be a
fertile source of inspiration. (On the lack of a distinctive Kuhnian legacy, see
Alexander Bird, ‘Kuhn’s Wrong Turning’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
33: 3 (2002), 443-463.)
While there is much that is good in this volume, some may be disappointed by what
they do not find. Those who think that the issue of incommensurability is a semantic
issue to be dealt with by a causal theory of reference will find little to support their
program here. Those who think that positive methodological insight may be gleaned
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from Kuhn’s views about epistemic values will find this issue mostly bypassed here.
Equally, those who think that that the issue of scientific realism may be interestingly
joined on the basis of Kuhn’s account of scientific change will find little positive
contribution to the realism debate here. In sum, whether deliberately or otherwise,
the volume tends to marginalize some important issues and interpretative
approaches. This is no basis for reproach, however, since alternative viewpoints are
amply represented elsewhere in the Kuhn literature. The interested reader will be
soon led to these by the references at the end of the volume.
2003.03.08
Christopher Eberle
Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics
Eberle, Christopher, Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics, Cambridge University
Press, 2002, 416pp, $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521011558.
Reviewed by Gerald Gaus, Tulane University
I Eberle’s target in this book is “justificatory liberals” — such as “John Rawls, Charles
Larmore, Bruce Ackerman, Robert Audi, Amy Gutman, Thomas Nagel, Lawrence
Solum” and me (11). Justificatory liberalism (a term Eberle prefers to “political
liberalism”) holds that “because each citizen ought to respect her compatriots, each
citizen ought to pursue public justification for her favored coercive laws” (11;
emphasis in original). According to justificatory liberals — and this is the focus of
Eberle’s objection — “the norm of respect imposes on each citizen an obligation to
discipline herself in such a way that she resolutely refrains from supporting any
coercive law for which she cannot provide the requisite public justification” (12). And,
since justificatory liberals insist that arguments necessarily depending on religious
conviction are disqualified as public justifications, they insist that respect for others
requires religious citizens to refrain from imposing coercive laws solely on the basis of
their religious convictions. “The justificatory liberal is unavoidably committed to the
claim that a citizen in a liberal democracy ought not to support (or reject) any
coercive law for which she enjoys only a religious justification” (14). Eberle’s book is a
reply to such justificatory liberalism and a defense of purely religious justifications for
imposing coercion on one’s fellow citizens.
In this review, I will criticize many of Eberle’s main arguments: justificatory liberalism
is, I think, far more plausible and appealing than Eberle’s proposal that, at the end of
the day, citizens may both respect others and coerce them simply on the basis of their
religious convictions. At the outset, however, let me stress that Eberle has written a
very good book indeed. It is manifest that he has thought much harder and deeper
about justificatory liberalism than justificatory liberals have thought about religious
justification and belief. His analysis of religious epistemology and mysticism (ch. 8)
clearly demonstrates the extent to which many liberals have attacked caricatures of
religious justification. After Eberle’s book, secular liberals must be much more careful
in their claims about religious beliefs and their justifications.
II
“Respect for others requires public justification of coercion: that is the clarion call of
justificatory liberalism” (54; emphasis in original). Eberle, though, heeds this call in
his own way — or at least he heeds some of it. As he sees it, the justificatory liberal
typically has in mind two rather different claims:
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The principle of pursuit: a citizen should pursue public justification for his favored
coercive laws.
The principle of restraint: a citizen should not support any coercive law for which he
lacks a public justification (68; emphasis in original).
As Eberle interprets it, according to the principle of pursuit:
If a citizen enjoys only a religious rationale for a given coercive law L, then she lacks a
public justification for L . . . . And if she lacks a public justification for L, then the
principle of pursuit obliges her sincerely and conscientiously to do what she can do to
discern some rationale for L that articulates appropriately with her compatriots’
distinctive points of view — that will be convincing to them insofar as they are
adequately informed and fully rational, or that would be convincing to them, or that
they are in a position to criticize, or the like (75).
Eberle’s crucial claim, though, is that “an obligation to pursue public justification
doesn’t imply an obligation to exercise restraint” (70). The principle of pursuit only
requires “a sincere and conscientious aspiration to public justification” (75) and so
says nothing at all about what the citizen should do so long as he pursue public
justification. And fulfilling the obligation to pursue public justification does not require
that one achieve public justification. Consequently, if a religious citizen does her best
to develop a public justification for L but fails, she has fulfilled her obligation to pursue
public justification, and may with consistency proceed to endorse L even though she
has only religious grounds for it. Eberle thus endorses an “ideal of conscientious
engagement” according to which a citizen will (104-105):
(1) seek to arrive at a justification for L that is sound given one’s own system of
beliefs and values;
(2) refuse to endorse L if one does not have a good justification for it in one’s own
systems of values and beliefs;
(3) seek to convey to others one’s reasons for coercing them;
(4) endeavor to arrive at a public justification for L —one that connects in the
appropriate way to the beliefs and values of one’s fellow citizens;
(5) pay attention to others’ objections to, and criticisms of, one’s reasons for coercing
them and aim to learn from them;
(6) refuse to endorse any L that violates the integrity of one’s fellow citizens.
A great deal of Eberle’s case depends on the claim — really, the intuition — that a
religious citizen who meets (1)-(6), but goes ahead and imposes a coercive law for
which he can find only a religious justification nevertheless may still respect them
when doing so. If the religious citizen takes no joy in imposing God’s will, is not
motivated by a “gleeful imposition of power” or “indifference to his compatriots’ cares
and concerns,” the religious citizen respects his fellows even when he imposes such a
law on them (113). After all, in trying to publicly justify the law to them the religious
citizen does not treat his secular compatriots merely as things, for he attempts to
reason from a shared point of view, and one does not do that with mere things.
I confess that my intuitions about the requirements of respect are better expressed by
Master Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.” It is all very well to try to make me see
your point, but if your point is one that I have no good justification to embrace, then
in the end I am simply being subjected to your power, however well-intentioned and
conscientious you may be. Eberle sees “no reason that we may not impose moral
demands on those who lack what they take to be good reasons to adhere to our moral
demands” (133). Eberle, of course, holds that in some sense there really are good
external reasons for non-believers to accept the demands, since God’s will must yield
good reasons. But it is important to stress that Eberle does not simply maintain one
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can justifiably impose laws on those who take themselves as having no justifications
for accepting the law, but one may impose on those who really have no good
justification for embracing it. Thus Eberle admits that a secular citizen so imposed
upon neither has an accessible reason to conform to the religious demand nor should
religious citizens hold her blameworthy for failing to comply; they should pity her, but
nevertheless they may go ahead and force her to comply with their view (133).
Eberle appears to have little or no appreciation of the moral costs of viewing other
citizens as objects of pity, who cannot see the truth but must be forced to conform to
it, though it cannot be justified to them. His model is the moral acceptability of
coercing a genocidal politician: she simply must be stopped, even if she cannot see
the point of respecting human life. Now it is surely true that those who threaten social
life justly may be controlled and even destroyed; as Hobbes points out, those who
remain in “the condition of war” may be destroyed without “injustice” (Leviathan,
chap. 15). However, in such cases we do not confront each other as responsive moral
persons but merely as natural persons who can take action against each other. Even if
sometimes we cannot avoid treating others as mere natural persons in this way, to
take it as a model for the way that citizens should relate to each other in a liberal
democracy is disturbing indeed.
III
Eberle’s resistance to the principle of restraint (“a citizen should not support any
coercive law for which he lacks a public justification”) stems from a sort of standing-
Rawls-on-his-head-maneuver. Eberle advances a version of the Rawlsian “strains of
commitment” argument according to which it is expecting too much of theistic citizens
to bracket their “totalizing and overriding obligation to obey God” — such would be
tantamount to annihilating their moral selves (146). And, says Eberle, there is a
superior alternative to restraint: “the ideal of conscientious engagement permits a
citizen to support coercive laws he conscientiously takes to be mandated by God, even
if he lacks a public justification of those laws” (147).
Many secular philosophers may instinctively be critical of this anti-restraint doctrine,
yet they should beware: similar anti-restraint views are voiced by “liberal
perfectionists” such as Steven Wall (Liberal Perfectionism and Restraint, Cambridge,
1998). As Eberle effectively argues (chap. 8), religious beliefs are not on obviously
thinner epistemic ice than are, say, some moral realist beliefs (I agree, but draw a
different lesson). Those who refuse to exercise restraint in relation to their moral
views — they refuse to bracket their firmly held moral convictions in political
argument even when these cannot be justified to others— are badly placed to criticize
Eberle’s refusal to embrace constraint vis à vis religious beliefs. Indeed, one of the
striking features of this book is how structurally similar are the criticisms of “neutralist
liberalism” offered by perfectionists and Eberle: both insist that citizens who firmly
and rationally believe that they posses important truths ought to be free to coerce
others to conform to them, even when those others have no good reason to embrace
such “truths.”
IV
Why, then, not simply accept justificatory liberalism’s principle of restraint along with
the view that R is a public reason for law L if and only if all reasonable citizens accept
R? As I read his chapter 7, Eberle would like to push the justificatory liberal into a
dilemma. The first horn supposes that the justificatory liberal (1) adopts an inclusive
characterization of the relevant public to whom justification is addressed, and (2)
within this public, considers people much as they are (their present beliefs, values,
etc), instead of some idealized version of their present selves (200). Such “populist”
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interpretations, Eberle suggests, clearly tie justificatory liberalism to respect for the
actual public as we find it: the beliefs and values that actual citizens actually accept
will form (to use Marilyn Friedman’s phrase) the “legitimation pool”— the pool of
relevant beliefs of the relevant people for legitimatising policy (198ff, 378). But if we
are resolutely populist, we cannot meet the “sufficiency condition” (205-207); few if
any proposals are apt to be justified, as there will always be someone who has no
reason to accept any given proposal. Eberle’s stronger claim is that not even basic
liberal principles could be justified since some reasonable person will veto them (i.e.,
some person will not have reason to embrace them), and so justificatory liberalism is
self-defeating — not substantively liberal at all (205). His weaker claim is that
characterizing the public inclusively and realistically will so truncate politics that many
of the issues that are now on the political agenda cannot be resolved, with the result
that we will have an unhealthy political life (206).
In order to avoid the first horn of the dilemma, the justificatory liberal may seek to
ratchet up the criteria for being a member of the justificatory public, restricting and
idealizing the agents that participate in public justification (for example, by restricting
the legitimation pool to those with adequate information). Thus the second horn of the
dilemma: embracing this exclusiveness will give the liberal his conclusions, but only
by building in sectarian (i.e., liberal) constraints right at the outset in determining who
is a member of the justificatory public (228). Thus the dilemma: either the liberal has
a non-sectarian conception of public justification (in which case liberalism is not
vindicated), or he vindicates liberalism, but only by appealing to a sectarian
understanding of public justification.
There is real insight here. Most importantly, I think few justificatory liberals have
confronted the possibility that plausible conceptions of public justification have the
radical consequence of removing a great deal from the political agenda, since no
position on many current political issues is capable of public justification. Since most
justificatory liberals are also friends of an extensive state, Eberle shows that they
confront a real problem. Overall, though, the argument is not compelling, especially if
(as do I), one embraces the implication that justificatory liberalism shrinks the domain
of the political. Eberle’s argument depends on the claims that (1) as soon as we
idealize enough so that basic liberal principles are successfully justified to the relevant
set of agents, the idealization manifests the liberal’s own “parochial” presuppositions,
and (2) the agents so idealized are so far removed from actual agents that respecting
the idealized agents no longer plausibly manifests respect for real people whom our
constructions seek to idealize (231). As Eberle’s usually realizes, the devils are in the
details, but I do not see that he has shown that we cannot both (a) idealize enough so
that core liberal principles are justified (i.e., say only moral or reasonable persons
form the relevant set, and they have no manifestly false beliefs) and (b) do not build
on suppositions that are objectionably parochial.
V
Eberle is especially effective in replying to two common arguments against appeal to
religious belief in liberal politics. First, drawing on the experiences of the European
religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is often claimed that
unless most citizens “privatize” their religious commitments (1) we shall be consumed
by strife, chaos, death and destruction (158) or, more modestly, (2) we shall
experience “social and political maladies that lack the severity of religious conflict, but
are serious nonetheless” (167). Eberle shows that the first is simply not plausible;
twentieth-century America is not seventeenth England. Most importantly, in
contemporary America freedom of religion and non-establishment are settled
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convictions among the vast majority of religious citizens, so the attempt to forcibly
convert others to orthodoxy — which was the crux of the earlier disputes — is simply
not part of the political landscape today (161-162). Eberle carefully criticizes the more
modest “malady” argument; social divisions will result from excluding arguments that
require religious suppositions as well as including them. And in any event, it is hard to
know how much social division would result from allowing religious considerations and
how this compares to the social divisions that accompany other political disputes. The
calculations are so complex and uncertain that consequentialist arguments are
inconclusive.
More interestingly, Eberle raises some powerful objections against theories of public
justification that seek to characterize specific epistemic standards required for public
justifications — such as public accessibility, replicability, fallibilism, inerrancy, external
criticism, independent conformability — and then contend that religious beliefs fail to
meet the standards, and so must be excluded from the public realm. Although there is
much to argue with in these complicated and thoughtful discussions, one of Eberle’s
most successful strategies is to show the epistemic similarities between moral and
religious beliefs. Some justificatory liberals exclude religious considerations by
showing that they cannot meet the criteria employed to evaluate observation
statements, but then admit moral judgments into the realm of public reason even
though they too fail to meet those criteria. If justificatory liberals are to defend this
combination of exclusion and inclusion, they need to do a lot more careful work on
moral and religious epistemology.
VI
Without doubt, Eberle has raised the level of discussion of the place of religious
argument in liberal politics. My admiration, however, is tempered by the judgment
that, in the end, Eberle has gone a long way toward showing that deeply religious
citizens are not good candidates for conscientious liberal democrats. As Eberle
describes many religious citizens, “they regard themselves as bound to obey a set of
overriding and totalizing obligations imposed upon them by their Creator. They regard
their failure to discharge those obligations as anathema” (183). Moreover he
persuasively argues that these obligations often, perhaps typically, are not understood
as private commitments but as requiring political action. If this is their view, it is very
hard to see how they can accept an obligation to conform to adverse democratic
decisions on issues relevant to these obligations. To ask them to conform to a
majority decision they do not accept would seem to “require them knowingly and
willingly to disobey God” (183). If it would be disobedient to God not to raise religious
arguments, surely it is still disobedient to have raised them, but then act contrary to
them because the majority has decided otherwise. Eberle himself seems caught in a
dilemma. (1) Religious citizens may be reasonably doubtful that they know the will of
God; they can accept adverse democratic decisions on the grounds that the majority’s
judgment is also reasonable, and in light of this, religious citizens should not insist
that their uncertain interpretations be law. But if this is their view, then it also seems
that they can abide by the principle of restraint in political argument by refusing to
appeal to their uncertain interpretations when arguing about what the law should be:
they can live with the law failing to reflect their view of God’s will. (2) If they cannot
accept the principle of restraint in political argument because it will be too much of a
strain (see III above) to fail to act as God tells them, then they will feel unable to
obey laws contrary to their understanding of God’s will. Since Eberle rejects (1), he
seems committed to (2). Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics appears to be
something of a rebel’s catechism.
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2003.03.09
G.E.R. Lloyd
The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and
China
Lloyd, G.E.R., The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece
and China, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 188pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN
0521894611.
Reviewed by Eric Hutton, University of Utah
In the late 1980’s, the well-known scholar of ancient Greek science G.E.R. Lloyd took
up an interest in comparing the development of science in early China and early
Greece. The Ambitions of Curiosity is the third book in Cambridge UP’s “Ideas in
Context” series in which he pursues this research program, which was first announced
in his Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge UP, 1990) and then expanded in
Adversaries and Authorities (Cambridge UP, 1996). Because of its subject matter and
comparative approach, The Ambitions of Curiosity and its predecessors merit the
attention of anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science, early Greece,
early China, and comparative studies of intellectual history in general. Readers
attracted to these topics and Lloyd’s particular approach to them will also want to
consult the volume he has recently co-authored with Nathan Sivin, The Way and the
Word (Yale UP, 2002), which likewise compares ancient Greek and Chinese medicine
and science.
Lloyd has three main aims in writing on these topics. One aim is to challenge certain
stereotypes about Greece and China by showing that they are neither as different nor
as similar as some have claimed. A second, more important aim is to illustrate how
scientific ideas developed differently in the two cultures, and in particular to show how
different social and political settings influenced the methods of investigation and
results of inquiry. For a few decades now, there has been growing acceptance of the
idea that the history of science has been shaped by social and political factors, so
Lloyd’s work is not new or revealing in that regard. Rather, his point is that we can
only appreciate exactly how much these non-scientific factors affected the
development of science when we compare different traditions in order to appreciate
better the peculiarities of each.
Thirdly, Lloyd aims to promote a particular method of comparative study, one focusing
on the categories used by the “actors” themselves, i.e. the ancients, rather than those
used by the “observers,” i.e. modern scholars (cf. Ambitions p. 45). His point is that if
we start out with some pre-conceived notion of, say, astronomy, and then go hunting
through the ancient texts looking to see how they do “astronomy” as understood by
us, we will likely wind up disappointed, since much of what the ancients did would not
qualify as “astronomy” in our sense (or even as “science,” in our sense), and
moreover we will have failed to grasp how they understood their own projects.
Instead, we need to start by paying careful attention to how they themselves describe
their investigations and how they relate them to each other. Only then can we
adequately appreciate how their respective scientific traditions developed differently.
In applying this method, Lloyd admirably avoids taking the extreme and unreasonable
step of disowning the modern categories altogether, for without some general
categories under which the Chinese and Greeks can be seen as investigating the
“same” subject material, no comparison would be possible at all. The modern
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categories remain in Lloyd’s approach as thin labels (e.g. “astronomy” understood

broadly as “study of the heavens”) that serve as points by which to give some initial
orientation to our study of the materials.
In The Ambitions of Curiosity, Lloyd pursues the above three aims through an
examination of “systematic inquiry” in the Chinese and Greek traditions. Lloyd
explicitly eschews giving a definition of this term at the outset, preferring instead to
let it emerge from the studies that make up the bulk of his text, but he seems to have
in mind something like a notion of “research,” where this involves careful and
sustained investigation aimed at producing solutions to some set of questions or
concerns faced by the investigators. Lloyd does not limit himself here to specifically
“scientific” investigation, since he wants to see how the various fields of investigation
came to define themselves and be recognized as distinct areas for inquiry, which
would be obscured if we started by dividing the objects of inquiry into discrete fields.
The breadth of Lloyd’s conception of “systematic inquiry” is shown by the range of
topics he covers over the course of the book. Chapter one compares the rise of
historiography in Greece and China. Chapter two focuses on how interests in
predicting the future or divining unseen facts helped the development of astronomy
and medicine in China, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Chapter three examines how
Chinese and Greek thinkers both showed an interest in numbers, though in quite
different ways. In a particularly noteworthy section, Lloyd points out that stereotypes
of the Chinese as interested in numbers primarily for their practical application, and
not out of any more purely theoretical interests, are simply false (p. 62-63). Chapter
four compares Greek and Chinese innovations in warfare, agriculture, and civil
engineering. Here, as a point complementing his attack on stereotypes about the
Chinese in the previous chapter, Lloyd shows how the Greeks were not engaged solely
in abstract theorizing, but were also very interested in practical applications. Chapter
five examines the development of technical language in the two traditions, with
particular regard to terms in mathematics, medicine, and botany (especially plants
with pharmacological properties). In the sixth and final chapter he sums up the results
of the preceding studies and draws general comparative conclusions about the
development of systematic inquiry in ancient times.
Since the last chapter is, in a sense, the heart of Lloyd’s enterprise, in describing and
evaluating the book it is perhaps best to concentrate on that chapter. There, Lloyd
focuses on the way institutional frameworks, most specifically state support,
contributed to or impeded various forms of systematic inquiry. As he points out, no
simple and reductive conclusions can be drawn about the matter. From the studies of
the first five chapters, it is clear that state support or lack thereof neither
systematically spurred nor inhibited successful inquiry in either culture. Nevertheless,
in Lloyd’s view certain overall trends due to institutional differences can still be
discerned as follows.
In China, much systematic inquiry was conducted for the sake of the Emperor and was
supported by the state. Such support paved the way for striking successes in some
cases, and the centralization of power also made it possible that discoveries could be
widely disseminated and implemented. However, this institutional framework also
meant that the investigators needed to be careful about the results they presented,
lest they lose their means of livelihood—or even their heads. Moreover, the fact that
much systematic inquiry was funded by the state probably contributed to a certain
kind of consensus among Chinese thinkers. For instance, while Chinese cosmologists
may have disagreed about certain particulars, their works show a striking similarity in
articulating a system in which the ruler is responsible for ensuring harmony in nature
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and among humans. Lloyd suggests that such convergence seems more than
coincidental when one notices that such systems highlight how the ruler must depend
upon his subordinates—including precisely the cosmologists writing these works in the
state’s employ—in order for the world to be well ordered (p. 138-139).
By contrast, in Greece there was no centralized ruling power, and most investigators
worked without state support. While some of them may have been independently
wealthy, most would have had to teach for a living, which meant that they would have
to compete with each other for students. According to Lloyd, this factor promoted a
greater diversity of views, since one way of distinguishing oneself from the
competition was to come up with unique, daring, even extravagant ideas and
approaches and then claim that one’s rivals were inferior in terms of veracity,
accuracy, effectiveness, and so on. At the same time, the lack of a strong, centralized
state authority to support inquiry and disseminate its results meant that discoveries
frequently benefited only a few, and were sometimes lost to the public altogether.
The preceding summary cannot do full justice to the nuance of Lloyd’s work. Any book
surveying such a broad range of texts, topics, and times must inevitably generalize,
and for almost any generalization there are exceptions. Lloyd is usually sensitive to
such exceptions and takes care not to overstate his case, which is one of the virtues
of his work. Even so, there are still certain points on which one might seriously
challenge his contentions in Ambitions. Given the vast amount of material Lloyd
surveys, it is impossible to discuss all the places where one might disagree with his
generalizations, so I will focus on a few select claims he makes about the Chinese
tradition, since that is where Lloyd’s analysis seems more problematic, and where the
majority of Western readers are less likely to be familiar enough with the sources to
evaluate Lloyd’s claims for themselves.
First, in his chapter on historiography, Lloyd notes that historians in both early Greece
and China aimed to teach and advise those in positions of political power, and he
claims that to this extent, “The beginnings of historiography in both cultures are
political” (p.18). He adds that the development of historiography in the case of China
took an “official” route, in the sense that most histories were either commissioned by
the state, or at least were written by persons in official positions with access to state
archives. Both of these points can be disputed, but I will concentrate on the former.
Lloyd’s claims about the “political” nature of early Chinese historiography rest
primarily on a consideration of works such as the Chunqiu, Zuozhuan, Shiji, and
Hanshu, which report mainly—though by no means exclusively—on political events
and prominent figures connected with the ruling house. Yet, such was not the only
kind of historiography being done in early China, nor was all historiography aimed at
rulers. Consider, for example, the “Shi Qiang Pan,” an inscribed bronze vessel from
ca. 900 BCE. This vessel tells the stories of both the early Zhou dynasties and the
family history of the person who cast the vessel, Scribe Qiang. (Note that the word shi
rendered here as “scribe” eventually came to mean “history” and “historian.”)
Moreover, the vessel is intended for Qiang’s own family, not for the king, and the
recounting of Zhou history chiefly highlights the illustriousness of Qiang’s own lineage
in service to the dynasty.1 In this case, historiography is more a family and religious
matter (religious, in light of the ancient Chinese worship of ancestral spirits), and is
not aimed at giving political advice at all. While this vessel dates from many years
before the period that is Lloyd’s main focus, it is clear that the recording of family
history for a non-imperial audience did not die out. For instance, in the eastern Han
dynasty (25-220 CE, also within the range of Lloyd’s purview) there is a multitude of
stele inscriptions recording family histories and biographies that were not intended for
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imperial use.2 Since many of these inscriptions were commissioned by private

individuals, they also constitute counter-evidence to Lloyd’s claim about the “official”
route taken by Chinese historiography.3 Thus, while Lloyd is correct that much history
was written by state-supported historians and was aimed at advising the ruler, a
significant amount of Chinese historiography also does not fit this mold.
Another point where there is a significant counter-example to Lloyd’s claims is in
regard to cosmology. He states, “In China, the regular relations between heaven and
earth are, in a sense, the responsibility of the Emperor who acts as a mediator
between them . . .. Order in the heavens . . . could not be taken for granted” (p. 63).
However, the early Confucian thinker Xunzi quite explicitly rejects this view, saying,
“There is a constancy to the activities of Heaven. They do not persist because of Yao
[a sage king]. They do not perish because of Jie [an evil tyrant].”4 Moreover, Xunzi,
like most other early Chinese thinkers, sought the patronage of rulers, and in fact he
succeeded in securing it for a period of time. Indeed, he was very influential both
during his own lifetime and afterwards until the Tang dynasty, but ultimately this
particular view of his was not widely adopted. Even though Xunzi thus represents a
minority opinion, it would not be right to dismiss him merely as an instance of “the
exception proves the rule”.5 For the aim of Lloyd’s book is to show how the
development of certain styles of systematic inquiry can be in part explained by
reference to the social and political environment. Where there exists a significant
exception to majority views and practices, that means there is something further to
explain, namely why the exceptional view or practice remained an exception instead
of going on to become dominant, especially since these exceptions arose in the same
social and political context as the dominant ones. Until that issue is addressed, we will
still not have really understood why the majority practice was the way it was, and so
we will not have understood why the overall trend of development took the shape it
did.
A third example of where one might disagree with Lloyd concerns his explanation of
why there was less consensus of views in Greece than in China. Lloyd points to the
fact that Greek intellectuals had to rely on payments from students, but the only way
to get and retain students was to have a better argument than one’s rivals, which lent
itself to greater diversity of opinions and more competitiveness. In support of this
idea, Lloyd writes, “Moreover the [Greek] record contains many examples, from both
philosophy and medicine, of defections, of pupils leaving one teacher or school for
another. Criticism of your own teacher—rare, if not quite unknown in China—was
common in Greece, sometimes as a prelude to the pupil setting up a rival school of his
own” (p. 134). Lloyd appropriately qualifies this remark about China in a footnote,
where he refers to Hanfeizi and Lisi, famous former students of Xunzi’s who came to
reject his teachings, but Lloyd still regards this as a “rare” instance. Again, though,
the Chinese records reveal less school loyalty and more competitiveness than Lloyd
lets on.6 Aside from Han Feizi and Lisi, a striking example is Mozi, founder of the
Mohist school. Mozi shows a familiarity with the classical texts and rituals that is
usually a hallmark of Confucian education, and scholars have long suspected that he
might have studied with the Confucians at one time. Even if he did not actually study
under a Confucian master, it is clear that he rejects much of the content of his own
classical education, since in attacking the Confucians he wants to do away with music
and ritual. Furthermore, the Mohist school had its own problems with student loyalty,
as the following passage from the Confucian thinker Mencius indicates:
Mencius said, “Those who desert the Mohist school are sure to turn to that of Yang
[Zhu]; those who desert the Yang school are sure to turn to the Confucianist. When
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they turn to us we simply accept them. Nowadays, those who debate with the
followers of Yang and Mo behave as if they were chasing strayed pigs. They are not
content to return the pigs to the sty, but go on to tie their feet up.” (Mencius, 7A26)7
From this, it seems clear that students were not necessarily loyal to their teachers,
and the various schools of thought in early China did compete with each other for
students, and not merely for the ear of rulers. Also, according to the early texts
Zhuangzi and Hanfeizi, after Confucius and Mozi died, their followers split into rival
groups that argued amongst themselves over the correct interpretation of their
respective master’s teachings. Thus, Lloyd’s claim that the diversity of views in
ancient Greece is attributable to a greater competitiveness among Greek thinkers
does not seem as well supported he presents it.
The above cases are only a few of several instances where Lloyd’s analysis may not be
entirely convincing. That is not to say that his generalizations are totally wrong.
Indeed, there is usually some well-founded basis for each of his claims, but
nevertheless on many points a closer reading of the source materials shows that the
situation is still even more complex than is reflected in his account, despite the great
care he takes not to over-generalize.
Overall, Lloyd is to be commended for forming the bold ambition to compare the
Chinese and Greek traditions and then pursuing it with the diligence that The
Ambitions of Curiosity clearly evinces. Regardless of whatever shortcomings it may
have, Lloyd’s work is in general well worth reading and thinking about, and Ambitions
is perhaps especially suitable as an introduction to his approach for those unfamiliar
with it, since the project began from the Isaiah Berlin lectures given by Lloyd at
Oxford in 2000, and it retains some of the characteristics of a general lecture, which
makes it easy to approach for non-specialists. For specialists, it is worth noting that
while Ambitions does present certain new lines of argument and extend Lloyd’s
comparative approach into some subjects he has not covered before, many of the
lessons drawn in the last chapter of Ambitions are either strongly prefigured or even
stated outright in the final chapter of his previous work, Adversaries and Authorities,
which as a longer book tends to go into somewhat greater detail than Ambitions does.
Therefore, specialists or others looking for more thorough treatments of the subject
matter may find it more useful instead to read Adversaries and Authorities, or The
Way and the Word, since the latter is also supposed to present a more complete case
for Lloyd’s views.8
Endnotes
1. For a translation and detailed analysis of this vessel, see Shaughnessy, Edward L.
Sources of Western Zhou History. University of California Press, 1991.
2. I thank Miranda Brown for information on these sources.
3. Even better examples of such “non-official” historiography are the fangzhi (“local
gazetteers”), which were initially written by local gentry, not government officials.
Such works appeared much later (Song dynasty) than the period Lloyd is considering,
but they show that even if Chinese historiography started as largely an “official”
pursuit, it certainly did not stay that way for the whole imperial period of Chinese
history.
4. Cf. Xunzi, ch. 17.
5. Xunzi was not entirely alone in this view, either, since it was partially derived from
earlier Daoist thinkers such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, who promoted a view of Heaven as
indifferent to humankind.
6. Indeed, in certain respects the very idea of “schools” of thought in early China is a
construct of later Chinese thinkers, rather than a historical fact. See Csikszentmihalyi,
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Mark and Nylan, Michael, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions through
Exemplary Figures in Early China” (forthcoming in T’oung P’ao).
7. Translation from D.C. Lau. Mencius. Penguin, 1970.
8. I would like to thank Chris Bobonich, Miranda Brown, P.J. Ivanhoe, and T.C. Kline
III for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
2003.03.10
George Pattison
Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, literature
Pattison, George, Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology,
literature, Routledge, 2002, 240pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415283701.
Reviewed by M. Jamie Ferreira, University of Virginia
Pattison explores a genre of Kierkegaard’s writings that is less well-known than either
his popular pseudonymous works or his explicitly Christian works—namely, the
upbuilding discourses written in Kierkegaard’s own name and published in tandem
with the pseudonymous works. Elegantly and clearly written, this study argues that
these discourses (in addition to the popular Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Pattison
treats Discourses on Imagined Occasions and Discourses in Various Spirits)
collectively provide a privileged viewpoint on the authorship as a whole. His approach
to these discourses is informed both by the implications of Kierkegaard’s unpublished
“Lectures on Communication” (1847) concerning indirect communication, as well as
Kierkegaard’s own appreciative assessments of rhetorical form and situation. Pattison
makes an intriguing case for rejecting other philosophical readings of the discourses—
e.g., in terms of dialectics, phenomenology, and the Kantian idea of the sublime—as a
complement to his own positive thesis that these discourses highlight the categories of
‘love’ and ‘upbuilding’ (or ‘love as upbuilding’) and thereby provide a unifying center
illuminating the entire authorship (an inexhaustible unity-in-diversity, to be sure,
rather than any uniformity, but still a challenge to those who deny any unity in the
authorship).
Pattison also proposes that these discourses reveal ways in which the entire
authorship is open to a “philosophical” reading. What he means by such a
philosophical reading is that there is a sense in which we can understand even the
specifically Christian works without the “prior acceptance of dogmatic principles or
ecclesiastical authority” (193). The Christian works do, Pattison admits, “presuppose a
set of distinctively Christian presuppositions” (208), but he argues that the kind of
“moral and personal reflection that the upbuilding discourses seek to arouse” reveals
that “Kierkegaardian faith” is not absolutely heterogeneous, but “comes as the final
expression of a process of understanding that is firmly and broadly contextualized in
human experience” (205). In other words, because the meaning of the human and
divine love narrated in the upbuilding discourses is “not strange to us” (204), religious
faith is not ultimately strange to us. This argument for a kind of humanistic continuity
is made in the service of what Pattison himself terms a “strong claim”—namely,
Kierkegaard is a paradigmatic thinker for the regeneration of moral discourse in a
situation determined by the collapse or problematisation of the grand narratives of
religion and social progress and the inability of science to move beyond an essentially
reductionist approach to religion and ethics (9).
Kierkegaard’s usefulness in this respect is a function of reading themes in the
discourses (ideals like ‘love hides a multitude of sins’ and pictures of loving
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forgiveness or “becoming as nothing”) as “regulative” principles that guide our life but
“do not presuppose any general ontology or any particular world-view” (9). He is
explicitly aware of the danger of mining the discourses for anthropological content at
the cost of theological conclusions (169), but his claim that these discourses do not
contribute to any ontology, religious or otherwise (93), is provocative (to say the
least) when applied to regulative ideals like “becoming transparent to God.”
An important contribution is made by Pattison when he begins a project that should be
continued by others—namely, reading the contemporaneous signed and unsigned
works in light of each other. One of the most suggestive and beautiful chapters gives
a lengthy illustration of how the discourses that were published on the same day as
Fear and Trembling can provide fresh insights into that work, one we probably all feel
very familiar with already. Moreover, when one thought nothing new could be said
about the role of the broken engagement, Pattison (resisting standard
psychobiography) does just that by exploring that theme in the light of the discourses.
Overall, the book argues for a kind of humanistic continuity, such that Christian
religiousness is “conceived,” and therefore conceivable, “within a framework erected
on the ground of common human experience and understanding” (215); this
continuity, however, should be clearly distinguished from a stronger claim, which
Pattison attributes to Works of Love, namely, that distinctively Christian religious
experience is the “demand[ed]” “fulfillment” of “a logic inscribed in the very structures
of human beings’ quest for self-knowledge and their attempts to speak rightly about
love” (215). This worry aside, the book does a valuable service: both because this is
the first full-length treatment of the upbuilding discourses in English and because
Pattison has impressive literary and artistic sensitivities, this study should interest a
wide range of readers. In sum, the portrait of these discourses is so engagingly
fashioned, readers should be eager to visit or revisit them.
2003.03.11
Nancy J. Hirschmann
The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom
Hirschmann, Nancy J., The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom,
Princeton University Press, 2003, 308pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN 0691096252.
Reviewed by Ann E. Cudd, University of Kansas
This book presents and defends a social constructionist account of freedom and
applies the account to three examples of women’s unfreedom to develop and illustrate
the use of the theory. Hirschmann’s main aim is to define freedom in a way that is
useful to feminism, that is, to understanding the oppression of women. This effort
goes against the grain of much recent feminist literature that rejects freedom in favor
of autonomy as the basic aim of feminism.
Hirschmann begins with Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive
liberty and argues that while both concepts are limited, they each provide some
insight into freedom that must not be overlooked. Negative liberty focuses on external
barriers to successful choice. While Hirschmann thinks choice (or the lack thereof) and
the notion of external barriers are crucial to understanding women’s oppression, the
focus is too individualistic. Positive liberty extends the analysis of freedom by focusing
on the social context of choice-making. Although Berlin rejected positive liberty
because of its potentially coercive molding of the citizen for the purposes of the state,
Hirschmann takes from positive liberty the notion of the subject as always already
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socially constructed. By social construction she means not only what social supports
are provided for individuals’ choices but also the social construction of the context of
choice and of the choice-making subject herself. As she summarizes her agreement
with them:
Like classic negative-liberty theorists, I maintain that the ability to make choices and
act on them is the basic condition for freedom. However, like positive-liberty theorists,
I maintain that choice needs to be understood in terms of the desiring subject, her
preferences, her will, and identity. (30)
The book contains a historical chapter in which Hirschmann examines Locke’s,
Rousseau’s, Kant’s, and Mill’s theories of freedom or liberty. She argues that each one
contains elements of both negative- and positive- liberty theory, despite the fact that
each is usually identified entirely with one or the other. While the first three are
undeniably sexist, she also argues that each of their theories of freedom are
masculinist in their adherence to individualistic accounts of freedom that ignore the
deeper levels of social constructionism. While I was initially skeptical of this claim, the
examples she examines later in the book help the reader to see the point. If theories
of freedom begin with the idea that men are free and equal when and because they
can choose their plan of life, then this notion of freedom is blind to the social barriers
to women’s freedom, and thus they are masculinist.
The central chapter of the book contains Hirschmann’s discussion of social
constructionism and the resulting paradox of social constructionism. The central idea
of social construction is that there is no such thing as “human nature”; humans are
the products of sociohistorical configuration. On her analysis, three different levels of
social analysis are termed “social construction.” The first level is the claim that social
construction is ideology, or in other words the misrepresentation of reality.
Hirschmann thinks this level of analysis does not go deep enough because it presumes
(falsely in her view) that there is some reality that can be apprehended independent
of social constructions. The second level claims that social construction is the creation
of reality. Hirschmann rejects this as the complete analysis because it ignores the fact
that the social constructions themselves have to be interpreted. The third level is
social construction as “the discursive construction of social meaning”(81). This is the
postmodern interpretation, and Hirschmann accepts the point that reality has to be
interpreted through discourse, but wisely resists holding that reality is therefore just
discourse. In her view all three levels of social construction are always at play and
feed into each other. All three levels also can be seen to give rise to the social
construction paradox, which is analogous to the paradox of ideology, which is the
problem that the very theory of ideology must itself be seen as ideology. As
Hirschmann puts it in applying the paradox to her own theory:
How can women reject patriarchal discourse if we have participated in its construction
and it makes us who we are? . . . How can we ever figure out who “we” are or what
“we want” if the language and concepts we must use are antagonistic to the
enterprise we seek to carry out, that is, are themselves barriers to women’s freedom?
(99)
The answer is that patriarchy is not total, nor is it the only structure of constraint on
women. In order to train women for their social roles, for example, women learn to
read and have the opportunity to read and create feminist theory. Further, there are
activities that are not primarily constructed along the lines of gender, for example,
those that are along race and class lines, and these provide fissures through which the
patriarchy can be exposed and resisted.
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Three chapters of the book take up three sites of women’s oppression: domestic
violence, welfare (in the U.S. context), and veiling practices in Muslim countries. With
these chapters Hirschmann aims to illustrate the ways that a full appreciation of the
social construction of each site can best illuminate the complexities of women’s
oppression. She also shows how the particular social practice and institutions of
women’s roles, romantic love, sexuality, law enforcement, child custody, etc.
construct the available choices for women. Women are clearly agents choosing within
these constraints, but their freedom is limited relative to that of men. I found the
veiling chapter somewhat problematic, however. Hirschmann writes:
I will argue that veiling itself is not oppressive, but rather that its deployment as a
cultural symbol and practice may provide (and often has done so) a form and mode by
which patriarchy oppresses women in specific contexts. (171)
She then argues that there are contexts in which women choose segregation and
veiling in order to celebrate their femininity. But this example seems to recognize that
veiling necessarily entails segregation of women and men. Unlike Hirschmann, I would
argue that such segregation is necessarily oppressive, because it denies individuals
the opportunity to choose not to be identified by this arbitrary feature of themselves,
i.e., their gender. This example seems to me to be a prime instance of the lack of
inner freedom that her social construction theory reveals.
Hirschmann aligns herself with feminists such as Drucilla Cornell and Amartya Sen
(though disagreeing with details of their theories), who champion freedom rather than
autonomy as the goal of feminism. Autonomy theorists look not to choice but rational
or moral behavior as the hallmark of personhood. To be autonomous one needs to
have a rationally formulated sense of the good and a plan of life that can be
reasonably expected to achieve it. Hirschmann argues that freedom is prior to
autonomy because the ability to be an agent, that is, to make a choice does not
require that an individual have a clear sense of the good and a rational plan to achieve
it. She is not clear, however, on why feminists should not want autonomy on top of
freedom. In the end, I would agree with her view, but I think we would part company
on why this is so. For Hirschmann, feminism is ultimately a kind of solidarity with
women. Consider the following statement in the ultimate chapter of the book:
I do think that feminist freedom requires that women’s decision be respected,
regardless of what they choose; feminists must support, in principle, if not politically,
women’s choices to oppose abortion, stay with abusers, not report rape or sexual
harassment, or become full-time mothers and housewives . . . . But such respect is
motivated at least as much by recognition of oppression – as in the case of the
battered woman who returns to her abuser because she has nowhere else to go or
fears for the safety of her family – as respect for freedom – as in the case of pro-life
women who believe that abortion is murder. (237-8)
This seems to me to be an explosive bullet for a feminist to bite. Such choices are for
unfreedom, and as such ought to be regarded by feminists in the same way Mill
regarded contracting oneself into slavery. Such choices are contradictory to the very
idea of freedom. Furthermore, when women make these choices they strengthen the
very institutions that oppress women. So I think that feminists need to be able not to
respect such choices. Autonomy theorists are able to do this by showing that the
choices are irrational or came about through a process of desire formation that is itself
compromised by oppression. But I also think that Hirschmann’s theory provides the
tools to criticize these choices. For, as she has shown for at least some of the
examples, they are socially constructed within social systems that systematically favor
men. That Hirschmann fails to see this application of her theory is surprising, I think,
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but it further strengthens the claim that she has produced a very useful theory of
freedom for the cause of feminism.
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2003.03.12
Theodore Schatzki
The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social
Life and Change
Schatzki, Theodore, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution
of Social Life and Change, Penn State University Press, 2002, 296pp, $45.00 (hbk),
ISBN 0271021446.
Reviewed by Joanna Crosby, Morgan State University
Through the analysis of two disparate communities, a 19th-century Shaker village and
20th-century day traders, Theodore Schatzki defends, clarifies, and revises the
arguments he presented in Social Practices. These two examples provide him with a
rich field of events and interactions that he uses to illustrate his concept of site
ontology. The example of the Shaker village illustrates the full range of his theoretical
claims. The practice of day trading concentrates Schatzki’s claims about social sites,
providing a concrete and concise example of how social sites, social orders, practices,
and agency provide a coherent and adequate account of social life.
While Schatzki’s explanation of the book’s title is rather obscure, the use of ‘site’ to
connote a much broader set of phenomena is intriguing. The most charitable reading
of his understanding of ‘site’ is as a broad, metaphoric reference to the many kinds of
spaces humans inhabit: spatial, temporal, and teleological. While ‘space’ or ‘place’
would seem sufficient to serve this same purpose, and ‘space’ would also contribute
alliterative value to the title, neither ‘space’ nor ‘place’ draw on the prevalence of the
internet and the ubiquity of ‘sites’ found there. It is difficult for most of us to even find
a ‘there’ on the internet, which may be what Schatzki is alluding to.
He gives three accounts of site. The first addresses the obvious: a site is a location
where something is or takes place. This includes its location in space, in a localized
context, in the history of a particular practice and also of teleological location. ‘Site’ is
where something can be found, and this can include language, the span of a life, or
the set of activities that make up a practice.
The second sense of ‘site’ encompasses a wider scene than the first sense. Schatzki
says:
In this second sense of ‘where,’ physical space is the site where phenomena occupy
physical spatial locations, and physical, activity, or activity-place spaces are the
spatial sites where activity occurs (64).
To be honest, I’m not sure of the difference between the two. The first seems to be an
activity’s location, the second the location of the activity. The first seems capable of
encompassing both more specific as well as wider arenas of ‘site.’
Activities and locations are contextualized in the third sense of ‘site.’ To quote
Schatzki once again:
Something’s site in this sense is that phenomenon or realm (if any) as part of which it
is or occurs. This sense of ‘where’ shares with the second the intuition of wider scene,
and it shares with the first and second senses the idea that where something is is the
place it is found. Site-ment in this third sense is also a central feature of that type of
context I call ‘site’: a context is a site when at least some of the entities that occur in
it are inherently components of it (64-65).
It does seem a bit odd that Schatzki would see the need to create a new word when
he has at his disposal ‘situate’ and ‘situation,’ both of which share the same Latin root
(situs) with ‘site.’ Both ‘situate’ and ‘situation’ connote placement within a context, a
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key aspect of his third sense. And, if I understand correctly what Schatzki means by
this, a situation could be defined as a context with inherently occurring components.
Schatzki draws on the role of human beings in articulating the distinctive quality of a
social site. He says that a social site “is a specific context of human coexistence: the
place where, and as part of which, social life inherently occurs (xi).” The site of the
social is significant in its plasticity. Schatzki’s conception of social sites is able to
account for change, intentional or not, that he posits as endemic to the social
existence of human beings. Social life is composed of practice and order complexes
constituent of and constituted by human coexistence. The social site is a nexus where
human practices take place, where human coexistence transpires. This is where
human lives ‘hang together.’
Orders and practices, claims Schatzki, comprise social sites. Together, the two form a
complex mesh of human coexistence and the source of social life. “Orders,” he says,
“are arrangements of entities (e.g., people, artifacts, things), whereas practices are
organized activities (xi).” He examines three current theories of order within social
affairs: regularity and pattern, stability, and interdependence. The first is lacking
because it excludes irregularity as a form of order, ignoring irregular patterns
(Wittgenstein) and the diversity of objects and concepts (Foucault). The second
cannot account for instability, which Schatzki argues is a ubiquitous aspect of social
life. Interdependence places unsound limits on the range of relations possible among
entities within social life (17).
Rather, Schatzki proposes that we conceive of social order as “arrangements of the
entities that enter social life (xxi).” These arrangements can be irregular or regular,
stable or instable, and can encompass any possible relation among entities. Schatzki
explains:
An adequate conception of order must encompass non-regularity in addition to
regularity. Dispersion and variety are parts of social order that historically have been
overlooked. Irregularity is as much a part of social phenomena as is regularity, and an
adequate theoretical account of the social should be able to account for it (12).
Regularity, stability, and interdependence do reflect three categories of social order;
they simply do not exhaust all the possible orders. A more inclusive notion of order
comes about through looking at what they eliminate from consideration prior to
examining social phenomena (24). Schatzki’s theory of the social site is able to
account for the phenomena of movement, rearrangement, and reorganization that he
believes are inherent in social life, but that current theory ignores.
Actions, intentions, projects, and ends are both tied to and altered in response to the
contingent flow of events that results from the intertwining and conjunction of human
doings with material ones. Actions, intentions, and ends are never, therefore, stable
(109).
The book covers four issues of ontological significance: Schatzki’s own account of
social orders and practices, agency, the characteristics of social change, and the
relation between the social site and nature. His argument about agency is compelling
relative to the debate over modern and postmodern accounts of subjectivity. He is not
alone in his fight to preserve agency. As Ladelle McWhorter argues in Bodies and
Pleasures, de-centering the subject and questioning subjectivity does not “preclude
the development of causally efficacious subjects within the interplay of networks of
power” (McWhorter, 77). She notes that Michel Foucault’s account of subjectivity as a
self-conscious bond to identity is what makes agency possible rather than prohibiting
either its existence or its exercise.
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While the many challenges philosophy and social theory have issued to agency remain
controversial, they do imply that one can no longer assume that ‘intentional human
action’ is an adequate definition of agency (190). Using examples from the Shaker
village, such as rats clogging drains with garbage, coal piled too close to a heat source
catching fire, and kettles springing leaks, Schatzki shows how objects in the world can
cause the activity of people, and characterizes these events as illustrative of
nonhuman agency. According to Schatzki, agency needs to be defined no more
specifically than as a doing. He explains, “To say that Y is attributable to the agency of
X is to say that X either did Y or did something that determined Y (191).” ‘Doings’ he
defines as a kind of event, one that accomplishes something within a larger chain of
events. The perpetrators of doings, then, do not have to be human.
Schatzki takes this in a more controversial direction when he concludes his analysis of
the accounts of fractured agency as developed by the teams of Deleuze & Guattari
and Latour & Callon. Agents are not ontological entities, but rather “arrangements to
which action is ascribed,” and “a unity-effect generated by these networks (207)” of
organs, systems and understandings. Fracturing agency, constituting human beings as
“compositional and embedding arrangements”, however, does not threaten agency
itself (207). The point is not that either humans are agents or nothing is, but that
human action is only such within a context of orders and practices. Human entities
come to be within this context, as do what they interact with and through. Agency
situates the continual and evolving occurrence of practices and orders (189).
Schatzki makes an interesting transition from the concept of human agency, which I
take to mean that humans can act as agents and that through action they contribute
to the existence and richness of the social site, to the concept of agential humanism,
the goal of which he states is “the goal of creating a better – more human, just, and
hospitable – world (192).” The implication for agency is that it can no longer be
attributed solely to the intentional acts of human beings. Schatzki concludes,
A cautious humanism alone is viable today. This is a humanism cognizant, among
other things, that nonhumans are agents, that humans are multiplicities whose
agency rises therefrom, and that humans may not be the sole creatures in the cosmos
capable of self-conscious, intentional, deliberate, planning activity (pg. 210).
This is not to say that objects are capable of such activity, but that at least with
respect to agency, our anthropocentric days are numbered.
This has further implications for the development of identity. For Schatzki, identity is
relational to location within a context. He says, “Meaning and identity arise (in part)
from where an entity fits into the mazes of relations that characterize the
arrangements of which it is a part (pg. 53).” The emergence of identity, though,
remains interdependent with the site: “Someone’s identity derives partly from his or
her position in arrangements and, in turn, is partly responsible for his or her position
there (pg. 54).” A site becomes what it is according to the parts and entities that
constitute it, and those entities and parts obtain identity through their situation.
Social orders evolve into nexuses of social practices. Practices for Schatzki are
organized bundles of human activities linked through a collection of practical
understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities.
Practical understanding involve three abilities: “knowing how to X, knowing how to
identify X-ings, and knowing how to prompt as well as respond to X-ings (78).”
Practical understandings allow him to explain particular actions where Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus or Giddens’s practical consciousness fail (79). Rules are those
principles, instructions, and formulations that people adhere to or take into account
when they do or say. Schatzki defines teleoaffective structures as, “a range of
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normativized and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and tasks, to varying degrees
allied with normativized emotions and even moods (80).”
While meaning shares in this pragmatic turn of definition, Schatzki ties it back to his
concept of practices. He says: “Meaning is . . . a reality laid down in the regimes of
activity and intelligibility called ‘practices’ (pg. 58).” A practice cannot be reduced to
one single act according to Schatzki. All aspects of a practice take place within a
nexus of overlapping and hierarchized nexus of social fields. He ties social orders to
meaning and practice by arguing that social orders are established within practices.
According to Schatzki, practices are bundled activities hierarchically organized into
nexuses comprised of doings, sayings, tasks and projects that make up social
phenomena. We can see this by taking a practice at random; say that of having
witnesses swear on the Bible that they will give truthful testimony before they take
the stand. Various activities comprise this practice, including positioning of bodies,
words spoken, and oaths taken. The witness, the bailiff, the judge, and attorneys all
operate within a very specific and ritualized hierarchy. The witness exists as such
within a web of contexts and relations with the other entities in the courtroom, who
also gain identity through acting within the situation. While the action itself seems
very simple, it is only meaningful within the contexts provided by the situation as
constituted through orders and practices.
Practices, however, are not ontologically distinct from orders. Orders and practices are
co-contextual; Schatzki says, “Just a practices form a contexture in which
arrangements exist, orders compose a contexture in which practices transpire (117).”
The distinction is analytic, allowing penetration into the complexity of the mesh of
social life (106).
Through careful critical analysis of the various theories that comprise social theory
today, Schatzki illustrates their shortcomings and provides what he argues is a more
adequate account of social life. His use of Foucault in particular is reflected in the
open-ended, continually transforming social site where everything that exists within
the site gains identity and significance from the site, as well as contributing to the
identity and significance of everything else that exists there and to the mode of
interaction or co-existence among what exists there.
2003.03.13
Pascal Engel
Truth
Engel, Pascal, Truth, Acumen Press, 2002, 184pp, $22.95 (pbk), ISBN 1902683579.
Reviewed by Richard Rorty, Stanford University
Pascal Engel, who teaches at the Sorbonne, is one of the leading figures in the
ongoing attempt to make the disciplinary matrix of French philosophy more like that
of Anglo-American philosophy, and to get French philosophers to take seriously the
problems discussed by their Anglophone colleagues. In this book, he offers a clear,
succinct, and very useful review of discussions of the concept of truth by such figures
as Moore, Ramsey, Strawson, Davidson, Wright, Rorty, Horwich, and Putnam.
Engel thinks it important to acknowledge the advantages of deflationist views—views
that take truth as a primitive and unanalyzable notion—but equally important to block
the road from deflationism to positions (such as Foucault’s, Latour’s and Rorty’s) that
smack of “nihilism”, “skepticism”, and “relativism”. So he formulates and defends a
compromise position that he calls “minimal realism”.
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Engel agrees with Wright,

if we described the practice of a community who had a device of assertion without
mentioning that assertions aim at truth, or if we described people as having beliefs
without these aiming at truth, our description would be incomplete and inadequate.
(92)
But he differs from Wright in insisting, “the norm of truth is the norm of realist,
recognition-transcendent truth”. (93) For “a minimalism about truth does not imply a
minimalism about truth-aptness”. In each domain of inquiry, “truth-aptness is to be
judged after the realist criterion of the independence of a domain from our
responses”. (89) So we have to “reconcile our epistemology of the concepts involved
in each domain with the account of the truth of propositions involving them”. (123)
Engel says, “deflationism about truth pays a lot of dividends, but it has to pay the
price”. (56) One such price is being unable to account for “the fact that truth is the
point of assertion”. He cites Dummett as saying that omitting the fact that assertion
and belief aim at truth is “like omitting the fact that the purpose of playing a game is
to win it”. (58) Another price is leaving us unable to compare the status of truths in
one domain (say science) to that of truth in another domain (say ethics, or fiction).
Still another is an inability to handle the distinction between metaphorical and literal
truth. “If some sentences fail to be literally true or to be apt for truth, the deflationist
should give us an account of this.” (59)
Engel grants that some deflationists, such as Rorty, are willing to “bite the bullet”,
claiming that it is a virtue of their view that it sweeps aside these and other traditional
distinctions, thereby dissolving many traditional philosophical problems. But he rightly
points out, “the sophisticated attempts of analytic philosophers at constructing
minimalist theories of truth” do not “automatically lead to the kind of nihilism and
skepticism illustrated by Rorty”. “There is”, he rightly says, “a theoretical ambition in
the former that is absent from the latter”. (63)
Engel has two sorts of arguments against deflationism. The first consists in pointing
out that deflationists cannot accept certain familiar platitudes, such as that inquiry
converges to truth, or that true sentences have a relation called “correspondence” to
their subjects that false sentences do not. The other sort is metaphilosophical: “The
reason why you need to have a robust conception of truth condition is . . . that
minimalism about truth-aptness robs all sorts of debates of any sense”. (119)
If those debates are held to be pointless, any “theoretical ambition” one might have
had in this area of inquiry will quickly drain away.
The first set of arguments relies on the reader agreeing that it would be absurd to
abandon a certain intuition. The second rely on her agreeing that it would be absurd
to claim that a certain long-lasting philosophical debate should never have been
begun. Neither can be conclusive, since a hardened bullet-biter will always try to
make a virtue of necessity. He will urge that letting go of certain intuitions, or letting
certain debates lapse, is the price of intellectual progress. Arguments about what does
and does not constitute such progress are about as inconclusive as philosophical
arguments can get.
This inconclusiveness is best illustrated by reflection on the upshot of the
metaphilosophical portions of Engel’s book, particularly chapter 4, “The realist/anti-
realist controversies”. Here Engel points out how many of the controversies between
analytic philosophers presuppose that some parts of culture are more truth-apt than
others. The blithe indifferentism of Arthur Fine’s “NOA” (the Natural Ontological
Attitude, which many deflationists adopt) “threatens to undercut all epistemological
questions about scientific theories”. (105) Again, “if there is no way of distinguishing
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description of matters of fact from expression of attitudes, any sort of meta-ethical

view, be it realist or anti-realist, is absurd.” (109)
Engel’s French colleagues who doubt that contemporary Anglophone philosophy is a
model worthy of imitation can accept everything Engel says about the need for a
notion of truth-aptness if we are to keep epistemology and meta-ethics going. But
they will then reverse the argument. Since those sub-disciplines have degenerated
into terminal dreariness, they will say, it would be a good idea to get rid of truth-
aptness, thereby hastening their demise. Skeptics of this sort can happily agree with
Engel that “most of the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy is a sort of
battlefield opposing various “realist” and “anti-realist” conceptions of truth”. (4) But
they think that the battlefield has been trampled into a quagmire.
2003.03.14
Georg Meggle, (ed.)
Social Facts & Collective Intentionality
Meggle, Georg (ed.), Social Facts & Collective Intentionality, Dr. Hansel-Hohenhausen
AG, 2002, 478pp, 112 euros (hbk), ISBN 3826700287.
Reviewed by Ingvar Johansson, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical
Information Science, Leipzig
The anthology Social Facts & Collective Intentionality contains twenty-three papers by
twenty-one authors who approach and discuss philosophical problems connected to
the topics stated in the title. Within analytic philosophy, there are in particular three
books that have played a major role in shaping the philosophy of social facts:
Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (1989), Raimo Tuomela, The Importance of Us
(1995), and John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995). Gilbert and
Tuomela have written two papers each in the volume to be reviewed; Searle is
present only in spirit.
1. Introduction
How to find order in a book where the papers are arranged only by the names of the
authors, and where the editor, Georg Meggle, himself a leading figure in the field of
social philosophy, says that he has “not managed to introduce a sense of order into
the papers”? According to Meggle, this fact merely reflects “the state of the art.”
However, since I need a map, I will impose an order that captures at least some
facets of this confusing state.
First, I will put old-fashioned social holism as represented by nineteenth-century
German and British idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; and Bradley, Bosanquet,
respectively) in the middle of the map. Second, I will draw three circles around it. The
outermost circle represents the view of old-fashioned social atomism according to
which social facts are aggregates of rather simply structured individual intentions and
beliefs. The analytic philosophy of social facts is to be found in the two circles in-
between.
In the circle closest to the center we find Searle, and in the next we find Gilbert and
Tuomela. Searle claims that there are irreducible we-intentions and we-beliefs. Gilbert
and Tuomela claim that such intentions and beliefs can be reduced to what they call
‘mutual intentions’ and ‘mutual beliefs’ (including beliefs about norms), but that these
cannot be further reduced to non-mutual I-intentions and I-beliefs. What, then, is a
mutual belief between me and another person (you) to the effect that p? In my head
(and correspondingly in yours), it consists in the following infinite progression:
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(i) I believe that p,

(ii) I believe that you believe that p,
(iii) I believe that you believe that I believe that p,
(iv) I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that p,
(v) I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that I believe that you
believe that p,
and so on, ad infinitum.
Searle’s analysis is much simpler. It consists in the view that it is possible that my
head (and correspondingly yours) contains only the not further reducible belief: “We
believe that p.”
In the nice paper “Social Ontology, Collective Intentionality, and Ockhamian
Skepticism,” Frank Hindriks surveys the arguments that have been used against
classical individualism and mentions some that have been marshaled against old-
fashioned social holism. He finds that there are four main arguments in favor of
modern analyses of collective intentionality: the argument from cooperation, the
argument concerning divergence of content, the argument pertaining to social
institutions, and the argument from everyday life
2. The We-As-Irreducible-We Approach
The paper that focuses most on Searle is Kay Mathiesen’s “Searle, Collective
Intentions, and Individualism.” Mathiesen uses the important distinction between
“intentional subject” and “subject of intention.” To be an intentional subject is to be a
bearer of an intentional state such as an intention. Like the whole of analytic
philosophy of social facts, she subscribes to ontological individualism, i.e., the view
that only individuals can be intentional subjects. The subject of intention, on the other
hand, is a part of an intentional state. An intention can, she claims, rightly in my
opinion, either (i) completely lack a subject of intention, (ii) as a subject of intention
have an I-intention, or (iii) as a subject of intention have a We-intention. Like Searle –
and again I agree – she thinks there are irreducible We-intentions as subjects of
intention; she calls this position phenomenological collectivism. So far, so good. But
then she is not reading Searle with a principle of charity as her interpretative guide.
Some words about that.
There is an ambiguity in Searle’s writings on collective intentions. Sometimes it is
quite clear that he is only talking about what goes on in one head; but sometimes he
writes as if he is talking about all the heads that, so to speak, belong to a real group
intention. This ambiguity can easily be removed. One needs only to read Searle as if
he is merely analyzing what might be called “veridical collective intentions.”
Mathiesen, however, reads him as putting forward the astonishing view that one
single individual intending “We intend to do A” can be a sufficient condition for a real
group intention. No one should take seriously her accusation that Searle is a
subjectivist. Nor her claim, which I have not discussed, that Searle does not manage
to keep ontological and phenomenological collectivism distinct.
3. The We-As-Mutual-I-Beliefs Approach
Gilbert and Tuomela seem nowadays to have more or less the same position. In
retrospect, they seem merely to have been interested in exploring and stressing
different aspects of this common position. Gilbert has primarily focused on the
normative aspects of groups and other collectives; Tuomela has primarily been
botanizing among all the different kinds of we-intentions and we-actions there are in
the world. Even though all collectives may require the same overarching general we-
as-mutual-I-beliefs structure, they can of course differ greatly in detail and be arrived
at by different routes.
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In one of her two papers, Gilbert gives a good summary of her present position; and
in the other she convincingly defends herself against the criticisms of her work that
are put forward elsewhere in the book. In order to understand her position properly,
one has to be aware of the way she looks upon the rights and obligations involved in
ordinary acting together. “It may,” she says, “be misleading to describe them as
moral obligations insofar as they need only the will of the parties to bring them into
being.”
Tuomela tries in one of his papers to develop his view about how conditional mutual
intentions of the form “I will do X if you will do X, but you will do X if I will do X . . .”
can progress (be “deconditionalized”) into a real joint intention. In his paper
“Responses to Critics,” he successfully defends his views against the criticisms put
forward in this anthology. Much of it, he claims rightly, seems to depend on
misunderstandings. It is deplorable that a lot of philosophers are so keen on criticism
that they do not take care to understand the views they are commenting on.
4. Searle Vs. Gilbert and Tuomela
I have claimed that there is a gap between Searle on the one hand and Gilbert and
Tuomela on the other. But, perhaps, I am wrong. Is this gap an illusion? The claim to
the effect that there is such a gap is explicitly questioned in two papers (see pp 193
and 462), and explicitly endorsed in one (p 145). Tuomela himself says somewhat
ambiguously that Searle “probably would object to the use of we-beliefs in my sense
for the analysis of institutions” (p 420). However, I find this issue very clear-cut. Even
though Tuomela has said that “we need a concept of we-intention which is irreducible
to I-intentions” (quoted from p 193, note 11), what counts are his definitions. And in
the definiens of these, one finds I-intentions only.
Here, I would like to take the opportunity to venture my own conjecture why the
protagonists of the We-as-irreducible-We approach and the We-as-mutual-I-beliefs
approach very seldom are able to enter into a real dialogue. My explanation has two
components: (1) Most critics of Searle have not understood his concept of intentional
state (as expounded in Intentionality), and Searle has not understood that the others
have not understood this; (2) most writers in the Gilbert-Tuomela tradition take it so
much for granted that one should look for necessary and/or sufficient conditions for
“veridical” we-intentions and we-beliefs, that they can’t imagine that Searle is not
trying do this too; Searle, though, is himself somewhat responsible for this
misinterpretation.
5. Expanding the Territory
A natural question in view of the discussions described is whether this modern
philosophy of social facts has repercussions on traditional philosophical disciplines
such as logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics.
Georg Meggle regards social facts as a new area where doxastic and epistemic logic
can profitably be applied. In his paper (“Mutual Knowledge and Belief”), he explores
from such a logical point of view the distinction between groups where all the
members believe/know that everybody in the group believes/knows that A, and
groups where all the members believe/know that everybody else in the group
believes/knows that A. This application does not imply any re-thinking of logic itself.
However, with respect to the philosophy of language, Anthonie Meijers (“Dialogue,
Understanding and Collective Intentionality”) forcefully argues that such a re-thinking
is necessary. In both Grice’s theory of meaning and in his theory of conversation,
Meijers find an unexplicated but irreducible collective dimension. Somewhat similarly,
he finds such a dimension explicitly mentioned but nonetheless not worked out in
speech-act theory. He is thinking of the concept of necessary “uptake.” According to
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both Austin and Searle, there is no promise if the corresponding speech act is not
understood (“taken up”) by the promisee. In spite of this, they have never really tried
to analyze this dependence between speaker and hearer. Meijers concludes: “Speech
acts thus turn out to be social acts in a stronger sense than has traditionally been
thought.”
With respect to epistemology, it is argued by Peter Baumann (“Epistemic Contracts”)
“it is not individuals as such who know this or that but only individuals as members of
epistemic communities or networks.” For Andrej Ule (“Common Knowledge in
Science”), Baumann’s view is merely a truism and a point of departure for an
investigation of the interplay between two kinds of “collective knowledge,” namely
“distributed knowledge” and “common knowledge.”
Compared with the papers just mentioned, the papers that relate to utilitarianism,
philosophy of law, evidential value, and simulation models have a somewhat unclear
relation to the philosophy of social facts
6. Conclusion
To give an overall evaluation of this mosaic of an anthology would be like trying to
add colors, shapes, and electrical charges together and then try to find a mean. An
attempted evaluation of the book along these lines would also obscure the fact that
some of the papers are quite good, while others fall short. Is such a variation in
philosophical quality a necessary feature of an anthology? If ‘yes’, then this fact is
surely a social fact.
2003.04.01
Jan Patocka
Plato and Europe
Patocka, Jan, Plato and Europe, translated by Petr Lom, Stanford University Press,
2002, 249pp, $19.95, ISBN 0804738017.
Reviewed by David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame
Jan Patocka (1907-1977) was a Czech philosopher who lived most of his life quietly
refusing to succumb to the oppressive political forces of his native land. These forces
deprived him for all but a handful of years of any regular academic employment,
including the right to publish. When he died under police interrogation in his Socratic
seventieth year, having been a modest participant in the Charter 77 human rights
movement, he lived on as a moral hero for many Czechs, including Vaclav Havel.
This volume is not so much a book by Patocka as a memorial to him. It is appropriate
that it appears in a series titled “Cultural Memory in the Present.” The translator, Petr
Lom, suggests “it is likely the [English] reader encounters [Jan Patocka] for the first
time” through this text (xiii). If so, this is unfortunate. This text has the kind of
interest that most scholars’ notebooks or letters would have: a useful supplement for
the specialist, a pleasant reminder of the human being for the friend or fan. Readers
whose primary interest is not Patocka as a figure will be frustrated, especially those
more engaged by Plato than by Husserl and Heidegger. A much better introduction to
Patocka is the anthology, with a long intellectual biography, edited by Patocka’s first
English translator, Erazim Kohák, Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Kohák’s own description of the text gives a very fair indication of the problems that
confront the reader. “Plato and Europe is not, strictly speaking, a book,” he wrote.
“The text is an unedited, verbatim transcript of a series of informal seminars held in a
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private apartment. The conversation ranges to and fro over Patocka’s beloved topics,
Plato, Aristotle, Husserl, Heidegger, myth, and philosophy. Two of the [eleven]
sessions are free discussions; the whole is only loosely held together by a concern for
what for Patocka is the basis of the European idea, the care of the soul” (117). If this
text were not the record of a noble man’s resistance to oppression, a testament to
how simply living the life of the mind with one’s friends can become a political act, few
would now see a strong reason to publish it or read it. I had the uncomfortable feeling
of someone who missed the wedding but is expected to enjoy the wedding video.
The main thread of the seminar, accounting for Plato in the title, is “the care of the
soul” in Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. Patocka sees this soul-care as a response to
the loss of groundedness provided originally by myth (54, 71). Reflection, which
Patocka associates with philosophical wonder (59), destroys our sense of being at
home and induces a state of “blind wandering” (55). This wandering is especially
evident in the way reflection reveals to us the possibility of multiple perspectives (62,
72). For us, Oedipus is the great mythic exemplar of this wandering, and Socrates
continues the Greek response to the tension between groundedness and wandering
(49-50). More precisely, philosophical dialectic becomes the instrument that orders
that bare multiplicity of clashing perspectives reflection produces (74, 77). Patocka
sees this overcoming of mere perspectivalism as the core of phenomenology, and so
he reads the Greek thinkers within a phenomenological idiom. “Care of the soul” is the
mode of this overcoming.
Patocka discusses three main versions of soul-care. He begins by contrasting
Democritus and Plato. Care of the soul in both is directed toward knowledge.
Democritus is radically private, isolating the thinker from community life to orient him
toward knowledge of being. Plato instead takes the primary object of knowledge to be
the soul; and pursuit of this knowledge, Patocka rather abruptly insists, essentially
involves an interest in politics and political reform (86, 89).
Platonic soul-care is essentially vertical: it always takes its bearings from what is,
even if this highest reality cannot be made actual in the political world. (Patocka has
in mind such passages as the conclusion of Republic IX, where Socrates and Glaucon
agree that the best constitution is a regulative paradigm even if it will never be
instantiated.) In other words, the concrete world of politics is always measured
against a standard of integrity embodied, if at all, only in individual philosophers. This
insistence on measure, in the face of the multiplicity of perspectives exploited by
sophists, is the defining political commitment of the European tradition, and is what
Patocka has in mind with the Europe of his title (89). But the text spends much less
time on this political application of Platonic soul-care than on soul-care as such.
By contrast to Plato, Aristotle’s soul-care is horizontal, and allows for creative freedom
in a way Plato’s does not (199-200). Aristotelian action is fundamentally creative or
productive, and so is responsive to the concrete political world in a way Plato cannot
be. Yet, Patocka wants to insist, Aristotelian action is as truth-directed as Platonic
soul-care. Openness to the “not yet” does not exclude the standard of truth (206,
217). It is unclear in the end if Patocka finds this greater space for freedom an
advantage for Aristotle.
The central goal of Platonic soul-care is what Patocka calls solidity or endurance (86-
87). He means by this the achievement of settled convictions that cannot be dislodged
by further dialectic examination, a kind of integrity and integration. (Patocka clearly
has in mind Socrates’ critique of Callicles from the Gorgias.) But this is not quite right.
It seems that the final integrity of settled conviction is beyond human beings once
they have fallen into reflection. Dialectical questioning does seek complete coherence
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and integration, but it cannot achieve this goal. Questioning itself, it turns out,
provides whatever unity Platonic soul-care can expect to achieve. Patocka seems
hardly to notice as he slides back and forth between the integrity achieved through
dialectical coherence and the integrity exemplified by resolute questioning (92-93),
perhaps the point in the text where the disproportion becomes most egregious
between Patocka’s nose for a great question and his casualness about providing an
answer.
Throughout this narrative, the influence of Heidegger is clear. Patocka is trying to
preserve what he can of Husserl’s call to certainty –Patocka goes so far as to call
attachment to questioning a kind of epochê (92) –while taking up Heidegger’s sense
of the resolute openness of philosophy. This entire set of issues about “care of the
soul,” then, has little direct connection to the themes at the heart of Pierre Hadot’s
and Michel Foucault’s interest in “care of the self” and spiritual exercises in antiquity.
It is much more closely connected to Leo Strauss’s exchange with Alexandre Kojève in
On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; original French edition
1954). For example, both raise the issue of whether philosophy is essentially private
or political in light of the ancient atomist tradition; both see Plato or Socrates as
reorienting philosophic questioning toward the soul and away from being as such;
both are concerned by Aristotle’s seeming accommodations to political “realities” other
than the highest good; both describe the Socratic commitment to questioning in ways
reminiscent of Heidegger. This congruence is not surprising. Strauss and Kojève,
without ever mentioning his name, had a constant eye on Heidegger, and particularly
on the Rectoral Address, as they debated the relationship between philosophy and
politics. It seems odd, then, that Petr Lom’s foreword goes out of its way to distance
Patocka from Strauss (xv) (in this anticipated by Richard Rorty’s review of the French
edition of Plato and Europe, New Republic 205, no.1 (July 1991), 37), especially in
light of Havel’s own expressions of indebtedness to Strauss.
There is much that is stimulating in this seminar transcript, but little that is satisfying.
Kohák suggested that this text “is Patocka at his finest, a philosopher at work” (117).
In the same vein, Havel’s eulogy for Patocka praised “these unofficial seminars” for
capturing Patocka’s “entire personality, its openness, its modesty, its humor,” and his
ability to pull his audience “into the world of philosophizing” (quoted in Lom’s
foreword, xv). However true such praises are of Patocka the man, they are not true of
Plato and Europe the text. Almost all of the forty pages of the transcript devoted to
“free discussion” could have been edited out without any loss. The questions often
amount to no more than the sort of quibbles or vague alternative “big pictures” one
might expect to come up in an easy-going graduate seminar. Much of Patocka’s own
exposition is of the same quality: it is repetitious, lacking in interpretive detail, and
vague or undeveloped on exactly the most interesting but therefore most difficult
points. In short, Patocka’s transcript is suggestive and wide-ranging, but rarely a
compelling read. The unedited transcripts of the seminars of most distinguished
scholars would fare no better. Indeed, Dr. Johnson and Goethe would get a little old
without the editorial work of Boswell and Eckermann, and Plato saw fit to make even
Socrates “young and beautiful” before he put him in a book.
2003.04.02
Philip Soper
The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law's Morals
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Soper, Philip, The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law's Morals, Cambridge
Reviewed by Leslie Green, York University
According to many legal philosophers, law claims that its subjects have an obligation
to obey it. According to many moral philosophers, no credible justification for
authority will validate the wide sweep of law’s claims. Even in a reasonably just state,
law’s authority is not always justified. But the law doesn’t say that people must obey it
except when moral philosophy permits otherwise; the law says people must obey
except when it permits otherwise. So what law claims is one thing, what it deserves is
another. Philip Soper has for some time been perplexed by this difference. This gap,
he feels, marks an “oddity” (xiv), a “conflict” (12), a “stalemate” (13)—maybe even a
“paradox.” (52) He wonders,
How could it be that the practice of law, in the claims it makes, is so out of step . . .
with the conclusions of moral philosophy? . . . [S]houldn’t the discrepancy induce
reconsideration of either the normative or the descriptive claim? (78)
Soper reconsiders both in this clear, stimulating, and enormously helpful book. The
first part is built around an analysis and critique of the obligation-centered account of
legal authority. Law, he argues, does not in fact claim obedience; it claims only that
its norms are correct and that it is morally entitled to enforce them whether or not
they are correct. Thus, “legal obligations are at most only statements about what one
ought to do, not statements about the obligations that subjects have.”(90) But on
Soper’s account law still makes moral claims, and he argues that for these claims to
be intelligible and made in good faith they must also have some degree of validity,
thus endorsing a natural-law position. The second part of the book puts the case that,
even though law doesn’t claim an obligation to obey, there is one—or at any rate an
obligation to defer. Law’s subjects should give weight to its requirements, even when
they think them wrong, and even when they have not consented to its rule. The
proper degree of deference varies according to the sort of law that is in question;
perhaps it even varies among subjects. But people may on no account simply proceed
as if there were no law, or as if it were entitled only to such deference as they think
that it deserves on its merits. The nature and grounds of deference in general are
explored in two fine chapters about promise-keeping and fair play. These cast new
light on the sort of reasons we have for complying with law, without reducing them to
an instance of either of those obligations. (These chapters will be of great interest to
moral philosophers, but I shall not explore their arguments here.) The emerging
theory of political obligation is pluralistic, with a heavily Kantian tinge: in addition to
such instrumental, respect-showing and cooperation-sustaining reasons as we may
have, we must also to defer to law in order to keep faith with our own principles.
Soper is not the first to focus on the right to coerce instead of the duty to obey. But it
is important to see that he is not just resurrecting Kelsen’s view that laws are norms
authorizing officials to coerce subjects. He adds two very unkelsenian thoughts: that
legal norms are meant for the guidance of their subjects and are claimed by law to be
correct, and that the law also claims that it is morally entitled to enforce them. Now,
judges often disown any claim that they must endorse the rules they apply—they
speak as if law has authority independent of its content (that is what motivates the
obligation-centered view). But Soper’s is not a thesis about what judges say; it is
about what we need to impute to the law, regarded impersonally, in order to make
overall sense of our practices. He maintains that we can explain law’s normativity in
terms of its claim to correct content, and that we can explain its exigency in terms of
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its claim to justified enforcement. The claim to moral authority—and the correlative
duty to obey the law for content-independent reasons—thus drops out, which is just
as well, because “Legal systems are not in the business of making pronouncements on
fundamental questions of moral philosophy; they are, rather, in the business simply of
making judgments about the norms to be enforced in a society.”(85)
Of the various sorts of deference Soper explores, the obligation to defer to law comes
nearest to the obligation of a promise, though it is not founded on it. The obligations
to defer to the views of friends, or to play fair by deferring to the distributive
preferences of those with whom we cooperate, are dominated by instrumental
considerations—they preserve and sustain those forms of relationship. Such reasons
exist also in law, but here context is everything: it is always possible to construct
cases in which those values are either not at stake or are not threatened by non-
compliance. The obligation of a promise, in contrast, is more deontological. In addition
to instrumental reasons, here we also have important reasons to defer in order to
keep faith with ourselves. In the case of promising, of course, deferring to the wishes
of the promisee is not only keeping faith with a principle that one would endorse were
the positions reversed, it is also performing an obligation that one willingly assumed.
In that respect, law is importantly different: few people choose to subject themselves
to the law, and fewer still choose the very laws that will be enforced against them. But
following a line of thought familiar from Kant, Soper argues that in obedience to law,
necessity fulfils the function that in promising is played by will:
The question of why I should defer to the norms of the state is answered by reminding
myself of the point of the state and the sense in which it represents values that, I,
too, endorse. The state is necessary, and it is the kind of entity that requires some to
govern, in good faith, on behalf of all. Thus I, who could do no different were I in
charge, have a prima facie reason to do as I would expect others in my situation to
do. (167)
Where does all this leave the gap between claim and entitlement that motivates the
book? Well, that gap is gone, because the claim to obedience has been abandoned.
But Soper holds that law claims both rectitude in content and a right to enforce. And
since he allows that law is fallible, each of these claims may in turn exceed what a
given legal system is morally entitled to. It is true that if these gaps become wide
enough, Soper will close them by denying the norms in question the title of “law” (I’ll
come to that shortly.) But narrower gaps are still real gaps. The law says its norms
are correct, but they may not be: there may be areas in which the law shouldn’t be
setting norms at all (even if law is a necessary institution, it doesn’t follow that all
laws are necessary laws). Or again: the law says its good faith effort to regulate and
enforce provides a full excuse for wrongdoing on its part—but it may in a given case
provide only a partial excuse or a weak mitigation. The fact that the law is trying in
good faith to perform a necessary task does not mean that its failures are irrelevant to
the question of its moral entitlements; at most it provides a cushion of legitimacy.
Perhaps a legal system that is trying hard can only sink so far. But that does not entail
that it cannot sink below what it claims for itself. Should Soper worry about these
gaps? I think not—but then he shouldn’t have been worried about the original gap
either. The are two reasons. First, the new gaps are the distance between law’s claim
to comprehensive right to enforce and its moral entitlement to a more limited one. But
the original gap was simply the distance between law’s claim to a comprehensive duty
to obey and its entitlement to a more limited one. No (except perhaps Robert Paul
Wolff) says that law has none of the authority it claims. If legal theory can tolerate the
enforcement gap, then it can also tolerate the authority gap; they are structurally
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identical. Second, there is actually nothing paradoxical or puzzling about any of these
gaps. While there is no doubt that descriptive jurisprudence is value-laden, there is
also no reason to think that it answers directly to the constraints of moral philosophy.
Consider an analogy. Suppose we were trying to characterize the social role of the
Pope. When speaking ex cathedra the Pope claims infallible authority in certain
matters of faith. Would a sound philosophical argument against papal infallibility make
us doubt that Popes actually claim it? There is no reason to think so. Claims, like
beliefs, are determined by the roles they play in our lives, and these roles do not
depend on their validity or their truth.
One of the pleasures of this book is the opportunity it affords to wrestle with some
sophisticated, conceptual arguments for the view that law is an essentially moral
enterprise. Many juris-moralizers have abandoned such arguments in favor views
based on the nature of adjudication. For example, Ronald Dworkin says if we look
closely at courts’ reasoning, we will often find them relying on moral judgment. If we
add to this (correct) observation the idea that the law is nothing more (and nothing
less) than any valid reason for a court’s decision, we will get the conclusion that
morality is part of the law. (We also get the conclusion that grammar, arithmetic, and
principles of animal husbandry are part of the law, for those too provide valid reasons
for deciding certain cases—some of us count that as an objection to Dworkin’s
theory.)
Soper refuses Dworkin’s line. He derives moral requirements on legal validity, not
from a theory of adjudication, but from a theory of the nature of law. He writes,
Legal systems, if they are not to collapse into coercive systems, must in short admit
that all standards tentatively identified as law by a positivist pedigree will count as
valid law only if they are not too unjust and thus remain capable of supporting a
good-faith claim that using coercion to enforce the law is morally permissible. (97)
The move from the idea that law necessarily makes a moral claim, to the conclusion
that law necessarily has moral merit crucially relies on this idea of good faith. What
does good faith require? If it were, say, merely a matter of sincerity, the inference
would fail. There must be substantive, and not just procedural, limits to what one can
claim in good faith. I think Soper assumes that justice must in some measure actually
be done in order to be claimed (in good faith) to be done. He clearly needs some such
premise, and some defense of it. For without that, we would have law necessarily
making moral claims for itself, but not necessarily securing moral merit for itself. And
that position any legal positivist can accept (which shows, incidentally, why we should
not describe positivism as the doctrine that there is no necessary “connection”
between law and morality).
Although Soper’s natural law is not based on a theory of adjudication, one might be
tempted to think it has consequences for such a theory, for a crucial element in his
test for law is someone’s certification that it is “not too unjust.” So we might expect
that judges would, in addition to the usual source-based tests of validity, also check to
ensure that there is no “serious moral error”(97) that might nullify a putative law.
Surprisingly, Soper does not take this line either. He says that adjudication can skip
the moral test, for all legal systems normally satisfy it. Moreover, they satisfy it with
such reliability that positivist tests for law work as a kind of evidentiary presumption:
“In most cases a social facts test for law probably is reliable and conclusive on the
question of legal validity because in most cases the pedigreed norm probably cannot
be said to be too unjust to be called law.”(99) The moral test for law thus normally
plays no role in adjudication: we go on as before, though not forgetting the (remote)
possibility that, “in theory”(99), a so-called law may be too unjust to merit the name.
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I confess to a certain disappointment whenever a natural lawyer’s build-up to the

importance of moral criteria for the existence of law is followed by the let-down
assurance that most laws meet the criteria. Not of course in Nazi Germany or old
South Africa, the familiar stalking-horses. But what about the United States? One
might naturally suppose it a consequence of Soper’s view that the U.S. had no legal
system at all before 1965 (or, if that seems tendentious, before 1870), and also that
the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick contributed no law to its current
legal system. After all, many of us take slavery, segregation, and the criminalization
of harmless intimacy to be paradigm cases of “serious moral error.” So the
unreconstructed U.S. constitution was nothing approaching “a good faith attempt to
administer in the interests of all”(166)—some abolitionists called it a “pact with the
devil.” The fact that public opinion divided (and may even still divide) on these
matters is irrelevant. Soper’s is not a test of popular approval; a serious moral error is
one “which no reasonable person could in good faith fail to acknowledge.”(97) So
which bullet will Soper bite? Will he say that the United States, for most of its history,
had no legal system, and that seriously unjust Supreme Court decisions make no law?
Or will he say that there is, after all, reasonable doubt whether the racism or
heterosexism involves serious moral error? Both strike me as very costly ways of
resisting the old idea that the existence of law is one thing, its merit and demerit
another.
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2003.04.03
Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten (eds)
Principles of Truth
Halbach, Volker and Horsten, Leon (eds), Principles of Truth, Hansel-Hohenhausen,
2002, 244pp, EUR 66,00, ISBN 3826712048.
Reviewed by Gabriel Uzquiano, University of Rochester
Two strands of research are prominent in the philosophical literature on truth. One is
provoked by the semantic paradoxes and makes extensive use of mathematical
methods in order to develop sophisticated formal theories of truth. The other attempts
to answer such philosophical questions as what it is for a putative truth bearer to be
true or false or what practical and theoretical purposes are accomplished by our use of
a truth predicate. The present volume consists of nine excellent articles on the
interface between the two areas by distinguished logicians and philosophers. The
collection aspires to draw attention to important connections between technical
developments and insights from philosophical reflection on truth in the conviction that
they will illuminate each other.
The editors have divided the articles in the volume in three groups. The articles by
John P. Burgess, Paul Horwich, Volker Halbach, and Stewart Shapiro are concerned
with the debate over deflationism. Two articles by Hannes Leitgeb and Vann McGee
are grouped under the label “semantic approaches to truth.” The last three articles by
Michael Sheard and Andrea Cantini, and Leon Horsten deal with axiomatic theories of
truth and informal provability. In all but one case, the articles report on the author’s
contribution to the conference Truth, Necessity, and Provability organized by the
editors in Leuven, Belgium, in 1999.
The volume begins with an extended introduction in which the editors provide an
excellent overview of a wide range of issues and technical developments in the
literature on truth since Tarski (1935). This includes a valuable discussion of Tarski’s
theory of truth, a superb account of the debate over deflationism and
conservativeness, and a helpful outline of prominent typed and type-free approaches
to truth. There are, however, occasional omissions that may disconcert a reader who
is not careful to read between the lines. For example, when the editors write “PA(S) is
conservative over PA” in the last paragraph of page 22, one should read: “PA(S)
without the induction axioms involving truth is conservative over PA.” But this doesn’t
detract from the value of the introduction as an attractive map of contemporary
research on truth that stresses critical forks in the road and provides the reader with
useful background for much of the discussion undertaken in subsequent articles.
1. Deflationism.
The discussion of deflationism makes up the first and largest part of the book.
Deflationism is a general approach to truth that includes a wide range of more specific
proposals such as minimalist theories of truth, disquotationalist theories, prosentential
theories, redundancy theories and others. What is perhaps the most distinctive mark
of all these views is the claim that, in general, an attribution of truth to a truth bearer
is trivially equivalent to the truth bearer in question, and that it is precisely this
equivalence that endows truth with its practical and theoretical utility. Different
deflationists may differ with respect to whether they take utterances, sentences, or
propositions to be the truth bearers, but they all reserve a special status for the
equivalences between attributions of truth to truth bearers and the truth bearers in
question. These equivalences are often summarized by an equivalence schema, which,
again, different deflationists characterize differently. Moreover, the explanation of the
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respects in which instances of the equivalence schema are central to truth varies from
proposal to proposal.
The volume opens with “Is There a Problem about the Deflationary Theory of Truth?”
by John P. Burgess. This article attempts to isolate an optimal formulation of the
deflationary position. To take up this task, Burgess must confront two different
problems at once. One is the problem of how to formulate the equivalence schema
itself, and the other is the problem of how to make precise the claim that its instances
are somehow central to truth. In the end, Burgess argues for his preferred formulation
of the deflationary thesis as superior to a range of other candidates he considers:
Grasping the meaning of ‘true’ consists in grasping that, as matter of meaning, the
following is assertable:
That _____________ is true if and only if ________________. (41-42)
For all its virtues, this characterization of deflationism makes crucial use of the notion
of assertability, and hence of assertion. And, as Burgess himself concludes, this
suggests that deflationists must make it plausible that an account of assertion may be
given that doesn’t presuppose truth.
One particularly well-developed variety of deflationism is Paul Horwich’s minimalism
about truth. As articulated and defended in his 1998 and 1991, a central ingredient of
minimalism is the thesis that the content of the truth predicate is exhausted by all
(non-paradoxical) instances of the schema:
The proposition that p is true if and only if p.
The principal burden of Horwich’s contribution to this volume, “Defense of
Minimalism,” is to clarify and defend this minimalist thesis against a wide array of
objections, some due to Horwich himself, some due to other prominent philosophers.
The next two articles in the volume are concerned with different aspects of the
question of whether a satisfactory formal theory of truth may be developed in the
spirit of disquotationalism.
Disquotationalism is a species of deflationism that takes truth as a device for
disquotation and semantic generalization; a truth predicate allow us to express infinite
conjunctions and disjunctions in a finitary language. Moreover, (T)-sentences are, on
this view, akin to analytic truths. This outlook immediately motivates certain formal
disquotational theories of truth. For suppose ∑ is some first-order theory that is able
to develop some syntax for its own language L. And let LT be the expansion of L by a
one-place predicate T. We obtain a disquotational theory of truth ∑T for L if we let ∑T
be ∑ plus all instances of the (T)-schema:
T([φ]) <-> φ,
where [φ] is the code (or Gödel number) of a sentence φ of L. Unfortunately, as
Tarski himself observed, ∑T is not a satisfactory theory of truth. For one reason, ∑T is
unable to prove even the most harmless semantic generalizations. For example, for
each sentence φ of L, ∑T proves:
T([φ]) T([~φ]),
where [φ] and [~φ] are the codes of a sentence φ and its negation, respectively.
What the theory doesn’t prove is the generalization:
x (Sentence(x) → (T(x) T(neg(x)))),
where neg(x) is a term for a function whose value for any number that is the code of
a sentence φ is [~φ]. The generalization depends upon an infinite number of axioms,
but no proof may use more than a finite number of premises. A similar problem afflicts
generalizations to the effect, for example, that other connectives and quantifiers
commute with truth, let alone those that state that the axioms of the base theory are
true or that the rules of inference preserve truth.
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In “Modalized Disquotationalism,” Volker Halbach proposes a novel solution to this

problem. The suggestion is to replace the (T)-sentences by an axiom that states that
all (T)-sentences are, in fact, necessary. This requires one to expand the base
language by both a one-place truth predicate T and a one-place necessity predicate N.
Then one must expand the base theory with axioms designed to govern the added
predicates. As one would expect, Montague’s paradox (see Montague 1963) imposes
severe restrictions on the axioms one may adopt for N, and the proposed restrictions
may seem somewhat artificial. However, the presence of a necessity predicate allows
one to state Halbach’s axiom that all (T)-sentences are necessary. And the result is an
attractive family of disquotational theories of truth that are able to prove, for
example, that the truth predicate commutes with all the connectives and quantifiers.
Admittedly, Halbach’s solution is not what one might have initially expected. Instead,
one might have attempted, for example, to augment the base theory by Tarski-style
inductive clauses defining truth (or satisfaction). In two recent articles, Stewart
Shapiro 1998 and Jeffrey Ketland 1999 have independently cast doubt upon the
availability of certain satisfactory Tarski-style theories of truth for adherents of
deflationism. They noticed that some such theories yield as (first-order) consequences
sentences of the base language (in which the truth predicate is not involved) that are
not consequences of the base theory alone. In other words, some satisfactory Tarski-
style theories of truth are not conservative over the base theory. But, they argued,
deflationary theories of truth shouldn’t deliver non-semantic information not
previously encoded in the axioms of the base theory.
In “Deflation and Conservation,” Stewart Shapiro takes stock of the debate and
responds to objections to his criticism of deflationism. After a helpful clarification of
the technical situation, Shapiro refines the conservativeness constraint one should
reasonably expect deflationary theories to satisfy. He then revisits a dilemma for
deflationists who accept the conservativeness constraint: either they replace first-
order consequence by a non-effective consequence relation in order to restore the
conservativeness of satisfactory theories of truth or they had better be prepared to fall
back to conservative, but presumably unsatisfactory, theories of truth.
2. Semantic Approaches to Truth.
The articles grouped under the label semantic approaches to truth are motivated by
very different concerns.
The article by Hannes Leitgeb, “Metaworlds: A Possible Worlds Semantics for Truth,”
explores a possible worlds semantics for truth. A sentence φ is thus assigned a set of
possible worlds that, he suggests, corresponds to the proposition it expresses. A
sentence of the form T([φ]) is then true in a world w just in case φ is true in all
accessible worlds to which w is related. In some cases, when Tarski’s policy to
separate the object language from a strictly richer metalanguage is observed, the
accessibility relation may be the identity relation. Of particular interest, however, is
the fact that when the language contains its own truth predicate, the accessibility
relation gives rise to frames that are familiar from temporal logics. This strikes one as
a fact that cries out for an explanation.
In “Ramsey and the Correspondence Theory,” Vann McGee is concerned with a
prominent alternative to deflationary conception of truth. He discusses a
correspondence account on which the activities of speakers are taken to forge
connections between linguistic expressions and their semantic values, which, in turn,
explain the truth conditions speakers attach to sentences. Unfortunately, this
correspondence account faces formidable obstacles on account of vagueness and
inscrutability of reference. If the activities of speakers are unable to pin down a
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referent for a name like ‘Kilimanjaro’, then it seems hopeless to suppose that
sentences like ‘Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain of Africa’ acquire their truth
conditions compositionally from the semantic values affixed to its components. How
then are such sentences ascribed the truth conditions they have by the activities of
speakers?
The primary purpose of McGee’s contribution is to outline an answer to this question.
The answer is inspired in Ramsey’s program for theoretical sentences, but it is framed
in terms of Tarski’s 1936 consequence relation, which makes no allowance for varying
domains of discourse. The proposal is to declare a sentence to be true if and only if it
is a Tarski consequence of the union with the theory speakers accept of the set of true
observation sentences. The suggestion is that the truth conditions of a sentence like
‘Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain of Africa’ depend on how speakers use the words
contained in the sentence, and this, in turn, depends in part on what their beliefs are.
3. Axiomatic Theories of Truth and Intensionality.
The last part of the volume is mostly concerned with axiomatic theories of truth and
informal provability.
Michael Sheard, in “Truth, Provability, and Naive Criteria,” identifies six different
criteria, based on central features of our use of the truth predicate, that one might
use to assess both formal semantic and axiomatic approaches to truth. Each criterion
has significant consequences for the comparative evaluation of systems such as the
revision theory of truth, Kripke’s fixed-point semantics, or variants of the Kripke-
Feferman system of partial truth. Sheard touches on the debate over deflationism,
since he intimates that conservative theories of truth may, in fact, contravene some of
the criteria he discusses.
The next contribution discusses an axiomatic characterization of Kripke’s fixed-point
construction known as the Kripke-Feferman theory (KF) of partial truth. In “Partial
Truth”, Andrea Cantini surveys results on the semantics and proof-theoretic strength
of KF and some of its variants. He explores, for example, a variant of KF that he
thinks is a candidate to be a deflationary, type-free theory of truth. And he looks at
consequences of KF in the context, for example, of intuitionistic logic, to conclude that
KF is, in fact, sensitive to the ground logic.
The last article in the volume discusses intensional paradoxes afflicting necessity,
knowledge, and informal provability. Richard Montague (1963) observed that if, in the
context of Robinson’s arithmetic, we expand the language of arithmetic by a one-place
predicate π, then we cannot expect our theory to contain all instances of the reflection
principle:
(i) π([φ]) → φ,
and be closed under the rule:
(ii) From φ to infer π([φ]).
Montague’s paradox is the observation that these expectations are contradictory. This
presents us with a problem when we attempt to interpret π([φ]) as: “φ is necessary”,
but, as Kaplan and Montague (1960) had noticed, similar problems arise when we
attempt to interpret π([φ]) as: “φ is known.” In “An Axiomatic Investigation of
Provability as a Primitive Predicate,” Leon Horsten is concerned with the interpretation
of π in terms of informal provability. One attractive answer to Montague’s paradox is
to restrict (ii) to disavow inferences from reflection to instances of: π([π([φ]) → φ]).
But after an extended discussion of some implementations of this proposal, Horsten
concludes that it doesn’t survive careful scrutiny. In the end, he suggests, the solution
to Montague’s paradox will require us to restrict reflection. The article concludes with
175
a discussion of the connection between the semantic paradoxes and the intensional
paradoxes afflicting knowledge, necessity, and informal provability.
The deflationary conception of truth is, however, the prevalent theme of the volume.
Even articles that are not primarily concerned with deflationism raise issues that
effectively connect with the discussion of deflationism. Thus, for example, Andrea
Cantini reports on the search for type-free theories of truth that capture the
deflationary outlook, and Michael Sheard comments on the risks of adopting
conservative theories of truth. The result is a compact volume whose treatment of
deflationism makes plain that there is a continuity between the technical development
of formal theories of truth and philosophical reflection on the role of truth. To the
extent that this is one of the primary aims of the editors, the volume is largely
successful.
There is, however, some irony in the fact that the semantic paradoxes seem to pose a
particularly urgent problem for correspondence accounts of truth. To be sure, the
semantic paradoxes afflict both deflationary and correspondence theories of truth. But
while it seems in principle open to deflationists to restrict the equivalence schema to a
suitably limited range of non-paradoxical instances without real harm to the position,
correspondence theorists are forced into the rather uncomfortable position of
admitting that we are far from understanding the connection between the truth
bearers and the facts in virtue of which true attributions of truth are true and false
attributions are false. Thus, as a look at Vann McGee’s article suggests, there is a
great potential for interaction between reflection on correspondence accounts of truth
and technical research on the semantic paradoxes.
Be that as it may, the editors have produced a highly attractive volume that contains
a wealth of remarkably suggestive material for both logicians and philosophers. No
one with an interest in truth and the semantic paradoxes will want to miss this book.
References
Horwich, P. (1991) Truth, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Horwich, P. (1998) Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, second edition.
Kaplan, D., and R. Montague (1960) “A Paradox Regained,” The Notre Dame Journal
of Formal Logic 1, 79-90.
Ketland, J. (1999) “Deflationism and Tarski’s Paradise,” Mind 108, 69-94.
Montague, R. (1963) “Syntactic Treatments of Modality, with Corollaries on Reflection
Principles and Finite Axiomatizability.” In Richard Montague, Formal Philosophy pp.
286-302.
Montague, R., ed. (1974) Formal Philosophy, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Shapiro, S. (1998) “Proof and Truth: Through Thick and Thin,” Journal of Philosophy
10, 493-521.
Tarski, A. (1935) “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” 152-278. In Alfred
Tarski, Logic, Semantics and Meta-Mathematics.
Tarski, A. (1936) “On the Concept of Logical Consequence” 409-420. In Alfred Tarski,
Logic, Semantics and Meta-Mathematics.
Tarski, A. (1983) Logic, Semantics and Meta-Mathematics, Hackett, Indiana, second
edition.
2003.04.04
Charles Taylor
Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited
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Taylor, Charles, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Harvard

University Press, 2002, 127pp, $19.95 (hbk), ISBN 0674007603.
This slender volume derives from lectures Charles Taylor was invited to give at the
Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in the spring of 2000. It addresses the large
question of the place of religion in our secular age. Taylor’s argument takes the form
of a confrontation with the thought of William James that is focused on Varieties of
Religious Experience and some of the essays in The Will to Believe. As Taylor notes in
the preface, his engagement with James “is idiosyncratic and selective” (vi). His aim is
to highlight ways in which James speaks to our present religious predicament.
The book is divided into four chapters. In the first, Taylor offers a sketch of the theme
in Varieties that he regards as particularly relevant to the contemporary religious
situation. It is the Jamesian view of religion as primarily “something that individuals
experience” (4). There are two aspects of this view that deserve attention. One is its
individualism: religion resides chiefly in the individual, not in corporate life. The other
is its experientialism: the real locus of religion is in feeling and action, not in doctrinal
formulations. Jamesian religion is a matter of inward personal devotion rather than
outward conformity to norms of ritual or orthodoxy. Taylor suggests that this take on
religion “is very much at home in modern culture” (9) and, indeed, “can seem entirely
understandable, even axiomatic, to lots of people” (13). He locates its origins in Latin
Christendom in the high Middle Ages. In outlining its subsequent historical
development, he alludes to the Brethren of the Common Life, Francis de Sales, the
Cambridge Platonists, George Fox, John Wesley, the Great Awakening, Pietism and
Romanticism. And he mentions analogies with Hindu bhakti, Judaic Hassidism and
Islamic Sufism. According to Taylor, however, the Jamesian perspective on religion is
limited, and can be a source of distortion, in three ways. First, it neglects the
collective connection prominent in some religions by which ecclesiastical life mediates
between the religious object and the believer. Second, it also fails to appreciate the
collective connection established by the sacramentality emphasized in Catholic
traditions. And third, it excludes theology from the center of religious life. Yet despite
this narrowness, Taylor contends, the Jamesian perspective provides a sharp vision of
religious phenomena that are or should be of concern to us.
The book’s second chapter discusses two such phenomena. One is the plight of the
twice-born or sick soul, which reaches a state of assurance that all will be well only
after passing through “the three great negative experiences of melancholy, evil, and
the sense of personal sin” (37). Taylor thinks that these three forms of spiritual
anguish continue to haunt our world. Even if James’s readers, who are commonly
educated nonbelievers, do not themselves feel a sense of personal sin, they will be
aware of the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity, in which this sense is very acute,
throughout the world, but particularly in Latin America and Africa. The horrors of the
twentieth century have, of course, made evil an oppressive presence in the lives of
reflective people. Indeed, as I see it, recent books such as Marilyn Adams’s
Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God and Claudia Card’s The Atrocity Paradigm
testify eloquently that even academic philosophers feel impelled to respond to evils
that threaten to render the lives of both victims and perpetrators meaningless. And
melancholy, which Taylor construes as a sense of the loss of significance, remains a
source of agony in the modern context. On his view, its distinctive shape now is “not
the sense of rejection and exile from an unchallengeable cosmos of significance, but
rather the intimation of what may be a definitive emptiness, the final dawning of the
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end of the last illusion of significance” (39-40). James thinks that the experience of
the twice-born soul is deeper and more truly religious than the healthy-minded
optimism of the once-born, and on this point Taylor is prepared to credit him with
extraordinary insight into the spiritual hungers of modern culture.
The other phenomenon treated in the second chapter is James’s apologia pro fide sua
in “The Will to Believe.” Taylor interprets his discussion of the ethics of belief as an
inner debate in which James had to argue against voices “that held that religion was a
thing of the past, that one could no longer in conscience believe in this kind of thing in
an age of science” (43). According to James, when we are faced with the religious
hypothesis, we confront a passional decision about whether it is best to yield to our
fear of its being mistaken or to yield to our hope that it is true. Taylor portrays each of
our options as deeply attractive. Supporting the choice to steer clear of the religious
hypothesis is the thought that “it is wrong, uncourageous, unmanly, a kind of self-
indulgent cheating, to have recourse to this kind of interpretation, which we know
appeals to something in us, offers comfort, or meaning, and which we therefore
should fend off, unless absolutely driven to them [sic] by the evidence, which is
manifestly not the case” (54). Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud invoke
considerations of this sort when they write, in a somewhat self-congratulatory style, of
their own courage in living without religious comfort or illusions. Supporting the choice
to adopt the religious hypothesis is a sense that its appeal to something in us hints
“that there is something important here which we need to explore further, that this
exploration can lead us to something of vital significance, which would otherwise
remain closed to us” (55). James himself was decisively influenced by this kind of
feeling. Taylor does not argue that one of these stances is superior to the other. The
main point he wishes to make is that in our culture many people feel the pull of both
positions even after they have opted for one of them. For believers, this can take the
form of a fragilized faith, a sense that their view of God, for example, is too
anthropocentric or too indulgent. For nonbelievers, it can take the form of
understanding faith as a temptation to which others they respect give in, even though
they succeed in resisting it. Taylor praises James for telling us more than anyone else
about what it is like to stand on the cusp between these two great options, having
little or nothing more to go on than the gut feeling that there may be something of
tremendous importance at stake in one’s decision. In explicating what it is like “to
stand in that open space and feel the winds pulling you now here, now there,” James
“describes a crucial site of modernity and articulates the decisive drama enacted
there” (59).
James is not a presence in the book’s third chapter. There Taylor sets forth his own
account of the contemporary religious situation, using a genealogical method to show
how it has grown out of previous religious dispensations in European history. Relying
implicitly on a conceptual apparatus heavily indebted to the masters of twentieth-
century sociological theory, he aspires to construct a grand narrative that will cast
new light on the secularization of the public sphere. The story begins in the Middle
Ages in an enchanted world. God’s presence in the world is reflected in the sorts of
sacred places and times familiar to readers of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the
Profane, and the sacred king expresses the connection between the political order and
the divine. When the Weberian disenchantment of the world occurs, sacred meanings
are no longer expressed directly in the universe around us. But the natural world of
Newtonian science still provides evidence of divine design, and a moral order designed
by God remains normative for the social world. In this moral order, articulated by
Locke and transmitted to us through Rousseau and Marx, human individuals are
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meant to associate in society for the sake of mutual service for mutual benefit.
Disenchantment proceeds along two paths. In Catholic societies, social hierarchies
remain in place but begin to acquire functional justifications in terms of their
contributions to the divinely ordained moral order. Taylor thinks of this situation as
the baroque compromise or the paleo-Durkheimian dispensation, observing dryly that
the path out of it “went through a catastrophic revolutionary overturn” (71). The
Protestant path or anglophone trajectory, as Taylor describes the alternative, is
smoother and leads ultimately to the neo-Durkheimian dispensation most fully
realized in the United States. In its denominational society, churches are affinity
groups in which membership is entirely voluntary, and yet the society as a whole
imagines itself to constitute a corporate religious body under providential moral norms
ordained by God. Adopting Robert Bellah’s idea of an American civil religion, Taylor
argues that belief is sustained by being identified with the state through civil religion,
while at the same time differences in spiritual style are accommodated by
denominational pluralism. On his view, it is not surprising that the neo-Durkheimian
dispensation supports a high level of religious belief and practice in the United States.
Taylor is convinced that a profound alteration in the social conditions of religious belief
has taken place in the past half-century. As he sees it, the consumer revolution and
the rise of youth culture are external manifestations of this change. The spread of
expressivist individualism and the culture of authenticity downward from an
intellectual elite, which is a legacy of Romanticism, reflects this transformation at the
level of cultural self-understanding. The world of fashion and its space of mutual
display, already visible in some of Manet’s paintings and in Baudelaire’s fascination
with the flâneur and the dandy, is another indication of this shift in our ways of being
together in society. (And, I would add, Walter Benjamin’s vast, unfinished Arcades
Project remains of interest to us chiefly because it hints at ways in which we might
make the new social space of mutual display comprehensible to ourselves.) The
upshot of this alteration in social conditions for religion is a post-Durkheimian
dispensation in which “the spiritual dimension of existence is quite unhooked from the
political” (76). In this new dispensation, the morality of mutual respect and toleration
seems to be embedded in a free-standing ideal of authentic self-fulfillment, not
inscribed in a divinely ordained moral order that justifies the enforcement of norms of
sexual ethics or economic productivity. According to Taylor, “in the new expressivist
dispensation, there is no necessary embedding of our link to the sacred in any
particular broader framework, whether ‘church’ or state” (95). Religiously speaking,
society now leaves each of us on our own, at liberty to do our own thing spiritually.
For Taylor, this is the state of affairs brilliantly foreshadowed by the individualistic
experientialism advocated by James.
Taylor is, of course, too shrewd to fall prey to the illusion that all, or almost all,
contemporary believers are happy with his post-Durkheimian dispensation. He calls
attention to the fact that “the Catholic church in the United States frequently lines up
with the Christian right in attempts to reestablish earlier versions of the moral
consensus that enjoyed in their day neo-Durkheimian religious grounding” (98).
However, he judges that the embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have
slid out of the old dispensation. In support of this judgment, he appeals to José
Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World, which characterizes such
interventions in political life as aimed at a “deprivatization” of religion. Taylor insists
that “the situation in which these interventions take place is defined by the end of a
uniform Durkheimian dispensation, and the growing acceptance among many people
of a post-Durkheimian understanding” (124). He endorses the view that the postwar
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shift in social conditions has increasingly destabilized and undermined the various
Durkheimian dispensations.
In the book’s brief final chapter, Taylor briskly covers three points on which James has
missed something important about our new religious predicament. The first is the
extent to which many people still find their spiritual homes in the collective
connections of churches, even though their religious loyalties are unhooked from the
sacralized societies of paleo-Durkheimian order and the national civil religions of neo-
Durkheimian order. The second point is the continuing importance of religious markers
of ethnic or historical identity in societies forced to defend their integrity against
external oppression. Taylor cites the Poles and Irish as examples of this phenomenon,
but he also notes that we find cynical manipulation of such religious markers in
Milosevic’s Serbia and by India’s BJP. And the third point is the way in which many
people respond to religious experience by searching for exacting spiritual disciplines of
meditation or prayer. They are not content with the many “touchy-feely” spiritualities
on offer in our culture. As Taylor puts the point, “many people are not satisfied with a
momentary sense of wow” (116)!
Taylor aims to be, for the most part, descriptive rather than evaluative in his
treatment of our present religious situation. He does not hide the fact that he is a
believer, but he worries about whether his judgment is biased by his religious stance.
At one point he remarks that a conclusion he has reached “may be a bit of believers’
chauvinism that I am adding to the equation” (60). Yet it seems to me that he does
aspire to reconcile believers to the post-Durkheimian dispensation. In the concluding
chapter, after acknowledging the tendency of individualized religious experience to
slide toward the feel-good and the superficial, he tells conservative souls who wish to
condemn the present age for that reason to ask themselves whether it is even
conceivable to turn back the clock to either of the Durkheimian dispensations. And he
somewhat sternly reminds them not to forget “the spiritual costs of various kinds of
forced conformity: hypocrisy, spiritual stultification, inner revolt against the Gospel,
the confusion of faith and power, and even worse” (114). It is no doubt fitting that
such a project of reconciliation should be undertaken by a distinguished Hegel scholar.
I am skeptical about the project’s prospects for success. But maybe conservative souls
can be persuaded to find some comfort in the thought that religious energies have not
disappeared under the post-Durkheimian dispensation, even though they now
manifest themselves in new and sometimes unattractive guises.
The book’s style is simple and direct, and it is a pleasure to read. However, I doubt
that many academic students of religion will find it satisfying. Philosophers of religion
are likely to complain that Taylor fails to engage with recent discussions of the
epistemology of religious experience or of pragmatic arguments for the rationality of
religious belief that use James’s thought as a source. Taylor may intend to defuse
criticism of this kind by remarking on “the unfortunate fact that James is neglected by
contemporary academic philosophers, with a few honorable exceptions” (22). But he
does not tell us who the honorable exceptions are, and he does not consider their
views. Similarly, historians of religion are apt to complain that his grand narrative is
too sketchy and impressionistic, and not richly textured or developed enough, to
explain why or even how changes in religious dispensation occurred. Nor is it firmly
grounded in the sort of detailed empirical evidence that is typical of good historical
scholarship. To be sure, Taylor reminds the reader more than once that his
dispensations are ideal types, but he does not argue that these particular ideal types
have the power to contribute to explanations of historical change. And sociologists of
religion may well complain that he fails to pay enough attention to the developments
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in sociological theory that have taken place since the days of the masters such as
Weber and Durkheim, whose concepts he employs without much critical scrutiny.
Thus, for example, though he does make contact with the work of Bellah and
Casanova, he does not come to grips with recent challenges to secularization theory
found in the writings of Christian Smith or Rodney Stark and their associates. I find
some merit in such complaints. I do not think we should look to this book for
important contributions to the philosophy, history or sociology of religion.
We should instead look to it for scattered insights, if we wish to read it with profit. I
think it contains quite a few observations that are worth pondering, even though I am
inclined to quarrel with some of them. An example is Taylor’s claim that the Jamesian
passional decision for or against the religious hypothesis is a crucial site of modernity.
Let me conclude with some reflections on another example.
During the past decade or so, several American liberal political theorists have argued
for restrictions on the use of religious reasons in the public square. Robert Audi is an
especially striking instance of this phenomenon. In his recent Religious Commitment
and Secular Reason, he contends that the ethics of citizenship for a liberal democracy
contains prima facie obligations not to advocate or support laws or public policies that
restrict human conduct unless one has, is willing to offer and is sufficiently motivated
by adequate secular reasons for such advocacy or support. It has for quite a while
seemed to me rather odd to find liberal theorists making a big fuss about religious
reasons in politics at a time when religion has been steadily losing influence in
American public life, becoming ever more marginalized and privatized. Perhaps
Taylor’s conceptions of neo-Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian dispensations can
help us to make sense of this situation. If you believe, with Taylor and Casanova, that
we now live under something like a post-Durkheimian dispensation, you will find it
natural to view interventions in politics by the Catholic church and the Christian right
as an attempt to deprivatize religion and a challenge to the status quo. And if you are
more or less content with a post-Durkheimian order and regard such a challenge as a
threat to it, you might well, like Audi, think it urgent to respond by insisting on
secularist principles of political morality. Of course, this interpretation of our situation
can be contested. From the perspective of many members of the Catholic church and
the Christian right, it probably seems that we still live under a neo-Durkheimian
dispensation, albeit an embattled dispensation, subject to severe pressures toward
secularization and the privatization of religion. Thus understood, our situation is one in
which the proposals of liberal theorists such as Audi pose a threat to the status quo,
because they would, if accepted, push us further in the direction of an unattractive
post-Durkheimian order. I do not think it would be easy to determine which of these
points of view is closer to being correct. The point I wish to make by setting them
forth is rather that Taylor’s conceptual framework seems to provide an insightful way
of articulating them and so may turn out to be of assistance when we try to
understand the social context of current debates about religious arguments in the
public square.
I recommend this book to those who are willing to mine it for insights that may prove
to be fruitful upon further reflection. I suspect, however, that it will frustrate the
expectations of those who come to it looking for a substantial contribution to the
philosophy, history or sociology of religion.
2003.04.05
Leon Pompa
181
Vico: The First New Science

Pompa, Leon (ed. and trans.), Vico: The First New Science, Cambridge University
Press, 2002, 366pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521387264.
Reviewed by Robert Miner, Baylor University
Composed in 1725 but never before published in a full-length English edition, The First
New Science is Leon Pompa’s translation of the first version of the master work that
Vico wrote and rewrote until his death in 1744. Understandably, the editors of the
series in which this serviceable translation appears (Cambridge Texts in the History of
Political Thought) decided not to go with the text’s full title. Principles of a New
Science Concerning the Nature of the Nations, Through Which the Principles of a New
System of the Natural Law of the Gentes are Retrieved does not fit very well on a
book’s front cover.
A small number of Vico connoisseurs have persistently claimed that the 1725 version
of the Scienza nuova— dubbed the Scienza nuova prima by Vico himself in his
Autobiography—is a more readable text, and a more illuminating guide to its author’s
intentions, than the better known 1744 edition. Some who have made this claim also
allege that Vico wrote the final Scienza nuova when he was senile—although it might
be remembered that at least one of his contemporaries claimed that Vico was mad as
far back as 1720. These speculations aside, the suggestion that the 1725 Scienza
nuova is a less cluttered text than either the 1730 or 1744 versions is not implausible.
The Scienza nuova prima is divided into five books. Book 1, “The Necessity of the End
and the Difficulty of the Means of Retrieving a New Science,” begins with a relatively
clear statement of the problem. Neither philosophers nor philologists have adequately
discerned the origins of human culture. Books 2 and 3 perform the work of retrieval,
unearthing respectively the “Principles of This Science Through Ideas” and the
“Principles of This Science From the Side of Languages.” Book 4 provides the “Ground
of the Proofs Which Establish This Science,” and Book 5 narrates the “Development of
the Matter Whence a Philosophy of Humanity and a Universal History of the Nations
are Formed at the Same Time.” The titles may be cumbersome, but they are relatively
descriptive. Vico’s decision to provide each Book with its own Latin motto (taken from
Virgil, the poets, the Latin heralds, the philosophers, and the historians) adds a touch
of elegance, and even clarity.
Long before it became fashionable, Vico relentlessly criticized philosophers who
suppose rational discourse to owe little or nothing to the pre-rational discourses of
myth, law, and poetry. In our own time, some philosophers schooled in the Anglo-
American tradition of the last century have grown skeptical about the value of “pure”
conceptual analysis divorced from historical reality. One notable example of this
phenomenon is Bernard Williams. Williams characterizes the approach of Nietzsche,
which he increasingly finds congenial, as one that “typically combines, in a way that
analytical philosophy finds embarrassing, history, phenomenology, ‘realistic’
psychology, and conceptual interpretation” (Williams, Making Sense of Humanity, pp.
75-6). Something similar is true of Vico. Anti-historical philosophy and anti-
philosophical philology have both failed, Vico announces in the First New Science,
because “we have hitherto lacked a science that is both a history and philosophy of
humanity” (p. 18, §23). Vico may be regarded as the father of all modern attempts,
from Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre to Collingwood and Hegel, to effect a
rapprochement between history and philosophy. He is also the ancestor of
contemporary attempts to recover a positive conception of rhetoric against the
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strictures of ‘method,’ as the opening pages of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, which
explicitly invoke Vico, would suggest.
It would not be impossible for an Anglophone reader to draw these conclusions by
reading The New Science of Giambattista Vico, the generally excellent and widely
available translation of the 1744 Scienza nuova by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max
Fisch. Such a reader would also be well served by David Marsh’s recent translation of
the same text. But her task will be made considerably easier by the availability of an
English edition of the 1725 version. As such, both Pompa and the editors of the
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought are to be commended.
There are some flaws of the translation that a second edition will want to correct.
Pompa mistranslates the titles of Book 2 and Book 3. In Italian, the title of Book 2 is
“princìpi di questa Scienza per l’idee.” To render this as “principles of this Science
concerning ideas” is a blunder. Vico is perfectly capable of using su or intorno when he
wishes to. In this instance, he deliberately uses the preposition “per” because his aim
is to derive principles for his science through an investigation of ideas, “per l’idee.”
This is rather different from an attempt to furnish principles “concerning” a particular
domain. Similarly, Pompa’s translation of the title of Book 3 is misleading. Vico’s title
is not “principles of this Science concerning language,” but “princìpi di questa Scienza
per la parte delle lingue.” An exact rendering of this phrase into idiomatic English is
not possible, but a more faithful translation would be “principles of this Science from
the side of languages.” In addition to preserving Vico’s use of the plural (le lingue,
“languages”), such a rendering better captures Vico’s intention to draw principles for
his Science from a study of languages, rather than to treat “language” as a quasi-
autonomous subject matter, as Pompa’s version would suggest. The appearance of
maladroit translations in running headers that occur on each page of the work’s two
longest parts is annoying.
In his Glossary, Pompa makes the argument that Vico’s use of cose, “things,” should
only infrequently, if at all, be translated as “institutions.” Pompa’s argument is sound:
the translation of cose ought “to avoid the suggestion of things that are instituted, i.e.
deliberately set up, since Vico believes that many things that become institutions arise
naturally and without deliberate intention” (p. lxiv). How strange, then, that Pompa
should render “le umane cose delle nozze” as “the human institution of marriage” (p.
172, §294), and elsewhere translate “cose civili” as “civil institutions” (see, e.g., p.
288, §521). A term not included in the Glossary, but which might have been, is
ritruovare (Vico’s archaic spelling of ritrovare.) Pompa indiscriminately renders both
ritruovare and scoprire as “to discover.” The former term should be translated “to
retrieve” or “to recover.” Losing the archaelogical tone of ritruovare with no
corresponding benefit makes little sense. “To discover” and “discovery” should be
reserved for those places where Vico uses “scoprire” and “scoverta” (or, less
frequently, “discoverta”).
Other candidates for correction in a future edition: intelligere does not mean “perceive
by the senses” (p. 185, §316). Spons, spontis is not quite the same as “one’s self” (p.
209, §369—this is precisely the sort of anachronism that Vico would protest). To have
Vico speak of “a kind of genera” (p. 205, §360) is to make him ungrammatical.
Although careless at times in other ways, Vico does not make these sorts of mistakes.
Nor would he conclude his description of the slide of fallen man into bestiality with the
declaration “thus the giants become true” (p. 71, §102). A translation that is equally
literal, and yet makes sense, would be “thus they become true giants.” Some
overtranslations need to be scaled down. “Creduti ... che essi stessi si finsero” is
rendered more appropriately as “beliefs ... which they themselves feigned,” rather
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than Pompa’s “products of their own imagination” (p. 78, §116). (Finsero as “feigned”
has the additional virtue of not obscuring the continuity with Hobbes’s usage of “to
feign.”) “Against a stranger the right of possession is eternal”(p. 167, §284)
overtranslates the phrase that Vico quotes from the Law of the XII Tables, “aeterna
auctoritas [erat],” even if one supposes that it conveys the actual meaning of the last
fragment of Table III. In other places, Pompa undertranslates. For example, “what his
words say shall be law” is much too pale for “uti lingua nuncupassit, ita ius esto” (p.
122, §202; p. 201, §355). Aside from its loss of the uti ... ita construction, Pompa’s
rendering obscures that a nuncupatio is not just any utterance. It is a public
proclamation or vow.
The First New Science does not meet the highest standards of philological accuracy.
This is perhaps surprising in a work published by Cambridge University Press and
which appears in a series that has Quentin Skinner for a co-editor. Some doubts arise
about the reliability of the transcription of Greek terms, as when Pompa (or the
editors) misprint phúle for phule/ (p. 90, §145). In some cases, however, the First
New Science improves upon Battistini’s edition, e.g. the correction of cheruches to
kerukes (p. 88, §140), the form that one finds at Iliad 18.503, 18.505, and 18.558.
Sometimes Pompa will fail to convert Latin terms to the nominative case. On page 162
(§278) Pompa has Vico speak of “withe, which was called vimina in Latin, from vi.” In
the original, Vico moves seamlessly from Italian into Latin (“a vi”), but an acceptable
English translation must convert the ablative into a nominative (“from vis”). Similarly,
Vico’s freedom to quote Varro in the accusative case does not license us to speak of
the “formulam naturae” (p. 150, §251).
The editorial apparatus is far from useless, but it lacks the consistently high quality of
Battistini’s annotations. It is strange to be told in a footnote that the source of Vico’s
comments on Agamemnon and Iphigeneia is Lucretius (p. 84). The absence of any
reference to Euripides is jarring. Occasionally Pompa will include the overly intrusive
footnote, in spite of his declared intention to adopt “an agnostic attitude because of
the degree of disagreement that exists in relation to the interpretation of almost any
aspect of Vico’s thought” (p. xlviii). His own Introduction is an attempt to resolve
some of these disagreements. It is unlikely either to persuade the Vico scholar or to
help the beginner. The bibliography included by Pompa is long, but of doubtful value
to its audience. It includes a large body of work in Italian that many readers who
require Pompa’s translation will not be able to consult. Moreover, it fails to
acknowledge some important work on Vico produced in the last decade. There is no
mention of either Giuseppe Mazzotta or John Milbank. Both have done specialized
research on Vico, and both are known beyond the somewhat narrow circles of Vico
studies. Surely this would commend their work for inclusion in a bibliography designed
to help the general reader. Perhaps most curious of all, in view of Pompa’s own
emphasis on the mathematical and scientific context, is the omission of any reference
to David Lachterman’s insightful work on Vico, nominalism and synthetic geometry.
Fortunately, these errors and oversights are easily correctible. Any first translation of
a work is bound to have its share of mistakes. In view of the difficulty of our author’s
prose, it is reasonable to suppose that Pompa’s effort contains fewer errors than one
might expect from an initial translation of a work by Vico. Along with the editors of the
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Pompa is to be commended for
making the first version of Vico’s magnum opus available in English.
2003.04.06
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Yvonne Sherratt
Adorno's Positive Dialectic
Sherratt, Yvonne, Adorno's Positive Dialectic, Cambridge University Press, 2002,
264pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 052181393X.
Reviewed by Deborah Cook, University of Windsor
In The Coast of Utopia, Alexander Herzen muses aloud about the course of human
history. Asking, “Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation?”
Herzen offers this oracular response: “Surely those millions of little streams of
accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which,
without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no
such place, that’s why it’s called utopia.”1 Tom Stoppard’s evocation of the millenarian
Zeitgeist in his remarkable trilogy finds an enigmatic echo in Yvonne Sherratt’s
attempt to unearth a positive thesis in Adorno’s forbiddingly negative critical theory.
According to Sherratt, Adorno does sight the coast of utopia. Yet his utopia is neither
situated in any place nor realizable at any point in time. Indeed, Sherratt argues that
Adorno’s critical theory is teleological precisely because he believes that the
subterranean flow of history courses towards an aim that is simultaneously
“unrealised and unrealisable.” This new Erewhon is enlightenment (44), or “the ‘good’
society governed by genuine reason” (19).
Sherratt wants to challenge existing interpretations of Adorno as an unrepentant
pessimist with her thesis that Adorno offers a positive notion of enlightenment as the
inherently unrealisable telos of human history. She focuses on Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory to support
her contention that Adorno outlines a “systematic Utopian thesis” (13) based on a
largely Freudian conception of the human soul or human nature. Adorno’s utopianism
“consists of incorporating aesthetic experience into all the foundational dimensions of
human life, including reason itself” (17). Acknowledging the centrality of Marx in
Adorno’s thought (35-8), Sherratt nonetheless wants to counter what she perceives as
a widespread bias “towards an examination of the Marxist influence” (14) by
highlighting Adorno’s debt to Freud and his psychoanalytic concepts of “the ego and
id, maturity and immaturity” (68-9). That Adorno sketches a positive dialectical
relationship between id and ego instincts is one of Sherratt’s central theses, though
she readily concedes that her interpretation builds upon “thoughts that Adorno alludes
to but has not himself systematically developed” (146).
Id and ego instincts can only relate to one other dialectically if each offers its own
unique cognitive purchase on objects. Consequently, as she develops her view that
Adorno has a dialectical conception of this relationship, Sherratt contests Freud’s claim
that the id instincts are solely “responsible for the (absolutely non-cognitive)
pleasurable engagement of the Subject with the Object.” To demonstrate that Adorno
believes the id instincts are geared towards the acquisition of knowledge, Sherratt
cites a passage from Minima Moralia where Adorno criticizes Freud for turning reason
into “‘a mere superstructure’.” Against this conception of reason as epiphenomenal,
Sherratt contends not only that Adorno grounds reason in the id instincts but also that
the relationship between the id and its objects has the same features as aesthetic
knowledge acquisition. She concludes from this discussion that the id instincts are
oriented towards knowledge acquisition (210-11).
Unfortunately, this argument is problematic on logical grounds. For one cannot infer
directly from either (or both) of these claims that the id instincts themselves are
cognitively oriented. The argument is flawed on the hermeneutic level as well because
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Adorno actually grounds reason in the ego instinct of self-preservation. Dialectic of

Enlightenment–a central text for Sherratt–advances the speculative anthropological
claim that Western rationality first emerged in response to threats posed by external
nature. Reason originally developed as an organ of adaptation to an environment
perceived as hostile. Adorno stresses the relationship between reason and self-
preservation in his later work as well: “Ratio came into being in the first place as an
instrument of self-preservation, that of reality-testing.”2 But he also warns that the
more uninhibitedly reason “turns itself into the absolute opposite of nature and forgets
nature in itself, all the more will a self-preservation gone wild regress into nature.”3 In
fact, it is just this regression of self-preservation that accounts for the negative
aspects of enlightenment; self-preservation has “gone wild” because it now unleashes
destructive tendencies that threaten the lives of the very subjects it is meant to
preserve.
Sherratt follows her controversial claim about the dialectical relationship between the
id and ego instincts with the argument that aesthetic knowledge acquisition “has its
basis in the aspect of the self that is the id instincts” (211), while instrumental
knowledge is grounded in the ego instincts. Adorno outlines a positive dialectical
thesis because instrumental and aesthetic reason are related to each other in such a
way that they may supplement each other, thereby giving rise to a more flexible mode
of cognition which lends a voice to objects in their concrete, material haecceity rather
than merely subsuming them coercively under concepts or conceptual systems in the
identificatory fashion that Adorno condemns throughout his work. As an antidote to
rigid identificatory thought–which, as Sherratt persuasively argues, constantly risks a
decline into animism–Adorno offers this new dialectical mode of thought that “retains
precision, clarity, and distinctness and negates rigidity” (138-9).
Sharrett’s claim about the dialectical relationship between instrumental and aesthetic
knowledge acquisition is largely based on an interpretation of one sentence in
Negative Dialectics: “art and philosophy . . . both keep faith with their own substance
through their opposites.” In a series of elisions, Sherratt equates philosophy with
instrumental reason, which she then interprets as the opposite of art, thereby
attempting to ground her view that instrumental reason can be played off dialectically
against aesthetic reason (190). What is most problematic here is Sherratt’s conflation
of philosophy with instrumental reason. In the sentence she quotes, Adorno actually
contrasts his own non-instrumental philosophy, or critical theory, with art. Moreover,
he does not maintain that there is a dialectical relationship between philosophy and
art such that art can supplement philosophy in the way Sherratt claims. If philosophy
“will not abandon the yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art,” it must
remain faithful to its own conceptual substance. Even though the concept “negates
that yearning,” philosophy can neither circumvent this negation, nor submit to it.
Rather, it “must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept” (ND, 15).
In Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, also published recently by Cambridge
University Press, J. M. Bernstein makes a sophisticated attempt to explain what
Adorno means by striving to transcend concepts by way of concepts. Unfortunately,
Sherratt makes no reference to this book in developing her thesis about Adorno’s
positive dialectic. At the very least, she might have heeded the emphasis he places on
the ethical dimension of Adorno’s thought, along with his warning that “to displace
reason with aesthetic praxis and judgement” constitutes a “massive misunderstanding
and distortion”4 of Adorno’s work. Sherratt wants to supplement instrumental identity
thinking with an aesthetic mode of identification owing to the failure of non-identity
thinking to serve as an adequate corrective to identity thinking. While convincingly
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documenting this failure in Chapter Four, Sherratt could have overcome it by

developing Gillian Rose’s claim that Adorno postulates a rational mode of identity
thinking. To cite Rose, rational identity thinking involves the use of concepts to refer
to the ideal conditions of an object’s existence. Rose calls this “the utopian aspect of
identifying.” She adds: “For the concept to identify its object in this sense the
particular object would have to have all the properties of its ideal state.”5
Both Rose and Bernstein have convincingly argued that the salient feature of Adorno’s
thought is its ethical dimension. Indeed, one of the central problems that awaits an
interpretive solution in Adorno scholarship is the relationship between the
epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of his thought. More to the point,
when Sherratt claims that the nonconceptual, absorptive identification that
characterizes aesthetic reason “allows us to be receptive to the fact that the object
has a sense of self” (180), she supplements instrumental thinking with the aesthetic
loss of self in the “selfhood” of objects such that “the Subject himself .. . is
incorporated into the Object.” Aesthetic identification consists in “the Subject
becoming like the Object” (173). Yet such absorption would not only involve a highly
contentious identification with the very objects that Adorno describes throughout his
work as fundamentally damaged; it would also not permit the subject to recognize this
damage as damage. To identify uncritically with damaged life certainly does not bode
well, even for an inherently unrealizable utopia. In fact, Adorno characterizes his
dialectical mode of thought as an ethical endeavour that attempts both to make good
on the damage inflicted on objects under existing conditions (ND, 19) and to
transcend concepts by using concepts.
Adorno also states that “the means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration
of its hardened [verhärteten] objects is possibility–the possibility of which reality has
cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one” (ND, 52). Indeed,
he explicitly defines utopia as the “consciousness of possibility that sticks to the
concrete, the undisfigured” (ND, 56-7). The positive, utopian dimension of his thought
consists in its conceptual invocation of the emphatic possibilities that glimmer faintly
in damaged reality. These utopian possibilities are by no means exhausted in a
dialectical conception of subjectivity, as Sherratt implies when she focuses exclusively
on the subjective, psychological, and Freudian dimension of Adorno’s theory to the
exclusion of its predominantly Marxist thrust. The utopian goal of critical thought is “to
abolish the hierarchy,” not only between the thinking subject and its objects, the ego
and the id, but also between society and the individual (ND, 181). If enlightened and
mature subjects constitute an enlightened society, it is equally the case that “the
subject of ratio pursuing its self-preservation is itself an actual universal, society–in its
full logic, humanity.”6
This utopian vision obviously remains unrealized today. Is it, however, unrealizable in
the sense that history is carrying us to a place that does not exist and never will exist?
Are we really going straight to nowhere? Martin Jay convincingly demonstrates that
Adorno’s is not a straightforwardly teleological view of history.7 Indeed, Sherratt
simply contradicts herself when she argues that Adorno has a teleological conception
of history that is simultaneously “non-developmental” and “has no end point” (67).
Expressing profound doubt on countless occasions about prospects for realizing the
emphatic goal of an enlightened society, Adorno never conceived of this goal as the
telos of history. Rather, he famously postulated a line of historical development that
leads from “the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” To the extent that history exhibits a
pattern, it is one of universal social regression–not one that leads from “savagery to
humanitarianism”(ND, 320). In Negative Dialectics, then, Adorno not only rejects the
187
idea that history follows a subterranean course towards enlightenment, he sometimes

seems to adopt a dystopian conception of history. Although there are moments when
he also suggests that history could take a dramatic turn for the better, Adorno often
appears to bequeath to his readers the same dark legacy that Herzen bestows upon
his son: “The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion
without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to
perish.”8
Endnotes
1. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, Part II, (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) p.
100.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models:
Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998) p.272.
3. Idem, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, (New York: Continuum, 1973) p.
289;translation altered. Cited henceforth as ND.
4. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001) p. 4.
5. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W.
Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) p. 44.
6. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models, op. cit., p. 272.
7. See Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984) pp. 107-8. See also
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998) p. 37.
8. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, Part III, (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) p.
34.
2003.04.07
Max Kolbel
Truth Without Objectivity
Kolbel, Max, Truth Without Objectivity, Routledge, 2002, 165pp, $30.95 (pbk), ISBN
0415272459.
Reviewed by Richard Fumerton, University of Iowa
Kölbel’s book is a swashbuckling attempt to defend the initially implausible view that
there is a semantically respectable notion of relativized truth. Indeed, on one reading
of his view, he seems to be arguing that that the concept of relativized truth can be
thought of as a conceptual building block in terms of which we can understand the
more commonly employed concept of objective truth.
After a preliminary discussion of truth-conditional semantics, Kölbel introduces in
Chapter 2 one of the main themes of the book, the idea that we should guard against
an “excessive objectivity” in our conception of truth. He relies heavily on examples to
generate the need to move beyond objective truth. Specifically, he asks the reader to
consider the following statements:
1) Licorice is tasty
2) Popocatépetl will probably erupt within ten years.
3) Cheating on one’s spouse is bad.
While 1) through 3) look like genuine assertions, statements that we can think of as
true or false, Kölbel argues that they are importantly different from other sorts of
statements that have truth value. In particular, he argues that a person A can believe
each of these statements, while another person B rejects each of these statements,
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while neither A nor B has made a mistake. You can think that licorice is tasty while I
think it is not tasty and we don’t suppose that one of us must be in error. Of course, if
the claim I make about licorice has an objective truth value, and you are denying the
very claim that I make, then it wouldn’t make sense to suppose that neither of us has
made a mistake. At least it wouldn’t make sense if we understand mistaken belief in
the most natural way—belief that is false. The moral to draw, Kölbel argues, is that
there is a concept of truth that is not objective—there is a perfectly respectable
concept of relativized truth. Generalizing from these examples, Kölbel offers the
following preliminary characterization of objective truth:
For any p it is objectively true or false that p just if: for all thinkers A and B: it is a
priori that if A believes p and B believes that not-p then either A has made a mistake
or B has made a mistake. (p. 31)
Since Kölbel thinks that the claim that licorice is tasty is not objectively true or false in
the above sense, but he does think it has a truth value, he thinks we need a concept
of relativized truth—we need to introduce the concept of p’s being true relative to a
perspective. Believers occupy perspectives and A’s belief that licorice is tasty can be
true relative to A’s perspective S1 but not-true relative to R’s perspective S2.
You probably would very much like a better idea of what a perspective is, but you’re
not going to get one from Kölbel. He gives us the bad news on p. 101 when he
acknowledges, “I will not be able to explicitly define the concept of perspective
possession . . . .” Nevertheless, he argues, one can still attach sense to the concept in
terms of the explanatory role it plays within the theory. We do, after all, need an
explanation of the datum (difference of belief without error) and we can view the
introduction of perspectives as a “postulate” whose justification is the explanatory
work it does. In this respect, Kölbel argues, his perspectives are no different from the
theoretical entities introduced in physics (p. 103). I’ll have more to say about the
plausibility of this way of introducing perspectives later.
Kölbel is well aware that many of his readers will think that his solution to the alleged
puzzle concerning assertions of the form “Licorice is tasty” is a bit drastic given the
availability of alternative approaches. In Chapters 3 and 4, he considers what he calls
the revisionist and the expressivist alternatives. The philosophers Kölbel calls
revisionists would, no doubt, prefer to be called reductionists. They take assertions of
the form “Licorice is tasty” to be elliptical for indexical assertions. “Licorice is tasty,”
said by me, might just mean, for example, “I like the taste of licorice.” Your
“rejection” of my view on licorice is just your way of stating that you don’t like the
taste of licorice. We now see how there can be “disagreement” (something like what
Stevenson called disagreement in attitude) without error. Similar sorts of reductions
have, of course, been proposed for probability claims and ethical statements (Kölbel’s
other candidates for relativized truth).
The objections Kölbel offers to reductionism are brief to say the least. He simply
argues that if we look at discourse concerning taste, for example, it is not unusual to
encounter conversations of the following sort:
You: Licorice is tasty
Me: No, you’re wrong about that.
If the reductionist were correct, the conversation would be decidedly odd. Your
statement would be equivalent to “I like licorice” and my statement would be most
naturally construed as claiming that you have made some sort of introspective error.
Expressivism (noncognitivism) gets a more careful treatment and his primary
objection to the view seems to center around Geach’s concern that we seem to have
no difficulty employing aesthetic and ethical statements as premises in arguments
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that we view as valid. It is difficult even to make sense of validity when we are dealing
with premises/conclusions that lack truth value.
The book closes with an attempt to survey and respond to some of the main criticisms
that have been leveled at relativistic views of truth.
Evaluation:
It seems to me that Kölbel’s rejection of reductionism/revisionism really are too quick.
Consider the following familiar sort of conversation:
She: I love you
He: Me too.
To be sure, the literal interpretation of the conversation might suggest that he is
simply expressing a kind of narcissism in associating himself with his lover’s love of
himself. Of course, we all know that in this context the “me too” is an indication of his
willingness to utter a sentence token of the same type, a token that will assert his
own love of her. Similarly, if the reductionist were correct, it wouldn’t be all that
surprising if we adopt similar conventions for contexts in which one person says
“Licorice is tasty/I like licorice” and the other person, wanting to indicate conveniently
disagreement in attitude, says simply “I disagree”—meaning only to indicate that he
wouldn’t put forth a sentence token of that type (a token that would indicate that he
also liked licorice). I’m not arguing here that the reductionist will win the day—I’m
arguing only that it would be a mistake to take the surface grammar of our sentences
about taste too seriously or straightforwardly in trying to uncover the underlying
meaning of such statements.
If Kölbel’s argument were successful against the reductionist, I worry that a similar
sort of argument would be equally effective against his own relativist account of truth.
On one interpretation of Kölbel’s view, he is claiming that we are at least implicitly
aware of the fact that we are employing a relativistic understanding of truth with
respect to the evaluation of assertions about taste, ethics, probability, etc. Why else
would we be hesitant to assert that when you say “Licorice is tasty” and I say “It’s
not” one of us has made an error? But now imagine the following conversation:
You: Licorice is tasty
Me: I couldn’t disagree more—What you said is so untrue.
On Kölbel’s view, I should realize that it makes no sense to evaluate your statement
as true or false simpliciter—that’s why we don’t have to think that one of us has made
a mistake. But then I should recognize that in all likelihood your statement that
licorice is tasty is true relative to your perspective. Indeed, that’s how I should think it
most natural to evaluate your statement in terms of truth or falsehood. But then with
what precisely am I disagreeing? I shouldn’t be saying or thinking that your statement
is false simpliciter. I shouldn’t even think it appropriate to evaluate your statement
that way—it doesn’t have objective truth or falsehood. But if I evaluate it the way it
should be evaluated according to Kölbel, I should in fact agree that what you said is
true relative to your perspective. Indeed there is no real disagreement between you
and me since I can quite consistently think that it is objectively true that your
statement is true relative to your perspective, while I also think that it is objectively
true that my statement is true relative to my perspective.
An analogy might be helpful. There are, of course, all sorts of relative concepts. I can
truly say of a pygmy that he is tall (relative to the class of pygmies) while you can
simultaneously truly assert that he is very short for a prospective NBA power forward.
You and I are in no sense disagreeing about anything. It is not that there is no
objective truth about whether the pygmy is tall or short. There is an objective truth
about whether he is tall relative to one class of people and short relative to another.
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But truth relative to a perspective, if we can make sense of that notion, is presumably
like height relative to a reference class. When you say that it is true (relative to your
perspective) that licorice is tasty, and I say that it isn’t true (relative to my
perspective), you and I are no more disagreeing in this case than we were in the case
of the pygmy. It is not that we should be struck by the fact that there is disagreement
without error. It is rather that there is simply no disagreement.
Though I’m personally rather sympathetic to the redcuctionist approach to most of the
problematic assertions that concern Kölbel, I think that the expressivist also has
resources to defend expressivism against Kölbel’s objections. When we think about
deductive validity, we think in terms of the form or structure of arguments and we
don’t focus much on the content of the statements that comprise the premises and
conclusions of those arguments. It is an uncontroversial fact that even if expressivism
were true, the sentences that the expressivist regards as neither true nor false have
the syntactic structure of sentences that make assertions. In the context of evaluating
an argument, it wouldn’t be surprising, I think, that we would simply not worry much
about the fact that certain sentences are problematic bearers of truth value in
characterizing a given argument containing sentences of that type as deductively
valid.
Let me conclude by commenting briefly on the idea that we can rest content as
philosophers with introducing the critical notion of perspective as that which plays a
certain explanatory role. Consider again an analogy. Suppose a philosopher excitedly
suggests that he has finally found the elusive fourth condition that when added to
justified true belief will give one an account of knowledge that is immune to Gettier
counterexamples. Somewhat skeptical, we ask for more information and we are told
that in addition to a belief’s being true and justified it must have the property of being
Gettier-shielded. We wonder what that property is and are told that it is the property
(whatever it is) that makes justified true beliefs immune to Gettier counterexamples.
In response to our disappointment, the philosopher assures us that the property of
being Gettier-shielded is a theoretical posit whose philosophical utility is to be
measured by the explanatory work it does—and what wonderful work the posit does!
We all feel that there is a distinction between the justified true beliefs that are also
knowledge and the justified true beliefs that are not, so we could surely use a
property that would account for the difference. Now I trust no-one would think that
our excited epistemologist has made any genuine philosophical progress in getting a
handle on Gettier counterexamples.
In the same way, I’m inclined to think that Kölbel hasn’t given us anything we can
hang our philosophical hats on when he introduces perspectives as theoretical “posits”
the justification for which consists in the explanatory work they do. In the case of
theoretical entities posited by physicists, first there is typically an array of properties
attributed to these entities, and second, the explanatory work they are supposed to
do is typically causal. Their existence and nature is supposed to causally explain
phenomena we think need a causal explanation. But perspectives aren’t causally
explaining anything. They are introduced as essential elements in the development of
a philosophical theory, a theory we must understand before we can evaluate it.
Without some sort of positive story about what a perspective is, I’m somewhat at a
loss as to how to even think about the relation of being true relative to a perspective.
Kölbel’s book is clear, original, and stimulating. While I wasn’t convinced (I don’t think
many will be), it is a refreshingly straightforward attempt to advance a relativism that
will, at the very least, require the reader to think more carefully about how to
approach in a different way the data Kölbel seeks to illuminate.
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2003.04.08
Catherine Chalier
What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas
Chalier, Catherine, What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas, translated by
Jane Marie Todd, Cornell University Press, 2002, 208pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN
0801487943.
Reviewed by Adrian Peperzak, Loyola University
Catherine Chalier is known for several fine books that demonstrate her familiarity with
the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas or develop his thought in relation to urgent
questions of our time. A new book of hers that confronts Levinas with the greatest
moral philosopher of modern history, with whom Levinas, despite radical differences,
shares a deep affinity, is therefore particularly welcome, not only for a reassessment
of Kant’s revolution, but also for a clarification of the questions and answers by which
Levinas went beyond Kant’s ethical theory.
An ideal confrontation of two original thinkers would keep a perfect balance of critical
distance and benevolent familiarity with regard to both authors, unless one of them is
clearly superior to the other; but even then one should make both as strong as they
can be, or at least as strong as they are in their best passages. Chalier pays much
attention to Kant’s principles and arguments, which she explains respectfully. The
roles of reason and sensibility, theoretical reason (the intellect) and practical reason
(the will), goodness and happiness, ethics and religion, the other and me are
discussed extensively before she compares Kant’s theses with Levinas’s fundamental
ethics and criticizes them from the perspective of the latter. Her conclusion is that
Levinas’s views in all respects are superior to those of Kant.
Is her comparison complete? It is cheap and vain to criticize a book for not asking and
answering questions oneself deems important, but in this case the contrast between
Kant and Levinas might have turned out somewhat different if Chalier had not
bracketed (1) the role of concrete morals, which Kant extensively treats in the “The
Doctrine of Right and of Virtue” of his Metaphysics of Sittlichkeit (1785), while Levinas
never deals with “applied” ethics, and (2) the role history plays in Kant’s and Levinas’s
more or less hopeful perspectives on the reality of moral life. Chalier refers only four
times to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, and she does not seem very interested in the
way Kant concretizes his formal imperatives by finding an appropriate content or
“matter” for moral behavior, when he tests the maxims that are prompted by our
(natural, universal, and inevitable) striving for happiness. Chalier’s understanding of
Kant’s ethical theory does not seem to recognize the intimate union of his rational and
purely formal imperative(s) with our natural, normal and as such innocent dynamism
that aims at satisfaction, without which our will would not be able to do anything.
There are more topics about which this reader disagrees with Chalier’s presentation of
Kant, but there are few places where he disagrees with her explanations of Levinas’s
oeuvre.
Chalier’s book would have become exciting if she had challenged certain difficulties
and unclarities that emerge from Levinas’s work by trying to give Kant a more
challenging role vis-à-vis Levinas. For example, Chalier argues that Kant’s universal
principles or laws “alienate” man (32), while Levinas’s appeal to the epiphany of the
face is not a principle but a more profound living source (38). However, could Kant
not argue against Levinas that the face, if it is indeed “naked,” as Levinas constantly
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emphasizes, is as universal as humans’ “humanness” (Menschheit) or “dignity”

(Würde) which, according to Kant, must be respected and honored as an absolute
“end in itself” transcending all values (Werte)? Another Kantian attack could start
from the universal experience that people have of duties with regard to themselves,
which Kant not only takes for granted, but also justifies on the basis of rationality,
while it causes considerable problems for Levinas’s focus on the Other’s “emptying”
and “denucleating” me as a being-for-the-Other.
Instead of a fight between Levinas and Kant, one could stage a more reconciliatory
intrigue by strengthening and reformulating their partially hidden affinities and
convergences, some of which Levinas repeatedly recognized. Such a drama would not
lead to a synthesis, but it could foster an advancement of the search for an
appropriate theory of the Good.
Chalier wrote a skillful book on Kant as seen from the standpoint of Levinas; what we
still need is a book on Levinas from the (retrieved) perspective of Kant; or even
better: a new stage of the ongoing search for an ethics beyond ethics.
2003.04.09
Cass Sunstein
Risk and Reason
Sunstein, Cass, Risk and Reason, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 342pp, $22.00
(pbk), ISBN 05217919959.
Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette, University of Notre Dame
What should be done about risks such as genetically engineered food and
environmentally induced cancer? Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago chairholder and
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, says society can respond
either with “uninformed stabs in the dark” or with “cost-benefit balancing” (6).
Supporting the latter, his book argues for a “cost-benefit state” controlled largely by
economic experts (ix): “because I will place a high premium on technical expertise
and sound science, this book is, in many ways, a plea for a large role for technocrats”
(7). Sunstein’s volume is important not only because he has had a distinguished
career in administrative and constitutional law (including many awards from the
American Bar Association) but also because the current US presidential administration
defends causal, ethical, and political claims virtually identical to those in the book.
Although Sunstein correctly calls for “sound science” in risk policy, he often gets his
science wrong and almost always attempts to reduce ethical to purely scientific
questions.
Chapter one makes a case for environmental-risk regulation based on “reason,” on
least-cost methods for saving equal numbers of lives. To determine least cost,
Sunstein uses many tables listing scores of societal risks, their benefits, and their
respective costs-per-life-saved. He presupposes that virtually all ethical distinctions
(such as who is responsible for creating each risk, who benefits from it, whether it is
compensable, or whether the risk is involuntarily imposed or voluntarily chosen) are
irrelevant. For him, only cost-per-life saved should count in societal risk decisions.
Chapter two reiterates the well-known arguments that members of the public are
ignorant of risk, react emotively, and fail to assess different probabilities accurately.
As a result, Sunstein says, the public requires regulation when it is not supported by
risk-cost-benefit balancing of the sort given in his tables (49).
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To defend his “cost-benefit state,” Sunstein must show not only that members of the
public are wrong about risks but also that cost-benefit experts are right. Chapter three
argues that using any risk evaluations except those of cost-benefit experts amounts to
using politics rather than reason (76), as he says happened at Love Canal and
elsewhere: “it remains unproven that the contamination of Love Canal ever posed
significant risks to anyone” (81). Dismissing many alleged risks, he says people fear
things like toxic chemicals or pesticides because of “mass delusions” (79), availability
heuristics (fears fanned by the media), informational and reputational “cascades,” and
interest-group campaigns. Instead of faulty risk perceptions, Sunstein claims the
public should rely on experts’ cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of various risks.
Chapters 5 and 6 argue for “reducing aggregate risks” (117) by testing all regulations
to see whether they produce more benefits than costs (113). According to Sunstein,
such cost-benefit decisionmaking does not reduce lives to dollars but actually saves
lives. His reasoning is that “private expenditures on regulatory compliance may reduce
risk but produce less employment and more poverty” (136); less employment and
more poverty produce greater health risks because nations with higher wealth have
citizens who live longer: “wealth buys longevity” (136-7); therefore, “if regulations
increase poverty, and decrease wealth, they will increase risk as a result” (137).
Given his causal assumption (not substantiated by any controlled experiments or
statistical analyses) that regulations typically increase poverty and decrease wealth,
Sunstein concludes that risk regulations typically kill more people than they save
(136-137) and that the public is irrational in demanding them.
Chapter 7 defends the Bush administration’s proposed suspension of Environmental
Protection Agency regulations for arsenic in drinking water. This presidential move is
exactly what Sunstein recommends throughout the book: dropping regulations,
including arsenic protections, that fail the CBA test, as given in his tables. Later
chapters also are devoted to case studies, including one in which Sunstein challenges
the Clean Air Act and argues for judicial review based on whether it passes the CBA
test.
The final two chapters defend Sunstein’s alternatives to regulation: disclosure of
information, economic incentives for pollution control, industry-government contracts
for risk reduction and, in general, “free-market environmentalism” (132, 278). His
proposals are premised on exchanging risk regulation for rational decisionmaking by
technocrats. His final section is on “celebrating technocrats” (294-5).
What can be said for Sunstein’s proposals? Critics err if they dismiss his book because
of its advocating CBA. And many philosophers (like Hubert Dreyfus, Doug MacLean,
Alasdair MacIntyre, or Mark Sagoff) arguably miss the mark when they reject use of
CBA. They err if they presuppose that (1) because CBA is not sufficient for rational
societal decisionmaking, it is not necessary; (2) it is reasonable to ignore attempted
calculation of relevant benefits and associated costs of proposed societal actions; (3)
Ron Giere, Alex Rosenberg, and Pat Suppes are wrong in showing CBA is merely a
formal calculus, capable of being interpreted in terms of any benefits and costs, even
nonutilitarian ones; (4) there are reasonable ways to address the problem of social
choice that ignore CBA; (5) less transparent alternatives (to analytic methods like
CBA) are more susceptible to democratic control than CBA; and (6) there are no
financial constraints on real-world decisionmaking. If such presuppositions about CBA
err, and if many philosophers and environmentalists rely on them to dismiss CBA too
crudely, what can be said about Sunstein’s position? The problem arguably is not his
advocating CBA, but (A) his adopting CBA as the final or sufficient condition for all
societal decisionmaking and (B) his supporting a version of CBA that requires only
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market parameters and willingness-to-pay criteria. (A) is flawed because CBA is only
necessary, not sufficient, for policy, given the arguable need to recognize ethical and
legal constraints on decisionmaking. And (B) is questionable, given that even market
proponents correct for market flaws (caused by factors such as speculative
instabilities, monopolies, lack of competition or full information, free goods like air and
water, or public goods). Even market proponents avoid begging rights questions by
using both willingness-to-accept and willingness-to-pay criteria, not just the latter, as
Sunstein does. (B) also is contrary to recommendations by the World Resources
Institute, many third-world economists, and experts such as Bill Schulze and Alan
Kneese. But if so, Sunstein’s main problem may be not his advocating CBA , but his
recommending only CBA (and only a crude interpretation of it) for societal
decisionmaking.
But does Sunstein really claim CBA is sufficient for societal decisionmaking? He does
say agencies are “permitted” (111) to take qualitative factors into account,
presumably factors beyond the range of CBA. But his “permission” seems half-
hearted, given that, in every chapter he claims one or another regulation – from
requirements for child restraints (car seats) in automobiles, to workplace regulation of
methylene chloride, to reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions from fossil-fuel plants –
should be dropped because it does not pass the CBA “test.” To support claims about
passing the test, Sunstein produces only market figures of aggregate risks, benefits,
and costs for each regulation. But such figures would not be sufficient for claiming
that a regulation “failed” the cost-benefit test, unless monetary values alone were
sufficient for the test. Thus, although Sunstein says agencies are “permitted” to take
qualitative factors into account, to the degree they do so, they undercut the
conclusiveness of his CBA-test criterion for sound policy. If Sunstein’s “permission”
were not disingenuous, he should have amended his claims about CBA tests and
require d (not permitted) agencies to take account of qualitative factors such as legal
rights to life or to equal protection, as in the Delaney prohibition against carcinogenic
food additives.
Because Sunstein repeatedly calls for “sound science” to replace the allegedly
irrational risk opinions of the public, what is the quality of his own science? He has no
citations to work from the US National Academy of Sciences and almost no citations to
mainline scientific journals to document his many claims about cancers or pollution.
Instead he repeatedly cites non-scientific sources, like the American Enterprise
Institute (5, 27, 138); the Reason Institute (40); political scientists Aaron Wildavsky
(14, 79, 82a, 82b, 83a, 83b, 105, 135, 136) and John Graham (26, 31, 40, 49, 118,
133); and other corporate/conservative think tanks and spokespersons to “back up”
most of his scientific claims.
Sunstein also seems too hasty in attacking laypersons’ irrationality and “intuitive
toxicology,” while calling for risk judgments by experts. The dominant psychometric
account of risk perception, that of recent Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his
coauthor Amos Tversky, fails to support Sunstein’s view. They showed that when both
experts and laypeople rely on probabilities, without actual frequency data, experts are
just as likely as laypeople to err in evaluating risk, even when the experts have Ph.D.s
in probability or statistics and have been warned previously about the same errors.
Kahneman says experts, faced with uncertain probabilities, have overconfidence and
representativeness biases that are as serious as errors of laypeople. Yet Sunstein
never discusses this point.
Sunstein also misrepresents rational decision theory. He argues repeatedly that expert
risk decisions (based on CBA) are objective and rational, whereas lay risk decisions
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are delusional and emotive, yet he ignores the fact that CBA analysis of risks is deeply
value-laden. It is value-laden, in part, because “risk” is an increment in “average
annual fatality of probability” associated with something like workplace exposure to
benzene or living near a waste dump. Because most hazardous materials are not
tested, most risk probabilities are determined through mathematical models. As such,
the models describe events falling into the category of Bayesian “uncertainty,” where
no accurate probabilities are available, because there are no frequency data. If data
were available, there would be no need for risk analysis and its attendant models.
Given this Bayesian uncertainty, virtually all risk experts accept the fact that risk
analyses typically err by 4 to 6 orders of magnitude. Such errors argue both against
the thesis that CBA is a purely factual “sound science” (as Sunstein says) and against
his claim that it is reasonable to rely only on comparative CBA of various risks (and
their associated probability models), alone, in order to make societal risk policy. For
example, Sunstein accuses the public of irrational fear of nuclear power. He supports
the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Bush administration plan for nuclear
electricity and for the Yucca Mountain (Nevada) nuclear waste facility. Yet the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) used the DOE’s own radiation-dose
calculations from Yucca Mountain and concluded in 2002 that uncertainty in DOE’s
doses fell between 8 and 12 orders of magnitude. That is, radiation doses to the public
could be between a hundred million and a trillion times higher than the DOE alleged,
many times higher than what would kill everyone in the US. But the DOE did not
admit this uncertainty. Both IAEA calculations – and typical risk-analysis uncertainty
bands – suggest that public fear of nuclear power might not be irrational, particularly
for a repository that will be lethal “in perpetuity.” 2001 DOE data also show nuclear
fission is more expensive, per kilowatt-hour, than coal, natural gas, wind, and solar
thermal. That is one reason no new US nuclear plants have been ordered since 1974.
If nuclear energy does not pass CBA and market tests, using the best data from the
pro-nuclear DOE, then why is Sunstein so dismissive of its risks throughout the book?
The reader begins to suspect more than “sound science” is at work here.
Another problem with the quality of Sunstein’s research is his misrepresenting
positions he attacks. For example, he claims my 1991 book, Risk and Rationality,
argues (1) that risk decisions should not rely on “scientific fact” and CBA; (2) that
ordinary people, not experts, should resolve risk problems; and (3) that issues of risk
are “questions of value not fact” (108). Yet my book explicitly and repeatedly argues
for the opposite of each of these claims. Contrary to (1), 5 of its 12 chapters criticize
misuse of CBA and argue both for more and better science in CBA, and for explicit
consideration of values. Contrary to (2), it explicitly and repeatedly calls for both
expert analysis and public deliberation, just as did the US National Academy of
Sciences’ volume, Understanding Risk, five years later. Contrary to (3), two of its
chapters argue against the social-constructivist claim that risk perceptions are purely
subjective/evaluative. Many environmental ethics anthologies use selections from this
book to exemplify the classic position defending CBA. Hence, in saying I oppose CBA,
Sunstein not only gets my position wrong, but he gets it badly wrong. Instead of
attacking a straw woman, Sunstein should have answered my arguments that call for
epistemological reform (not rejection) of CBA, mathematical uncertainty analyses
instead of mere “best estimates,” and attention to issues such as framing and who
bears the burden of proof.
Among Sunstein’s ethical presuppositions, one of the most questionable is that
technocratic and lay views of risk err because the public is ignorant about
probabilities. Yet as many quantitative sociologists and psychologists (Riley Dunlap,
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Gene Rosa, Paul Slovic) have shown, the views diverge not because of differences
over probabilities, even though laypeople often get their probabilities wrong. Rather,
evaluations diverge because frequently the public does not trust government risk
estimates; does not believe a risk is “worth” the benefit; claims a risk imposition is
unfair; or does not enjoy rights to full compensation for industry-imposed risks (as in
the case of the government-mandated liability limit that excludes citizens’ claims for
98 percent of worst-case nuclear-accident losses).
Sunstein’s ignoring considerations of fairness, merit, and responsibility is particularly
telling, as in his risk-CBA tables. For example, after listing various risks and their
associated costs and benefits, he alleges the public is irrational in demanding money
be spent to control industrial toxins in the environment, which (he says) kill 60,000 in
the US each year, while not requiring government to fund programs encouraging
people to exercise and eat properly (8). Sunstein neglects the fact that although
people typically have rights to choose how much to exercise and what to eat, polluters
do not have rights to impose their wastes on the public, just in case the societal risks
(industries impose) are smaller than individual risks (like those associated with lack of
exercise) chosen by citizens. Sunstein’s comparisons thus fly in the face of several
hundred years of philosophical distinctions between acts of omission and commission,
proximate and non-proximate causes, negative and welfare rights, justified and
unjustified paternalism, causal chains of responsibility, and so on. Even the
Nuremberg Accords, adopted after World War II to govern societal risk impositions,
require that in medical-therapy cases, potential victims must give free informed
consent to risk. Sunstein demands even less in non-therapeutic cases, the cases in
which he arguably ought to require greater ethical attention.
Although Sunstein’s book offers little for philosophically sophisticated readers, it
provides a fascinating glimpse of contemporary political philosophy. Bush’s philosophy
of risk regulation may be defensible, but Sunstein’s arguments are too flawed to offer
him much help.
2003.04.10
Antiphon the Sophist
The Fragments
Antiphon the Sophist, The Fragments, edited with introduction, translation, and
commentary by Gerard J. Pendrick, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 483pp, $75.00
(hbk), ISBN 0521651611.
Reviewed by Michael Gagarin, University of Texas at Austin
Until now, the standard collection of the fragments of "Antiphon the Sophist" was the
magisterial work of Diels-Kranz (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6 th ed. vol. 2, 334-
370 [Berlin 1952]), who established the order and numbering of fragments used by
almost all scholars since, including Untersteiner (Sofisti, vol. 4, 1-211 [Florence
1962]). Much has been written about Antiphon since these editions, and in 1984 a tiny
scrap of papyrus was published that forced scholars to abandon some generally
accepted restorations in a papyrus text published earlier and to reexamine some
widespread views about this late fifth-century thinker. Thus a new edition of the
fragments has long been desired, and scholars working on the sophists should be
most grateful to Pendrick (hereafter 'P') for undertaking not only a new edition but the
first extended commentary on the fragments as well. P's work began as a 1987
197
dissertation written under Leonardo Tarán at Columbia, and this much revised edition
has now been published in this handsome edition by Cambridge University Press.
Controversy has long surrounded the figure of Antiphon. We have contemporary
evidence from the historian Thucydides (8.68) that in 411 BCE, "Antiphon of
Rhamnus" was one of the leaders of the oligarchic coup of the 400, that when
democratic government was restored shortly afterwards Antiphon was tried and
executed for his role in this coup, and that this same Antiphon advised litigants in
court and even wrote speeches for them, of which we now possess three courtroom
speeches, three "Tetralogies" (sets of four speeches from the same hypothetical case)
and more than a hundred fragments and titles of other speeches. But ancient
biographies of this Antiphon regularly confuse him with others of the same name,
some of whom are clearly different figures. But there is one Antiphon, identified by
the fourth-century writer Xenophon as "Antiphon the Sophist," whose identity has
been disputed since at least the first century BCE. Some scholars, ancient and
modern, have argued for the "separatist" view that this Antiphon was a different
person from the Rhamnusian while other "unitarian" scholars, who in recent years
seem to be in the majority, have argued that the two are one and the same. In his
dissertation and two earlier articles, P has argued strongly for the separatist position,
and he resumes his arguments in a thorough review of the question in the first section
of his Introduction. Since I have argued at some length for the unitarian position in a
recent work not available to P (Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law, and Justice in
the Age of the Sophists [Austin 2002]) I will not rehearse my objections to P's
arguments here. Suffice it to say that I am not persuaded. In fact, however, one's
view of Antiphon's identity has little or no effect on the value of this work, which will
still be of use to both unitarian and separatist scholars. Indeed, I regret not having
had it at my disposal when I wrote the above mentioned work.
The rest of P's Introduction addresses the individual works of the Sophist-or the
"sophistic" works of Antiphon of Rhamnus, if one takes a unitarian position-the most
important of which are On Truth and On Concord. Only a few fragments remain from a
Politicus and only reports of a Dream-Book. In a final introductory section, P discusses
"Antiphon's Thought in its Fifth-Century Context" (53-67). P's general approach to any
interpretation of the works, individually or collectively, is restrained. He primarily
examines the attempts of previous scholars to find overall meaning in each work or in
all the works taken together, or to find specific responses in Antiphon to other
contemporary works. P rejects most of these earlier attempts as wrong or
unsupported, and for the most part shows little or no interest in undertaking his own
general interpretations ("By its very nature, the fragmentary and incomplete evidence
for the writings of the sophist Antiphon steadfastly resists attempts to impose on him
a unified and consistent philosophical system"). In his one attempt at a positive
assessment of Antiphon's views, on nomos and physis ("law, custom" and "nature"), P
concentrates on significant differences between the views of Antiphon and those of
Callicles and Thrasymachus (as portrayed by Plato), and notes that "Antiphon
envisions a more limited potential for the pursuit of self-interest where the constraints
of law and custom seem all-embracing."
Since the publication of the papyrus fragments of On Truth nearly a century ago,
Antiphon has been known especially for his views on this issue of nomos and physis,
and scholars writing about him have also devoted most of their attention to this issue.
But it is worth recalling that without the chance discovery of these papyrus scraps,
modern scholars would have almost no idea that Antiphon had even addressed this
issue. Fr. 15 on matter as nature (perhaps), gives no hint of any nomos/physis
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polarity, let alone one with an ethical dimension. Had a different bit of papyrus been
preserved, we might have a completely different view of Antiphon as a thinker.
After P's Introduction come twelve Testimonia to Antiphon's sophistic activity,
conveniently presented with an English translation facing the Greek text and
apparatus criticus. Half of this section is taken up with the first two of these,
Xenophon Memorabilia 4.6.1-15 and Hermogenes Peri Ideas 2.15, which are primarily
significant for the question of identity. The Testimonia are followed by eighty-one
Fragments, again with Greek and English facing.
After these comes the Commentary, which (considering the smaller font used in it)
comprises more than half of the work. This is clearly the most important part of P's
work. It treats both the Testimonia and the Fragments in discussions ranging from
two lines to many pages. It is here that the substantial amount of revision and
expansion from the dissertation is most evident. Fragment 1, for example, in the
dissertation is nothing but a quotation from Galen with no indication of what part of
the text, if any, is Antiphon's original, no translation, and an inconclusive commentary
("it is in fact quite uncertain what Antiphon was saying"). In the book this has become
a slightly longer and in places different text of Galen, with an explicit indication of
what P takes to be Antiphon's own words, accompanied by a translation and a much
fuller commentary. It is disappointing, however, that this additional work does not
bring us any closer to understanding the fragment, for after rejecting earlier
interpretations P ends by suggesting that in quoting Antiphon Galen may have omitted
"something essential to deciphering Antiphon's meaning but superfluous to his own
purposes".
The longest section of the commentary, as one would expect, is devoted to the
papyrus fragments (F44), which form by far the longest text. P returns the three
pieces of this text to the order of the original editors (44 A, B, and C), followed by
Diels-Kranz and others, which some recent scholars had changed. This decision is
sensible since the actual order is uncertain and it has been confusing to have two
different orders. The commentary itself is also generally sensible, though I would take
issue with some points, such as equating expressions like ta tês physeôs, "the things
of nature," with the noun physis. It may be hard to determine the precise nuance of
the first phrase, but it is hard to imagine that Antiphon meant it to be identical with
the simple noun.
The book concludes with a 27-page bibliography of works cited and three indices (of
passages cited, subjects, and Greek words). The bibliography is nearly complete; I
miss only the article of Ronald Billik (TYCHE 1998), who (wrongly, in my view)
disputes the assignment of the papyrus fragments (F44) to On Truth and even to
Antiphon, and the book of Klaus Hoffmann, Der Recht im Denken der Sophistik, with
its fairly extensive interpretation of Antiphon's views in F44.
In sum, P's useful dissertation has now been revised and thoroughly reorganized for
publication in ways that make it much easier for the reader to use. On the other hand,
the book's origin as a dissertation is still very much in evidence, especially in the
unnecessarily lengthy (in my view) discussions of the opinions of virtually all previous
scholars going back some 150 years. There may be some value in knowing, for
example, what Bernays thought in 1854, but the long discussions of his views and
those of scores of other scholars on almost every point are likely to dissuade all but
the most dedicated Antiphon devotees from making much use of the book. Readers
who might wish to know what P himself, after more than a decade of working on
Antiphon, thinks about these fragments will find it rough going, as they skim through
the ideas of earlier scholars looking for some indication of P's own views. And when
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they find it, they are likely to be disappointed, since P's overall approach to
interpretation is generally to avoid suggesting views of his own and, when he does
venture an interpretation, to restrict himself to a fairly limited point. Thus, the work
will be helpful for dedicated specialists like myself, but may not offer much for those
interested in the thought of Antiphon or of the sophists more generally.
2003.04.11
David Boonin
A Defense of Abortion
Boonin, David, A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 350pp,
$23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521520355. Reviewed by: Win-chiat Lee, Wake Forest University
Reviewed by Win-chiat Lee , Wake Forest University
In this book Boonin is primarily interested in establishing a negative case for the
moral permissibility of abortion by showing that the arguments made against it by its
critics all fail. But Boonin does not have his eye set on doing that alone. In fact, he is
also interested in showing that these arguments can be defeated on grounds that the
critics of abortion accept. To this end, Boonin goes over a very large number of such
arguments, organized around three themes, and shows how they all fail.
This is a very impressive book. I think Boonin has largely succeeded in what he sets
out to do. The outcome is a very exhaustive treatment of the subject of the moral
permissibility of abortion, which also makes it a very exhausting and demanding read.
It is hard to imagine that Boonin has left any deserving stone unturned on the
subject. Boonin's treatment of the arguments of the critics of abortion is thorough,
judicious, and careful. His refutation is typically decisive and often very insightful. If
there is any fault in his treatment of the critics' arguments, it is probably that he has
bent over backwards to be charitable in some cases. Boonin's book is definitely an
important contribution to the philosophical debate on abortion.
In the following, I will attempt to give an account of the overall structure of the book
and comment on some the philosophical issues involved in the book as a whole. I
hope my critical remarks do not distract too much from the overall very favorable
impression I intend to convey about the book. I will also make very little effort, except
in two or three cases, to summarize or discuss the particular arguments Boonin
considers in the book and his reasons for rejecting them. That has proved to be an
impossible task, given the sheer number of arguments Boonin discusses in each
chapter. In this way, this review does not do justice to the book because these
particular arguments are where the real action of the book takes place. Boonin's
resourcefulness, originality, clear-headedness and insightfulness comes through most
clearly in the detail of his treatment of each of the arguments he considers.
In this book, Boonin is only concerned about the narrower question of whether
abortion is morally permissible. But what exactly does it mean to say that abortion is
morally permissible? Does it mean that abortion is not wrong morally speaking, as it
typically would? It is not clear that that is what Boonin has in mind. He distinguishes
between the moral impermissibility of an act or a practice from its moral criticizability,
the former being “qualitatively stronger” than the latter (4-5). According to him, from
the claim that an act is morally permissible, it does not follow that one ought to do it
or that one is not morally criticizable for doing it (7). But does this mean there may
still be other moral reasons against doing it that are conclusive? If it does, it seems
that one may still be wrong in doing what is morally permissible. If that is the case,
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one wonders what exactly the claim that abortion is morally permissible amounts to.
The following sentence offers no help: “To say that an action is permissible is not to
say that there are no moral reasons against doing the action, but only that it is a
candidate from which one is morally permitted to choose” (7-8, italics are mine).
The most helpful account of moral permissibility Boonin offers is the following: “To say
that an action of mine is morally permissible is to say that no one has a valid claim
against my doing it, that doing it violates nobody's moral rights” (5). Thus, to say that
abortion is morally permissible is to say that no one's moral right is violated by
abortion. On this analysis, moral impermissibility is simply a very specific kind of
wrong that involves the violation of someone's moral rights. (If this is what moral
impermissibility is, one wonders how there can be a category of non-rights-based
arguments for the moral impermissibility of abortion to discuss in the closing chapter
of the book.) In that case, Boonin owes us an account of why moral impermissibility,
as a specific kind of wrong involving the violation of someone's moral rights, is
always, as he puts it, “qualitatively stronger” than other kinds of wrong. That is,
Boonin owes us an account as to why the duties that are neither based on or
correlatives of other people's rights can never rise to the same level of importance or
seriousness as those that are.
Given Boonin's analysis of moral permissibility, it is clear why most of the book is
devoted to the discussion of whether abortion violates anyone's rights. That discussion
comes in two stages. First, there is the discussion of the all-too-familiar question,
whether the fetus has the right to life (Chs. 2 and 3). Then the discussion proceeds to
consider the question, whether such a right, if it exists, is violated by an abortion
(Ch.4). If Boonin can establish, albeit negatively through the refutation of the
opponents' arguments, either 1) the fetus does not have the right to life, at least
through a good part of the pregnancy, or 2) an abortion does not violate the aborted
fetus's right to life even if it has such a right, then he has made the case for the moral
permissibility of abortion. Boonin attempts to establish both claims. But either one will
suffice as a case against the rights-based critics of abortion.
In Chs. 2 and 3, Boonin goes over a number of arguments that attempt to establish
that the fetus has the right to life and shows how they all fail. These arguments all
start with the assumption that you and I have the right to life and then attempt to
show that you and I are indeed related to the fetus in such way that it will be morally
inconsistent for us not to treat the fetus as also having the right to life. Ch. 2
examines nine arguments that try to show that the fetus has the right to life at
conception. The upshot of Boonin's discussion is this. It can't be the case that it is by
virtue of being members of the human species alone that you and I have the right to
life. Therefore, it must be some other properties that you and I share that explain why
we have the right to life. Whatever other properties you and I actually share with the
fetus either cannot explain why you and I have the right to life or cannot rule out
sperms and eggs as also having the right to life. Therefore, if the fetus has the right
to life at conception, then it must be due to the fact that it will come to possess later
on the relevant properties you and I already possess.
The argument Boonin considers to be the strongest in this regard is Don Marquis's
future-like-ours argument. But in Boonin's view, this argument ultimately fails to show
that the fetus has the right to life at conception. Even though there is no denying that
a fetus at conception has a future-like-ours, another necessary ingredient is missing,
namely, that the fetus values such a future. Boonin thinks we cannot attribute any
desire in any sense to a being unless it has some actual desires. The earliest we can
attribute any actual desire to the fetus is by the 25th week of gestation. That is when
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the fetus starts having organized cortical brain activity, according to Boonin's
empirical argument— well after more than 99% of the abortions in the United States
has been performed. This organized cortical brain activity criterion is what Boonin
endorses in Ch. 3 after he considers and rejects several other postconception
criteria—criteria such as implantation, fetal movement, and initial brain activity—as
candidates for the criterion for the right to life.
In Ch. 4, which takes up almost half of the book, Boonin enters the second stage of
his discussion, which is to show that abortion does not violate a fetus's right to life
even if it has such a right. Here Boonin invokes Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous
argument in defense of abortion that appeals to an imaginary situation as an analogy.
In this imaginary situation, a person wakes up one morning and finds herself, without
her consent, connected intravenously to a famous violinist. The violinist, as the story
goes, will need this arrangement for nine months in order to live. Like the person who
does not violate the violinist's right to life by disconnecting herself from the violinist, a
mother who aborts a fetus also does not violate the fetus's right to life. Boonin labels
this argument “the good Samaritan argument” to highlight the idea that one (the
fetus) does not have the right to assistance from someone else (the mother) if the
cost for that person to provide such assistance (the burden of carrying the pregnancy
to term) is great.
Not surprisingly, many objections to the good Samaritan argument are devoted to
identifying some moral disanalogy between the case of the violinist and abortion.
There are two kinds of disanalogy proposed. The first kind focuses on the following
difference: the person who finds herself connected to the violinist has not done
anything voluntarily to bring about that situation whereas the mother, in non-rape
cases, voluntarily participates in a sexual intercourse that results in the pregnancy.
The second kind focuses on the difference between the nature of the act of
disconnecting from the violinist and the nature of the act of aborting the fetus (letting
die vs. killing and intending vs. foreseeing death, for example). Presumably this
second kind of disanalogy does not distinguish between rape cases and non-rape
cases. Boonin discusses both kinds of disanalogy.
One objection, among the sixteen that Boonin considers, stands out, in my view, as
the most promising. This is the one Boonin calls, “the responsibility objection.” It
appeals to a disanalogy of the first kind. According to this objection, the mother is
responsible for the existence of the fetus and its being in a state of need if the
pregnancy is the result of a voluntary sexual intercourse, whereas the person attached
to the violinist is responsible for neither his existence nor his being in a state of need.
Therefore, from the fact that the violinist does not have his right violated if he gets
disconnected, it does not follow that the fetus does not have its right violated if it gets
aborted. Boonin's reply is that one needs to distinguish between being responsible for
another person's existence and being responsible for her state, given that she already
exists (169). The mother is at best responsible for the existence of the fetus, but not
responsible for the fact that the fetus cannot survive outside her womb, given that it
now exists. The thought here is that the mother does not have the option of bringing
into existence a fetus without its being in a condition of having certain needs which
only she can satisfy. Her situation is therefore different from that of a person who,
through a voluntary act, creates a dependency of another existing person on her.
One would think that it makes a difference to the mother's obligation towards the
fetus whether she has engaged in the sexual intercourse voluntarily without the use of
contraception while foreseeing the possibility (or even the likelihood) of getting
pregnant in doing so. Boonin is unmoved by such consideration. He writes, “If the
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good samaritan argument is successful in rape cases, then it is successful in nonrape

cases as well, including cases of voluntary intercourse in which contraception is not
used” (188). This sounds right to me if we concentrate on the right of the fetus to life
or its right to aid. Why should it matter to the fetus's rights how it comes into
existence? Why should a fetus that is conceived in a rape have fewer rights than a
fetus whose parents engage in the intercourse voluntarily but do not care to use
contraception? This indicates to me that those who want to argue for the disanalogy
between the violinist case and abortion in non-rape cases cannot rely on a rights-
based approach. They had better look elsewhere for the source of the special
obligation of the mother (and perhaps even the father) towards the fetus in non-rape
cases to make a case for the moral impermissibility of abortion in such cases. Nor can
we simply assume that such a non-rights-based approach will be unsuccessful without
begging the question (that the kind of moral reason against doing something that
does not involve the violation of rights can never be conclusive).
Boonin seems to me to have come quite close to doing just that in his rejection of the
pro-life feminist argument later in the book. This is the kind of argument that is based
on an ethics of care inspired by Carol Gilligan's famous book, In a Different Voice.
From that kind of ethics, Boonin writes, “It follows that a woman who has an abortion
acts uncaringly, and that a feminist is entitled to criticize her morally on these
grounds. But it does not follow that a feminist should conclude that a woman who has
an abortion does something that is morally impermissible. Many acts that are
criticizable as uncaring are nonetheless morally permissible.” (303) Perhaps more
needs to be said here about why the moral reasons against abortion that stem from
the value of caring can never be conclusive. Regardless, the pro-life feminist's appeal
to the value of caring to make an argument against abortion is problematic on other
grounds. For one, it is not clear that abortion is never a caring response to an
unwanted pregnancy.
The discussion of the pro-life feminist argument is part of the final chapter of Boonin's
book that deals with non-rights-based arguments for the moral impermissibility of
abortion. This is also the shortest among the chapters that discuss the specific
arguments against abortion. This is simply a reflection of how fixated on rights the
debate on the morality of abortion has been – a holdover perhaps from the legal
debate that is rightly focused on rights.
One problem I have with the book as a whole is its preoccupation with showing that
the arguments of the critics of abortion can be defeated on their own grounds. It is
understandable that given the contentious nature of the subject, Boonin's defense of
abortion would employ such a strategy in order to make a more effective contribution
to the debate. But this also makes Boonin's defense of abortion only as good as those
premises that the critics can or do already accept. If our interest is not only in
engaging the critics of abortion, but also in knowing the truth of the matter, then
these premises themselves will also need to be examined. As in the Socratic practice
of elenchus, Boonin's refutation of the arguments of the critics of abortion on grounds
they accept does not by itself establish knowledge about the matter.
2003.04.12
Rosalyn Diprose
Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas
Diprose, Rosalyn, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and
Levinas, SUNY, 2002, 227pp, $20.95 (pbk), ISBN 0791453219.
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Reviewed by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, University of Notre Dame
In contrast to the influential poststructuralist resuscitation of the notions of gift and

welcome, feminist philosophers and writers tend to be rather suspicious that the
“virtue” of generosity, even in its postmodern reincarnation, remains in complicity
with violence, oppression, and the subordination of women. It is not by accident, for
instance, that Virginia Woolf famously portrays a refusal of the violent demand of
generosity as the condition of the possibility of women's creativity. As Lily Briscoe, the
figure of the feminist painter in To the Lighthouse, observes with anger, “that man,
she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave, that man took. She, on the other
hand, would be forced to give . . . . You shan't touch your canvas, he seemed to say,
bearing down on her, till you've given what I want of you” (149-150). Presenting its
complex arguments with an enviable clarity and eloquence, Diprose's Corporeal
Generosity not only shares Woolf's unease but also in fact provides a brilliant
diagnosis of the complicity between generosity, domination and gender inequality.
Indeed, the main question the book poses pertains to the relations between
generosity, power, and social justice. The book rightly criticizes both the traditional
philosophical understanding of generosity as a moral virtue and the poststructuralist
theories of the gift precisely for their failure to investigate the unequal distributions of
the social benefits, labor, costs, and the cultural capital of generosity. One of the
effects of such an unequal distribution lies in the extortion of the unacknowledged and
devalued “gifts” from disempowered social groups, and in the systematic forgetting of
these contributions. As Diprose puts it, “women seem to be incapable of giving
anything except that which already belongs to someone else or that which must be
extracted by force” (56).
For Diprose, the unequal valuation of the gift in turn implies unequal social valuation
of embodiment. By examining how privileged bodies acquire social value through the
appropriation of the gifts of others, Diprose argues that the extortion and forgetting of
the gift takes place through the social regulation of gender and cultural differences.
Diprose's account of what might be called the politics of generosity, its genealogy and
normalizing effects, leads her to contest two predominant models of generosity: one
based on the contractual exchange of gifts, the other, on moral virtue guided by
rational deliberation. For Diprose, these models are intimately interconnected in so far
as they both presuppose the possession of private property, the sovereignty of the
isolated subject, whose identity is constituted prior to the act of giving, and the
contractual exchange in complicity with commodification. This genealogical critique of
what we might call “restrictive” contractual economy of generosity is informed by
Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of the sacrificial, destructive character of female
generosity born out of women's political and economic subordination (Diprose, 85), by
Nietzsche's critique of the creditor/debtor relation, and by the post-Foucauldian
analysis of disciplinary power. By drawing on the Nietzschean critique of the
normalizing, disciplinary function of the creditor/debtor relation presupposed by the
contractual character of restrictive generosity, Diprose argues that power not only
regulates the circulation of the gift, but also constitutes its value and the identities of
its givers/recipients. This kind of genealogical critique of the politics of generosity
informs, for instance, the brilliant analysis in the second chapter of the contradictions
inherent in the legal, political, and moral regulation of the exchange of body parts--
cells, blood, organs, semen--practiced by modern medicine.
Yet, the critical genealogy of the relation between generosity and power, though
crucial for feminist politics, is not the most original contribution of the book to
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contemporary philosophical discussions of ethics and politics. Although the book is all
too aware that the discourse of generosity can support conservative politics, it
nonetheless assumes the “fine risk,” in the Levinasian sense of the word, of
elaborating an alternative understanding of generosity as the possibility of social
justice and transformation. In contrast to the individualistic economy of exchange, this
alternative model posits generosity as a pre-reflective, non-volitional openness to the
other—an openness that precedes and enables the formation of the subject and social
relations. As Diprose puts it, “it is an openness to others that not only precedes and
establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness.
Primordially, generosity is not the expenditure of one's possession but the
dispossession of oneself, the being-given to others that undercuts any self-contained
ego” (4). As a pre-reflective openness, generosity is fundamentally intertwined with
sensibility and corporeality in the sense that it both is registered on the level of
affectivity and informs the constitution of the bodily identity. Although this productive,
corporeal generosity does not operate outside of normative power, it nonetheless
“precedes and exceeds its terms” and, in so doing, opens it to transformation (44).
Diprose's model of corporeal generosity is both indebted to Derrida's account of the
aporias of gift and to Levinas's ethical welcome of alterity, and, at the same time,
differs from their theories in fundamental ways. What is important for Diprose in
Derrida's work is his critique of the reciprocal relations of exchange and his emphasis
on the aporetic constitutive function of the gift, which both enables and disrupts the
economy of exchange and the formation of identity. The Levinasian inspiration of the
whole project is readily apparent in its emphasis on generosity as a pre-reflective
ethical openness to alterity. Yet, despite this indebtedness, it is the differences from
Derrida and Levinas that foreground the importance and originality of Diprose's theory
of generosity. As I have already mentioned, Diprose is far more concerned with the
genealogical critique of the politics of generosity, its relation to gender domination,
and social justice. Furthermore, her account stresses a fundamental link between
generosity, affect, eroticism and corporeality, a link which she develops through her
critical engagements with Nietzsche, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir and Butler.
And finally, in fundamental disagreement with Levinas's position, Diprose contests the
rigid separation between ethics and ontology. In fact, the ambition of the book is to
work out a new ontology of generosity, which would foreground its constitutive role in
the emergence of social, embodied subjectivity. Based on the primordial pre-reflective
giving of corporeality registered on the level of sensibility, the ontology of the gift
becomes the very model of the formation of social identities and differences. It is
precisely the absence of such an ontology of intercorporeal giving, Diprose argues,
that leads not only to the reductive interpretations of generosity in terms of the
contractual model of the exchange of private property—an exchange that is separate
from the identity of the subject—but also to the lack of sufficient analysis of social
domination, which operates through the commodification of the gift. By contrast, the
reinscription of generosity within an ontology of intercorporeality “grounds a
passionate subjectivity that aims for a justice that is not here yet” (14). It is precisely
this claim that the model of corporeal generosity requires not only a new account of
ethics but also of ontology and politics that constitutes the most ambitious and
original contribution of the book.
Diprose develops an ontology of corporeal generosity in the first part of the book,
primarily through the negotiation between Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty's
philosophies. She begins with Nietzsche's analysis of generosity as both the model of
self-production and an alternative to the creditor/debtor relations and mnemotechnics
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of pain they imply. By focusing on the contradictory role of femininity in the

Nietzschean account of the masculine self-production, Diprose stresses the
intersubjective and intercorporeal aspects of generosity. By contesting the
individualistic undertones of Nietzsche's philosophy, Diprose argues that self-
production and self-overcoming are primarily intercorporeal events taking place
“through the other's proximity and within a social milieu” (11): Such events rely on
“the other's generosity (particularly a woman's giving of herself), a generosity that is
denied to the other's detriment” (11).
As a counter to Nietzschean individualism and his ambivalence about indebtedness to
the other, Diprose turns to Merleau-Ponty's account of the pre-reflective intertwining
of the flesh, in order to develop further a notion of bodily identity that is not individual
but fundamentally intersubjective (70). What she reinterprets in terms of generosity is
Merleau-Ponty's claim that the becoming of the subject for oneself depends on being
with other lived bodies. By functioning as a “mirror,” the other's body gives the
incipient subject a model of lived corporeality: “I live my body outside of myself
through the mirror space of the other's body” (89). The subject thus becomes aware
of its difference through the look and the touch of the other. Because the
differentiation of lived corporeality takes place in relation to the other's body, this
relational bodily identity is never closed but fundamentally ambiguous, escaping the
subject/object distinction. By emphasizing the function of giving in this intersubjective
constitution of corporeality, Diprose argues that the ambiguity of bodily existence
cannot be interpreted, as sometimes the Lacanian accounts of the mirror stage tend
to do, as the alienation of the subject in the other, but as the productive opening of
the new possibilities of existence. Ultimately, for Diprose this model of intercorporeal
generosity implies a new concept of freedom and its limitation, both of which are
based on the capacity—or what Merleau-Ponty calls a “tolerance”—to give and receive
corporeality from the other (54-55). Consequently, the projects of bodily becomings
are both enabled and limited by what Merleau-Ponty calls the “sedimentation” of the
intersubjective exchanges and the institutional settings in which they occur.
This ontology of corporeal generosity allows Diprose both to acknowledge the
importance of and to complicate Judith Butler's model of gender performativity. By
underscoring the formation of gendered bodies through the regulated repetition of
socially prescribed acts, Butler's theory of performativity, Diprose points out, not only
accounts for the cultural production of gender norms but also challenges the
foundational idea of the subject in the legal and political theories of modernity—
namely, the idea of the subject remaining unchanged by her act and thus held
accountable for those acts. Nonetheless, despite its seminal importance for feminist
philosophy and politics, Butler's work presents for Diprose two limitations: first, it fails
to account for the role of the other in the subversion of the gender norms and in so
doing becomes vulnerable to charges of individualism; second, it ignores the limits of
subversion posed by the corporeal history of the subject, shaped by its sedimented,
habitual ways of being in the social world. Diprose proposes a similar critique of
Butler's diagnosis of the relation between power and affect: even though her account
of gender melancholia is not individualistic, Butler “misses too much . . . about the
dynamics of affective and social life” (97). As Diprose rightly points out, “for the most
part, there are only two terms in Butler's account”: the law and the performing body,
which in its singularity disrupts its normative identity through the disjunctive
repetition (68). By contrast, Diprose stresses the fact that the performative
subversion of gender identity occurs not just through the disjunctions inherent in
repetition but through the opening to the other's body: “It is because bodies are open
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onto others, rather than being distinct, that we can act, have an identity, and remain
open to change” (69). It is through the ambiguous relation to the body of the other
that we can disrupt the sedimented bodily habits and open new modalities of being
(72).
Because of the strong emphasis on the intersubjective and the social dynamics of
affect, power, and giving, it is hardly surprising that the last part of the book is
focused directly on the relation between corporeal generosity and formation of
community. Emerging out of lengthy meditation on the political significance of
Levinas's ethical responsibility to the other, the main claim here is that generosity
born out of corporeal relation to alterity “generates rather than closes off sexual,
cultural, and stylistic differences” (13) in social life. Radically opposed to the defensive
investments in cultural sameness, Diprose's account of the community formation
underscores the ethical and political significance of “a generous response to cultural
difference.” Diprose powerfully demonstrates the importance of such a politics in
chapter 8, “Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization,” devoted to the analysis of
the roles of testimony and apology in the decolonization and reconciliation processes.
More specifically, Diprose analyzes the cultural and ethical role of the testimonies
about the assimilation policies of European colonialism in Australia that encouraged
the removal of indigenous children from their communities. It is in the context of
Australian responses to the crimes of cultural genocide that she stages a confrontation
between the Nietzschean critique of universal truth, a critique that pinpoints the lie
about cultural difference in the project of colonialism, and the Levinasian notion of
unconditional apology, which foregrounds the subject's exposure to the accusation of
the other. Prompted by historical and political urgency, such a provocative
confrontation between Levinas and Nietzsche, and their respective critiques of
power/knowledge and generosity, leads to a productive reinterpretation and extension
of their thinking that complicates for instance the distinction between ethical alterity
and cultural difference.
Ultimately, the book both elaborates and performs a generous modality of
philosophical thinking, which creates new concepts and exceeds its own limits by
welcoming the disorienting alterity of the other. Seen in this perspective, the project
of feminist philosophy for Diprose is not merely the necessary critique of the gender
bias in the philosophical tradition and the elaboration of alternative structures of
female subjectivity from a feminist point of view but also a transformative critical
thinking “through the affective field of the other” (143). In other words, in the context
of feminism Diprose performs a difficult shift from a methodology based on the
autonomous feminist “standpoint” (from a philosophy “in a different voice,” so to
speak) to a philosophy open “to the teaching of the other, including the teaching of
feminism” (142).
The only regret I have about this remarkable project is that Diprose does not pursue
further the implied critique of the capitalist relations of production and exchange.
From her book we get a clear sense of the interventions corporeal generosity can
make in the areas of cultural politics, social justice, and philosophical thinking. The
questions I was left with were about the capitalist economy and economic injustice: in
what sense can corporeal generosity intervene in these social relations? Is the critique
of liberalism and the contractual notion of generosity a sufficient response to this
problem? These questions notwithstanding, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with
Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas makes a significant contribution to
contemporary discussion of ethics, politics, and embodiment in continental philosophy,
feminist theory, and cultural studies. By contesting liberal individualism and the
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separation between ethics and politics, it offers a powerful discourse of corporeal

generosity that preserves utopian aspirations of social justice without being idealist.
2003.04.13
Thomas Aquinas
The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89
Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89,
translated by Robert Pasnau, Hackett, 2002, 434pp, $14.95 (pbk), ISBN 0872206130.
Reviewed by Eileen Sweeney, Boston College
This book offers a new translation of questions 75-89 of the first part of the Summa
Theologiae. The translation is based on the Leonine edition of the text, to which
emendations have been made. The text also includes a short introduction and fairly
extensive commentary (about 200 pages, compared to 220 pages of translated text).
There are eight appendices, which are translations of passages from other works of
Aquinas which are important for the issues considered in questions 75-89. Several of
these are passages from Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle, especially De Anima;
there are also passages from a crucial discussion of free choice in the Quaestiones
Disputatae de Malo, and from a couple of biblical commentaries.
The book is clearly meant for undergraduate students. There is, for example a brief
“Guide to Sources,” which gives the dates and one sentence descriptions of the major
works and figures cited by Aquinas. The introduction assumes no knowledge of
Aquinas's life or work and gives a very basic introduction to both. By giving the
introduction, commentary, and other supplementary materials, the author is clearly
seeking is make it worthwhile for teachers and students to purchase this volume when
the most widely used translation, that of the Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (Benzinger Brothers), is no longer under copyright and is available at a
number of different web sites. The question is whether he succeeds. I think the
answer is “yes” but with some qualifications.
I see the main value of the book in its commentary for introductory students rather
than the translation itself. While it is true that the Leonine edition on which the
Benzinger Brothers translation is based has many flaws, I don't find the changes
Pasnau makes based on consultation of other manuscripts to be that significant,
especially for beginning students. Further, the Dominican Fathers' translation is quite
clear and not terribly old fashioned or jargon-filled. Pasnau's translation in the end is
not that different. There is a reason why this is so: Aquinas's Latin is very dry,
predictable, technical and clear. Hence, there aren't that many significant choices to
be made by the translator, and Pasnau does not (and this is to his credit) make huge
or systematic changes to the more standard translation of technical terms. He does
have some helpful comments on technical terms (such as scientia, substantia,
subsistens, intelligere, etc.) in the commentary portion.
There are some exceptions to this general characterization. For example, Pasnau
translates liberum arbitrium as “free decision” rather than the more traditional “free
choice.” He explains why he doesn't use “free will.” (p. 318) Quite rightly, Pasnau
notes that there is in Aquinas's notion of “liberum arbitrium” an important cognitive
element not captured by “free will” as a translation. What is puzzling is that there is
no explanation of why he rejected the more usual “free choice” as a translation.
Further, in the midst of the explanation, Pasnau wrongly characterizes the relationship
between will (voluntas) and liberum arbitrium. For he claims that question 83 moves
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toward the conclusion that “free decision” is identical to the will. Hence, ultimately
“free decision” could be translated as “free will” but to do that in the early articles
would be, he argues, to presuppose that conclusion. This account obscures the very
important distinction between will and free choice or decision in Aquinas. While both
are acts of the same power, they are distinct acts. Will is the simple appetite for the
end which is desired for its own sake; free choice is about the means to that end, not
the end. We have free choice about the means but not about the end. Thus free
choice and will are not identical for Aquinas. The problem here is not so much with the
translation of “liberum arbitrium” as “free decision” but the explanation of that
translation. The explanation is at least misleading, especially for students who are
expecting to find in Aquinas a notion of “free will,” which is not there.
Another exception is the translation of “cognoscere” as “cognize” instead of “know.”
No explanation of this choice is given where the term is used, though under the
explanation of intelligere Pasnau refers the reader to appendix five, a translation from
Aquinas's commentary on the Gospel of John. This passage contrasts the act of
understanding (intelligere) and cognizing (cogitatio). Another example is the
translation of “habitus” as “disposition.” In this case the choice of “disposition” over
“habit” doesn't seem to accomplish much and might be confusing. It should be clear
that Aquinas is using the Aristotelian notion of “habit,” which the translation of it as
“disposition” obscures (unless the reader has read a translation of Aristotle that makes
the same choice). Moreover, later in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas explicitly makes
a distinction between habitus and dispositio (I-II q. 49, a. 2, ad 3). Habitus is a
disposition that is not easily lost. Some of the changes Pasnau makes are valuable,
however. For example, Pasnau renders passio as “passive alteration” rather than
simply “passion.” This translation captures the sense of passio that beginning students
might miss, given the modern sense of “passion.” Pasnau also translates “potentia” as
“capacity,” which is more helpful to the beginning students than “power” because it
clears up the ambiguity in the Latin term “potentia.” Pasnau's commentary explains
his choice and makes clear what is gained and lost by it.
In many cases, Pasnau's explanations of technical terms in his commentary are just
citations of Aquinas's own explanations of terms elsewhere in the text. This is accurate
and helpful, but some terms need more clarification. One example is “species,”
especially since this word is simply transferred from the Latin into English. Pasnau
might have noted its connection to the Greek term eidos and the ways in which it is
and is not like the more modern notions of idea or concept. Sometimes Pasnau shifts
a traditional translation in order to correct a common misapprehension. Once again,
this is often helpful, but sometimes though the clarification Pasnau adds in the
commentary is quite good and accurate, the translation itself does not, as he seems to
claim, make his point for him. For example, he translates the principle usually
rendered “nature does nothing in vain” as “a natural desire cannot be pointless.” (p.
237) He argues that the traditional interpretation can be misunderstood as the claim
that nature never gives a desire that cannot be fulfilled. Though I agree that what it
means is that “nature always works for some purpose,” I don't see why Pasnau's
translation obviates the misreading more than the older translation. Overall, I think a
glossary of technical terms would have been a significant improvement to the text,
especially if it included more than citations of Aquinas's definitions or explanations of
technical terms.
The commentary does much more, however, than explain technical terms and
scholastic principles. Pasnau also attempts to give brief explanatory sketches of the
philosophical positions and issues Aquinas is debating. And again the majority of this
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material is helpful. For example, Pasnau gives a basic account of the views of human
nature that Aquinas is arguing against, those of Averroes, Plato and the view that the
soul has a multiplicity of forms. However, to explain the appeal of Averroes, Pasnau
cites a passage from Emerson which seems to endorse some kind of monopsychism.
(p. 245) While the passage is interesting, it is less effective than explaining some of
the apparent grounds for such a position. Aquinas gives some of these grounds, of
course, in the objections preceding his reply (1a q. 76, a. 2, obj. 1-5). Not all of these
are convincing to contemporary readers, but there are several that point to the
strongest grounds: the universality and commonality of knowledge which might be
explained by a single source. In general, the commentary would be improved by using
Aquinas' own objections as a way of showing the nature of each issue and its
significance.
Pasnau also includes , again in a way that is helpful for beginning students,
explanations of Aristotelian text and principles which Aquinas draws on. He also
explains more obscure technical distinctions, for example, the difference between two
different types of per se predication. (p. 249) Pasnau is also refreshingly direct in
questioning dubious claims or arguments Aquinas makes when he does not think they
can be defended. So, for example, he calls Aquinas's claim (originally found in
Aristotle) that “those with soft flesh are mentally well fit” preposterous (p. 254), and
he also notes the difficulty of figuring out what Aquinas and Aristotle mean by the
claim that “the intellect cannot be false.” The commentary avoids taking for granted
the clarity or truth of Aquinas's claims and principles, and gives admirably brief and
clear explanations of the most likely and strongest arguments in their favor.
Pasnau states at the outset that he has “made strenuous efforts to avoid tendentious
remarks that reflect [his] own idiosyncratic readings of the text.” Instead his aim is
“to point out areas of controversy and uncertainty, without [himself] taking a stand on
the appropriate interpretation.” (p. xxi). Pasnau works hard to keep this promise. The
commentary points the reader to secondary literature on controversial issues or in
cases where there is a long and complicated medieval controversy to which Aquinas is
responding. In such contexts, Pasnau always gives multiple references, often explicitly
noting that those sources take opposing views. More importantly, Pasnau does not
take a view on issues he takes to be unsettled. For example, he does not say whether
or in what sense Aquinas thinks of sensation as merely material alteration, nor
whether or in what sense Aquinas might be a kind of dualist (though not a
“substance-dualist” like Descartes). On the other hand, there is a deeper sense in
which the commentary puts forward a certain way of reading Aquinas, and a certain
way of constructing the philosophical issues with which it is concerned. Pasnau's style
of explanation and references to secondary literature are generally in the analytic
tradition. By this I mean two things. First, I mean that the way Pasnau glosses the
issues and arguments Aquinas puts forward uses the method of close linguistic and
logical analysis that are hallmarks of philosophers working in the analytic style.
Second, I mean that the issues highlighted in the commentary are those that would
tend to put Aquinas in dialogue with an analytic philosophy of mind. Both of these
perspectives have great advantages because they don't, as earlier commentaries
have, simply take for granted the positions and principles Aquinas stakes out, nor do
they, as for example Gilson's reading of Aquinas's epistemology does, construe
Aquinas as a response to Descartes and Kant. The criticism I have of Pasnau's
commentary is not so much that it has a perspective but that he takes his reading to
be neutral, when it is not.
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Also, perhaps out of a desire to make Aquinas appear “philosophical” to contemporary

readers, the commentary tends to gloss over theological and Neo-platonic elements of
the text. For example, the commentary does not in any way address the role of
scripture in the text. Most beginning students assume that Aquinas is using scripture
to prove the points he wants to make or at least that he allows scripture to dictate the
positions he ultimately defends. Neither are the case, but the role it does play is
surely larger than window dressing, which is what Pasnau's non-consideration of it
implies. The most telling comment comes during Pasnau's discussion of Aquinas's
consideration of the knowledge of the separated soul, where he asserts that this part
of the Summa theologiae, in contrast to Part III (what he thinks about Part II is
unclear) “relies only on principles that can be rationally defended outside a specifically
Christian framework.” (p. 369) The implication is that we may dispense with the
theological elements of the text and may safely consider it as “philosophy” in the
modern sense.
Where I find the commentary least helpful is in guiding students through what the
author acknowledges is a difficult philosophical genre. The brief introduction gives the
basic structure of the abbreviated form of the disputed question Aquinas uses here.
But apart from giving some different strategies for reading the articles out of order as
a way of making Aquinas's views a little easier to discern, Pasnau offers no more
explanation. Within the commentary, Pasnau often precedes his discussion of each
article with a “yes” or “no” in response to the question posed by that article. This may
help beginning students trying to get a beginning foothold in that article, but it is a
little like citing the conclusions of Socrates' arguments rather than paying attention to
how he gets there. Both in the introduction and the commentary Pasnau attempts to
get around and minimize the disadvantages of the form rather than show its
philosophical value and interest.
In the end, I would recommend use of the book in courses on philosophical
anthropology or epistemology. The commentary is certainly more helpful than
anything else available (or even out of print) for beginning students. The form and
language of the Summa theologiae is so foreign to contemporary students and
teachers, and this edition goes a long way toward making both accessible. While I
might have wished for an access that brought contemporary students closer to
Aquinas's language and methods rather than an exegesis that brings Aquinas closer to
contemporary ways and means of approaching these issues, Pasnau makes an
admirable and often successful attempt to accomplish the latter.
2003.05.01
Beatrice Han
Foucault's Critical Project
Han, Beatrice, Foucault's Critical Project, translated by Edward Pile, Stanford
Reviewed by Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame
In this impressive and provocative book, Béatrice Han argues that Foucault, for all his
express opposition to phenomenology and other forms of transcendental thought,
never really got beyond its standpoint. Her case is based on a series of detailed and
challenging readings of key methodological passages in Foucault's writings, from his
thesis on Kant's Anthropology (where Han provides the worthy service of
summarizing, with extensive quotations, this unpublished text) through his final work
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on the history of ancient sexuality. Although, as will be apparent, I find her case
unconvincing, there is much to be learned from the details of her thorough and
informed analysis. The translation of the book, from the French original, L'ontologie
manquée de Michel Foucault (Jérôme Millon, 1998), is very well done.
According to Han, all of Foucault's work can be read as the (failed) effort to revive the
project of transcendental philosophy: to find the conditions of possibility for
experience. Of course, Foucault approaches this problem in a distinctively historical
manner, and so Han's discussion focuses on what he calls the “historical a priori”. This
notion first appears in the context of Foucault's archaeology of knowledge. As Han
points out, even Husserl seeks an historical a priori (e.g., in The Origins of Geometry),
but for Husserl this turns out to be “suprahistorical, in the sense that it exists
essentially to guarantee the possibility of recovering . . . the primary evidences” that
exist “beyond the sedimentations of history and tradition”. Foucault, on the contrary,
“proposes the paradoxical hypothesis of an . priori fully given in history” (4).
Nonetheless, Han insists that “despite appearances, archaeology is profoundly
connected to phenomenology in that it attempts to find a solution to the same
problem (providing a new version of the transcendental)” (5).
Why, on Han's view, does Foucault's archaeology fall back into the transcendentalism
it is trying to avoid? As she notes, “Foucault hardly ever troubles himself to give the
historical a priori clear theoretical definition” (38), but she pursues the formulations
(implicit and explicit) present in his archaeological writings, from The Birth of the
Clinic through The Archaeology of Knowledge, and tries to demonstrate the theoretical
inadequacy of each. In The Birth of the Clinic, for example, Foucault defines the
historical a priori as the “originary distribution of the visible and the invisible insofar as
it is linked with the division between what can be stated and what remains unsaid”
(BC, xi). Han notes that Foucault's language here seems to refer to Merleau-Ponty,
which suggests that “archaeology could therefore be interpreted, from the foundations
laid out by The Phenomenology of Perception, as an attempt to identify historical
variations of the structures of perception in a given domain” (49). But she further
notes that the suggestion founders on the fact that Foucault further characterizes the
historical a priori as a “deep space, anterior to all perceptions and governing them
from afar” (BC, 5), which soundly rejects Merleau-Ponty's central assertion of the
primacy of perception. From this she concludes that “The Birth of the Clinic finds itself
without any real theoretical support” (50).
Han sees the The Order of Things as implicitly offering an apparently quite different
characterization of the historical a priori that “can be textually reconstructed as an
implicit relation between ‘words' and ‘things', or, as Foucault says, between 'language'
and 'being'“(50). This, Han maintains, presupposes a “traditional metaphysics” (54),
through its postulation of things independent of language, that is inconsistent with the
strict nominalism to which Foucault tries to adhere in his subsequent work. She also
notes that the book's Preface hints at a Heideggerian alternative to this metaphysics,
based on an identification of Being as that which “orders” things. But, Han argues,
Foucault is in no position to follow this Heideggerian path, since, first, order itself
presupposes a certain understanding of Being and, second, Foucault's
characterizations of order vacillate between an objective understanding of it that
implies a substantiality inconsistent with Heidegger's Being and a subjective
understanding that fall back into the humanism and both Heidegger and Foucault
reject.
Han is surely right that Foucault cannot consistently explicate his idea of a historical a
priori in terms of either Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology or of Heidegger's ontology.
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But to suggest that he is trying to do either of these is both to mistake his

methodological intent and to misread his rhetoric. The Birth of the Clinic and The
Order of Things are both primarily works of history, not philosophy in the traditional
sense. In them, Foucault is concerned with forging a new approach to historical
analysis but not with the meta-question of how to understand and justify this
approach philosophically. Accordingly, Han should not, as she does, find it “strange”
that “Foucault hardly ever troubles himself to give the historical a priori clear
theoretical definition” (38). Nor should she read so literally Foucault's casual
employment of various philosophical vocabularies (from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
among many others) to add suggestive allusions to his characterizations of his
historical project.
The Archaeology of Knowledge is, of course, an explicitly methodological treatise in
which Foucault does undertake to formulate clearly the key concepts of his
archaeology, including that of the historical a priori. Here, according to Han, he rejects
the “confused phenomenology of The Birth of the Clinic and the hidden metaphysics of
The Order of Things” and instead presents a “happy positivism” that “understands the
historical a priori as a purely empirical figure” (65). He defines the historical a priori
“as a principle of selection at work in the discursive field” (64). More fully, “among the
vast collection of possibilities offered by logic and grammar, the historical a priori has
the function of circumscribing a more restricted domain by defining the conditions of
possibility of statements in their character as ‘things actually said'” (64, citing The
Archaeology of Knowledge, 127, Han's italics). Han finds two major difficulties with
this definition. The first—earlier raised by Dreyfus and Rabinow—concerns the status
of the criteria whereby logically and grammatically possible statements are excluded
at the archaeological level of analysis. To be consistent, Foucault must hold that these
criteria correspond to merely descriptive regularities, for, if they were prescriptive
rules, they would have to be consciously followed by those who obey them. But
archaeology is precisely supposed to reveal the “unconscious” of knowledge. In fact,
however, in order to give the criteria causal power (so that they will not correspond to
merely accidental regularities), he must treat them as prescriptive. This, as Dreyfus
and Rabinow put it, results in the “strange notion of regularities which regulate
themselves”1 and, according to Han, lands Foucault in the contradictory position of
confusing the empirical with the transcendental—the very mistake for which, in The
Order of Things, he reproaches philosophical thought since Kant.
Han's second difficulty derives from the fact that Foucault in effect defines the
conditions for the reality of statements in terms of the rules that govern their use. If,
she argues, this is not an empty tautology, it leads to an infinite regress:
the definition . . . generates a regression in the order of conditions of possibility, since
one could only account for the conditions for the exercise of the enunciative function
[i.e., for the use of statements] by means of a “set of rules” which itself would require
another “set of rules” identical to the first (66).
It's hard to know what to make of this second objection. On the one hand, it would
seem to have force only given the gratuitous assumption that a given set of rules can
be understood only by giving another set of rules; on the other hand, even if we grant
this dubious point, Han says that, in this case, the “other” set of rules is in fact
“identical to the first”, which, if true, will hardly generate a regress.
The first objection has more substance, but it ultimately rests on a faulty formulation
of the description/prescription dichotomy. The objection assumes that, for a rule to
have prescriptive rather than merely descriptive force, it must be consciously
formulated and applied. But this is not so, even of the rules of logic and grammar. In
213
most cases, we are not aware of the logical and grammatical rules we are following.
Of course, given an adequate level of reflection, many such rules can and have been
formulated. But it seems very likely that such reflection is not always possible, given
the conceptual resources of a particular domain of discourse at a particular stage of its
historical development. Accordingly, it may well be that there are, at any given time,
rules governing our discourse that we are not even capable of formulating. Moreover,
it is not the case, as the objection assumes, that Foucault cannot allow for the
conscious awareness, at least in principle, of the archaeological rules that govern our
discourse. His position maintains only that these rules are typically unconscious, not
that they can under no circumstances be brought to consciousness.
Foucault's turn to genealogy, adumbrated in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de
France, The Order of Discourse, and fully developed in Discipline and Punish, goes
beyond archaeology by reformulating the historical a priori in terms of non-discursive
causal factors, in particular social power relations. Han thinks this move avoids the
difficulties she raised regarding the historical a priori of archaeology, and she applauds
Foucault's genealogical focus on truth (rather than mere discourse in itself) as well as
his intimate connection of knowledge with power via the notion of a “regime of truth”.
But, she maintains, his new approach brings with it transcendental problems parallel
to those that afflicted archaeology. One concerns the definition of truth, which
Foucault sometimes formulates as “that which the regime governs and allows us to
think” (141) and sometimes as “the set of rules according to which the true and false
are separated and specific effects attached to the true” (141, citing Power/Knowledge,
132). These two definitions, Han maintains, show Foucault trying to understand truth
as both constituting (i.e., as a set of independent rules specifying what is true in a
given regime) and constituted (i.e., itself specified as true by the regime's power
relations). Their inconsistency, she maintains, shows that he is still in the grip of the
dichotomy of the transcendental and the empirical. Similarly, she argues, Foucault's
understanding of power/knowledge vacillates between an “excessive essentialism”
that makes it “a metaphysical entity” that has the “quasi-transcendental function” of
determining all possible forms of knowledge (143) and an extreme nominalism that
reduces truth to nothing more than that the very regime of power that it is supposed
to constitute.
But even Han admits that these difficulties do not alter the fact that “the genealogical
reinterpretation of the historical a priori is one of the most fertile elements in
Foucault's work and that “genealogy itself turns out to be a powerful methodological
tool” (145). Therefore, at a minimum, her objections have force only if we agree with
her that genealogy requires a philosophical foundation. Why is such a foundation
necessary, when, as Han admits, even without it genealogy remains an effective
method of historical understanding? Insisting that Foucault provide the “theoretical
foundation which [genealogy] needs philosophically” (145) leads Han to give strong
philosophical weight to formulations that are more plausibly read as heuristic
suggestions of how, in certain contexts, we can fruitfully think of truth than as strict
philosophical definitions of the notion. Han simply assumes that Foucault must have a
transcendental project in mind.
At first glance, Han's presentation of Foucault as in the grip of the transcendental
problematic would seem most plausible for the final period of his work, in which he
added to the axes of knowledge (archaeology) and power (genealogy) that of the
individual subject, which “constitutes” itself in the context of the first two axes. But, of
course, merely bringing into the discussion the individuals who are the subjects of
knowledge and power hardly requires accepting a transcendental standpoint, which
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requires a very particular conception of the subject (that which Foucault denotes in
The Order of Things as “man”). Han, however, maintains that Foucault's subject is a
transcendental ego: “Foucault reactivates the perspective of a constitutive subjectivity
and understands the constitution of the self by means of the atemporal structure of
recognition” (187), a position that, as she notes, is obviously inconsistent with his
earlier work, both archaeological and genealogical.
But why does Han insist that Foucault makes such an uncharacteristic move? Simply
because he presents the subject as forming itself by a process of reflection and action,
as, for example, when he says that thought (that whereby the subject gives itself a
specific meaning) is “freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one
detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem”.2
On Han's reading, such passages imply that Foucault's subject is “autonomous” (172),
even in the radical sense of Sartrean existentialist humanism (169). She goes so far
as to claim that Foucault's “insistence on the importance of problematization and
recognition as voluntary and reflective activities leads him to envisage the relationship
to the body in a purely unilateral manner, as an action of the self on the self, where
the body only appears as material for transformation while consciousness seems to be
paradoxically reinstalled in the sovereign position that genealogy had criticized” (165).
This simply ignores the fact that freedom and reflection need not be read as the
technical terms of idealist philosophy but may refer to everyday features of human life
that are not radically autonomous but rather represent the small spark of subjectivity
in a context heavily constrained by the social system of power-knowledge. In his
books on ancient sexuality, Foucault of course often uses Platonic vocabulary, which
smacks of strong autonomy. Moreover, since the power-knowledge constraints of
ancient Greece and Rome are no longer relevant to us, he has little to say about
them. He is simply looking for modes of thinking about the self (e.g., in terms of an
aesthetics of existence) that might suggest strategies in our struggle with modern
disciplinary society. None of this provides any grounds for concluding that Foucault
has lapsed into transcendentalism.
Han's misreading of the late Foucault also derives from her difficulty in making sense
of the notion of experience he deploys. This is understandable, given her focus on the
brief and cryptic comments on experience in his Introduction to The Use of Pleasure.
But she unfortunately ignores Foucault's detailed discussion of experience in other
contexts; in particular, that of the philosophy of science. Here, among other things,
Foucault makes it clear that the individual freedom Han reads as existentialist
autonomy is rather rooted in the deviations (errors) of an organism acting in a strong
field of bio-social forces.3
Han has an enviable knowledge of Foucault's texts and offers a valuable survey of
what he has to say on the topic of transcendental philosophy. She also does a good
job of showing the difficulties that confront efforts to construct a Foucaultian version
of historicized transcendentalism. But her contention that these difficulties reflect
unresolvable tensions in Foucault's own project remains unpersuasive. Her insistence
on Foucault's transcendental project perhaps derives from her own conviction that
such a project is philosophically unavoidable—a conviction on which Foucault's work in
fact casts considerable doubt.
Endnotes
1. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 1983, 84.
2. Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1985, 388; cited,
165.
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3. See Michel Foucault, "Life: Experience and Science", in Paul Rabinow (ed.),
Essential Works of Foucault, Volume II, New York: The New Press, 1998, 465-78
216
2003.05.02
Thomas Reid
The Correspondence of Thomas Reid
Reid, Thomas, The Correspondence of Thomas Reid, ed. Paul Wood, Edinburgh
University Press, 2002, 356pp,#95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0748611630.
Reviewed by James A. Harris, St. Catherine's College, Oxford
The latest volume of the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid collects 103 letters from
Reid, twenty-one letters addressed to him, and seven letters which are neither by
Reid nor addressed to him, but which touch closely on aspects of his life or writings
and are likely to have been passed on to him in some shape or form. (One of these
seven is Hume's letter to Hugh Blair about Reid's Inquiry; another is from Lord
Deskford to William Cullen, describing Reid as “the fittest Man in the Kingdom” to
replace Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow (p. 32).) Thirty-four
of the letters from Reid, and nineteen of those to him, are previously unpublished. A
good number of the letters from Reid, having been included by Sir William Hamilton in
his edition of Reid's works, will already be familiar to students of the philosophy of
common sense, but it is nevertheless a great pleasure to encounter them again in Paul
Wood's beautifully edited collection. As Wood notes in a brief introduction to the
volume, Hamilton's idea of best editorial practice is very different from ours today:
Hamilton modernizes Reid's spelling, changes wordings, silently omits passages, and
conflates letters. Where possible, Wood has returned to the manuscripts. The result is
an exceedingly clean text of every extant letter from or to Reid. Explanatory and
textual notes for each letter are given at the end of the book and are always helpful. If
there is anything missing, it is short biographical sketches of Reid's correspondents.
This reader, at least, would have been aided by three or four sentences about, for
example, William Hunter, or Robert Adair, or La Blancherie.
As is to be expected, not every letter included in this collection could be said to shed
light on the character or development of Reid's thought. But several of the more
minor pieces have the virtue of giving the reader a flavour of Scottish university life in
the eighteenth century. Two letters written by Reid before his departure for Glasgow
in 1764 indicate how different were the arrangements for students at Aberdeen's two
colleges. Whereas at Marischal, in the increasingly wealthy and populous New Town,
students lived with relatives or in lodgings, in 1753 it was decided at King's to have all
students live and eat within the College. They were thus constantly under the eyes of
their teachers; and were “shut up within walls at nine at night” (p. 10). This was an
innovative scheme, but, according to Reid, it soon had beneficial effects “both upon
the morals and proficiency of our students” (p. 11). Letters written during the
Aberdeen period suggest that Reid's involvement in the running of King's was intimate
and energetic. At Glasgow, by contrast, Reid seems to have felt burdened by the
number of meetings he had to attend (“often five or six in a week” (p. 46)), and by
the “Intrigue and secret caballing” (p. 37) that went along with every academic
election. Complaints on Reid's part about how little time he has to pursue his personal
academic interests strike a decidedly familiar note (“We are here so busie reading
Lectures that we have no time to write” (p. 58)). Reid dwells upon the number of
students taking his classes (part, at least, of his income would have been directly
proportional to the quantity of students he could attract), does not forbear from
mentioning that his class is bigger than Smith's had been (p. 57), but notes that
Adam Ferguson's moral philosophy class at Edinburgh “is more than double of ours”
(p. 44). The academic economy was then very much a free market economy, though
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Glasgow could always rely on a supply of students from Ireland. Irishmen made up
about a third of the student body in the 1760s, and seem to have been a somewhat
disruptive element: “The most disagreable thing in the teaching part”, Reid writes in
1765, “is to have a great Number of stupid Irish teagues who attend classes for two or
three years to qualify them for teaching Schools of being dissenting teachers. I preach
to these as St Francis did to the fishes” (p. 45).
Despite all this, however, Reid had no difficulties admitting during his second year at
Glasgow that “the opportunities a man has of improving himself are much greater
than at Aberdeen” (p. 51). Many of Reid's letters prove what Paul Wood has for some
years been arguing to be the case: that mathematics and natural science were
absolutely central to Reid's intellectual life. Self-improvement for Reid seems to have
meant keeping up with the latest developments in natural philosophy—and, where
possible, carrying out the requisite experiments himself. “Chemistry seems to be the
only branch of Philosophy that can be said to be in a progressive State here” (p. 39),
Reid writes, and a series of letters to his friend David Skene sees him explaining “Dr
Blacks Theory of Fire”, which is to say, Joseph Black's theory of latent heat. (Black
had succeeded William Cullen as professor of medicine at Glasgow. In 1766 he took
up the chemistry chair at Edinburgh, an event that prompted Reid to lament that
“[o]ur Medical College has fallen off greatly this Session” (p. 58).) In one of the
earliest letters in this collection Reid describes “the Calculation of the Problem with
respect to the Earths Figure” (p. 4); and fifty years later he writes to John Robison
with detailed suggestions concerning Robison's paper “On the refraction of light in
passing through media that are themselves in motion”. Just before being elected to
the moral philosophy chair at Glasgow, Reid was asked by the university's professor of
mathematics, Robert Simson, to send comments on the second edition of his Elements
of Euclid. Reid reports that he “spent some labour more than a year ago”
endeavouring to prove the properties of right-angles from Simson's definition of such
angles (p. 33). More evidence of Reid's expertise in mathematics is provided by the
fact that the Aberdeen Town Council asked him in 1766 to help examine candidates
for the mathematics chair at Marischal College. Reid seems to have felt frustrated at
having to limit himself to teaching moral philosophy at Glasgow. He writes to Skene in
1770 that “the immaterial World has swallowed up all my thoughts since I came
here”, and describes this work as both “dreary” and “Solitary” (p. 63). The revolution
in moral philosophy and political economy engineered by Hume and Smith appears not
to have excited Reid much. “I have always thought Dr Smith's System of Sympathy
wrong”, he writes in a rare discussion of such matters; “It is indeed onely a
Refinement of the selfish System” (p. 104).
Reid writes about Robert Simson's edition of Euclid to William Ogilvie, complaining
that “it mortifies me not a little to find that in his [Simson's] Judgment the 11 or 12
Axiom upon which so great a part of the System hangs is neither self-evident nor does
admit of a demonstration in the strict sense”. “I am ashamed to tell you”, Reid
continues, “how much time I consumed long ago upon this Axiom, in order to find
Mathematical Evidence for what common sense does not permit any man to doubt” (p.
23). Such remarks tempt one to find a source of Reid's philosophy of common sense
in his deep engagement with mathematics. But the two epistolary exchanges of
greatest philosophical interest—with Kames and with James Gregory, in both cases on
the philosophy of action—suggest that it would be unwise to imagine that Reid's
philosophy of mind was in any significant sense the product of his work in natural
philosophy. Indeed, Reid insisted on the difference between the study of the mind and
the study of nature. In comments on a draft of the first volume of Dugald Stewart's
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Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Reid agrees with Stewart that “[t]he
Knowledge of the Mind may be said to borrow its principles from no other Science” (p.
212). In so far as we can learn about the powers of the mind from examining how it
operates when we set it to solving problems in the philosophy of body (and also when
we indulge in the “pleasures of Taste”), it may be said that the other sciences
illuminate the mind; but this is not to say that the substantive content of chemistry,
say, has any bearing at all on the analysis of mind. Reid has nothing but contempt for
the way in which Joseph Priestley mixes up physiological and psychological
investigations. Apparently not aware that Price and Priestley were friends, Reid mocks
Priestley in a letter to Price, asking “what light with regard to the powers of the Mind
is to be expected from a Man who has not yet Learned to distinguish Vibrations from
Ideas, nor Motion from Sensation” (p. 87). The letters to Kames and Gregory show
that what Reid took from natural philosophy to moral philosophy was a conception of
scientific method. A central question in Reid interpretation, and one that the letters to
Kames and Gregory provide significant help with, concerns how that method
determines characteristic features of Reid's philosophy of mind.
Like most Scottish philosophers of his day, Reid is keen to represent himself as a
disciple of Francis Bacon, as eschewing all “hypotheses”, and as grounding all of his
philosophizing in experience. What the letters to Kames and Gregory make particularly
clear is that, for Reid, a commitment to inductivism goes together with a renunciation
of the search for causes that Bacon himself had taken to be the work of the
philosopher. For Hume had shown that causes—that is, real, efficient causes—are not
part of our experience of the world. Experience tells us what the laws of nature are,
but laws, as Reid never tires of telling his correspondents, are not causes. This is why
no matter how regular the conjunctions might be between particular types of motives
and particular types of actions, it will always be unacceptable to say, as Hume and
Priestley do, that motives are the (physical, not efficient) causes of actions. The
Hume-Priestley claim, in fact, is that all actions are caused by motives. Reid sees this
as disproved by the fact that we are sometimes conscious of being able to act without
a motive, or, at least, without a determining motive—as when, for example, I choose
to take one coin from my pocket when I could have chosen several identical others. It
might seem natural to wonder whether there may not be unconscious determinants of
such a choice. Reid, though, points out that an unconscious motive is by definition
something that cannot be experienced, and so by definition something that the
Baconian philosopher will reject (pp. 232-3). Only one prepared to trade in
hypotheses could countenance the notion of an unconscious motive. The letters to
Kames and Gregory are included in the Hamilton edition of Reid, and are therefore
already well-known (though, as already mentioned, as presented by Wood they are
somewhat clearer and easier to read). Rather less so are the comments on Stewart's
Elements, quoted from above. Here, again, we see Reid's extreme form of
Baconianism place drastic limitations on acceptable theorizing about the mind. Reid
rejects Stewart's account of attention because it “is grounded upon the Hypothesis of
hidden trains of thinking of which we have no Remembrance next Moment, upon the
most attentive Reflection. This . . . seems to me a Hypothesis which admits neither of
proof nor of refutation” (p. 217). I find it mysterious why a philosopher who was
fascinated by the progress of natural philosophy restricted so severely our means of
finding out more about the human mind.
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2003.05.03
James Warren
Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia
Warren, James, Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, 241 pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521813697.
Reviewed by Tim O'Keefe, University of Minnesota, Morris
Epicurus’ debt to Democritus’ metaphysics is obvious. Even where Epicurus feels the
need to modify Democritus’ metaphysics because of its skeptical or fatalist
implications, he is working within Democritus’ general framework. The situation is
quite different in ethics. Ancient critics of Epicurus claim that the Cyrenaics’ hedonism
is the inspiration for his ethics, and in modern times, Epicurus’ ethics is usually viewed
in the context of Aristotle’s eudaimonism.
Warren claims that we can better understand Epicurus’ eudaimonistic hedonism if we
see its relationship to the ethical views of Democritus and those thinkers influenced by
him. Epicurus and Democritean Ethics is a study of the ethical tradition of the
Democriteans and how Epicurus responds to it. Warren acknowledges that Epicurus
appropriates aspects of Democritean thought: its stand against teleology, its rejection
of meddling deities, and its advocacy of peace of mind. However, Warren concentrates
his attention on the ways in which Epicurus is hostile to this tradition and seeks to
overcome its failings. In particular, Democritus’ assertion that only atoms and the void
exist in truth, while qualities like sweetness and heat exist only ‘by convention,’ has
important consequences on the ethical theories of Democritus’ followers—although not
on that of Democritus himself—that Epicurus feels the need to resist. Anaxarchus and
Pyrrho develop moral anti-realist positions, where values exist only ‘by convention’
and not ‘in truth,’ whereas Nausiphanes, the reviled teacher of Epicurus, does not
deny the reality of values but reduces ethics to physics, claiming that knowledge of
phusiologia—natural science—is sufficient for knowledge of ethics, politics, and
rhetoric.
Or so Warren claims. One reason that the influence of the Democriteans’ ethical
thought on Epicurus has not been much studied is because the information in this area
is so sketchy. Hence, much of Warren’s archaeology involves trying to piece together
ethical theories from scattered, variable, and unclear sources.
Epicurus and Democritean Ethics has many worthwhile things to say about Epicurus’
predecessors. People interested in the ethics of Democritus, Anaxarchus, Pyrrho,
Timon, or Nausiphanes should certainly take a look at this book. However, some of its
most important claims about the Democriteans are dubious. And in the end, Epicurus
and Democritean Ethics doesn’t succeed in its larger aim of improving our
understanding of Epicurus’ ethical system. I’ll consider Warren’s main claims about
Epicurus’ predecessors and my reasons for doubting some of them before turning to
an assessment of this study’s impact on our thinking about Epicurus’ ethics.
After a general introduction to his project and an opening chapter devoted to
explaining who the ‘Democriteans’ are, why they are part of a common tradition, and
what his main sources are, Warren turns to Democritus’ ethics. Following a discussion
of the various terms Democritus unsystematically uses for the telos (such as
euthumia, ‘cheerfulness’), Warren comes to the following tentative conclusions: Some
of Democritus’ terms for the telos and the ways he describes it bear striking
resemblance to the Epicurean telos of ataraxia, and many of their ethical concerns are
similar, such as the stress on removing fear, particularly fear of death, and
moderating the desires. Nonetheless, we cannot simply assimilate Democritus’ ethics
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to Epicurus’. For one thing, Democritus is not a hedonist. In addition to denying

explicitly that hêdonê is the telos, Democritus distinguishes between terpsis (joy) and
hêdonê (pleasure).Warren concludes that the difference between the two is that
terpsis “tracks what is objectively valuable” (Warren bases this on DK B4, where
terpsis is described as the boundary-marker for what is beneficial), whereas hêdonê
does not. That’s because what’s pleasurable can vary from person to person, whereas
the same thing is good and true for all people (B69). Furthermore, not all pleasures
are beneficial (B74), and one shouldn’t choose all pleasures, but take pleasure only in
what is good (B207).
Warren’s discussion here is tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying. Even if one accepts
his analysis of the difference between terpsis and hêdonê, he leaves unanswered the
most important philosophical questions. For instance, Warren says that the difference
between terpsis and hêdonê is not one of ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘bodily’ pleasures, respectively,
but it’s not clear what exactly the difference is. Nor does he explain what it means for
things to be ‘objectively valuable’ or what makes them objectively valuable. Warren
may mean that one takes joy only in things that really are ultimately productive of a
state of euthumia, whereas one can feel pleasure both at things that do and don’t
ultimately produce such a state, but I’m not sure.
Warren says that Democritus’ discussion of the pleasures of the foolish (i.e. taking
pleasures in things that are not really good for you) anticipates Epicurus’ division of
desires into natural and necessary, natural but non-necessary, and vain and empty.
But of course, Epicurus maintains that all pleasures are valuable per se, although not
all are choiceworthy, that the pleasant life equals the eudaimôn life, and that the state
of ataraxia is itself most pleasant, whereas Democritus (it seems) would deny all
these claims. Warren doesn’t address the issue of why there is this radical change in
the status of pleasure—if the change is indeed substantive and not merely
terminological—despite these underlying similarities.
Warren also considers whether Democritus identifies the ideal state of euthumia with
a certain physical arrangement of atoms. Warren looks at B191, where Democritus
says that “souls moved out of large intervals are neither well settled nor euthumoi.”
He argues that there are good reasons to suppose that Democritus thinks of the ‘large
intervals’ here as literal physical intervals between soul atoms, but he decides in the
end that Democritus’ position is unclear. This suits Warren’s overall thesis, because he
proposes that the ambiguities in Democritus’ ethics are developed in different
directions by different followers. So on Warren’s analysis, there is little in Democritus’
own ethical thought that Epicurus is responding to directly.
Warren’s discussion of Democritus contains much of interest, but his picture of
Democritus is still quite indeterminate. I don’t endorse Jonathan Barnes’
characterization of Democritus’ ethics as simply a series a dreary homespun platitudes
on how to lead an undisturbed life, with nothing of philosophical interest (530-5),
since there isn’t enough evidence to justify such negative dogmatism. However, at
least as characterized by Warren, it’s not clear whether Democritus has a systematic
ethical theory rather than simply a number of ethical views.
In the next chapter, Warren turns to the shadowy figure of Anaxarchus, who links
Democritus to Pyrrho. He came from Abdera and may have been an atomist (although
the evidence only weakly points this way). He reportedly accompanied Pyrrho to India,
and his impassivity and contentment earned him the epithet ‘the happiness man’ (ho
eudaimonikos). Warren proposes a novel interpretation of Anaxarchus’ position.
The most important testimony on Anaxarchus’ philosophy comes from Sextus
Empiricus (M 7 87-8), who says that some people report that Anaxarchus abolishes
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the criterion by likening real things to painted scenery and supposing them to
resemble the images occurring in dreams and madness. Usually this is thought to be
making the point that none of our sense-experiences are veridical (or at least that
none are trustworthy). Anaxarchus may be drawing upon Democritus’ contention that
none of the phenomenal qualities conveyed by the senses exist in truth.
Warren, however, gives a more restricted reading: Anaxarchus’ skepticism applies
only to moral qualities, not phenomenal properties tout court. According to Warren,
Anaxarchus is a moral anti-realist, where nothing is good or bad in truth, but only by
convention. However, he probably still leaves perceptible qualities intact. Anaxarchus’
image of the world to a stage-painting can be fruitfully compared to the Stoic Aristo’s
contention (DL 7.160) that the wise person should regard all externals as utterly
indifferent and view himself as an actor merely playing a role. Warren glosses this as
asserting that the external social roles are all “mask and costume,” with no real value.
I find this parallel unconvincing. Although both images are theatrical, Aristo’s
metaphor concerns how we should approach our social roles, whereas Anaxarchus’
metaphor that things in the ‘real world’ are like painted scenery, along with the
likening of our sensations to dreams and madness, is most naturally taken as making
a wider point about our sensations generally, and Sextus introduces the image in such
an epistemological context. Warren replies that this is an interpolation: later sources
read skeptical epistemologies back into the remarks of predecessors of genuine
skeptics like Arcesilaus and Timon. Such a distortion is possible, but then is Warren
contending that the likening of the images to dreams and madness is also a later
interpolation? To read this metaphor as asserting only a moral anti-realism, instead of
making the wider skeptical point, would be strained.
In any case, if we are dubious about the reliability of these later reports, I see little
reason to attribute to Anaxarchus a skepticism limited to values, rather than to
remain entirely agnostic about his thought. Warren’s evidence for moral anti-realism
in particular is that the biographical anecdotes on Anaxarchus reveal somebody mainly
concerned with moral anti-realism. The stories emphasize Anaxarchus’ approval of
‘indifference,’ where this approval of ‘indifference’ is really (Warren claims) mainly
indifference as to the value of external goods, not indifference as to epistemological
matters. For instance, when Anaxarchus praises Pyrrho’s indifference when Pyrrho
ignores Anaxarchus after he’s fallen into a pond (DL 9.63), this is most naturally read
as moral indifference as to whether helping Anaxarchus really matters one way or the
other, not doxastic indifference whether Anaxarchus is really in the pond or not.
Warren’s main text to support his position is Plutarch’s report of Anaxarchus’ rebuke
of Alexander the Great (Plut. Alex. 52, DK A3). Alexander is distraught after hearing of
the death of a man at his orders. Anaxarchus replies that standing in fear of the
censure and laws of men and being enslaved by empty opinion would be foolish. After
all, Alexander, with his power, lays down what is just, and what is done by the ruler is
ipso facto just (dikaios) and lawful (themistos, translated by Warren as ‘right’). From
this anecdote, Warren generalizes about Anaxarchus’ ethics: Alexander “may be said
to be Anaxarchus’ indifferent man writ large” (82). No things are valuable by nature,
and the wise person realizes this and is able to become “the arbiter for himself of
various values” (82) with no external constraints on the decisions he makes that
impose value on the world.
This anecdote is philosophically suggestive, but I have reservations about Warren’s
line of argument. First, the anecdote indicates that Anaxarchus is a conventionalist
about justice and lawfulness, but this need not generalize to value across the board.
Furthermore, Alexander is in a unique position because of his power. It’s dubious to
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infer from Alexander’s situation that all people have the power to create values
through fiat, unconstrained by external considerations and empty opinion. In
Alexander’s case, there is an obvious way in which the opinions of others about what
to do are empty, as far as he’s concerned, that doesn’t apply to the man on the
street. Second, even if Anaxarchus does have the anti-realist moral position Warren
ascribes to him, this doesn’t show that his anti-realism is restricted to morals in
particular. He may have a much wider eliminativist position that applies also to moral
properties.
Warren turns in his next chapter to Pyrrho and Timon. Warren says Pyrrho’s position
is similar to Anaxarchus’. The key text for understanding Pyrrho’s thought has long
been recognized to be a report by Aristocles, preserved in Eusebius, which declares
that our sensations and judgments tell us neither truths nor falsehoods, because
things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and undecidable. (Thus, the
epistemological point depends on a sweeping metaphysical claim.) Warren defends the
received text from a proposed emendation by Zeller, which would reverse the
direction of inference: we should conclude that things are indifferent, etc. because our
sensations and judgments tell us neither truths nor falsehoods. After defending the
received text, however, Warren goes on to argue that for Pyrrho things are not
‘indistinct’ “in the sense of being metaphysically indistinct, but in the moral sense of
having no intrinsic value” (92). (Although, if this is right, then it seems that Pyrrho
should say that our judgments about things having value should be false, instead of
neither true nor false.)
To support this, Warren notes that Pyrrho insists on the unreality of moral values
particularly strongly and often (for instance at DL 9.61) and that for Pyrrho one gains
ataraxia by believing that things are indifferent as far as their value is concerned.
Warren acknowledges that many later reports seem to extend Pyrrho’s claims about
indifference beyond the moral realm to the world in general and what can be known
via the senses. However, he claims that, as in the case of Anaxarchus, these claims
are later accretions. In particular, Warren tries to draw a sharp distinction between
Pyrrho, whose skepticism extends only to morals, and Timon, who has a global
skepticism and reworks Pyrrho in light of this. According to Warren, Timon is not
merely a reporter, but an important independent thinker. This is an intriguing thesis,
and Warren gives some other support for it. (Hankinson tentatively puts forward a
similar proposal about the limits of Pyrrho’s skepticism and the relative independence
of Timon’s thought (65-73).)
The case for Pyrrho’s skepticism (or really, negative dogmatism) extending only to
value is much stronger than the case for Anaxarchus having such a position, but I’m
not convinced. The later reports that portray Pyrrho as a global skeptic may well be
later accretions, but it’s hard to see how to determine this one way or the other, while
still having confidence that the reports that point toward a restricted moral skepticism
are reliable. Also, having indifference about values in particular is consistent with
having indifference about things in general, as is thinking that indifference about
values is particularly important for the attainment of ataraxia. After all, this seems to
be Sextus’ position.
Warren then goes on to consider the response of the later Epicurean Polystratus to
skeptical arguments that claim that values cannot exist in truth because what is fine
and foul varies from place to place. Polystratus’ reply, basically, is that relational and
dispositional properties can be real, as cases of certain foods being nutritious for some
creatures but harmful for others make clear. This chapter also contains a quite
interesting discussion of the ambiguity of pig imagery in Epicurean and skeptical
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thought: pigs were widely considered both amoral, unintellectual gluttons and symbols
of ataraxia. In addition, Warren considers the place of distinctively human rational
capacities in Epicurean ethics, as opposed to Pyrrho’s attempt to strip off the human.
Following this is a short chapter called “Hecataeus of Abdera’s Instructive
Ethnography.” The title is misleading, since Warren says that we can’t really tell
anything about Hecataean philosophy based on the second-hand and probably
paraphrased material we have. Despite this, Warren believes Hecataeus has
significance: Hecataeus shows that there is a link between the ‘Abderites’ and the
‘Pyrrhonians,’ since he is counted as a member of both groups (159). This seems fairly
thin, though, and I don’t see how the inclusion of Hecataeus contributes to the overall
project of the book.
The final predecessor Warren considers is Epicurus’ teacher Nausiphanes. After some
remarks on the relationship of Nausiphanes to Pyrrho and Nausiphanes’ candidate for
the telos, akataplêxia (unshakeability), Warren tries to reconstruct Nausiphanes’
ethical theory by looking at the fragmentary remains of the Epicurean Philodemus’
attack on Nausiphanes’ rhetorical theory. This material is philosophically rich, but I
don’t think we can draw from it the conclusions about Nausiphanes’ and Epicurus’
ethical theories that Warren thinks we can. The passages are quite gappy, but Warren
thinks (I believe correctly) that Nausiphanes’ main theses about rhetoric are:
• Oratory is a technê.
• Somebody who knows natural philosophy (phusiologia) will know what nature
wants.
• Knowledge of natural philosophy is sufficient training for knowing the technê of
oratory, and thus for being able to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens by
offering reasoned advice on what nature wants and how to achieve it.
Whereas Philodemus and Epicurus hold the following:
• Oratory is not a technê, but a knack which one picks up through experience
(empeiria).
• In any case, knowing phusiologia is not sufficient for persuasion of an audience,
since phusiologia need not command universal assent (as SV 29 makes clear).
Instead, successful oratory would also require knowledge of the audience’s
desires and beliefs, and how to appeal to them.
Warren says that the source of the dispute between Nausiphanes and Epicurus on
rhetoric is that Nausiphanes is a reductivist atomist who insists on a ‘close link’ (an
identification?) of desirable psychological states such as euthumia, akataplêxia, or
ataraxia with a certain physical state of the soul and who thinks that knowledge of
phusiologia is sufficient for knowledge of the human good, whereas Epicurus is a non-
reductive atomist who rejects these claims. I think that this is a stretch. First, Warren
does not specify in what sense Nausiphanes is a ‘reductivist’ and Epicurus is not, so
it’s difficult to evaluate his claim. In discussing this issue Warren slides from correctly
noting that Epicurus objects generally to Democritus’ eliminativism to then saying that
Epicurus therefore objects in particular to Nausiphanes’ “attempt to reduce ethics to
physics” (177). But this is perplexing, since eliminativist materialism is quite different
from reductionist materialism, and somebody could quite happily hold that tranquility
is identical to a certain physical arrangement of soul atoms while objecting to the
damaging ethical implications of abolishing psychological states from one’s ontology.
In fact, I think that that’s Epicurus’ own position. (See O’Keefe (2002) for further
discussion of the distinction between Democritus’ eliminativism vs. Epicurus’
reductionism.) In any case, no deep-seated metaphysical anti-reductionism about the
nature of the mind is implied by anything in Philodemus’ discussion of rhetoric and his
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attack on Nausiphanes. Almost any reductionist could accept all of the theses
Philodemus advances. David Armstrong, for instance, has an identity theory of mind,
but he could still think that people need practical experience in order to learn how to
speak well, and that knowledge of sub-atomic physics on its own will not enable one
to speak persuasively to people on how to live their lives.
At the end of his book, Warren briefly turns, in a section which spans 8 pages, to
consider what light is shed on Epicurus’ ethics from the preceding discussion. He notes
that the Epicurean Colotes attacks Democritus because his eliminativism regarding
macroscopic qualities like colors leads to skepticism, and hence makes life impossible.
And Epicurus himself, in the anti-fatalist digression in On Nature book 25, attacks
Democritus because of the effect Democritus’ eliminative materialism would have on
our conception of ourselves as causally efficacious agents, and hence on our practices
of praise, blame, and argumentation itself. All of this is true, but it’s all been noted
before. None of it helps substantiate Warren’s claim that Epicurus’ ethics was shaped
in reaction to problematic strains within Democritean ethical theories. Nowhere does
Warren clearly explain how the connection is supposed to work.
The sketchiness of this final section of Warren’s book is a shame, because the topic is
promising: what is the ontological status of ethical properties for Epicurus, how do
ethical properties fit into Epicurus’ metaphysics more generally, and how does this
conception of ethical properties respond to worries about skeptical ou mallon
arguments in general and Democritus’ eliminative materialism in particular?
Furthermore, what is it that that gives ethical properties their value in a world with no
deities and no teleology? Warren’s discussion raises these sorts of metaethical issues
but does not clearly deal with them.
Despite these shortcomings, I appreciate that Warren has drawn attention to the
ethics of Epicurus’ Democritean predecessors, and I hope that this book will serve as a
basis for further work in the area.
References
Barnes, Jonathan. 1982. The Presocratic Philosophers. London: Routledge, London
and New York.
Hankinson, R. J. 1995. The Sceptics. Routledge, London and New York.
O’Keefe, Tim. 2002. “The Reductionist and Compatibilist Argument of Epicurus’ On
Nature Book 25,” Phronesis, vol. 47 no. 2 153-186.
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2003.05.04
Jeremy Waldron
God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought
Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political
Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 263pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521890578.
Reviewed by Victor Nuovo, Harris Manchester College, Oxford/ Middlebury
College
In God, Locke and Equality , Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke’s mature writings
present an idea of basic human equality, grounded in Christian theism, and that this
idea is “a working premise of his whole political theory” whose influence can be
detected in “his arguments about property, family, slavery, government, politics, and
toleration”. Waldron also argues that contemporary liberalism lacks just such a well
founded and versatile idea as well as the resources to supply it. Its self imposed
secular stance is the reason for this deficiency. Since Locke’s idea of human equality is
rooted in theism, it is only reasonable that contemporary liberalism should relax its
restrictive stance and consider religious reasons such as Locke’s for its commitment to
equality.
Two of the main theses of his book, that Locke’s mature works aim at a unified
outlook that may be fairly characterized as liberal, and that this outlook is founded on
Locke’s Christian beliefs are not new. John Dunn, who was the first to present Locke’s
political theory in its religious context [The Political Thought of John Locke,
Cambridge, 1968] has said as much in numerous places and Waldron acknowledges
this. [For a succinct account of these theses, one that applies nicely to Waldron’s
project, see Dunn’s Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 2nd ed.,
Cambridge, 1992, pp. 38-42.] What is new is Waldron’s assertion of the contemporary
relevance of Locke’s Christian outlook for political thought, in particular as it pertains
to human equality. This and his liberal optimism contrast sharply with Dunn’s
pessimistic attitude towards the efficacy of liberal and democratic theory, especially
Locke’s, just because it is rooted in theism. In the place just cited, Dunn refers to a
brief handwritten note circa 1693 [Bodleian MS Locke c. 28, fo. 141; Dunn earlier
adopted it as the motto of his previously cited book], in which Locke contemplates the
consequences for mankind if there were no God and no divine law. The result would
be moral anarchy. Every individual “could have no law but his own will, no end but
himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole
measure and end of all his actions”. It should be observed that in this note Locke still
attributes fundamental freedom and equality to mankind even without God, but the
prospect for civil society, and even more for liberal democratic society, would
disappear and in its place would appear a social condition that Dunn characterizes as
’dolefully Nietzschean’. According to Dunn’s view, Locke not only was able to imagine
the consequences of ’the death of God’, he also in a sense anticipated it by his own
failure to show that human rationality is sufficient to discover the theistic foundations
of the political morality that he takes for granted in the second Treatise. This was the
task that was promised but never fulfilled in Locke’s Essay. Locke’s argument for the
necessity of revelation in The Reasonableness of Christianity is taken by Dunn as a
tacit admission of this failure. In the light of all this, Dunn characterizes Locke as a
tragic figure, whose greatness is manifest more in his intellectual courage to
persevere in his enquiries than in his philosophical achievement. The lesson to be
learned from reading Locke is a moral one, and it is well worth learning. On the other
hand, any attempt to appropriate Locke for contemporary political theory is
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misguided. Even if one disagrees with Dunn, as I do, it must be admitted that his
conclusions are based upon a remarkable sensitivity for his subject and a deep
familiarity with Locke’s writings and their contexts.
Waldron directly challenges Dunn’s pessimistic interpretation of Locke and that of his
intellectual predecessor Peter Laslett, whose critical edition of Locke’s Two Treatises
more than three decades ago opened a new phase in the understanding of Locke’s
political thought. Laslett contended that Two Treatises of Government and An Essay
concerning Human Understanding represent different projects that Locke pursued
more or less concurrently but never connected. As already noted, Dunn interprets this
difference differently, offering a coherent view of Locke’s intellectual life and its
endeavor, but not of its product.
Against Laslett and Dunn, Waldron proposes a robust account of the unity of Locke’s
thought that he intends to make a vehicle in which to carry theological argument into
contemporary liberal theory. But to succeed he must demonstrate a need for this sort
of argument. Since contemporary liberal theory, at least in its dominant Rawlsian
version, excludes Christian theism, along with all sorts of comprehensive moral
outlooks, religious or secular, from political discussion, he must show that this
exclusion is self-defeating, in particular, that it is an obstacle to achieving an adequate
idea of basic equality. So Waldron pursues his campaign for the contemporary political
relevance of Locke’s theism on two fronts, the one represented by Laslett and Dunn,
the other by John Rawls.
In the third chapter of his book, Waldron presents arguments that are crucial to his
project. Hence, this review will focus mainly there. In this chapter Waldron presents
Locke’s idea of political equality and justifies it on grounds from which he argues for
the inadequacy of Rawls’ secular counterpart. A secondary purpose of this chapter is
to refute Laslett’s claim that the Two Treatises and the Essay are independent projects
that ought not to be conflated.
According to Waldron an idea of fundamental equality must consist of two sorts of
things: a set of one of more capacities, for example, rationality or physical strength,
and some reason or purpose for which these capacities are intended and by which the
lives of those who possess them acquire meaning and purpose. The strong attribution
of equality to mankind in the Two Treatises seems to be subverted in the Essay by
Locke’s species skepticism. In Essay III. vi. 9-28, Locke argues that the species term
’Man’ denotes a nominal essence, a collection of sensible ideas, that are, to be sure,
rooted in nature, but taken together are not grounds for making a real distinction
between mankind and other species. This applies to all our names of natural kinds, so
that it would be a mistake to use them as a guide to a real system of natural species,
or even to conclude that nature is a system of distinct species. Locke even dismisses
an appeal to generation as a guarantee that a mother and her child belong to the
same species. (Essay III. vi. 23). It should be noted that this directly contradicts
Locke’s assertion in the second Treatise (Â§Â§ 4, 6) that God created mankind as a
natural community, endowed with similar faculties, and infers their basic equality from
what he takes to be a self-evident principle that “creatures of the same species and
rank promiscuously [i.e. without distinction] born to all the same advantages of
nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal”, unless by a positive
command of God one individual is set above all the rest to rule them. [In fact, Locke
believed that God did set one individual over all, but one who wasn’t exactly a regular
member of the human species, viz. Jesus Christ.] So Locke both asserted and denied
(to be sure, in different books) that mankind is a real species whose members are
without distinction born to an equal state.
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Waldron argues that Locke found a way out of this inconsistency. He fell back to the
fact that the perceptible qualities that constitute the nominal essence of mankind
include “real resemblances”. Human beings are, for the most part, perceived to be
corporeal beings who think, or more precisely, who are able to think abstractly, and it
is on this basis that an idea of equality may be built. But rationality of this sort is not
something one has or has not, but has more or less, so the basic condition of equality
is a “range concept”, a term that Waldron borrows from Rawls. So corporeal beings
who have the capacity to think abstractly are equal to one another, although some
may manifest more or less rationality. But what is the point of being a creature so
endowed? Locke’s answer, according to Waldron, is that whoever has this capacity is
fit to discover God and the moral law of nature. The pursuit of these things and the
endeavor to live by them gives meaning and purpose to every individual human life.
This derivation of basic equality seems to work, but it is not a derivation of equality
that Locke intended. It is Waldron’s construction based on Locke. Moreover, it is
arguable that Locke would not have thought it necessary, for he had no reason to
believe that his argument in the second Treatise was deficient. Waldron remarks, in
chapter 4, that the arguments in the second Treatise for equality and property
acquisition are natural-law arguments. This is only half true. In fact, they are mixed
arguments, based on reason and revelation. Since Scripture, which Locke believed to
be infallible, asserts that Adam and the generations proceeding from him are one
species or kind, and since revelation trumps rational doubt, Locke did not need to find
another way to equality. This, of course, leaves the Essay and the Two Treatises as
separate projects.
One advantage of Waldron’s construction of the idea of equality is that it facilitates
easy comparison with Rawls. Rawls’ idea of basic equality consists of two capacities:
the capacity of having a conception of one’s good (a rational plan of life) and a
capacity for a sense of justice, together with standard rational capabilities, e.g. the
ability to draw inferences and to think abstractly. These capacities constitute a moral
person. (. Theory of Justice rev. ed., Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 442.) His idea of basic
equality is richer than the one Waldron attributes to Locke. But there are resources in
the Essay upon which Waldron might have drawn to fashion a Lockean version that is
equally rich. I refer to Locke’s account of a person as a “Forensick Term” denoting
“intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery” (Essay II. xxvii. 26),
and his definition of freedom as a human agency determined by the good (Essay II.
xxi. 47, 48 and passim). Waldron then contends that Rawls’ idea of basic equality is a
“shapeless” set, because, unlike Locke’s idea, it lacks a transcendent reference from
which the meaning and purpose of its parts derive. In Locke’s case this transcendent
reference is to God and our duty, through which the happiness that we seek is
assured. From Locke’s point of view any plan of life would not be rational if it did not
have this aim. This doesn’t seem to me a fair appraisal of Rawls’ idea. It is at least
arguable that the inclusion in it of the capacity to develop a plan of life regulated by a
sense of justice provides it with an inbuilt source of meaning and purpose. Rawls’ idea
thus seems simpler and has the advantage of self-sufficiency.
In the next to last section of the final chapter of God, Locke and Equality, Waldron
raises another objection to Rawlsian exclusivism that seems more imposing. It relates
to Rawls’ idea of public reason. [See Rawls Political Liberalism, New York: 1996,
Lecture VI.] Public reason, on Rawls’ account, consists of all the reasons that ideally
may be employed in a pluralistic democratic society to justify its basic institutions and
to advocate fundamental justice. It is a restricted domain, excluding elements of
comprehensive moral doctrines, whether religious or secular, from public discourse
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and deliberation; it regulates reasons that may be employed in the exercise of all
public duties, including casting a vote. Waldron worries that this domain may be too
restrictive and that in order to insure its adequacy it is necessary to include within it
substantive doctrines over which there may be serious disagreement. Waldron
suggests that Rawls’ idea of moral personality and Locke’s theism perform the same
function of establishing a meaningful equality; both are intended as antidotes to
nihilism. If this is so and if both are adequate, then it would seem arbitrary to include
one and not the other.
So much for the basic argument of this very interesting book. Much of the rest of the
book is devoted to demonstrating the influence of Locke’s idea of basic equality on his
reflections concerning the family, the status of women, private property, social
differentiation, and toleration. Any one of these chapters is worth the price of the
book. After reading them, one cannot doubt that Locke took human equality very
seriously and that, paradoxical as it may seem, it pervades the whole of his political
thought.
I close with a critical comment. The title indicates that Locke’s Christian commitments
are the basis of his idea of equality. Nevertheless, as Waldron remarks at the
beginning of chapter 7, there is little that is explicitly Christian in the Two Treatises,
where the idea of equality is most fully worked out and most forcefully asserted. He
remarks on the few citations from the New Testament, in contrast to so many from
the Old Testament, and wonders why this is so, especially in the light of John Dunn’s
claim that the Two Treatises are infused with Christian content. The trouble is that
Waldron never makes clear just what kind of Christianity Locke adhered to, except a
vaguely Protestant sort. In fact, Locke’s Christianity was strongly messianic, which is
to say, he believed that Christian doctrine must be understood as Scripture presents
it, embedded in a sacred history that runs from the creation of Adam to the Last
Judgment. In this connection, Locke adhered to the doctrine of divine dispensations.
The proper place in this history to treat the themes of the Two Treatises is prior to the
Mosaic theocracy and the founding of the messianic kingdom. The nature and function
of the civil state are properly considered, then, only under the general providence of
God which prevailed under the Adamic and Noachic dispensations. The counterpart of
the Two Treatises is The Reasonableness of Christianity, whose central theme is the
founding of the transcendent Kingdom of God. The difference between the two realms
and their respective authorities is a central theme of the Epistola de tolerantia. In the
light of this, Laslett was correct when he remarked that Locke’s major writings
represent separate projects. He was wrong to suppose that they do not cohere.
Indeed they do when viewed from the standpoint of Locke’s particular Protestant
vision. I believe that Waldron’s case for the unity of Locke’s thought would be
strengthened by a richer account of this vision. I am less sure that contemporary
liberalism would find such a vision relevant.
2003.05.05
Adam Sutcliffe
Judaism and Enlightenment
Sutcliffe, Adam, Judaism and Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 2003,
329pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521820154.
Reviewed by Steven Nadler , University of Wisconsin, Madison
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What is to be done about the Jews? This, of course, is the great question faced by all
Western societies from late antiquity onwards. Sometimes, as during certain periods
in the Middle Ages, the answer was a relatively simple one, involving expulsion and/or
violence. But the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, in some nations at least,
supposed to be an “age of reason”. Despite the fact that, at the beginning of this
period, Jews were still officially banned from several domains (including France and
England), there was a great deal of sophistication in both official and unofficial
attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe.
Just how sophisticated — and complicated — they were is made abundantly and
eloquently clear in this fascinating book. Adam Sutcliffe’s subject is not just the
obvious one of the legacy of the Enlightenment for the Jews, that is, what the
toleration, secularism and rationalism of the Enlightenment held in store for Jewish
emancipation, and how these principles lived in tension with the animus against Jews
and Judaism by leading thinkers of the time (such as Voltaire). Rather, Sutcliffe wants
to show just how “throughout the Enlightenment the question of the status of Judaism
and of Jews was a key site of intellectual contestation, confusion and debate” (5).
Indeed, he insists, “the complexities clustered around Judaism are of central
importance for a general understanding of the Enlightenment itself” (6). Judaism for
Sutcliffe becomes a kind of lens through which we can see deeply into Enlightenment
thinking, and especially some essential ambiguities and tensions within it.
Sutcliffe is interested not only in intellectual, political and religious attitudes toward
the Jews and philosophical reflections on Judaism (such as those we find in Toland,
Locke and Bayle), but also in Jewish stimuli for Enlightenment polemics and even
Jewish sources for Enlightenment modes of thought, including those modes that were
hostile to Judaism. He examines what the Jewish problem — the question of how
“Jewish difference” is to be accommodated in modern society, with its non-
denominational universalism — meant for the Enlightenment, and how the tools for
dealing with that problem sometimes came from within the Jewish milieu itself. It is a
rich and complex story, one that Sutcliffe tells with great style, if not always with
sufficient philosophical depth and detail. Above all, he offers a clear analysis of the
ways in which Judaism, Jewish figures and Jewish writings — especially Hebrew
Scripture, Spinoza and kabbalah, but also (astonishingly) Jewish anti-Christian
polemics — provoked ambivalent and contradictory responses — alarm, perplexity,
intrigue, assimilation — from Enlightenment thinkers.
Much of what Sutcliffe presents will not be new to readers of two other, landmark
studies. His discussion of Hebraism in Christian academic circles in the seventeenth-
century is familiar from Aaron Katchen’s 1984 study, Christian Hebraists and Dutch
Rabbis, while his inquiry into the role played by Spinoza and his circle in the
development of the Enlightenment echoes elements of Jonathan Israel’s magisterial
Radical Enlightenment (2001). Where Sutcliffe goes beyond Israel’s work is in his
claim that not only did certain heterodox Jewish figures play an influential role in the
genesis of a radical stream in the Enlightenment, but Judaism itself — its history, its
texts, its status — was “inescapably of special significance in the formation of
Enlightenment rationalism” (181).
Sutcliffe begins his investigation with the Hebraism to be found in scholarly and
religious milieux, especially in the Netherlands of the early seventeenth-century. It
was not an unadulterated “philosemitism” — in fact, Sutcliffe explicitly declines to use
the terms ’philosemitism’ and ’antisemitism’ to frame the terms of his discussion —
but rather a profound interest in the texts, languages, culture and history of the
ancient Hebrews, sometimes from academic motives, often as preparation for anti-
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Jewish polemics. The reader is introduced here to tensions that reappear later in
Sutcliffe’s account, between, on the one hand, fascination for and use of res Judaica,
and, on the other hand, antipathy toward and fear of Jews and Judaism. The same
individuals who had a scholarly and sometimes even a religious respect for Jewish
sources also believed in the obsolescence of Judaism itself.
For readers coming from philosophy and its history, the real interest of this book lies
in Sutcliffe’s analysis of the role played by the Jewish material in the rise of
Enlightenment rationalism. As we know from Israel’s study, the real culprit here is
Spinoza, as well as the city of Amsterdam itself and the Portuguese-Jewish community
that thrived in its cosmopolitan and relatively tolerant environment. Sutcliffe argues
that Jewish Amsterdam was practically a breeding ground of the radical
Enlightenment. Its cross-fertilizations of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish cultures and
Dutch and Iberian sensibilities “touched the entire community and influenced the
outlook of its leadership”, as well as its many members, with the result that it
nourished “the minds of those isolated radicals who most insistently explored the
intersection between those worlds” (112). Sephardic Amsterdam, with heterodox
thinkers such as Da Costa, Prado and Spinoza, was a “crucible of theological dissent .
. . [that] contributed to the ideas and arguments of the wider European
Enlightenment, as it gathered force in the closing decades of the seventeenth-century”
(117).
What the Enlightenment radicals found in Spinoza, above all, was a serious,
knowledgeable de-sacralizing critique of Scripture, one that reduced it to a work of
human literature. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise gave them the tools they
needed to undermine the claims of organized religion, and especially the political
usurpations being practiced by contemporary ecclesiastics. But there was a problem.
These arguments that the radical crowd found so useful came from a Jewish source.
Thus, once again, we come across the tension that Sutcliffe finds so essential to the
Enlightenment. The same Jewish tradition that needed to be rejected for its
particularism — “the epitome of unenlightened superstition and legalism” — and as a
threat to the universalist rationalism being promoted by these thinkers, offered the
best practical tools for furthering their anti-establishment project. This brings Sutcliffe
to one of the more interesting aspects of his story, viz., the way in which the
Enlightenment labored to de-Judaize Spinoza and distance him from his Jewish
origins. In order to claim Spinoza for itself, radical philosophy had to erase all traces
of Jewishness from his identity. Spinoza may have been born and raised a Jew, but
Judaism rejected him and he rejected Judaism, with the result that he ended up an
atheist, and the period’s most prominent truly secular individual. Spinoza thus
becomes to his radical but anti-Judaic acolytes the messiah of rationalism (or, to use
Sutcliffe’s phrase, “the Jesus Christ of Reason”). Spinoza is represented in literature of
the time “as something almost miraculous: a Jew who has utterly transcended the
mark of his origin” (139). He gave early Enlightenment radicals messianic hope that a
universalistic reign of reason was close at hand. “The dawn of Enlightenment is thus
given a subliminally millenarian tinge, with Spinoza performing the key Messianic role
as its necessarily originally, and then no longer, Jewish harbinger” (140).
Part of Sutcliffe’s argument on the role that Spinoza played in the genesis of the
radical Enlightenment depends on what seems to be a somewhat questionable reading
of Spinoza. Sutcliffe’s Spinoza is a thinker still sentimentally beholden to his Jewish
roots. While Sutcliffe takes note of Spinoza’s denigration of and “profound hostility”
towards “formal Judaism”, especially as an “unphilosophical” religion, his portrayal of
Spinoza is that of someone who is nonetheless respectful, even defensive, about
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Judaism and its history. True enough, as Sutcliffe notes, “a distinctly Jewish
perspective is woven into [Spinoza’s] philosophical arguments”. But Sutcliffe’s Spinoza
still retains a sense of Jewish identity and “pride” in Jewish history and culture.
“Jewish history was legitimated per se, as the collective memory of his own people”
(124). It was not Spinoza, Sutcliffe claims, but only later thinkers (such as Lodewijk
Meyer) for whom “Jewish difference . . . stands as a problem, to be transcended by
the imminent triumph of secular reason. In implicitly situating Judaism as antithetical
not simply to Christianity but to reason itself, Meyer injected a sharp hint of hostility
into the relationship between Judaism and the radical early Enlightenment” (128). But
is not this “hostility” already there in Spinoza, the man who insisted that Jews were
“emasculated” by their religion? It is hard to read the Theological-Political Treatise and
come away with the impression that its author still saw himself as a Jew, much less
that he saw Judaism as compatible with progressive, secular reason. Sutcliffe takes a
different approach from that of Steven Smith who, in his Spinoza, Liberalism and the
Question of Jewish Identity, argues that it was Spinoza himself, and not only his
followers, who required the transcending of a particularism that was represented
above all by Judaism. Even Sutcliffe, later in the book, allows that Spinoza
“unambiguously excludes Judaism from his standards of intellectual tolerability”, and
that for him Judaism is “the starkest case of a worldview that does not conform to
[the] standards” of rational logic (217-218).
Sutcliffe’s is ultimately a story of decline. In the end, the Enlightenment would turn on
the Jews. What was originally, in the mid seventeenth-century, ambivalence and
tension among gentile scholars who were engaged in the intense study of rabbinic and
other Jewish texts — “eagerly scouring the Jewish tradition for guiding insights into
fundamental questions of history, theology, hermeneutics and politics” (247) — and
especially in the radical stream of the Enlightenment, becomes, by the early
eighteenth-century, only tension, mainly between the moderate wing’s ideal of
toleration and the intolerant invective often hurled against Judaism. Voltaire was
willing to argue for the toleration of contemporary Jews, but he had nothing but
contempt for Judaism itself. His was a rationalistic hostility, Sutcliffe argues, that
stemmed not from rhetorical enthusiasm or unfortunate personal relations with
particular Jews, as has been suggested, but from what he saw as Judaism’s resistance
to fitting into the Enlightenment schema. It is an emblematic attitude. “Voltaire’s
persistent hostility towards Judaism in a sense draws into unique focus the problems
underlying the general Enlightenment stance towards a minority that appeared
profoundly unassimilable to its logic” (233).
On the whole, this book is an outstanding addition to the literature. Like Arthur
Hertzberg’s more narrowly focused The French Enlightenment and the Jews(1968), it
will be required reading on the Enlightenment and the Jews; and, like Israel’s book, it
will constitute an important source for the context and legacy of Spinoza’s thought.
Readers, especially those seeking an elaboration of philosophical positions, will be
frustrated by the quick pace and large cast of characters and works that Sutcliffe
expertly surveys. He is great on sweep, but often short on details. For example, we
are not told what exactly is the “purified Judaism” that, for the Dutch radical (and
Spinozist) Adriaen Koerbagh, constitutes the “true philosophical religion” (131). But
this is a minor complaint. Sutcliffe’s analyses and fluent narrative make for compelling
and informative reading, and the picture that emerges throws a good deal of light on a
hitherto neglected aspect of this period of intellectual history.
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2003.05.06
Otfried Hoffe
Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity
Hoffe, Otfried, Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity, Translated
by Mark Migotti, Penn State University Press, 2002, 341pp, $26.50 (pbk), ISBN
0271021594.
Reviewed by Patrick Kain, Purdue University/ Philips-Universitat, Marburg
Many supporters and critics of “modernity” have proceeded with an inadequate

understanding of Kant’s political philosophy. In this collection of thematically linked
essays (some new, others revised for the occasion), Otfried Höffe, one of Europe’s
leading political philosophers and interpreters of Kant’s practical philosophy, offers a
powerful apology for the revival of a more authentically Kantian foundation for
contemporary social and political philosophy and for the more nuanced understanding
of modernity such a revival would bring. Höffe insists that modernity be understood,
from its origins, as a “polyphonic” composition, with Kant’s voice providing the
necessary counterpoint to the legitimate, yet exaggerated strains of modernity’s prima
donnas, empiricism and pluralism (4). [Contrary to the translation of the subtitle,
Kantianism is a counterpoint within modernity.] There is a positive and negative side
to Höffe’s thesis. On the positive side, Höffe contends that there is a rather compelling
justification for Kant’s categorical imperative and the “categorical principles of law”
that follow from it, such as the human rights widely recognized in the modern world.
The justificatory refrain is “practical metaphysics plus [moral] anthropology” (9, 93,
99). On the negative side, Höffe alleges, neither contemporary legal theory, given its
empirical-pragmatic bias, nor contemporary social theory, given its uncritical
obsession with radical pluralism, can justify such categorical principles.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One provides an interpretation of and
apology for Kant’s “Categorical Imperative of Law (in the singular),” i.e., “act in the
external world in such a way that the free use of your voluntary agency is consistent
with the freedom of all according to a universal law” (94). Höffe defends this moral
principle against claims that it is insufficiently “critical” (ch. 2), objectionably
“moralistic” (ch. 3), and indefensibly “metaphysical” and/or abstract (ch.4). Part Two
is primarily concerned with several applications of this categorical principle. It begins
with a critique of utilitarian attempts to accommodate “the justice objection” (ch. 6)
and proceeds to offer an interpretation and partial defense of Kant’s arguments for the
prohibition against false promising, against charges of “rigorism” (ch. 7); for the
legitimacy of retributive punishment, against its complete dismissal (ch. 8); and for an
international confederation of nations, against charges of utopianism (ch. 9). Here the
arguments proceed via insightful exegesis, analysis, and reconstruction of key
passages from Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Kant’s Groundwork, Doctrine of Right, and
“Perpetual Peace” essay, respectively. Especially in this section, Höffe’s defenses of
Kant are only partial: he sets aside several of Kant’s more extreme and controversial
conclusions, for example, that specific moral principles do not allow exceptions even in
cases of moral conflict or that criminal punishment is obligatory and should strive for a
literal “eye for an eye” and eschew consideration of the subjective elements of crimes.
Part Three extends and clarifies several elements of the account (and that offered in
Political Justice [1987, trans. 1995]) through critical reviews of the attempts by
Axelrod (ch. 10), Rawls (ch. 11), Apel (ch.12) and Habermas (ch. 13) to do without
some or all of the core elements of the Kantian account.
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The book succeeds at “presenting a conceptual profile” of the Kantian “counterpoint”

and “examining its validity” (4). It lays out a provocative and ambitious agenda for
Kantian political philosophy in conversation with Adorno, Apel, Axelrod, Habermas,
Hegel, Kelsen, Lübbe, Luhmann, Marquard, Mill, Rawls, Scheler, and others; includes
stimulating interpretations and reconstructions of several important Kantian texts; and
contains several brief, yet helpful, excursions into the history of political philosophy,
law, and social theory. Given its scope and construction, the whole and its parts will
be of significant interest to a wide-range of readers (and potentially useful in a variety
of seminars, especially given Kenneth Baynes helpful eighteen page foreword.) Given
its programmatic nature, there are many nits left to be picked, arguments requiring
further development, and responses to be considered. It would be a mistake,
especially thirteen years after its original publication (Kategorische Rechtsprinzipien:
ein Kontrapunkt der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990) to consider this collection
as the last word on modernity, contemporary political philosophy, or even Kant’s place
within it. A thorough critical evaluation would have to examine Höffe’s prolific
attempts, over the last two decades, to defend and further develop various aspects of
this project. Such an examination is certainly beyond the scope of the present review.
But it is possible to provide a brief, provisional assessment of Höffe’s Kant
interpretation, the strength of his philosophical case, and of the accuracy of this
English translation.
The core of Höffe’s proposal emerges in response to the charges that Kant “moralizes
politics” and relies upon dubious “metaphysical abstraction.” Höffe responds to the
familiar complaint that Kant “moralizes politics” by distinguishing between three (or
four) different levels of analysis and argumentation and between two different
domains of application. “First moral philosophy” or “Fundamental Ethics” begins with a
semantic account of the concept of morality, the idea of the “unconditioned good” and
categorically binding claims, and proceeds to derive a general normative criterion of
morality, the categorical imperative and its demand for “universalizability,” from this
concept. This first moral philosophy, according to Höffe, is common to ethics and
political philosophy. “Second moral philosophy” is concerned with the application of
this general criterion to two different domains: on the one hand, “law and right”
[Recht], concerned with law and external action; and on the other, ethics, concerned
with individual virtue [Tugend] or “morality” in the more familiar sense. Within each
domain, there are two stages of application. At the “general” or “intermediate” stage
of application, a single highest principle is identified for each domain (“The Categorical
Imperative of Law [in the singular]”(quoted above) and “The Categorical Imperative of
Virtue [in the singular]”, respectively). At the “special” stage of application,
substantive categorical principles are derived, within each domain, from the relevant
principle (5-7). The distinction between the domains of “external” and “internal
freedom” within Kant’s unified theory, Höffe argues, is what supports Kant’s political
anti-moralization thesis, the “morality of law without moralizing”: (8, 55) state
authority can be morally legitimate and is obliged to recognize human rights, but
public authorities ought neither demand that individuals comply with the law out of a
“sense of duty,” nor attempt to legislate all of morality.
Höffe responds to the charges of metaphysical excess and hopeless abstraction with
the slogan “practical metaphysics plus anthropology,” which involves two theses. The
integral anthropology thesis maintains (in this case explicitly contra some of Kant’s
own excessive programmatic assertions) that, at the fundamental, general and special
levels of analysis and within each domain of application, the metaphysical demand for
“universality” is and must be paired with a “moral anthropology” which identifies the
234
conditions of application for the relevant universal principle (8-9). The thesis of
metaphysical modesty maintains that the metaphysical demand, especially the part of
it specific to “The Categorical Imperative of Law,” amounts to a “practical” rather than
a “theoretical metaphysics” and may require neither full-blown transcendental
idealism nor, anthropologically, even absolute “freedom of the will.” This more modest
metaphysics is constituted by the unconditional demand for “universalizability” or
reciprocity applied to a more limited conception of “freedom of action”(50, 87-88, 92-
93). Especially at the “special” level of application within the domain of right, Höffe
argues, the more or less plausible and increasingly concrete anthropology keeps
Kant’s theory in contact with the concrete and empirical.
Many aspects of this conception have proven themselves quite promising in the recent
Kant literature, and in this context Höffe’s interpretive contributions remain
stimulating. In particular, the significance (and contested status) Höffe ascribes to the
“moral anthropology” within Kant’s moral and political philosophy is beginning to be
explored quite fruitfully in recent work by Felicitas Munzel, Robert Louden, Allen
Wood, and others. Similarly, Höffe draws our attention to the significance of several
Kantian distinctions for liberal political theory: the distinction between justice and
virtue, the difference between rights and benevolence (both fruitfully explored, for
example, in Onora O’Neill’s Toward Justice and Virtue), and the distinct ways in which
the legitimation of state authority can be related to justifications of a welfare state.
Höffe’s reconstruction of Kant’s “false promising” example and his proposals for a
Kantian approach to moral dilemmas are worth considering alongside some of Barbara
Herman’s work. (Can Höffe’s approach be extended to cover all perfect and imperfect
duties?)
Some will remain unconvinced of Höffe’s central philosophical contention that non-
Kantian attempts to ground or account for “categorical principles of law” are doomed
to failure, and that a “transcendental” grounding focused on Kantian
“universalizability” will succeed. On the negative side, Höffe provides a number of
arguments which suggest that familiar pragmatic-empiricist attempts to ground these
principles rely on dubious premises and amount to, at best, contingent defenses of
what appear to be necessary principles. These arguments, even if compelling, do
leave one free to abandon the alleged categorical necessity of the principles rather
than the commitment to empiricism. Moreover, even if one concedes that the
principles do require a non-empirical, “metaphysical” grounding, we receive only a
“sketch” of some of the key arguments, especially those devoted to grounding the
Kantian “first moral philosophy” (76, 183). Without taking anything away from the
contribution here, it is important to note that it constitutes a strong apology but not a
decisive positive argument.
I would suggest that, in the final analysis, the requisite Kantian argument for the
unconditional moral authority of the categorical principles of law may entail some
qualification of both the metaphysical modesty thesis and the anti-moralization thesis.
Recall Höffe’s contention that, in conjunction with the anti-moralization thesis, Kant’s
“philosophy of law and right . . . dispenses with the freedom of the will” (50). To be
sure, there is an important sense in which the content of Kant’s philosophy of law
focuses upon external freedom of action rather than autonomous or virtuous
motivation (87): the criteria for distinguishing between just and unjust claims, laws,
and regimes do not refer to the autonomy or heteronomy manifested by the relevant
parties. And, it may also be that, under certain empirical conditions, self-interest will
supply everyone with reasons to comply with the demands of Kantian justice, in which
case autonomous motivation would be unnecessary (51-52). In at least two respects,
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however, the normative authority of the categorical principles of right may require
more “practical metaphysics” (or metaphysical “moral anthropology”) than is
immediately apparent.
On Höffe’s account, the categorical principle(s) of law are moral principles: they
articulate an unconditional supra-positive norm, in the first instance, for states,
“juridical orders” or “social conditions,” rather than for individuals (31-32, 40, 54).
The presuppositions of the first moral philosophy that Höffe would have ground this
norm is unclear. Why ought states be concerned with or aspire to the idea of this
“unconditionally good social order”? Höffe may be correct that some normative
standard is essential to distinguishing between a legal order and a criminal enterprise
or “mere structure of power relations,” perhaps even that the norm must require that
“at least in certain cases, those subject to the force of the law are also those that
benefit by it” (46). The justification for the specifically Kantian demand that legal
institutions provide, at the fundamental level, an equal benefit to each (rather than
merely some benefit to each or a merely collective benefit), seems to be grounded in
the claim that objective normative judgment can only be completed in an absolutely
“unconditioned” principle (76, 79, 108, 221). But this regress argument to the
unconditioned principle may turn out, when elaborated, to presuppose that the
“judges,” those participating in, exercising, and subject to state authority or reflection
upon it, are autonomous rational beings.
A similar conclusion emerges if we consider the normative status that the categorical
principles of right have for the actions of individuals. There is some ambiguity in
Kant’s (and thus Höffe’s) account about whether the concept of right should include
any unconditional demand for “juridical legality,” i.e., an unconditional and supra-
positive demand that individuals act (from some motive or another) in compliance
with the fundamental demands of right. On the one hand, Kant may seem to suggest
that right only commands compliance when there is an empirical motivation (
[6:218,230]; cf. 50, 56, 67, 92). On the other hand, Kant claims, for example, that
right requires that all individuals who can enter into the civil condition ought to
([6:306] cf. 94, 127-8, 178). Regardless of how this question is resolved, there seems
to be a dilemma. If absolute “juridical legality” is not part of right, then within the
theory of right, human rights seem to be less than categorical. To sustain its
categoricity, one would have to invoke ethics, which requires juridical legality as a
presupposition of “juridical morality,” but would thereby be drawing on the stronger
metaphysical assumptions of ethics. If juridical legality is considered part of right, its
absoluteness would entail that right presuppose that there is always a motive to
comply with its demands. Right would need to presuppose either that people have a
capacity to be motivated by “duty” when self-interested motivation is lacking
(presupposing “freedom of the will”), or it would need to presuppose that there is, as
Kant thought, a providential “coincidence” between enlightened self-interest and the
demands of right that holds for all of its subjects (51, 193-4). Either way, the
categorical demand for “juridical legality” requires a substantial “metaphysical”
assumption.
Höffe is correct that in this context we may leave open the question of whether the
“practical metaphysics” is best defended with or without appeal to other aspects of
Kant’s philosophical system (64, 77). My critical philosophical suggestion, however,
prepared by Höffe’s own insightful analysis, is that, in spite of the important
distinction between the domains of right and virtue, the normativity of Kantian
categorical principles of right, for both the state and the individual, may depend upon
a bit more “moralizing” of politics and/or a bit more of the more demanding “practical
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metaphysics” (or metaphysical anthropology) associated with Kantian morality than

may be explicitly acknowledged here or in Kant’s texts.
The translation of the German word “Recht” and its relatives is the source of many
difficulties and controversies, as English-speakers familiar with Kant’s political
philosophy are well aware. Some awkwardness or confusion is unavoidable. The
translator’s choice to switch between “law and right,” “law,” and “right,” and their
cognates, and late in the book to switch intentionally, yet suddenly and inexplicably,
to “Recht” may strike some as less than ideal (227, cf. xxxvi). Höffe’s phrase
“morality of law without moralizing” hints at two related challenges: within Kant’s
theory “morality” (and its relatives) sometimes seem to refer to both ethics and
political philosophy, other times only to ethics; and within ethics, Kant draws a
motivational distinction between “morality” and mere “legality,” the latter of which can
be easily confused with the “legality” and laws discussed in political philosophy. To
avoid confusion, a translation of a contemporary work needs to adopt (even
interpolate, if necessary) and strictly adhere to some technical terminology; variation
can seem to suggest unintended distinctions. Somewhat unfortunately, this translation
seems to vary its technical interpolations as the book progresses: at different points in
the book, for example, the ethical subdomain and/or its special motive are identified
in terms of “moral worth,” “moral goodness,” “moral autonomy,” “strict morality,”
“ethics proper,” and “full blown” or “full fledged morality.” [The frequent interpolation
of “strict” morality (50f, 130) is potentially confusing since Höffe himself uses a
different “strict” sense in another passage (221).] On some occasions, technical terms
are also misused (e.g. Rawls’s “original situation”[220], “division of powers” rather
than “separation of powers”[79-80, 186, 277]). Other mistranslations mistakenly
suggest interpretive or philosophical errors, e.g., the assertion that happiness (rather
than happiness in proportion to virtue) is the complete good (246); or the running of
the same transcendental argument in opposite directions (76). This translation also
drops, for no obvious reason, a number of in-text citations and cross-references, and
drops (inconsistently) the original’s helpful use of italics to highlight organizational
cues. Nonetheless, the present translation manages, by and large, to make this
interesting and important work available, at last, to English-speaking readers. For this
we should be grateful.
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2003.05.08
Katerina Ierodiakonou
Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources
Ierodiakonou, Katerina (ed.), Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources, Oxford
University Press, 2002, 320pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199246130
Reviewed by R.J. Hankinson, University of Texas at Austin
“The title of this volume leaves no doubt as to its main objective”, writes the editor at
the beginning of her introduction: “the articles here are meant to shed light on
Byzantine philosophy against the background of ancient philosophical thought”. And
as she justly remarks a paragraph later “Byzantine philosophy remains an unknown
field”. Was there even any such thing in its own right? “Isn’t it all theology”, as a later
subtitle provocatively asks? The function of such a volume is to return the answer
“No” to that syntactically yes-expecting question. And the purpose of this review is to
assess how far it succeeds in so doing.
Of course, Byzantine philosophy was done against a heavily (sometimes repressively)
religious background -- but then so too was mediaeval philosophy in the west, and
most of us are prepared, if sometimes grudgingly, to allow that some real
philosophizing took place in Europe in the Middle Ages. Ierodiakonou proposes that we
allow, at least for the sake of argument, “that philosophy in Byzantium is an
autonomous discipline” (in some sense) and see what fruit can be gathered on the
basis of such an assumption.
No matter where one decides to draw the chronological boundaries of such a study (a
process which is, as Ierodiakonou stresses, obviously to some degree an arbitrary
one), the period is a vast one; even if we choose to begin only with Justinian’s anti-
pagan decrees of 529, and to end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it still lasts
nearly a millennium; and as Ierodiakonou notes, there are good reasons to begin
earlier and end later (the east was distinctively eastern soon after the founding of
Constantinople; and Greek influence and intellectual activity did not simply vanish
with the establishment of Ottoman power). The volume contains eleven substantial
contributions, and the figures discussed range from the 4th-century Basil of Caesarea
to George Scholarios, who remained active under the new order until his death in
1472. I shall discuss -- necessarily briefly -- most of these articles and then offer a
few general remarks in conclusion.
Sten Ebbesen begins with an enormously learned and authoritative general survey of
“Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction” from antiquity to the renaissance. He identifies
five successive waves of Greek influence on Latin culture, the first dating from the end
of the Roman Republic, involving the efforts of Cicero, Lucretius and others to make
Greek learning available in Latin (the Hellenizing movement was not of course purely
philosophical); and there was at least one period in which the commerce was in the
other direction, during the period of Venetian dominance that follows the fourth
“Crusade” in the early 13th century, when Latin philosophical texts began, for the first
time, to be rendered into Greek by Planoudes and others. But Ebbesen’s main point is
that this traffic was, until the very end of the period, almost exclusively in one
direction or the other -- there was very little actual intermingling of ideas until the
fifteenth century and after.
This fact means that we might expect Byzantine philosophy, when we discover it, to
be altogether more exotic and alien. And perhaps it is. But the first case-study of a
particular individual concerns the period when the east and the west are still nominally
at any rate part of the same Empire. Paul Kalligas examines “Basil of Caesarea on the
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Semantics of Proper Names”, contending that Basil managed to elaborate an

interesting and original variant on the available existing theories. Basil is writing
against the position of Eunomius, who advocated an extreme version of the view that
there were divinely ordained “proper” proper names for things, which could only be
attained by revelation. Basil, by contrast, thinks that names pick out individuals by
standing for some sort of “concept” associated with the particular (contingent)
attributes of the name’s bearer. Thus Kalligas compares it to contemporary “cluster-
theories”. His article ranges very far and very wide; philosophy of language from Plato
to Kripke is evoked, and ancient theories are evaluated in the light of modern
distinctions (between denotation and connotation, sense and reference). Far more
than any other contribution to the volume, this article practices what might be called
the contemporary analytical method of the history of philosophy. I am (usually) an
adherent of the method—but here it seems to yield distinctly unsatisfying results.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I do not see anything very significant, or very
interesting, in Basil’s theory. Kalligas’s analysis is clever (perhaps too clever) – but
ultimately unconvincing (he also, on p. 35, without comment offers an extremely
heterodox account of the Stoic amputation paradox, one which -- as far as I can see -
- fails to make any sense of it; but I have no space to discuss that here).
Dominic O’Meara examines a fragmentary dialogue on political science sometimes
attributed to Peter the Patrician, a high-ranking bureaucrat in Justinian’s court. The
dialogue attacks Plato’s conception of the ideal city but deals with the issue of the
nature and justification of ruling from a recognizably Neoplatonic standpoint; political
science is necessitated by the intermediate nature of the human condition, neither
fully rational nor fully irrational, neither divine nor material. O’Meara effectively
identifies the structural traces of Neoplatonic influence on the text; but it also draws
on what O’Meara himself characterizes as “a banality of the literature of monarchy of
the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods” (p. 55), namely the idea that “kingly
science is an imitation of God, or an assimilation to God”. Still, it retains its Platonic
flavor—the upshot being that good rulers must imitate divine attributes of goodness,
wisdom and justice. This will strike some (myself included) as fairly small beer— and
it is tempting to see the text as simply an attempt by a courtier to curry favor with an
autocrat by providing a largely spurious “philosophical” justification for absolutism. Its
author (as O’Meara concludes by emphasizing) elevates temporal kingship over that of
the church, in opposition to the views of pseudo-Dionysius. It may thus also be seen
(although O’Meara does not make this point) as one round in a long battle, fought in
the west at least as much as in the east, between the rival claims of the church and of
temporal authority to precedence.
Michael Frede contributes a characteristically challenging and thoughtful piece on
“John of Damascus on Human Action, the Will and Human Freedom”. The term
preferred by John for the faculty of the will is thelêsis, rather than the boulêsis
(wishing) or prohairesis (choice) of the classical tradition. This is no accident, Frede
argues—for John wanted to emphasize aspects of his understanding of the will, of its
relation to reason, choice, and appetite, and of its role in locating humanity (and other
created intelligences) in the divine order of things that would have been quite foreign
(indeed unintelligible) to Aristotle. Inter alia, Frede offers a sketch of John’s complex,
multi-layered analysis, and some stimulating thoughts of his own on the relation of
willing to choosing and the availability of options. His article is a judicious mixture of
fine scholarship, acute history of ideas, and philosophy, the upshot of which is that it
is reasonable to see John as a pivotal figure in the development of what is to become
the Thomist conception of the will as a separate faculty (or perhaps faculties),
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independent of both reason and desire, although obviously related to them. And this
account is both historically and philosophically plausible—for we know that John’s
work was indeed read and absorbed in the high Middle Ages in the west.
Jonathan Barnes offers a typically acute piece analyzing the logic theory in a text
known (since 1929) as the “anon Heiberg”. Although its authorship is unknown, it can,
unusually, be very precisely dated: a reference in the chapter on astronomy shows
that it was composed in the autumn of 1007. It is not, Barnes allows, in any way
original (in a pugnacious footnote Barnes questions whether originality is all it’s
cracked up to be; certainly other contributors seek, sometimes rather desperately, to
discern flashes of novelty in their subjects). What it is is a shortish digest of standard
Aristotelian logical theory; that is, Aristotle’s theory, supplemented in standard ways.
It deals, among other things, with the logic of “undetermined” propositions (“men
walk” -- Barnes rightly castigates the usual `translation’ “man walks” as barbaric:
101, n 27). Aristotle certainly mentions such propositions as forming a separate class
in de Intepretatione but made no effort to integrate them into his syllogistic. Later
writers, followed by anon Heiberg, do so, although it is impossible to come away from
Barnes’s lucid critical discussion without thinking that he did so ham-fistedly. Indeed
Barnes remarks candidly “I conclude that, in the matter of undetermined syllogisms,
our text is logically inept” (p. 105); and it is hard to resist that conclusion elsewhere
as well. Our author surveys a hotch-potch of later developments (including
hypothetical syllogistic, and—perhaps, the text is very unclear—Galenic relational
syllogisms), and concludes that, when all allowance has been made for tense,
modality, category, and types of negation, there are 2,433,552 valid argument
schemes. But here the modalities have been counted twice, and Barnes’ ingenious
suggestion for accommodating this (p. 112 n 56) is probably too clever. Barnes’s own
discussions of the logical issues raised are invariably interesting and acute; but they
are raised, for the most part, precisely because of the ineptitude of the text.
And I’m afraid that, to the extent to which the contributors engage with the
philosophical issues themselves rather than merely contenting themselves with
historical reconstruction (and this extent varies considerably from scholar to scholar),
with the exception of Frede on John they do so in spite of their subject-matter. Thus
“Metochites’ Defence of Scepticism”, as recounted by Börje Bydén, seems a poor
affair, uninspired by any real knowledge of the Sextan tradition, but (more
importantly in my assessment) equally uninspired by any genuine philosophical ability.
All that Metochites does (in the early 14th century) is to get hold of a few scraps of
sceptical argument preserved in the tradition, and confect an argument for the
imperfection of human knowledge (except as regards God and mathematics). Thus he
is in some sense the forerunner of the fideistic scepticism of the Reformation and
beyond. But like almost all of the subjects of this book, his main concern is theological
controversialism, to which philosophy is at best a very poor, secondary cousin.
The same goes for “The Anti-Logical Movement of the Fourteenth Century” discussed
by the editor in one of her two pieces (the other, a lucid treatment of “Psellos’
Paraphrasis on Aristotle’s de Interpretatione”, I have no space to consider). The
question that concerned the participants in the debate was not what logic was, or how
it should be developed, or whether and if so how it is a useful tool in human
understanding; the issue is rather: is it Godly? And I find that question of minimal
interest. One of the participants in the debate was Barlaam of Calabria (his major
opponent being Gregory Palamas); he held that logic was of value not merely in
refuting the pagans (so much Palamas allowed: pagan tools can be used against the
pagans, just as snake-venom can be used as an antidote), but also in establishing
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God’s positive qualities. Here too the issue is of enormous theological importance, and
had been at least since pseudo-Dionysius; and some interesting philosophizing may
be done, inter alia, while debating it (the main point here, however, is the notorious
“filioque” clause, and the hopeless wrench it threw in the works of the ecumenical
movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth century). But the conclusion is,
philosophically at any rate, depressing: Ierodiakonou commends Barlaam over
Palamas for superior understanding of Aristotle’s syllogistic; but he lost the debate,
being condemned by the Ecumenical Synod of 1341. He returned to Italy, where, as is
relatively well known, he tried without much success to teach Petrarch Greek; and he
thus holds a place of honour in the early history of renaissance humanism.
Barlaam is one of several figures who crop up in this book of whom non-specialists
may have heard mention and may even know something about, usually because of
some non-philosophical role they played in the history of their times, often in relation
to the west; and it is a pleasant side-effect of reading this book to have one’s limited
understanding of them fleshed out by accounts of their intellectual interests. Others in
this category include Michael Psellos and Gemistos Plethon, each of whom are the
subject of a number of articles. They are treated together in “Psellos and Plethon on
the Chaldean Oracles” by Polymnia Athanassiadi; she compares and contrasts their
different editorial attitudes to the said oracles, supposed at the time to be of great
antiquity, and hence of superior spiritual importance; and she shows how their
different editorial principles of inclusion and emendation reflect their rather different
intellectual aims, Plethon’s being to use them as a basis for a new syncretic spiritual
religion.
Plethon too had connections with the west, being associated with the failed
ecumenical council in Florence in 1439-40. Indeed it was there that he both lectured
on Plato (helping to spark Florentine neoplatonism), and composed a work against the
views of Scholarios, a supporter of Aristotle’s claims to pagan philosophical primacy.
Of course the dispute had a religious underpinning, but Plethon’s case is more
interesting than most – as a result of his commitment to Plato (and to the Chaldean
oracles) he effectively became a pagan himself, and although he died a natural death
at a very advanced age around the time of the fall of Constantinople, his works were
condemned (by Scholarios, who became the first Patriarch of the church under the
Ottomans). Against Scholarios was itself written in response to an attack of Scholarios
on an earlier work of Plethon’s (written before he took the name “Plethon”, in
conscious, not to say self-conscious, emulation of Plato, in fact) On the Differences
between Plato and Aristotle. Plethon (as plain George Gemistos) had argued that the
manifest differences between the views of the two great pagans could not simply be
interpreted away. Aristotle says the world never began, Plato that it did; Aristotle’s
God is not involved in the management of the world, Plato’s is. Thus Plethon takes
sides in the revival of a controversy that had obsessed the neoplatonists – can
Aristotle and Plato be harmonized? And he answers a resounding “no”. But, as George
Karamanolis, in his article on “Plethon and Scholarios on Aristotle” notes, the issue is
not simply one of interpetative accuracy: the participants in the debate are concerned
with discerning the truth. And on this, Plethon sides with Aristotle (as he interprets
him) and against Plato – and Christianity. Here at last (it seems to me) we have
philosophy for its own sake (at least as far as Plethon is concerned); but even now,
the philosophy is not, to my mind, terribly impressive in its own right, although it is
more interesting and important historically (in the context of the story of the revival of
Platonism in the west).
241
Ultimately, then, on the basis of this learned collection, my answer to the question
posed at the outset (how important is Byzantine philosophy?) would be: in its own
right, not very. There is one substantial article I have not yet touched upon (I exclude
Linos Benakis’ none the less useful “Epilogue: Current Research in Byzantine
Philosophy” from this category): John Duffy’s “The Lonely Mission of Michael Pellos”,
which takes its title form Psellos’ own assessment that “I am a lone philosopher in an
age without philosophy” (p. 152). He also claimed that “Philosophy, by the time I
came upon it . . . had already expired, . . /; but I brought it back to life, all by myself”
(p. 155). Duffy comments that “Psellos was no stranger to exaggeration . . . [but] on
the issue of philosophy, the evidence suggests that he is telling us nothing but the
truth”. To that conclusion, a deflating one for a historian of philosophy at least, I
would add that the time of the patient’s coma was a very long one, and that Psellos
did not really succeed in resuscitating it. For the most part, the “philosophers” treated
in this book are not only unoriginal (that may indeed be a venial sin, if indeed it is a
sin at all)—they are uninterestingly unoriginal. But for all that, this is a worthwhile
book, and I’m glad I read it –for I would not have come to that conclusion (or at least
not on remotely adequate grounds) had I not done so. And negative conclusions may
be disappointing -- but, in the humanities no less than in the sciences, they are often
very useful.
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2003.05.09
Gordon Graham
Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry
Graham, Gordon, Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge, 2002, 196pp, $12.95
(pbk), ISBN 041525258X.
Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan, University of Tennessee
Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry, is at its best when Gordon Graham focuses his
attention on aspects of the contemporary debates surrounding biotechnology that
purport to have an ethical dimension. Here, in the second half of the book, Graham
presents a series of compelling arguments to the effect that, for the most part, the
ethical issues engendered by new advances in biotechnology (e.g., genetic
engineering, adult mammalian cloning) are not different in kind from those issues
engendered by more ’traditional’ biological technologies (e.g., ’ordinary’ plant and
animal breeding, assisted reproductive technologies, etc.). However, Graham’s
apparent lack of familiarity with the relevant literature and lack of experience with
biology more generally results in his arguments being weaker and less well developed
than they need be, and the lack of references to those people that have made these
or similar arguments before (and, in many cases, made them better) is frustrating.
In the first part of the book, where Graham’s arguments depend on the details of
biological cases, his apparent inexperience with the literature, and with biology more
generally, is deeply problematic. Indeed, the number of straightforward factual errors
in Genes gives the unfortunate impression that Graham’s understanding of the current
state of evolutionary biology, genetic research, the philosophy of biology, and even
bioethics, are all fairly weak. However unfair, it is hard to take seriously someone
whose knowledge of the current state of the fields at issue comes across as so poor.
Graham seems blithely unaware of the status of important hypotheses, important
technologies, and important conceptual debates within and between these arenas. For
example, for at least the past decade, no one has seriously supposed that it was “a
long series of volcanic explosions” that wiped out the dinosaurs (48) rather than an
asteroid or comet impact. The idea that humans evolved “independently in
Australasia” and Africa (75) is likewise now pretty much dead in the water, and has
been for at least five years (and was on pretty shaky ground before that). The idea
that “the ultimate survivors” in Darwinian evolution are genes (80) does not represent
anything like a consensus (or even majority) view in contemporary evolutionary
biology. That the origination of life on Earth began 2.4 b.y.a (63) is far afield from the
figure of 3.5 b.y.a.. supported by current evidence. Likewise, Graham is apparently
unfamiliar with biochip technology (his arguments on page 99 depend on biochips not
existing), with the genetics of human eye color (he claims on page 52 that it is
determined by a single gene, which is known not to be true even of the blue/brown
case), or with genetics more generally (at one point, on page 112, he seems to be
claiming that selective abortion to eliminate recessive genes is impossible because
“50% of the population are heterozygotes” when of course the degree of
heterozygocity of a particular locus in a particular population is an empirical question).
The book’s references are remarkable for what is left out as much for what is included.
There are, for example, six of Richard Dawkins’ works referenced, but no references
to works by his late arch-rival, Stephen J. Gould (who is only mentioned once in the
text, and then in passing). There is an extended discussion of the limits of the so-
called ’neo-Darwinian Synthesis,’ but no mention of Richard Lewontin, who is certainly
one of the most important, if not the most important, evolutionary biologist to explore
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those limits in a rigorous and responsible fashion. Indeed, Graham’s understanding of

contemporary evolutionary biology seems to have been gleaned primarily from
reading Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Richard Dawkins’ popular works.
Whatever one thinks of the value of Dennett’s book, neither it nor Dawkins’ works can
substitute for the more technical introductions to evolutionary biology available, to
which no references are made (Douglas Futuyma’s classic Evolutionary Biology, now in
its third edition, provides a very even-handed introduction to the field, and a quick
perusal of it would have prevented many of Graham’s more embarrassing blunders).
There are no references to any works by such important names in the philosophy of
biology as Eliot Sober, Kim Sterelny, Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths, etc., and, even
when works by such important players as Philip Kitcher and Michael Ruse are
mentioned, it is in each case only one popular book that is cited.
The second chapter, “Genetic Explanation,” is the longest, and in many ways the most
problematic, chapter in Genes. It is not that there is much in his conclusions to
disagree with –the basic claim of the chapter seems to be that it is impossible to
adequately explain all the features of individual organisms (and the living world) only
by reference to their genes or to the details of their particular evolutionary history.
This is utterly uncontroversial, despite the sometimes injudicious language of authors
like Dawkins. The difficulties lie not with the conclusions, but with how those
conclusions are argued for, and what the conclusions are taken to imply.
For example, in discussing the possible limitations of what Graham calls “Darwinism”
he first confronts creationist and neo-creationist arguments. Graham’s attack on
creationism is sound (if unoriginal) and his discussion of the difficulties with Behe’s
use of the concept of ’irreducible complexity’ in the case of sophisticated organismal
biochemical pathways is at least adequate–Graham correctly notes that neither of
these represent a real threat to contemporary evolutionary biology. But what is
disturbing is that Graham then goes on to support Behe’s contention that the ’origins
of life’ are one arena where so far evolutionary biology has had relatively little to say
– a fact, claims Graham, that reveals a real limitation of “Darwinism.” This claim
demonstrates something of a category mistake on Graham’s part. The ’origin of life’
question is not, despite the protestations of Behe and the more traditional creationists
to the contrary, properly part of evolutionary biology at all. It is a problem for physical
chemistry, and, while if it is solved its solution will undoubtedly utilize insights from
biochemistry, it is emphatically not, nor could it be, a question about the evolution of
living things. The ’failure’ of “Darwinism” to provide an adequate solution to the
problem of how life originated is no more serious than its ’failure’ to provide an
adequate explanation for the physico-chemical properties of water. While explanations
of both are required to fully explain the living world, neither is properly speaking part
of the domain of biology (and still less of evolutionary biology).
Likewise, Graham takes the evidential and conceptual difficulties with ’Evolutionary
Psychology’ (EP) to be a serious problem for what he calls “Darwinism.” Now, if
“Darwinism” is meant to refer to contemporary evolutionary biology, Graham’s claim
is simply false, as some of the harshest criticisms of EP have come from practicing
evolutionary biologists themselves, many of whom regard the practitioners of EP to be
dilettantes of the worst sort (see Pigliucci and Kaplan 2002 and cites therein). Graham
rehashes a subset of the standard criticisms of EP and concludes (quite rightly) that so
far EP has not shown itself capable of providing the sorts of explanations for particular
behaviors or behavioral tendencies that its practitioners wish to provide. But is this a
problem for “Darwinism”? I can’t see that it is. The existence of phenotypic plasticity –
the ability of a particular developmental system to take on different phenotypes in
244
response to different environmental cues – implies that often what is required is not
an explanation of a particular phenotype, but rather an explanation of the evolution of
a range of possible outcomes. Further, evolutionary theory is not committed to the
view that everything an organism does it was selected to do; rather, some traits can
be co-opted for other uses (see Gould and Lewontin 1979). An evolutionary
explanation of the range of behaviors we are capable of performing given a particular
developmental context would be a successful explanation of the first order, in just the
same way as explaining, e.g., the range of the flowering times for a particular
genotype of Arabidopsis given particular developmental conditions is a success of the
first order (see Pigliucci 2002 for discussion). Now, if Lewontin is right, we may never
be able to adequately explain even why we evolved brains capable of the sorts of
complex tasks they are capable of, since the information needed to test competing
hypotheses may well be lost to time (Lewontin 1998). But again, our inability to
discover every detail of what actually transpired in the development of life on earth is
not and cannot count as a failure of ’evolutionary biology,’ no more than our inability
to discover every detail of what actually transpired in Napoleon’s march across Europe
is a failure of the more traditional historical enterprises.
Now, perhaps these criticisms of Graham are unfair; perhaps in criticizing “Darwinism”
Graham has something much more specific in mind than contemporary evolutionary
biology. But if so, Graham owes the reader a clearer picture of what “Darwinism” is
and how it fits into contemporary evolutionary biology, as evolutionary biology is
understood by practicing evolutionary biologists (including those who are
acknowledged to be leaders in the field). But again, Graham not only fails to provide
us with such an overview, he provides us with no discussion of, or references to, the
work of any contemporary practicing evolutionary biologists at all: Dennett and Pinker
are not evolutionary biologists, and neither Dawkins nor Wilson are practicing
evolutionary biologists any more (rather, they are both now primarily popularizers,
etc.).
These problems, though, remain mostly internal to Chapter 2, as all Graham needs for
the arguments he develops in the second half of the book is the uncontroversial claim
that our (and all other organisms’) development is not deterministic, simply the
unfolding of some simple genetic program. In Chapters 3 and 4 (“Genetic Engineering”
and “Playing God”), Graham focuses on the ethical issues that are supposed to
emerge from those biotechnologies currently being developed, as well as those
envisioned. Here, Graham is clearly on much more familiar terrain, and his arguments
are far more interesting and well-developed. Indeed, these two chapters provide a
good introduction to a particular way of thinking through these kinds of issues that
has not been given sufficient attention.
The basic line of argument through this more successful part of the book is that the
ethical and moral issues supposedly engendered by contemporary and emerging
biotechnologies are not in fact particularly new at all. For example, given current
technologies, attempting to clone an adult human would be wildly unethical because
the results of adult mammalian cloning are so uncertain, and so often result in
deformities and other serious problems. That we ought not experiment on humans
under these conditions does not require any new insights. With respect to future
possible cloning technologies, Graham correctly points out that the problems with
utilizing them are similar to the problems with utilizing other expensive assisted
reproductive techniques – the reasons for pursuing such technologies are poor at best
(162ff) (for more on this topic, see my review of Cole-Turner ed. 2001). The choices
that individuals make given particular social circumstances are not, Graham argues, a
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good guide to the kinds of technologies we should, as a society, wish to make

available and routine, since part of our goal should be to think about what kind of
social circumstances we want people to find themselves in – what kinds of choices we,
as a society, want to make available.
Graham does not, however, follow this line of reasoning in other places where it would
seem equally appropriate. He is quite right, I think, to argue that there is nothing
unique about the ethical issues that genetically modified agricultural products
(including food crops) give rise to; as in the case of (human) assisted reproductive
technologies, there are dangers of the ordinary sort to be weighed in cost-benefit
analyses. The mere fact that transgenetic elements are used does not create any
special risks not present before. But here, unlike in the case of assisted reproductive
technologies, Graham fails to consider the context in which decisions involving
contemporary agribusiness take place. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may
not be uniquely bad, but that does not prevent them from being part of a bad system
– a system that is reducing the number of kinds of agricultural products available and
the genetic diversity of those products that are available, while increasing the
distance, both physical and psychological, between most of us and the production of
our food. The claims of those people committed to the current methods of food
production notwithstanding, it is not at all clear that contemporary large-scale farming
is necessary to ’feed the world,’ nor even that it is markedly more efficient than is
small-scale farming (for related discussion, see Levins and Lewontin 1985). A more
nuanced exploration of the role that GMOs play in contemporary debates about the
role of agriculture in society would have been welcome.
Similarly, Graham’s discussion of the relationship between health insurance and
genetic information seems strangely shallow compared to his analysis of assisted
reproduction. The focus is oddly American; difficulties with getting health insurance,
being dropped by one’s insurance company, etc., are concerns that have little place
where ’health insurance’ is part of a national health system (as it is in most civilized
countries, the U.S. excepted). It might be true, as Graham argues, that the claims
that genetic information will radically transform private medical insurance are
overblown. But these concerns, even if overblown, could provide an entry into the
tricky questions of how we, as a society, wish to conceive of health insurance and
access to the medical system more generally. While in his analysis of assisted
reproduction Graham confronts the social context in which decisions regarding
assisted reproduction are made, his analysis in the case of health insurance falls
short.
Graham’s failure to follow up on the social role that health insurance plays and ought
to play may be the result of his peculiar understanding of the concept of the equality
of persons. Graham correctly notes for example, that the claim that human rights
derive from the basic equality of persons cannot be premised on people being equal in
every way. Oddly, he claims that the most plausible interpretation of the moral force
of the equality in this context is that “no one is in a position to decide that the life of
another is not worth living” (151). Now, while there is no consensus in political
philosophy on how to interpret the basic equality of persons, Graham’s notion is much
narrower, and rather weaker, than that found in more traditional formulations. Writers
such as John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Robert Dahl, etc., seem to take the equality of
persons to be about their moral and political equality; while different from each other
in many ways, these views all reflect the Kantian notion that as beings that can set
our own ends in life, and act to try to achieve these ends, we are owed a special kind
of respect. Specifically, preventing us from setting and acting to achieve our own ends
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requires a particularly strong sort of justification; hence, social systems that

encourage the development of people capable of making informed decisions about the
ends they wish to pursue and who are capable of acting to pursue those ends are
generally to be preferred over those that do not. Now, it certainly follows from this
that “no one is in a position to decide that the life of another is not worth living” but
the concept of political/moral equality is a much broader notion than Graham
acknowledges, and does far more work in both contemporary political philosophy and
in contemporary society. Taken seriously, it might for example point towards a
justification for providing access to a reasonable level of health-care, irrespective of
the health-risks people are born with.
The range of Graham’s interests as a philosopher is quite broad, extending from
aesthetics, to Christian ethics, to the impact of contemporary technologies on society.
Unfortunately, the material he confronts in Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry required
rather more depth than Graham provided.
References
Futuyma, D. J. (1998) Evolutionary Biology Third Edition. Sinauer Associates.
Sunderland, MA.
Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C. (1979) “The spandrels of San Marco and the
Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme” Proceedings of the
Royal Society of London B205:581-598.
Kaplan, J.M. (2001) “Review of Beyond Cloning: Religion and the Remaking of
Humanity,” (edited by Ronald Cole-Turner, Trinity Press, 2001). American Journal of
Bioethics. 1(3): 68-69.
Levins, R. and Lewontin, R.C. (1985) The Dialectical Biologist Harvard University
Press.
Lewontin, R.C. (1998), “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer”,
In D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues. An
Invitation to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 107-32.
Pigliucci, M. (2002) Beyond Nature vs. Nurture: the Genetics, Ecology and Evolution of
Genotype-Environment Interactions. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Pigliucci, M. and Kaplan, J.M. (2002) “The fall and raise of Dr. Pangloss: adaptationism
and the Spandrels paper 20 years later” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 15(2): 66-
70.
2003.05.10
Raimo Tuomela
Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View
Tuomela, Raimo, Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, 286pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521818605.
Reviewed by Seumas Miller, Australian National University
This is Raimo Tuomela’s most recent book, and it continues the general intellectual
project he has pursued in his earlier works, such as the The Importance of Us
(Stanford UP, 1995). Roughly speaking, that project is one of providing philosophical
analyses of various basic social action concepts, including joint action and collective
intentionality, and using these to provide accounts of less basic social notions such as
social institutions. Joint actions are actions involving a number of agents performing
interdependent actions in the service of some common intention or goal (e.g. two
people dancing together or a team of bricklayers and labourers building a wall). Such
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intentions or goals are referred to as collective or we-intentions since they are in some
sense shared and interdependent. We-intentions - together with mutual beliefs (e.g.
we all believe that p, we believe that we all believe that p, and we believe that we all
believe that we all believe that p) - constitute the core of what is usually referred to
by the term, “collective intentionality”.
The analysis of social action concepts is an important new area in philosophy;
twentieth century philosophy of action having been largely restricted to the analysis of
individual action, and twentieth century philosophy of social science to theorising in
relation to social explanation and the ontology of social entities. Other books in this
emerging field are Margaret Gilbert’s Social Facts (Routledge, 1989), John Searle’s
The Construction of Social Reality (Penguin, 1995), Christopher Kutz’s Complicity
(CUP, 2000) and Seumas Miller’s Social Action: A Teleological Account (CUP, 2001).
While many of these works offer closely related analyses of central concepts such as
joint action and we-intention, and of social phenomena such as social norms and
social institutions, there are some notable differences in the various analyses on offer,
and some of these are on display in Tuomela’s new book. One of the main theoretical
differences is between those who seek to reduce social action concepts such as we-
intentions to individual action concepts such as shared individual intentions, and those
who resist such reductions, opting to regard we-intentions as ’rock bottom’ or sui
generis concepts. Gilbert and Searle belong to the latter camp, Kutz and Miller belong
to the former. Although this is not everywhere obvious, I believe Tuomela ultimately
embraces the anti-reductionist camp. Here, as elsewhere in disputes about
reductionism, the outcome depends on the adequacy of specific proposed reductions.
(See Kutz’s Complicity and Miller’s Social Action.)
Another important theoretical difference is between constructivist accounts of sociality
and what can loosely be termed realist accounts. Tuomela sides with Searle in being a
constructivist. An important general argument against constructivist accounts is that
they emasculate central moral notions such as that of right and duty. It turns out that
human rights and correlative moral duties, for example, can exist only by virtue of
collective acceptance of specific practices. Accordingly, in morally degenerate societies
in which human rights are never respected, we must conclude that there simply are
no human rights to be respected; for we have no external moral standpoint from
which to make moral judgements in relation to collectively accepted social practices.
This is in my view deeply problematic.
The main social action concept analysed and deployed in this book is what Tuomela
calls “social practices”, and he offers his collective acceptance view of social practices.
Moreover, it turns out that social practices are fundamental building blocks of macro-
social forms, notably social institutions.
Tuomela understands social practices to be recurrent collective actions performed for
shared social reasons (Chapter 4). As Tuomela is aware, this is a wide and amorphous
set of social actions, and includes conventional actions such as using a fork to eat,
fashions such as wearing jeans, and socially accepted techniques such as the practice
of rote learning in schools. Indeed, Tuomela offers a detailed taxonomy of social forms
in this area. However, Tuomela’s analytical account of the core notion of a social
practice is essentially that of a repeated joint action, or at least an action that each of
a number of persons repetitively perform, and an action repetitively performed by
each on the basis of a shared we-attitude. This is similar to the analysis of a
convention offered by Miller in Social Action. However, Tuomela’s notion is weaker in
that there is no need for a collective end; all that is required is that each performs the
action in part for the reason that the others do (p.92).
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Tuomela’s central notion of a social practice presupposes so-called we-attitudes, such

as intentions or beliefs that are the objects of mutual belief among those who possess
them. Tuomela offers a useful taxonomy of we-attitudes, highlighting stronger and
weaker versions of shared intentions and the like (Chapter 2).
Note that Tuomela distinguishes between we-attitudes and I-attitudes (individual
attitudes). The former involve collective commitment and thinking from the
collective’s perspective; apparently they are also objective and public, as opposed to
subjective and private (pp.31-2, p.36 and p.144). So we-attitudes are not simply a
species of I-attitudes; they are qualitatively different. Presumably, therefore, we-
attitudes cannot be reduced to I-attitudes, or so Tuomela seems to think.
Here one might take issue with Tuomela and regard we-intentions and acting from the
collective’s perspective or as a member of a group (pp.37-39), as notions that can be
given an individualist treatment. Certainly, the view that I-attitudes involve only
actions directed to the individual’s own actions or benefit is unduly restrictive. An
individualist in the required sense can perfectly well admit the actions and benefits of
others - indeed the moral values or principles of all in the group including him/herself
- in the content of his or her intentions or beliefs. By parity of reasoning, individualists
can offer individualist accounts of notions such as an individual acting as a member of
a group. On the other hand, Tuomela has put forward more elaborate general
counterarguments that are germane to this issue (p.57f).
Most theorists would accept that social institutions are constructions out of more basic
notions; Tuomela opts for the more basic notion of a social practice as his building
block. By “social institutions”, Tuomela means complex social forms, such as money,
marriage and property regimes, that involve normative phenomena such as social
status and associated rights and duties. On Tuomela’s account, social institutions
conceptually depend on collective acceptance in the sense of shared we-attitudes; his
is a collective acceptance theory. This is a version of the view espoused by Searle in
his The Construction of Social Reality. However, Tuomela’s version is more detailed,
especially in relation to the key issue of what is to count as collective acceptance
(p.136f). It is important here to stress that the critical notion of collective acceptance
in relation to social institutions is one involving we-attitudes and not simply I-
attitudes.
A contrasting view in the literature to the collective acceptance view is a non-
constructivist teleological view (see Miller Social Action), according to which there are
pre-existing ends or goals which are also (real or imagined) human and collective
goods (e.g. law and order, material well-being, knowledge). On the latter kind of view,
institutional roles and tasks, and specifically institutional rights and duties, are in part
derived from the (real or imagined) human good which is the point of the institution
(and in part derived from human rights and the like, which ideally act as side
constraints); it is not simply a matter of collective acceptance of otherwise
unmotivated roles, goals, rights and duties. Note that on this teleological view a social
institution which failed to deliver the good it purported to deliver or which delivered an
outcome which was falsely believed to be a good, would be deficient qua social
institution. Tuomela appears at times to endorse the central plank of this teleological
view (p.157-158). Indeed, he speaks of an institution being “functionally successful”
(p.171) when it achieves a solution it purports to provide. Moreover, he accepts that
there are some institutions (viz. organisations) that have goals that in part define
them. To this extent he must accept a teleological dimension of at least some social
institutions. So a question arises as to whether Tuomela is opting for a hybrid model;
part collectivist acceptance, part teleological.
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Here I make three points. First, Tuomela makes it clear that his commitment to the
collective-acceptance view prevents him from embracing the proposition that social
institutions that are not also organisations have a defining telos which is some (real or
imagined) collective good. In the end, social institutions that are not also
organisations exist simply as a matter of collective acceptance, and the fact that they
might provide (real or imagined) collective goods is not even in part definitional of
them. Consider in this connection languages or systems of exchange which might not
involve organisations; surely they serve our collective communicative and other
purposes, notwithstanding the absence of an organisation. Second, in the case of
social institutions which are also organisations, Tuomela’s official general account in
terms merely of collective acceptance is inadequate; for ends or goals are, it turns
out, in part definitive. Third, and more generally, collective-acceptance accounts
appear to put the cart before the horse. It is not that we have social institutions
because we agree with, or simply acquiesce in, their existence; rather we have
established and continue to maintain social institutions because we have pre-existing
human and social needs for various collective goods that they can and do fulfill.
Throughout this book Tuomela offers elaborate taxonomies and analyses of the
various concepts and phenomena he is concerned to illuminate. Moreover, he
discusses a number of important issues that I have not mentioned, such as the
relationships between social practices in his sense, rule following and our application
of concepts to the world; and their implications for questions of logical priority in
regard to thought, language and action.
All in all, The Philosophy of Social Practices is a detailed and sophisticated treatment
of some of our most central social action concepts, and is a useful addition to the
philosophical literature.
2003.05.11
Wolfram Hinzen, Hans Rott (eds.)
Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface
Hinzen, Wolfram, and Rott, Hans (eds.), Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface,
Hansel-Hohenhausen, 2002, 252pp, 58 Euros (hbk), ISBN 1587506068.
Reviewed by Michael O'Rourke, University of Idaho
For a semantic theorist, belief and language are two important proving grounds. Belief
systems and languages both provide agents with information about our world and
influence our activity within it. More importantly, as many have noted, each provides a
window on the other: holding belief content and utterances constant, we can solve for
linguistic meaning; alternatively, holding linguistic meaning and utterances constant,
we can solve for belief content. Given this, semantic theorists must pay heed to the
relationship between belief and language, if only to argue that the suggested
connections are misleading.
In Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface, Wolfram Hinzen and Hans Rott offer
eleven essays that address the relationship between belief and linguistic meaning,
giving “various answers to how theories of the one notion relate to theories of the
other.” The editors go on to say that this collection should help determine “whether
the two concepts of belief and of [linguistic] meaning are essential to one another,
and how or whether they can be told apart” (vii). The collection is balanced between
belief and language, with belief content being the primary focus in five essays and
linguistic meaning being the focus in the other six. In all of the essays, though, the
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authors address implications for theories of the other sort of content. As a

consequence, one can learn much about the interface from both directions.
The volume is divided into three sections. Part I, “The Syntax of Meaning,” includes
three contributions that defend a syntactic, internalist approach to linguistic meaning
and conceptual content. The four essays in Part II, “Belief, Meaning, and Truth,”
present various perspectives on the nature and influence of belief content, with
considerations of rationality and intentionality framing inquiries into belief change and
belief’s role in a theory of linguistic meaning. Part III, “Semantics and Normativity,” is
home to four essays that address the normative character of belief content and
linguistic meaning, as well as normative elements in and constraints on semantic
theory generally. The volume also includes a brief introductory overview by the
editors, with Hinzen supplying further introductory material in the first half of his
essay in Part I.
In what follows, I sketch the main argumentative conclusions of the essays and their
connection to the overriding concern of the volume, viz., the theoretical association of
belief content and linguistic meaning. These essays, of course, do not restrict their
attention to a single theme, so in a second section I point to a number of related
issues and distinctions illuminated by this volume.
I. An Overview
In his opening essay, “Meaning without Belief,” Wolfram Hinzen describes a spectrum
along which we can locate theories of belief content and linguistic meaning. On one
end stand those theories that regard belief content and linguistic meaning as
“different and independent” (16). On the other, one finds theories that take them to
be the same thing. In the middle are various theories that take linguistic meaning to
depend on belief content, either methodologically or in a more substantive and
fundamental way. This spectrum represents the principal theme addressed by essays
in this volume, viz., the dependence of linguistic meaning on belief content.
The first group of essays stands at the “independence” end of the spectrum. This
group presents a broadly Chomskyan case for a syntactic analysis of belief content
and linguistic meaning. According to this brand of empirical internalism, concepts and
languages are controlled by different but related cognitive subsystems. While in
operation these subsystems can hardly be distinguished, they can be analyzed in
isolation for theoretical purposes. This analysis is restricted to the internal grammars
of the subsystems. In both places, meaning hypotheses are assessed relative to
syntactic evidence, and, in particular, empirical evidence concerning the range of
acceptable readings underwritten by grammatically approved structures. Thus, while
facts about belief can inform theories of linguistic meaning, and vice versa, these are
evidential and not conceptual relations. The semantic theory that results will be a
scientifically respectable theory of the internal, syntactic constraints on interpretation
and cognition.
Each essay in Part I makes methodological and substantive pronouncements. On the
methodological side, the authors express convictions in line with those that set
Chomsky apart from other, more traditional semantic theorists. Hinzen argues that
language should be studied as a system, with mechanisms posited to account for
linguistic meaning that is taken to be antecedent to and independent of belief or use.
In “Does Every Sentence Like This Exhibit a Scope Ambiguity?”, Paul Pietroski and
Norbert Hornstein contend that anyone who rejects the idea that “meanings of
sentences are not individuated more finely than syntactic structures . . . owes a
theory of the alleged nonsyntactic aspects of meaning” (66), where this requires
empirical research and not just intuition mining. Turning to the mind, James McGilvray
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announces early in “MOPs: The Science of Concepts” that his aim is “serious science”
of the mind, an internalist brand of empirical science that shuns notions such as
intentionality or wide content. On the substantive side, Hinzen crafts a complex
argument for the conclusion that rigidity as a feature of name-meaning is a syntactic
phenomenon. Pietroski and Hornstein develop a compelling case against the claim that
sentences like “Every girl pushed some truck” have a legitimate reading where ’some
truck’ takes wide scope. McGilvray defends a Fodorian account of concept structure
that is stripped of the externalist baggage of representationalism.
While the essays in Part I introduced us to the end of the spectrum where belief
content and linguistic meaning are independent, Part II includes two essays that shift
us to the opposite extreme. In “Meaning, Belief, and Truth,” Max Kölbel argues that
one can supply a Davidson-style truth-conditional theory of meaning for language and
avoid concerns about the limited reach of truth by replacing truth with belief as the
central semantic concept. By contrast, Alberto Voltolini spends almost no time
discussing language in “Why It Is Hard to Naturalize Attitude Aboutness,” choosing
instead to focus on a characteristic feature of representational content, viz.,
intentionality. But it seems Voltolini would agree that this non-reducible “mental-or-
semantic” feature of content is as much a part of linguistic meaning as belief content.
Akeel Bilgrami’s essay, “Belief and Meaning,” presents a view that holds to the middle,
as he insists that “it is not quite right” to identify belief and meaning (115n2). Even
so, his argument for a world-responsive externalism built on an internalist foundation
assumes that belief and meaning are closely related. Thus, when he urges us to reject
“orthodox externalist doctrine about content” in favor of a single notion that makes an
agent rational “by her own lights” without implying skepticism about the external
world, he champions a thesis about both belief content and linguistic meaning (107-
8).
The wild card essay in this part is Isaac Levi’s “Seeking Truth.” Like the others, it
focuses on belief and in particular on “the question of seeking truth in changing
beliefs” (125). In arguing that pragmatists can seek truth as a goal of inquiry, he
defends the claim that “epistemological infallibilism is consistent with corrigibilism”
(134) against challenges from Crispin Wright, Richard Rorty, and Donald Davidson. In
the process, Levi suggests that a theorist concerned with inquiry and interpretation
need have no “commerce with sense or meaning” (125). In fact, he seems to believe
that there is little semantic work for linguistic meaning to do, and this suggests that
belief and linguistic meaning should be treated as one topic and not two independent
concerns.
In Part III, we shift focus from the relation of belief and meaning to a topic that
concerns all who develop a theory along the spectrum, viz., the role of normativity in
semantic theory. Theory construction in any domain is normative, if only because one
must be sensitive to norms of logic and evidence. In the domain of meaning, though,
many regard normativity as part of the problem; in particular, meanings are seen as
normative constraints on use and interpretation. For its fans, normativity can figure
into the construction of semantic theory in at least two ways: the theory could itself
be normative, putting forth laws that govern the economy of contents, or it could be a
descriptive account of meanings as normative.
In the first essay, “The Purpose of a Normative Account of the Content of our Beliefs,”
Michael Esfeld develops an account of content that is normative, under pressure from
rule-following considerations. One difficulty for such a theory is an ontological
trilemma between reduction to non-normative considerations, excessive expansion of
normativity, or elimination of normativity entirely. Esfeld supplies a first-person
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account of normative meaning that dissolves the trilemma. The second essay,
“Semantic Structure of Belief and Meaning,” by Sebastian Rödl, serves up a social-
pragmatist account of the structure of content that is pressed over neuroscientific and
psychologistic alternatives. Rödl argues that semantic structure is the structure of the
capacity to use and understand sentences, a capacity that is framed by sociocultural
norms appropriate to the practice of language use.
By contrast with these normative accounts, the final two essays in Part III approach
semantic normativity as a fact to be explained. Diego Marconi, in “The Normative
Ingredient in Semantic Theory,” argues that semantic theories of the standard sort do
not embed norms but they do obey them. Focusing on formal semantics, Marconi
argues that “as a descriptive theory of semantic competence, [it] is informationally
incomplete” (219), but informational completeness can only be gained at the cost of
normative inadequacy, in particular, provision of the wrong truth conditions. Thus, if
one assumes that there is a “norm to the effect that the semantic values of the
descriptive constants ought not to be specified in an informative way,” one
rationalizes its informational inadequacy by taking formal semantics to be
“normatively-inspired”, even if it is not obviously a normative theory (225). In the
final essay, “From Within and From Without: Two Perspectives on Analytic Sentences,”
Olaf Müller presents a defense of “narrow analyticity” that is intended to capture our
intuitive sense of analyticity while withstanding the Quinean critique. With this, he
preserves a distinction that poses an important normative question to all language
users: “Which sentences am I not permitted to reject—if I want to avoid talking
nonsense?” (229).
II. An Evaluation
One measure of a good collection is the number of seminal papers. Most of the essays
in this volume are either extensions of projects articulated in greater detail elsewhere,
or are contributions to the necessary work of “normal science” within philosophy, i.e.,
the development of detail in broader theories. Relative to this measure, the collection
does not fare very well, but on another it stands out, viz., the number of important
themes and distinctions examined.
We have tracked the theme of the theoretical independence of linguistic meaning
through the first two parts, and while the essays in Part III have a different emphasis,
they can nevertheless be located along its spectrum. Both Esfeld and Rödl defend
theses located near the dependence extreme, with Müller not too far away. Marconi,
by contrast, views dependence as an obstacle, and so cleaves to the independence
extreme. Turning from this theme, we have noted that Part III examines normativity
in semantic theory, but again, the rest of the book is not mute on the topic. The
essays in Part I contribute to a descriptive, scientific theory of belief and language,
but in so doing staunchly support the methodological norm of “serious science.” Part
II is a mixed bag. Bilgrami denies “the relevance of norms to word-meaning” (111),
but the others are less explicit. Nevertheless, truth for Levi, belief for Kölbel, and
intentionality for Voltolini all appear to play the role of normative constraint on
semantic theory.
In addition to these prominent themes, several others receive close attention. Two
substantive themes concern the nature of content. Well-represented is the debate
between externalists who regard content as “outside the head” and internalists who
take it to be exhaustively specifiable in narrow, cognitive terms. Voltolini, Esfeld, Rödl,
and Marconi supply variations on the externalist theme, while the papers of Part I
serve up three statements of internalism. Bilgrami addresses the debate most directly,
and in so doing occupies middle ground, building an internalist externalism. Closely
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related to this is the debate between those who take content to be reducible to the
physical, and those who deny that it is so reducible. The reductionist view is given
initial expression in the first paragraph of the first essay, where Hinzen takes
the view that the human mind is a natural object that is not in principle investigated in
a different way than the immune system, say, or the planetary system. When
studying the human language system, we aim at explanatory principles and laws
much as in the sciences of the body, hoping for an eventual integration with the core
natural sciences. (13)
This view is echoed in Pietroski and Hornstein, and in McGilvray. On the opposite side
is Voltolini, who argues that intentionality resists physicalist reduction. Esfeld and Rödl
also toe the non-reductionist line, arguing that content is a non-reducible product of
social practices.
On the side of methodology, the volume explores two distinctions that frame much of
the philosophy of language. Is the proper theoretical approach to belief content and
linguistic meaning one that takes them to be present in individual agents or
distributed across groups of interrelated agents? The authors of Part I, along with
Bilgrami, develop the former answer, while Esfeld and Rödl pursue the latter. A
related question concerns the role of empirical considerations—should mind and
meaning be treated as proper objects of scientific study, or should they be the subject
of conceptual analysis, in the classic philosophical style? McGilvray champions the
former view, arguing that “the aim should be a serious science” (73). Hinzen, along
with Pietroski and Hornstein, join him in crafting arguments along these lines. A vocal
exponent of the latter view is Esfeld, who contends that the theoretical point of this
work “is not an empirical or psychological explanation of the capacity of thought, but a
conceptual analysis of norms, content, and meaning” (193). The chorus of like-minded
includes the remaining authors in the volume, with Rödl standing out as one who
explicitly endorses this approach.
This collection presents a number of well-argued essays that cut across several
important trends in contemporary philosophy. My chief complaint would be that Part
III is rather one-sided. As constructed, it contains no essays that challenge the
centrality of normativity to the investigation of meaning and content. The rest of the
volume is even-handed, but the view of normativity held by those who believe that
theories in this domain should aim at “descriptive and explanatory adequacy” (73) is
not in evidence. This weakness, however, is overridden by a wealth of useful insight
on a number of other theoretically interesting points.
254
2003.05.12
Ross Harrison
Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth
Century Philosophy
Harrison, Ross, Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of
Seventeenth Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 288pp, $23.00
(pbk), ISBN 052101719X.
Reviewed by Duncan Ivison, Princeton/University of Sydney
This extremely interesting and well-written book is billed as an “important new study
of the foundations of modern political theory”. Authors probably shouldn’t be held
responsible for their publisher’s blurbs, but this immediately raises a series of
questions and expectations. What counts as a “foundation” in the first place, and how
can reading Hobbes, Locke, Grotius and Pufendorf contribute to our grasp of these
foundations? It also suggests something like Quentin Skinner’s project in his now
classic Foundations of Modern Political Thought. For Skinner, the foundations of
political thought were to be exposed historically in part to reveal their contingency—
which didn’t necessarily mean they were arbitrary—and to help us see the connections
between philosophical arguments and contestable claims to social power. Harrison’s
project is more explicitly philosophical than Skinner’s, in the sense that he is less
concerned with detailed reconstruction of contexts and problems of power. But his
philosophical claims about foundations are also built on a historical thesis.
The title of the book is taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Macduff’s lament for
the murder of King Duncan, the consequence of which is that “Confusion now have
made his masterpiece!”. For Harrison, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the undermining of
moral and political order provides a leitmotif for thinking about seventeenth century
political philosophy in general. The greatest works of this century—here meaning
those of Hobbes and Locke—emerged out of moral and political confusion. Religious
disputes over the nature of belief and religious practice generated murderous civil and
international conflict. Philosophical disputes, and especially the revival of ancient
skepticism and newer forms of modern skepticism, sowed deep philosophical doubts
about the possibility of knowledge, natural or otherwise. Older philosophical
frameworks, such as Aristotelianism and Thomism, were found wanting, and
philosophers struggled to find new arguments to arbitrate between various warring
doctrines, or indeed to transcend them.
For Harrison, skepticism is the most pressing moral and political problem faced by
seventeenth century philosophy, and especially by Hobbes and Locke. And the
problem of skepticism infects “the most fundamental …problem in political philosophy”
– the problem of political obligation (p. 13). At times Harrison seems to suggest these
are still our problems, and that one way we gain insight into them is by seeing the
various options for their resolution as presented by Hobbes, Locke, and Grotius,
among others (pp. 4-5). We gain this kind of insight by taking the history of
philosophy seriously, and especially the contexts within which moral and political
arguments are formed. Not surprisingly, since these remain our problems, Hobbes
emerges as the most clear-headed in this history since he seems most willing to bite
the bullet when it comes to the clash between self-interest, politics and morality (263-
4). We need politics (the commonwealth) to solve the moral problem, given his
subjectivist account of what is good and bad and of moral judgment. In a lovely aside,
Harrison tells us that at one point he contemplated calling the last chapter “What’s the
Use?” in order to “reflect more generally on the possibility of political philosophy and
255
on the use for political philosophy of the historical philosophers I have been
describing” (p. 245; the chapter is actually called “Why Utility Pleases’). His answer to
this question is rather elusive, but I take it that it is Hobbes” insight about the need
for politics to help solve our moral conflicts that Harrison is suggesting is the master
stroke of the “new” natural law. This and the various attempts at refuting Hobbes”
argument, such as Cumberland’s, point to the “beginnings of the contractualist
method” of discovering the good by discovering those things into which everyone
would contract (262). Harrison even suggests that Locke gestures at something like it
in his 1692 note “Ethica A” (263). But in another much bleaker note written the
following year (which Harrison doesn’t cite), Locke suggests that without God and his
divine law what we get is moral chaos. Harrison admits that Locke is only “waving” at
something about which Hobbes is much clearer.
As it stands, the main claims of the book are hardly novel. The central focus on
skepticism fits into a pattern of thinking about the history of the seventeenth century
that has its roots in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and which has been central
to the work of historians of philosophy like Richard Popkin, amongst others. Richard
Tuck and Knud Haakonssen have also argued recently at great length and with great
skill that the political thought of the seventeenth century—especially that of Hobbes
and Grotius—was profoundly shaped by the challenge of skepticism mounted by
writers such as Montaigne and Charron. But what is interesting about the book, at
least for me, is the way it tries to balance historical and philosophical approaches to
these questions in a manner not often attempted in the existing literature. To over-
generalize somewhat, historically minded scholars often provide beautiful
reconstructions of the context of an argument or period, but avoid asking the kinds of
philosophical questions that inevitably emerge as one reflects on the relation between
arguments then and now. On the other hand, and much more frequently,
contemporary philosophers tend to wrench early modern arguments out of context
altogether, and criticize or put them to work in modern guise without any hesitation
whatsoever. Harrison tries to strike a balance between these two extremes, and it
provides an interesting background for the work as a whole.
Let me say a bit more about this tension as a way of thinking about Harrison’s
discussion of normativity, which strikes me as lying at the heart of the book.
Sometimes the history of philosophy is seen as a series of pale approximations
building up to what we now know to be true. The history of early modern philosophy is
particularly prone to this kind of distortion. Referring to the period beginning from the
seventeenth century up to the French Revolution as the “Age of Enlightenment” only
reinforces such a tendency. At some very general level it’s undoubtedly true that this
is an age of progress and genuine intellectual enlightenment. But just as many
questions are raised as answered by taking on too sweeping a vision of this narrative.
For one thing, it turns out that there isn’t just one “Enlightenment” but many - early
and late, “high” and “low’, radical and conservative, English and continental, etc. (see,
for example, the work of Jonathan Israel, Tim Hochstrasser and Ian Hunter). Second,
it is not even clear that we should assume that what we mean by philosophy today is
what philosophers in the seventeenth century understood themselves to be doing. A
basic assumption governing much of the writing of the history of philosophy since
Kant has been that a theory of knowledge is at the core of philosophy (call it the
“epistemological paradigm’, a phrase I borrow from Knud Haakonssen). Early modern
philosophy seems to confirm this development, and especially the role played by
someone like John Locke and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The
struggle against skepticism defines the project of philosophy from the seventeenth
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century onwards. Thus political philosophy is either a form of “applied philosophy’,

meaning the working out of various meta-ethical claims in different practical contexts,
or it is a domain in which claims about morality are irrelevant, or at least ineffective.
Philosophy is about justification, and political philosophy is either no different or it is
not philosophy.
Now Harrison argues that political philosophy has essentially three tasks (247-252).
First, the task of explanation, that is, “promoting understanding of political aspects of
our (social) world”. Second, the “task of justification . . . we want to know why or
whether we should have it, or in what way’, and in this sense political philosophy is a
normative subject, “a part of applied ethics” (247). Third, it must explain motivation,
that is, why people are or could be motivated to “produce” the desired outcomes or
institutions. These various aspects can come apart and combine in various ways, as
Harrison shows very nicely with regard to both Hobbes and Locke. But the crucial task
for political philosophy is justification – in fact, the need for justification is entailed by
the confusion caused by skepticism, and the responses by Hobbes and Locke are
“masterpieces of justification” (252). The structure of justification that Harrison
presupposes goes something like this. Rationally binding norms are either self-
grounding, on the basis of some account of self-interest, moral realism, or a
conception of man as a rational self-governing being, or they bind in virtue of the
superior wisdom and/or power of God. Seventeenth century political philosophy is
then taken to be a series of variations on these themes, and mainly variations of the
latter. Hobbes is the exception that proves the rule, and that is why he seems most
clear-headed from our modern perspective.
The dual commitment of Harrison’s project is striking here. On the one hand, he wants
to provide an historically sensitive account of the arguments of people like Hobbes,
Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Cumberland and others. And on the other hand, he is
arguing that the search for the foundations in political thought is best understood as a
problem of philosophical justification, understood basically in terms of what I called
the “epistemological paradigm”. To be fair, he also talks about the important role of
explanation and of motivation, but his main concerns are epistemological. How can we
know the content of the natural law? On what grounds do we know it and in what
sense does it bind? This reflects a deep ambiguity lying at the heart of Protestant
natural law theory in general; the worry that if there was no moral continuity between
Man and God, then it wasn’t clear how reason could establish any link between man’s
behaviour and God’s reward or punishment. So justification is obviously central to
what Hobbes or Locke thought they were doing. But if our conception of justification is
too narrow, then we risk leaving out an enormous amount out of what counted as
political philosophy in the seventeenth century—or as philosophy in general, for that
matter. Harrison’s off-hand remark that Spinoza is not a “normative thinker” and is
“descriptive in intention all the way down” (p. 252) is astonishing in this regard
(especially in light of much recent work on Spinoza). Moreover it is a missed
opportunity for a discussion of the different senses of “the normative” in seventeenth
century political philosophy, outside of the confines of the way we understand it
today—a way deeply shaped by Kant, it seems to me. This is not only a point about
history. One thing the history of political thought can do is help loosen the grip of
seeing our current way of using our normative concepts, as bequeathed to us by our
intellectual heritage, as the only way. This is probably asking Harrison to do
something that falls outside the bounds of his stated project, but I was led to think
about it in the course of reading his book.
257
Thus, Samuel Pufendorf, in his De officio hominis et civis, conceived of man in the civil
sphere as neither a self-obligating (and thus self-governing) rational being, nor as
under obligation in virtue of some higher and divine moral force. Instead (as Ian
Hunter and David Saunders have argued recently) he was attempting to reconstruct
politics along the lines of a kind of “civic ethics” that could free the civil authorities of
the territorial states in the new Westphalian world of Northern Europe from
destabilizing disputes over what counts as the truly “higher” authority. And he did so,
in part, by applying the distinctive moral idiom of “office” to his analysis of the
concept of duty in the civil sphere, something Harrison doesn’t discuss and which is
very different from moral theology or positive law (cf. 158-60) but still rooted very
much in the context of seventeenth century arguments about politics. Second, and
more generally, justification of belief was not the only way in which normative
concerns were pursued in early modern philosophy. For example, the role of ad
hominem argument and the “exemplary” philosophical life (e.g. Bayle’s portrayal of
Spinoza), have no role in Harrison’s story, despite their prominence in early modern
arguments. Being open to these different ideas of the normative is important for
grasping the absolute centrality in seventeenth century debates over the nature of
history—both sacred and profane—which involve conceptions of knowledge that sit
very uncomfortably with their modern counterparts. Hence debates over the
interpretation of Scripture, and the messianic nature of some forms of Protestant
theology (such as Locke’s), shaped various normative political claims in ways at odds
with the epistemological paradigm. In fact, Harrison is quite aware of the challenges
this raises for the task of justification in politics (see especially pp. 186-8, 254, 255-
7).
The book is replete with intelligent and very clear discussions of various problems
familiar to readers of Hobbes and Locke. Harrison displays an excellent grasp of the
wide range of texts that Hobbes and Locke wrote, as well as some of the surrounding
texts to which they were responding and arguing with. He is also capable of putting
various modern debates into helpful relief. Thus we get a careful discussion of the
limits to which Hobbes’s account of the state of nature represents a genuine version of
the prisoner’s dilemma as modeled by contemporary game theorists, one that
combines both conceptual analysis and careful attention to historical context (96-100,
113). The foundation of Locke’s conception of natural rights is distinguished from the
use Nozick makes of it (253-5). Harrison also makes an inspired use of Hobbes’s
distinction between “counsel” and “command” to help make sense of the ways the
laws of nature are meant to oblige (pp. 81-92). There is an excellent discussion of the
relation between will and consent in both Hobbes and Locke (126-129; 200-209). And
there is a careful discussion of Locke’s theory of property, which again asks the right
kind of philosophical questions about the nature and incidents of property, but also
with a view to the theological and practical contexts in which Locke’s argument was
embedded (219-238). Finally and more generally, as I’ve already mentioned, Harrison
is extremely sensitive to the kinds of question readers of these texts are prone to ask
today: what would happen if we dropped God from the picture? What work does God,
or at least various theological premises, do in these arguments? To what extent can
we make sense of these arguments outside of these theological premises? For all
these reasons and more, Harrison’s book is a very welcome addition to the literature
on seventeenth century political philosophy.
2003.05.13
258
Claudia Baracchi
Of Myth, Life and War in Plato's Republic
Baracchi, Claudia, Of Myth, Life and War in Plato's Republic, Indiana University Press,
2001, 280pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0253214858.
Reviewed by Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver
Claudia Baracchi offers something extraordinary to readers of her book, Of Myth, Life
and War in Plato’s Republic. I will not say that the book “adds” anything to Plato
scholarship, for as Baracchi says in the book’s Introduction, her purpose is rather to
subtract from the sediment of commentary layered upon Plato’s text. As she explains
it, the book attempts “to encourage a certain emptying, a certain hesitation to
embrace all too customary assumptions” (3). It seems to me that the book succeeds
in this attempt, and does so principally through its receptiveness to what is
extravagant in Plato’s text—that surprising or disconcerting extravagance which we
might otherwise eliminate if we were not receptive to the text in the way Baracchi
suggests (4-5). Through such receptiveness the book itself becomes extravagant in
the literal sense of wandering outside the customary bounds of interpretation.1 No
doubt some readers will find Baracchi’s reading extravagant in other ways—for
example, in its unhesitancy to make provocative claims, or its determination to
engage Plato’s text from within the language peculiar to contemporary Continental
thought.2 Nonetheless, the reply will be, I take it, that this latter extravagance is
something derivative, consequent upon that extravagance in Plato’s text to which
Baracchi has skillfully focused our attention.
It is not surprising that the book grew out of an attempt to interpret the role of myth
in Plato, and specifically the myth of Er at the conclusion of Plato’s Republic. Here an
extravagant reading like Baracchi’s is required to move beyond the tradition of
interpretation that either avoids the myth in the manner of Averroes (221-222), or
else excises the myth as a “lame and messy ending” in the words of Julia Annas (6,
222). For Baracchi, saving this myth in the way the text enjoins involves a
“receptiveness and responsiveness to the unexplainable” (219)—or, as she puts it
somewhat differently, “letting it come into itself while letting it come to pass, granting
it stability (if in passing), protecting it from pure dissipation . . . Above all, saving
means keeping safe that strangeness that eludes and strains one, whose provenance
one does not know, even as (especially as) that strangeness is one’s own” (118). Here
the language itself reveals Baracchi’s constant emphasis upon the pathos fundamental
to philosophy as such. Early in the book she captures the sense of this pathos as
something “utterly passive,” “radically affective and receptive” with respect to what is
described as “the primordially attuning, ineffably structuring environment of the
conceptual effort” (19). While she does note, at one point, that the creativity of
philosophy “stems from both the philosopher’s endurance and the philosopher’s
receptivity to something wondrous” (54), her constant emphasis upon the latter poses
certain difficulties that are instructive for the serious student of Plato.
This is perhaps most clear in Baracchi’s treatment of war in Plato’s Republic, which is
not only a topic of discussion, but is, as she says, enacted throughout the dialogue
(153). Tracing this theme, Baracchi illuminates the agonistic character of the Republic,
and of the philosophical activity characteristic of Plato’s Socrates more generally.3
Indeed, this theme is announced in the opening scene of the Republic, where Socrates
wonders whether there may not be an alternative to his being overpowered by
Polemarchus and the others or his overpowering them, and then enacts such an
alternative through the dialogical combat in which his opponents become his
259
interlocutors (154). For Baracchi, Socrates’ dialogical combat is not driven by the
“passion for disintegration,” but aims, rather, at transformation—”that death which is
other than termination,” as she puts it, so that the transformation concerns oneself as
much as one’s opponent, and both “in their belonging together” (156). From this
dialogical combat Baracchi sharply distinguishes actual warfare, which, she says,
“always presupposes a certain naïve self-confidence, the capacity for relatively
unproblematic self-assertion” (156). Thus, on her analysis, actual war does not allow
for dialogical combat—”the carrying out of a war on the battlefield (the falling of
bodies, the spilling of blood) does not admit of the development of war in speech”—
and conversely, dialogical combat “suspends war proper” (156). Since Baracchi
considers Socratic dialogue to be “the place of the affirmation of incongruity,” it
follows that dialogical combat is incompatible with and “clearly calls into question the
unquestioning exercise of warfare in its possibility, the very possibility of practicing or
even just promising war unquestioningly” (158).
Here we would do well to think about this relationship with the utmost care, especially
in light of present circumstances. Some instances of dialogical combat are purely
eristic and thus unphilosophical, just as some cases of actual warfare approximate the
naïve, unquestioning self-confidence or self-assertion that Baracchi describes. But are
we to conclude that there cannot be war without such naiveté, that it is impossible to
enact warfare in the face of questioning? Such a claim is certainly possible, but
Baracchi does not argue for her pacifism explicitly, and its imposition upon Plato’s text
makes the interpretation appear rather tendentious. What is most striking about
Plato’s thought on war—particularly in the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws—lies in
the close parallels drawn between philosophy and warfare, which suggests (with at
least some degree of presumptive evidence) that Plato does not hold philosophy and
warfare to be incompatible. Just as it is possible, in Plato’s texts, to engage one’s
interlocutors agonistically and at the same time philosophically, so, we may presume,
it is possible to engage in acts of war without prejudice to one’s commitment to
philosophy.
Furthermore, this suggested compatibility between philosophy and warfare in Plato’s
texts has important implications for a hermeneutic orientation toward Plato that claims
an attunement to pathos. If philosophical dialogue is to enact war, it must not only
constitute itself as “the place of the affirmation of incongruity,” as Baracchi says, but
also as the vigilant effort to preserve the integrity of one’s position against challenges
to it. Socrates suggests as much when, in Book VII of the Republic, he says:
Unless a man is able to separate out the idea of the good from all other things and
distinguish it in the argument, and, going through every test as it were in battle
[hôsper en machêi dia pantôn elenxôn diexiôn]—eager to meet the test [elenchein] of
being rather than that of opinion—he comes through all this with the argument still on
its feet [aptôti tôi logôi diaporeutêtai]; you will deny that such a man knows the good
itself, or any other good? (534b-c)4
Though philosophy must involve the wonder, risk and openness to transformation
emphasized by Baracchi (161), it could never reveal itself as dialogical combat if it
were not animated by the will to not let the logos fail in the face of assault. This, it
seems to me, is the only way we can understand Socrates’ commitment to be
persuaded only by the logos (Crito 46b-48d), his resolve to not let the logos die
(Phaedo 89b-c), and even his appeal to Achilles as an exemplar of moral resoluteness
(Apology 28c, ff).5
In this light we can see why the issues of self and other, identity and alterity, are the
focal points of Baracchi’s discussion of war in Plato’s dialogue.6 Baracchi addresses
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this “intimate relation of thought and war” in her discussion of how war emerges in
Socrates’ account with the founding of the polis as “unitary, self-same and self-
enclosed . . . fundamentally at war with its other” (165). While, at first glance, it may
appear that the polis will necessarily be poised toward the “denial of difference” and
“destruction of the other” (165), it is shown that the text, in Baracchi’s words, “lets
transpire, however fleetingly, suggestions to the effect that alterity may be
acknowledged otherwise than through the invention of the other concomitant with the
founding of sameness/identity” (167). This means, then, that Socrates’ polis will
acknowledge alterity even as it struggles for survival, and so will exhibit “the restless
reformulation of its shape and identity” (168). Of course, such a formulation could
equally well apply to Socrates’ vigilant concern for the logos within dialogical combat.
For he must continually acknowledge alterity and, even more, allow for some degree
of transformation in the logos in order to preserve it—and this holds whether we are
speaking of the definition of justice or the mythic account of Er. Thus, it turns out that
Socratic dialogue and Socratic warfare are intimately related, and the claim that they
are incompatible (even mutually exclusive) seems to presuppose that philosophy is
more wholly a matter of pathos than it really is—at least, for Socrates.
In an earlier essay, Baracchi offers a meditation on the limits of pathos as a
fundamental characterization of philosophical thinking.7 Noting Nietzsche’s
appreciation of thaumazein as the philosophical pathos, Baracchi captures the
important nuances in Nietzsche’s view of this pathos:
What shines through such an image, then, is the overwhelming experience of
exposure to the wondrous, the suffering involved in letting oneself be determined and
guided by the indeterminate, the awe and astonishment at undergoing an impression
that cannot be absolutely appropriated but only indeterminately received. From this
fundamental state does philosophy arise—as the laborious articulation of the
experience of powerlessness, as the articulation of passion. But . . . philosophy, as
this passionate articulation, is not itself merely passive, merely powerless. In fact, it
reverts into a kind of action, of which writing would be mere instrument and corollary
. . . [A]s philosopher, Plato would precisely image an agitating force, a force whose
de-forming, de-structuring and trans-forming character would reflect the philosophical
experience of an abysmal suffering.8
For Nietzsche, the transforming character is something found in Plato the man, the
political agitator, for whom even the founding of the Academy is to be understood
primarily in political terms (Werke 9: 238f.). Still, what is valuable about Nietzsche’s
view is the idea—certainly applicable to Plato’s writings—that “the passion of
philosophy comes to be reflected in an action resembling, rather, self-undoing and
pervasive agitation.”9 If this is how we are to understand what Baracchi calls “the
action of the passion of philosophy,”10 then pathos is clearly not a matter of mere
passivity.
My point in raising these illuminating passages from an earlier essay is not to argue
that Baracchi is wrong to focus attention on the importance of pathos in Plato’s
Republic as something “utterly passive” (19), but to underscore her point that the
creativity of the philosopher—at least, or above all, the creativity of Plato’s thought—
”stems from both the philosopher’s endurance and the philosopher’s receptivity to
something wondrous” (54). In any case, the danger would be one of stressing
philosophy’s relationship to the pathos of wonder while, at the same time, losing sight
of philosophy’s fundamental allergy to what Aristotle calls the life lived through the
pathê [pathê zôntes] (EN X.8, 1179a13). For, in the same dialogue where Socrates
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identifies wonder as the philosophical pathos and the archê philosophias (Theaetetus
155d), Socrates exhibits this fundamental allergy in the following words:
I should be ashamed to see us forced into making the kinds of admissions I mean
while we are still at a loss [aporoumen]. If we find what we’re after and become
freemen, then we will turn around and talk about how these things are suffered
[paschontôn] by others—having secured our own persons against ridicule [ektos tou
geloiou]. While if we can’t find any way of extricating ourselves, then I suppose we
shall be laid low, like sea-sick passengers, and give ourselves over to the logos
[parexomen tôi logôi] and let it trample all over us and do what it likes with us.
(190e-191a)
I take it that this allergy is, in large measure at least, the reason why the dialogues
dramatized by Plato are so often agonistic in character, why dialogue in Plato is often
(if not always) a matter of dialogical combat.
To conclude, then, Baracchi’s extravagant reading of Plato’s Republic does succeed in
the effort to subtract from Plato scholarship, principally by allowing the reader to step
outside customary interpretations and see the text in a novel way. Given the
prevailing silence among commentators as to the pathos to which philosophy is
attuned, Baracchi’s attention to this pathos, as a primary hermeneutic directive, is
something from which all Plato scholars can learn a great deal. We can certainly be
grateful to Baracchi for revealing ever more vividly the extravagance in Plato’s text to
which her own writing is a receptive response. Admittedly, there are a variety of ways
in which one might be responsive to this extravagance. It behooves all interpreters,
for example, to tread carefully around those moments of extravagance in Plato,
canvassing the interpretive work of those before us, responding conscientiously to the
text through the cultivation of one’s own hermeneutic conscience, like the “intellectual
conscience” of which Nietzsche writes. For her part, Baracchi has responded to the
extravagance of Plato’s text in so receptive a way that her own writing becomes
extravagant in the process, thus resembling the saying of Socrates which she
describes, in her own words, as “haunted by a numinous nebulosity” (122). If we
agree with Baracchi that the book does not “add” anything to Plato studies, we should
nonetheless insist that it is a promising sign of things to come.
Endnotes
1. Baracchi gives attention to this literal meaning of extravagant as extra vagans in
her discussion of the “ek-static character” of Er’s wandering (139).
2. To give but one example, I suppose that readers unsympathetic to Heidegger’s
thought will run afoul of the following line of questioning from the Introduction: “What
function do the dominant readings of Plato serve, which, in the end, amount to one
and the same, sharing as they do fundamental presuppositions concerning Plato,
Platonic idealism, Platonic dualism, Platonic totalitarianism, etc.? What is it that is
thereby made possible, enabled?...Could it be that what is allowed, invisibly
sustained, however remotely configured by such stories is an almost immediate
perception of the world as standing reserve, the stance of domination and
technologico-scientific mastery?” (5).
3. Helpfully, Baracchi draws attention to Socrates’ customary use of warlike language
[(dia)machein, etc.] to describe his dialogical efforts, and she cites passages from the
Republic and other texts—such as Socrates’ appeal to Achilles in the Apology (151-
152).
4. Quotation from Allan Bloom’s translation (1968), The Republic of Plato, Basic
Books.
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5. In each of these cases, Socrates turns his interlocutor’s (or audience’s) attention to
the importance of remaining [menein] by one’s commitments, remaining where one
has been stationed by oneself or by one who is better, and thus demonstrates his own
commitment to the integrity of his (moral) position in the face of changing
circumstances.
6. Though Baracchi refers to the Republic as “Plato’s dialogue of war,” it clearly is not
Plato’s only dialogue of war. Indeed, the Gorgias, which begins with the words
polemou kai maches, would provide Baracchi a useful comparison for many of her
observations about the thematics of warfare in Republic: e.g., the “heaviness” that
she finds in the Republic might usefully be compared with the oft-noticed “bitterness”
of Plato’s Gorgias.
7. See Baracchi, “Plato’s Shadows at Noon,” Research in Phenomenology XXV (1995),
90-117.
8. Ibid, 103.
9. Ibid, 104.
10. Ibid, 104.
2003.06.01
Ian Hacking
Historical Ontology
Hacking, Ian, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002, 279pp, $39.95
(hbk), ISBN 067400616X.
Reviewed by David Hyder , University of Konstanz
Ian Hacking’s newest book is many things at once: an anthology of occasional pieces,
a reflection on the uses of history in philosophy, a treatment of the work of Michel
Foucault, a contraction and extension of ideas in Hacking’s earlier work. Although
some of the pieces (“Dreams in Place”, “Wittgenstein as Philosophical Psychologist”)
lie apart from the main lines of the collection, the bulk of them combine to form an
invaluable overview of Hacking’s philosophy, above all of the twin strands of
traditional conceptual analysis and Foucaultian historicism running through his work.
The essays are written in a clear and straightforward style, although the varied genres
(including popular reviews, lectures for specialists, as well as academic articles) do put
varying demands on the reader’s knowledge.
In the previously unpublished introduction, also titled “Historical Ontology”, Hacking
considers what such a discipline might be, both by explaining how Foucault’s and his
writings exemplify it, and by distinguishing it from its cousins, “historical
epistemology” and “historical meta-epistemology”, as well as from more august kin,
such as “history”, “ontology”, and “epistemology” tout court. This chapter, like
Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, is something of a conceit: the science of
historical ontology is identified in the author’s work retrospectively, and one is not
quite sure if he truly wants there to be such a thing in the future (“my wish list in
philosophy would barely mention a desire for advance in historical ontology” p. 25).
Are we perhaps dealing with a nonce-word?
The answer is a qualified no. The term is intended to replace, or to subsume, a series
of methods that Hacking inaugurated in his 1974 lecture, “One Way to do
Philosophy”(not in this collection), which he describes in the second essay (“Five
Parables”) as representing his “historic-linguistic turn”. The basic premise, which
Hacking now rejects, was that philosophy aims to solve philosophical problems, and
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that since these problems are conceptual in nature, philosophy is essentially

concerned with concepts. Thus far, the ante is just that of Cambridge conceptual
analysis in the tradition of Braithwaite and Wittgenstein. The historical turn follows
from two further claims: concepts are to be identified with the conditions licensing the
use of particular words; but there can be rifts in the development of our knowledge
that occlude the original conditions on proper use. It follows that present concepts
(present conditions on the use of words) may retain traces of their origins, for we may
no longer remember why we first insisted that words be used in just this way, and
therefore that, “Some of our philosophical problems about concepts are the result of
their history” (p.37). Some problems, for instance the problem of induction, can be
seen to derive from forgotten assumptions, for instance from the notion of a
particulate fact.
If Hacking now rejects some premises of this argument—above all the assumption
that philosophy is about problems—he pursues the line of investigation they
occasioned in a series of more recent chapters concerned with what he, drawing on
the work of A.C. Crombie, calls “styles of reasoning” (“’Style’ for Historians and
Philosophers”, “Language, Truth, and Reason”). In these two articles, which are the
most strongly argued of the collection, Hacking advocates a relativist conception of
reason that is neither subjective nor constructivist. Many statements, he allows,
including “the maligned category of observation sentences”, are largely independent
of any given method of proof. But a large part of our language, above all that
expressing our scientific knowledge, acquired determinate meaning hand in hand with
specific styles of demonstration—those experimental, axiomatic, analogical-
comparative techniques (to name a few) that characterize the development of
Western science. These styles of reasoning determine what counts as a candidate for
truth-and-falsity in a given period. In determining a space of possibilities, styles of
reasoning relativize what is knowable. But it is not the panoply of styles that
determines what is true—neither truth nor rationality depend on our subjective whim.
Hacking concedes that he is arguing for a species of conceptual scheme; however, he
contends that his notion is immune to the usual Davidsonian critique. The latter
interprets conceptual schemes as sets of true sentences, and argues from the
indeterminacy of translation to the conclusion that the notion is incoherent. Hacking
counters that neither the notion of incommensurable schemes nor that of radical
mistranslation (“Was There Ever a Radical Mistranslation?”) is well-founded.
Furthermore, Hacking’s schemes are not constituted by sets of true statements—”A
style is not a scheme that confronts reality” (p. 175). Such a style is rather to be
conceived as a Comtian “positivity”, or a Foucaultian “discourse”. It is a set of
techniques, which can be both linguistic and material, that make statements
candidates for truth in the first place.
The fit between what Hacking first envisaged in the 1970s and Foucault’s work is no
accident—his program is no doubt to some extent a deliberate translation of Foucault’s
methodology into analytic terms. Hacking’s understanding of Foucault’s work is
outlined here in two chapters (“The Archaeology of Michel Foucault”, “Michel
Foucault’s Immature Science”), both of which will be useful mainly to new readers of
Foucault, in that they presume little or no familiarity with his work. These essays do,
however, make evident to what extent Hacking’s rejection of his earlier language-
oriented analysis parallels Foucault’s increasing distance from his early work and its
summa, the Archaeology of Knowledge. For both authors, that shift can very well be
understood as a shift from epistemology—a shift impelled by their dissatisfaction with
idealist remnants in their thought—to ontology (for Foucault, from “critical” to
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“genealogical” investigations). Hacking identifies the problem, or at least his version of

it, as “verbalism”: the doctrine that language is the primary object of our philosophical
investigations. Such a doctrine has generally been coupled to a weak
transcendentalism: it is not just language, but conditions on the significant use
thereof that the philosopher investigates.
In Foucault’s best-known works, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of
Knowledge, this linguistic transcendentalism is plain to see. Foucault maintains that
earlier systems of knowledge, which he terms “discourses” in order to underline his
rejection of idea-based semantics, are subject to large-scale structural constraints.
These “historical a prioris” cut across the boundaries of scientific disciplines, ordering
the space of statements that are possible in a given science in a given age. And the
historical epistemology that Foucault adopts from the earlier work of Bachelard,
Cavaillès and Canguilhem will reveal how these forgotten systems of reasoning
impinge on today’s scientific discourse. It is because only certain things can be said in
a given age that one feels permitted to say things like “X was not constituted as an
object of knowledge at time t”, or more simply “X did not exist at time t”. For,
following Quine, there were no variables to bind X to at t, and thus no sense in which
X existed then either. The fundamental categories of the language at t prescribe the
order of things at that point in history—they determine both its metaphysics and its
logic, as categories always have.
But such a line of reasoning conflicts directly with our realist intuitions. Taken to an
extreme, it leads to a philosophy which, while internally coherent, can never explain
how changes in category-systems could ever occur. Foucault’s move from critical to
genealogical investigations, which address the material and social conditions for the
emergence of different kinds of objects, no doubt reflects his dissatisfaction with his
earlier approach. Hacking’s thinking bifurcates at this point as well: the critical
intuition is developed further in the work on styles of reasoning; whereas the strong,
ontological version is preserved in what he calls “dynamic nominalism”, even though
the latter holds only for a restricted domain.
What is repugnant in strict nominalism is the idea that inanimate things respond to
our categories, that their behavior could be significantly influenced by what we say
about them. But, Hacking concedes, “In natural science, our invention of categories
does not ’really’ change the way the world works” (p. 40). The matter is different
when it comes to people (“Making Up People”), and it is this interaction between
systems of classification and the people they classify which, he tentatively suggests,
distinguishes the human from the natural sciences. The point is made here again in
terms both analytic and continental. If intentional action is, in Anscombe’s language,
action under a description, then the emergence of new categories in the human
sciences (psychic trauma, the phases of child development, hysteria, multiple
personality disorder) changes the space of possible action. Following Sartre, one can
say that changes in these categories do indeed change the ways of being that are
open to individuals.
One detects a curious reluctance on Hacking’s part at this juncture. For the interest of
an historical ontology lies presumably in its going past mere verbal transcendentalism,
in its investigating the creation not just of new ways of talking or thinking, but indeed
of new ways of being. In the domain of the human sciences, the emergence of
scientific objects is irrefutable: new classifications of mental disorders, new treatments
and institutions extend not only the space of talk, but indeed that of existence. By
contrast, in considering his own work on the creation of phenomena in the laboratory
as a candidate for historical ontology, Hacking denies it membership, because it does
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not “mesh with [the Foucaultian] axes of knowledge, power, and ethics” (p. 16). This
explanation seems insufficient, if not inconsistent. For if these axes confine the project
to the human sciences, then its scope is other than elsewhere advertised: “My
historical ontology is concerned with objects or their effects which do not exist in any
recognizable form until they are objects of scientific study” (p. 11). Surely there is
room here for non-human phenomena created in the laboratory?
The point is not to quibble about definitions—Hacking does remind us that his
introduction of the term is partly playful. And it is he, after all, who cautions us in
“Making Up People” against too quickly drawing a line between the human and natural
sciences by appealing to the interaction, or lack thereof, of concepts and their objects.
His reservation there is, I take it, the same one that underlies his equivocal use of the
term “historical ontology”. If we had a clear notion of what such interaction consisted
in, then we could use it to distinguish between natural and artificial orders, and thus
also between the natural and human sciences. But it is evidently true that, to the
extent that science is used to change the world, most scientific concepts do “interact”
with their objects. Nor will it do to say: “They interact, but the objects do not cognize
the concepts.” For the concepts that change the ways of being of human actors also
do not need to be cognized by them in order to change their ways of being. I surmise,
though Hacking does not say it outright, that he envisages a continuum of
interactions: at the one extreme are natural kinds completely distinct from our
descriptions, and at the other we have kinds that are purely artificial. To know where
a scientific concept falls on this line, we must “look and see”, as he repeatedly
admonishes. It is in the detail of such investigations that the exclusive disjunctions
between real and nominal, natural and social will lose their grip on us. This moral will
no doubt frustrate those philosophers impatient of such deliberate, Wittgensteinian
ambiguity. Others will, however, be cheered by Hacking’s approach in these pieces.
The game here is “to lose ourselves, as befits philosophy, in total complexity, and
then escape from it by craft and skills and, among other things, philosophical
reflection”(p. 17).
2003.06.02
Dale Jamieson
Morality's Progress
Jamieson, Dale, Morality's Progress, Oxford University Press, 2002, 380pp, 24.95
(pbk), ISBN 0199251452.
Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette , University of Notre Dame
In the title essay, Jamieson argues that moral progress is possible and that we have
experienced it in our lifetimes. The remainder of the volume includes 21 previously
published essays, all of which address specific issues on which moral progress is
needed. Most of the chapters focus on treatment of animals, but several deal with
other environmental issues such as sustainable development. From a substantive
point of view, the book is important because it is full of compassion and ethical
insight. From a methodological point of view, the book is interesting both because of
its readability and because it offers a window on how a “philosophically naturalist,
morally consequentialist, and metaethically constructivist” (vii) person might do
practical ethics.
In the first essay, Jamieson defines and defends moral progress as “the increasing
dominance of objective, impersonal, or agent-neutral reasons for action over
subjective, personal, or agent-relative reasons” (9). He says progress involves “the
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abolition of war and slavery, the reduction of poverty and class privilege, the
extension of liberty, the empowerment of marginalized groups, and respect for
animals and nature” (9). Lauding the classical utilitarians as moral progressives (12),
Jamieson nevertheless argues that a wide variety of ethical theorists could endorse his
account of moral progress (13). He closes the chapter with two important
contemporary examples of moral progress: the end of “American apartheid,” with the
l964 Civil Rights Act, and the growing recognition of animal rights. To achieve such
moral progress, Jamieson argues in chapter 2 that philosophers must forego the
prejudice of sharply distinguishing moral theory from moral practice and the belief
that the former has little or nothing to do with acting morally. His solution is to defend
“applied philosophy” and argue for doing it.
Most of the essays in the remainder of the book deal with animal rights. Chapter 3
argues for endorsing the “Declaration on the Great Apes,” that is, the rights of
chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans who are members of our “community of equals
within which certain basic moral principles govern our relationships with each other”;
among these principles, Jamieson includes “the right to life and the protection of
individual liberty” (48). Chapter 4 defends attributing mental states to animals, while
chapters 5 and 6 clarify and defend cognitive ethology, the study of the biological
bases of behavior. All three chapters explain behavior within evolutionary history,
emphasize the similarities between humans and other animals, and lay a foundation
for chapter 7. There Jamieson argues that much human behavior is at odds with
acceptance of the truism that one ought to minimize pain; most humans do not
minimize animal pain. Next he argues that harming an animal for any reason,
including scientific research, requires a defense (chapters 8-9). Animals, he says, are
like humans in relevant ways; they are innocent; and our bad treatment of them
makes us worse as people.
Chapter 10 examines the relation between cognition and moral status, including
issues such as privacy. Chapters 11 and 12 argue against zoos, while chapters 13 and
14, respectively, argue against not only the distinction between wild and captive
animals but also the separation of environmental ethics from animal liberation.
Chapter 16 argues for a pluralistic metaethics, which Jamieson calls “sensible
objectivism” (234) and which combines elements of subjectivism, conventionalism,
and realism. Nevertheless, he maintains that all these metaethical positions, taken
singly, also are compatible with the view that there are values in nature.
Most of the remainder of the volume argues against a variety of current
environmental policies, including using “ecosystem health” as a scientific term
(chapter 15); most attempts at central planning/redevelopment (chapter 17); US
policy on global warming (chapter 18); too limited a conception of environmental
justice (chapter 19); naive implementation of biotechnology (chapter 20); and
sustainability that ignores ethics (chapter 21). The final chapter is an entertaining and
sensitive autobiography that traces Jamieson’s evolution from a child of the sixties to
a philosopher interested in language, science, and the elimination of animal suffering.
As a collection of partially-unrelated essays, the volume has six important strengths to
recommend it. First, the issues with which Jamieson deals are fundamentally
important: whether moral progress is possible; whether society has been massively
unethical in its treatment of animals; whether current patterns of resource distribution
are equitable and how most lifestyles contribute to inequity. Second, his argument –
that different ethical perspectives (virtue theory, deontology, and utilitarianism) can
be shown to support respect for animals and for nature – seems effective, correct, and
importantly different from related claims made by Amartya Sen and Richard Brandt.
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Third, his chapter-two defense of applied ethics is the best anywhere. Every
philosopher should read it. My only quibble is that instead of “applied ethics,” he
should have said “practical ethics.” As Feinberg realized, practical ethics is not the
mindless, “plug-and-chug” application of fully-formed ethical theories to contemporary
problems, but the amendment and enrichment of ethical theory itself, on the basis of
factual, practical, and case-specific information, and vice-versa. “Practical ethics” does
more justice both to the complexity of work like Jamieson’s, and to affirming the
continuity between contemporary practical ethics and classical normative ethics -- in
the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill.
Another virtue of the volume is its profound and thought-provoking insights
(especially in the area of ethics and animal suffering). These insights reveal good
philosophical instincts, such as realizing that the side bearing the burden of proof
often will come out second-best in a philosophical controversy. Jamieson deftly
changes the burden of proof when he claims “When I look at an animal as a behaving
body....the real object of my perception has been displaced by a philosophical monster
– the idea of a behaving body....[that] needlessly problematizes the question of
animal minds.... When scientists assume that what we observe is bodily movements
and then worry about whether any inference to internal mental states is justified, they
wrap themselves in the garb of hard-headed empiricism. But really they are
recommending a disorder as a methodological stance” (57, 69; see also 135). His
insights also frequently have a knack for exposing inconsistency, as when he notes:
“Is it really better to confine a few hapless Mountain Gorillas in a zoo than to permit
the species to become extinct? To most environmentalists the answer is obvious: the
species must be preserved at all costs. But this smacks of sacrificing the lower-case
gorilla for the upper case Gorilla....What is to blame is the peculiar moral
schizophrenia of a culture that drives a species to the edge of extinction and then
romanticizes its remnants” (173, 178; see also 186, 188, 253, 257, 301, 311, 314,
317, 320, 334-336).
Because Jamieson’s book relies on his rich understanding of a wealth of literature, he
is able to bring new arguments for animal liberation out of old texts that others may
have misread or left unread. For example, he cites the case of Kant, who condemns
the man who shoots a dog who has become too old to serve (169); and of C. S. Lewis,
who argued that, if animals have no souls and no life beyond the grave, then the
obligation to minimize their suffering is increased by the fact that there is nothing,
beyond the grave, to counterbalance their pain (110).
Still another strength is Jamieson’s witty, common-sensical, and accessible prose.
After his elegant argument for animal minds, based on cognitive ethology, it is a
delight to read about his dog : “I can identify Toby’s mental states more reliably than
those of the President of my college” (63). Seventh, because of his blend of
philosophical argument, insight, and good prose, Jamieson’s volume is one to be
enjoyed by students, philosophy professors, animal-rights activists, and thoughtful
policymakers. Jane Goodall said the volume was full of “clarity, elegance, and
courage,” and she is right. The same could not be said of most volumes of
contemporary moral philosophy.
With so much to praise in Jamieson, does the volume generate any worries? Such
worries might fall into any of three areas: metaethics, environmental ethics, and
animal liberation. On the metaethics front, one concern is whether Jamieson is correct
that metaethics has no normative entailments (231, 233-234). If not, then one
wonders why Jamieson in chapter 2 criticizes the claim that moral theory has no
bearing on moral practice and seeks to remedy the disconnect. If not, one also
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wonders why Jamieson, later in the book, takes pains to argue that various
metaethical positions (subjectivism, conventionalism, and realism) are compatible
with affirming value in nature. A second metaethical concern, one of professional
philosophers, might be whether Jamieson ought to have spent so much time
preaching to the converted, regarding relatively easy first-order ethical claims, while
doing little second-order ethical analysis. For example, he spends a chapter arguing
that people do not consistently attempt to minimize suffering, including that of
animals, while they claim to want to do so (97; see pp. 135, 152, 210; see also pp.
107, 111, 117-119, 123, 129, 145, 162, 172, 184). Obviously he is correct here. But
isn’t the real issue that of dissecting, via second-order ethical analyses, why and when
one might be justified in minimizing or not minimizing such suffering? In what cases
might eating meat be justified, if ever? A related worry is whether Jamieson can
consistently (and often without argument) defer to populist wisdom, in repeated
cases, but reject it in other cases, also often without argument. For example, he
defers to populist wisdom in accepting the claim that there are animal minds, but he
rejects the populist belief in the reality of moral values (233; see 241, 277). The
problem is not his populist predispositions (which I share). Rather, to the degree that
one claims to follow these predispositions, often without argument, then one seems
bound to explain and defend one’s deviations from them.
Regarding environmental ethics, some minor concerns are whether Jamieson
sometimes gets his science slightly wrong. For instance, he questions much economic
theorizing on grounds of willingness to pay, but he ignores willingness to accept; he
questions ecological science as a basis for environmental ethics and policy (216), yet
he ignores more sophisticated ecological methods and models. The volume also could
have been improved had he updated the science in his essays. Several of them do not
reflect the scientific about-face that has taken place, on topics like global warming, in
the last 15 years. And sometimes Jamieson merely appeals to some scientific
authority (131), when what he seems to need to do is adjudicate conflicting claims of
different scientists.
With respect to animal liberation, philosophers might ask whether Jamieson ought to
assume, with only limited argument, that apes and humans have equal rights (233).
Should he merely have preached to the converted, that gorillas, apes, orangutans,
and humans have equal rights to life (ch. 3), but failed to provide the complicated
analysis of concepts like “equality,” necessary to sustain such a position? Or should he
have claimed that animals and humans share community (ch. 8, esp. 107, 128), but
failed to give any arguments about the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for
moral community? After all, one does not need to have moral community with animals
in order to argue effectively that it is wrong to harm them. Yet in his concern with
evolutionary history and animal minds, Jamieson has the basis for arguing effectively
about his community claims. But what are the precise necessary and sufficient
conditions for moral community? Does he agree with the classic stance of Golding,
that members of a moral community must share a conception of the good?
Another worry is whether Jamieson can completely escape Tom Regan’s charge (made
against many animal liberationists and environmentalists) that they are misanthropic
“environmental fascists.” Without argument, Jamieson says that the destruction of the
old city of Dubrovnik “would be a greater crime than some measure of death and
destruction wrought upon the people of Dubrovnik” (206). Such remarks may leave
him open to Regan-type charges. Finally, one wonders whether Jamieson can
convincingly argue, to the nonconverted, that all sentient beings ought to be in the
sphere of moral concern (7), but fail to provide second-order ethical criteria for
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adjudicating claims made by, or on behalf of, different sentient beings (see pp. 48,
50). His basic point about sentient beings and moral concern seems correct, but the
difficult philosophical business is not that point but instead developing criteria for
resolving conflicts among sentients.
From the point of view of philosophical flaws, the previous discussion suggests no
great concerns. This is in part because many of the questions (raised above) have
been addressed in Jamieson’s journal articles. Also, virtually all these philosophical
worries are more correctly understood as merely audience-specific questions from
professional moral philosophers, worried about second-order ethical analyses. As
such, these worries merely are requests for Jamieson to tell a fuller, more
philosophically and scientifically sophisticated, story. Yet a more philosophically and
scientifically sophisticated story arguably would bleed the manuscript of its readability,
clarity, wit, and courage. The resulting book likely would not be one that
nonprofessionals, as well as philosophers, would read. In short, Jamieson ought to be
defended for failing to address more journal-appropriate metaethical disputes, in large
part because of his audience. But given this more inclusive audience, his book would
have been better, had he updated the science in old essays (like ch. 18) and had he
edited his volume, so as to reconcile apparent inconsistencies in positions he took at
different stages of his career. The book also would have been better had he removed
offhand appeals to alternative metaethical positions, especially since he repeatedly
claims that such positions carry no normative entailments in the real world (231-234),
and had he removed chapters (like 14) that detail largely abstract, internecine battles
among theoretical environmental philosophers. But these quibbles are minor. They
speak largely to the difficulty of writing both for laypeople, in hopes of changing the
world, and for philosophers, in hopes of changing the way we see the world. Jamieson
is one of the best at doing both.
2003.06.03
Alvin Plantinga, Matthew Davidson (ed.)
Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality
Plantinga, Alvin, Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality, Matthew Davidson (ed.),

Oxford University Press, 2003, 248pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195103777.
Reviewed by Charles Chihara, University of California, Berkeley
This book consists of an introduction by the editor, eleven of Plantinga’s previously

published pieces, and an index. The previously published works are presented in the
following chronological order: “De Re et De Dicto” (1969); “World and Essence”
(1970); “Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals?” (1973); Chapter VIII of The
Nature of Necessity (1974); “Actualism and Possible Worlds” (1976); “The Boethian
Compromise” (1978); “De Essentia” (1979); “On Existentialism” (1983); “Reply to
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John L. Pollock” (1985); “Two Concepts of Modality: Modal Realism and Modal
Reductionism” (1987); and “Why Propositions Cannot Be Concrete” (1993).
In all these works, Plantinga makes reference to, and relies upon, the entities of the
metaphysical theory he has been developing for more than thirty years. These include
states of affairs, propositions, properties, functions, and sets. Thus, in the very first of
these pieces—a work to a large extent concerned with defending the coherence of de
re modality against the objections of various philosophers—one finds Plantinga making
heavy use of propositions, properties, and functions. One can see why the book is
entitled “Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality”.
It is in the second of these essays that Plantinga introduces what are to become the
basic entities of his metaphysics of modality: states of affairs. States of affairs are
held to be abstract entities that such phrases as ’George Bush being a Yale graduate’
and ’Laura Bush having run for the presidency’ refer to. Some states of affairs obtain,
others do not. The first of the two phrases I mentioned above supposedly refers to a
state of affairs that obtains; the second one supposedly refers to a state of affairs that
does not obtain. The concept of state of affairs is used to define what a possible world
is. For Plantinga, a possible world is just a state of affairs that is “fully determinate” in
a way to be explained shortly. We first define two relations among the states of
affairs: for all states of affairs S and S*, S includes S* if S could not obtain if S* did
not obtain; and S precludes S* if S could not obtain if S* did obtain. Now a state of
affairs P is a possible world iff, for every state of affairs S, P either includes S or
precludes S. In this essay, Plantinga uses his newly defined notion of possible world to
define the concept of having a property essentiall y and the concept of an essence.
Armed with these fundamental modal notions, Plantinga investigates some important
questions in the philosophy of language. In particular, he subjects John Searle’s
“cluster” account of proper names to a detailed and thorough examination (one very
different from Saul Kripke’s examination of the account in Naming and Necessity),
concluding that Searle is mistaken in thinking that the disjunction of the “identity
criteria associated with a proper name” (that is, the properties we use to locate and
identify the bearer of the name) is an essential property of the bearer of that name
(p. 56). This essay clearly illustrates how the modal concepts Plantinga had specified
could be fruitfully used in the analysis and refutation of philosophical positions and
arguments in a variety of areas of philosophy.
In “Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals”, Plantinga focuses on the sort of

modal theory developed in David Lewis’s counterpart theory. Making use of the modal
concepts he had articulated in “World and Essence”, Plantinga attacks the various
arguments that had been put forward to support the idea that individuals are “world-
bound” (that is, occur in only one world). Thus, taking aim at what was widely
supposed to be the most convincing case for accepting counterpart theory, namely the
argument that counterpart theory provides the best solution to the Problem of
Transworld Identity, Plantinga provides his own dissolution of the problem and then
argues that the reasoning underlying the problem is simply confused.
The fourth of the essays in this work, Chapter VIII of The Nature of Necessity, is
principally an argument in favor of Actualism—the doctrine that “there neither are nor
could be any nonexistent objects”. Plantinga is especially concerned in this chapter to
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refute the “Classical Argument” for the claim that there are or could be objects that do
not exist. This argument proceeds from the following three premises:
(1) There are some singular negative existential propositions.

(2) Some singular negative existentials are possibly true.
(3) Any world in which a singular proposition is true is one in which there is such a
thing as its subject, or in which its subject has being if not existence.
Plantinga provides a convincing refutation of this argument, again relying upon the
metaphysical machinery he had developed earlier. Along the way, Plantinga provides a
useful analysis of fictional names.
In “Actualism and Possible Worlds”, Plantinga claims that the more or less standard
possible worlds semantics of modal logic developed by Kripke engenders confusions
because “it suggests that there are things that do not exist” (p. 105). This fifth essay
in the collection aims at producing an account of possible worlds that allows us to
retain the insights and understanding achieved by the Kripkean “Canonical Conception
of possible worlds”, while clearly retaining the actualistic position. This essay presents
most of the modal concepts of his theory in essentially the form developed in the
earlier essays, but now the concepts are presented in a more systematic and
perspicuous manner.
“The Boethian Compromise” is concerned with the dispute between those who support
the “Fregean view” of proper names, according to which “proper names are
semantically equivalent to descriptions” and the Millians who claim that proper names
“denote the individuals who are called by them, but they do not indicate or imply an
attribute as belonging to these individuals” (p. 122). The Boethian compromise that
Plantinga supports is: “proper names express essences, and different names of the
same object may express epistemologically inequivalent essences” (p. 137).
In the later essays in this collection, Plantinga defends serious actualism, the view
that “(necessarily) no object has a property in a world in which it does not exist”,1
rejects existentialism, the view that “quidditative properties2 and singular propositions
are ontologically dependent upon the individuals they involve” (p. 160), and argues
that—contrary to what is widely believed—David Lewis is not a genuine modal realist.
The last of the essays is aimed at showing that propositions cannot be concrete (and
hence that propositions cannot be the sets of possible worlds that David Lewis claims
that they are).
Looking back on the historical development of Plantinga’s metaphysics of modality,

one sees a philosopher who, early on, hit upon some philosophical tools for carrying
out fruitful conceptual analyses of modal reasoning of all sorts. It would seem, from
the papers in the collection being reviewed, that Plantinga was more concerned about
exploiting the tools he had discovered than with putting his ontological theory on a
firm foundation. Thus, in the ninth piece in the collection, his reply to Pollock,
Plantinga sets out to prove that there is at least one possible world and that, for any
state of affair S, S is possible iff there is a possible world in which S obtains.3 In the
course of giving these proofs, Plantinga makes use of the following principles:
272
[1] States of affairs exist.

[2] Every state of affairs S has a complement S’.
[3] If S is a state of affairs, then necessarily either S or S’ obtains.
[4] Given any possible state of affairs S, there exists a set whose members are all
those possible states of affairs that include S.
[5] Given any set b of states of affairs, the conjunction of that set, all the members of
b having obtained, exists.
In addition to the above five, he also appeals to even stronger principles, such as:
[Expansion] For any possible state of affairs S, there exists a maximal possible state
of affairs that includes S.
[Sets of states of affairs] For any state of affairs S, there is a set of all states of affairs
that are possible and that include S.
[Quasi-compactness] For any set of possible states of affairs α, if α has a maximal
linearly ordered subset, then α has a maximal linearly ordered subset that has the
quasi-compactness property.4
He also makes use of a form of the Axiom of Choice known as “Housdorff’s maximal
principle”. Yet, nowhere does Plantinga put forward a formalized (or even an
informally axiomatized) theory of the entities of his metaphysical theory. Principles of
entity existence seem to be pulled “out of the air”, so-to-speak, as they are needed.
The developmental state of Plantinga’s ontological theory is comparable to that of
naive set theory in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Like naive set theory,
Plantinga’s theory of states of affairs seems to be based upon a sort of abstraction
axiom: Plantinga acts as if, given practically any gerund phrase, there is a state of
affairs that the phrase denotes. He also seems to believe that, given any sentence
attributing a property P to an object x, there is a state of affairs corresponding to the
phrase ’x having the property P’.
Given the well-known history of naive set theory, one would think that Plantinga
would exhibit some concern, in these papers, about the possible inconsistency of his
theory—especially since his ontological theory can be shown to be inconsistent with
the axioms of standard set theory.5 The big question is: can this ontological theory be
revised in a way that makes it, on the one hand, immune from paradox and, on the
other hand, strong enough to do the job Plantinga wants it to do? I dare say,
achieving such a revision would not be easy. Scanning the above principles that
Plantinga has accepted, one can see that the existence of states of affairs is intimately
related to the existence of both sets and properties. Indeed, the existence of these
distinct types of entities are so interrelated that coming up with a reasonable
limitation of the existence assumptions of the system in a way that would yield a
consistent system seems to me to be a formidable task indeed.
Endnotes
1. P. 179. Plantinga also supplies, in this piece, a deduction of serious actualism from
actualism
273
2. Here's how Plantinga explains what a quidditative property is. The thisness of an
individual is the property of being that individual. A property is quidditative is either a
thisness or involves a thisness in a certain way. This "certain way" is explained by way
of examples: Being identical with Nero. Being more bloodthirsty than Nero. Being
possibly Nero. Being believed by Nero to be treacherous. (See page 159 for other
examples).
3. Actually, Pollock gives a proof of these propositions, but Plantinga sets out to prove
them using what he takes to be weaker premises.
4. A maximal linearly ordered set A has the quasi-compactness property iff, A is

possible if every finite subset of A is possible. A set of states of affairs is possible iff it
is possible that all of its members obtain. A 'maximally linearly ordered subset' is a
subset that is linearly ordered by the proper inclusion relation and which is maximal in
the sense that there is no linearly ordered subset that properly includes (in the set
theoretical sense) it.
5. See my The Worlds of Possibility: Modal Realism and the Semantics of Modal Logic
(1998, Oxford University Press), pp. 126 f.
2003.06.04
James R. Otteson
Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life
Otteson, James R., Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life, Cambridge University Press,
2002, 338pp, $26.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521016568.
Reviewed by Robert McCarthy , Key School, Annapolis MD
In Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life, James Otteson offers a thought-provoking

approach to the unity of Adam Smith’s philosophical work. Otteson defines the “Adam
Smith problem” as follows:
how could the same person who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
apparently established a natural ’sympathy’ as the cement of human society, go on to
write The Wealth of Nations, which seemed to argue that economic policy should be
predicated on the assumption that people are fundamentally self-interested? (p. 2)
Instead of looking for the solution to this problem in individual moral psychology – in
the motives that lead us to either moral action or to self-interested commerce –
Otteson finds it primarily in the market mechanisms by which society transforms these
diverse motives into “unintended order.”
274
Otteson’s attention to the mechanistic character of Smith’s psychology is a strength of

the book. His language (calling the impartial spectator a ’procedure,’ for example)
shows that he sees clearly that Smith’s method is to give a causal account of human
behavior in terms of the interaction of human passions. The passions are simple, but
interact in complex ways. It is from this basis that what Otteson calls “unintended
order” arises. People acting on “basic, natural drives” cause “an order that they did
not consciously intend to create but that nevertheless unfolds on its own and serves
both to strengthen the interpersonal bonds and increase the wealth of the community”
(p. 6). It is Smith’s interest in this phenomenon, according to Otteson, that unites his
two major works. In particular, Otteson argues, the impartial spectator is the tool that
in both works produces this order, through the mechanisms of the marketplace.
Otteson begins with an account of the function of sympathy in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. Sympathy underlies the “impartial spectator procedure,” as Otteson calls
it. It is through sympathetic connection that we are able to put ourselves in the
position of others in order to judge them or ourselves. Otteson helpfully points out
Smith’s lack of consistency in the use of the word “sympathy”. “Roughly, Smith’s
three meanings of sympathy, in order, are: natural fellow feeling for others, pity for
others, and correspondence of sentiments between two or more people” (p. 17). He
fails, however, to appreciate the role different senses of sympathy play in the
impartial spectator’s judgments of propriety. Otteson argues that the third sense of
sympathy listed above is the basis of Smith’s moral theory (p. 18).
What happens is this. We see the misery or happiness of another, we imagine

ourselves in the same situation, and a real or imagined feeling wells up in us as a
result of this imaginative changing of place. We then compare what our own feelings
would be if we were in the other’s situation with what his actual feelings are in his
situation. If our respective feelings are commensurate, Smith says that we sympathize
with that other; if they are not, we do not. Thus sympathy is correspondence between
the imagined feelings of the spectator and the actual sentiments of the person
primarily concerned. (p. 19)
This cannot be a simple instance of sympathy, however, as it already involves two

acts of sympathy. For Smith, “we have no immediate experience of what other men
feel,” (TMS I, I, I) so knowing what the person primarily concerned feels requires an
act of sympathy, as does imaginatively projecting myself into another’s position.
’Sympathy’ understood as the correspondence mentioned above, then, must be a
correspondence between two acts of sympathy, not itself a single act. I compare what
I imagine I would feel were I in the situation I observe (one form of sympathy) and
compare that with what I imagine the person to be feeling on the basis of the
behavior I can observe (another form of sympathy). The situation becomes still more
complicated when we look at self-command, Smith’s cardinal virtue. Self-command
consists in my adjusting my reactions to the pitch I imagine will allow others to
sympathize. That is, I have to sympathize with other people’s impartial spectators,
and act as though my experience is no more intense than others imagine it to be. For
Smith morality is essentially social – without the constant balancing of sympathetic
judgments, there can be no moral judgments. That I can judge an act to be proper, or
in other ways virtuous, is a result of my reaction to my perception of others’
275
judgments of me. On Otteson’s account, this essentially social nature of moral

judgment is not made sufficiently clear.
Otteson spends significant time comparing Smith with Hume on the role of utility in
moral judgment. Though Smith, not Hume, is the focus of Otteson’s book, it seems
worth mentioning that Hume is a thinker of significantly more complexity than Otteson
allows. Otteson treats Hume as a simple utilitarian: “utility ultimately underlies all
moral judgments” (p. 52). This view is based on Smith’s own view, expressed at
several points in TMS, but Otteson supports it with his own reading of Hume’s Treatise
and Enquiries. However, Hume does not found all moral judgments on utility. The
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, for example, distinguishes between useful
qualities and ’immediately agreeable’ qualities. Otteson correctly points out that for
Hume considerations of utility can influence aesthetic judgments, but it is also the
case for Hume that there is no extra-aesthetic foundation for utility. That is, utility is
valuable because it pleases us. Utility influences our aesthetic sense, but aesthetics
influences our judgment of utility. Our interests are not fundamentally distinct from
enjoyments. There is a mechanism of mutual influence here that is in some ways
similar to that involved in Smith’s sympathy. However, for Hume the feedback
happens within one person’s experience, whereas for Smith it takes place only within
society.
The critical question is whether ethical and aesthetic judgment are fundamentally the
same or different. For Smith, there is a fundamental distinction between the two,
whereas for Hume there is not. This distinction rests on the difference in the operation
of sympathy between the two systems. For Smith, moral judgment is constituted
socially; it comes into being only in the interaction of sympathetic actors in society.
For Hume on the other hand, sympathy plays a more limited role. Hume’s moral
judgments are fundamentally a matter of each person’s sentiments; sympathy is
needed only in order to broaden my judgments, not to constitute them. What Hume
lacks is the double action of sympathy I described above – sympathy lets me feel
what another feels, but it does not allow me to compare what another feels with what
I would feel in the other’s place.
This view of sympathy has consequences for the “Adam Smith problem.” Sympathy is
“the cement of human society,” in the sense that it is essential to society’s ability to
develop moral (and, as Otteson argues, other) rules by which to govern itself. This is
not, however, in conflict with self-interest, or with the idea that self-interest should
govern economic policy. Sympathy, in the important sense, is not a motive, but a
mechanism for correcting our motives. Our desire for sympathy is a motive, but not a
motive for universal benevolence. There is no reason why, when doing business,
sympathy would prevent my acting in a self-interested manner. Even propriety need
not condemn self-interest. I can sympathize with a businessman’s desire to maximize
his profits, and find it entirely proper that he charge what the market will bear, though
I would not consider it proper if he cheats his customers. There is thus no problem
with reading Wealth of Nations as an application of the moral system of Theory of
Moral Sentiments to the world of commerce. The differences in vocabulary between
the two books remain somewhat strange, as Otteson points out, but that is equally a
problem for any account of the unity of Smith’s work.
276
That the “Adam Smith problem” is less intractable than Otteson believes, however,
does not detract from the real strength of the book, which is Otteson’s use of the
market model to account for the development of unintentional order. That is, the
’impartial spectator’ in moral theory and the ’invisible hand’ in economic theory have
similar structures. Otteson summarizes the market structure as follows:
a system of order arising unintentionally from individual actions, an increasing

complexity of the system over time in relation to the increasing sophistication of
individuals, a slow and gradual process leading to the formalization of rules, the
conformity of the system’s rules to the time and place of its instantiation, the system’s
dependence on free and continual exchanges between and among individuals, and the
natural desires of human beings as the motive force behind the creation and
development of the system. (p. 182)
That is, natural human desire evolves, through the free interaction of increasingly
complex groups of individuals, into complex, rule-governed systems. This is, according
to Otteson, equally true for Smith of economic and moral behavior. In both cases,
order arises from the undirected interaction of simple, natural, human passions. This
structural similarity, conjoined with what Otteson calls “the familiarity principle,”
becomes the core of Otteson’s answer to the “Adam Smith problem.” It is ironic that
some of Otteson’s best insights arose as a result of an unnecessary investigation.
Also worthy of attention is Otteson’s claim that Smith’s market-based moral theory
leads to a “union of, on the one hand, a kind of Burkean conservatism, which tends
towards the stability of society, with, on the other hand, a respect for progressive
development, which allows for creativity and innovation in society” (p. 322). This is
truly one of Smith’s great contributions: he rejects the application of naïve rationalism
to society, but provides us with a mechanism by which social change can be both
understood and evaluated. Otteson’s particular way of connecting The Theory of Moral
Sentiments with The Wealth of Nations does an excellent job of making this clear.
That social order evolves unintentionally from complex human interaction is a Burkean
point, but Smith’s analysis of the mechanisms of that evolution shows that
conservatism need not be hidebound. In Otteson’s words, “Smithian antirationalism
and moral conservatism do not imply that a society’s established moral rules are
absolutely, transcendently true or that they are beyond scrutiny. Indeed, the very
notion of these rules developing implies rather that they are in constant states of
modification or emendation” (p. 323). That this evolution takes place as an
unintended consequence of a series of individual acts is the basis for a strong
argument in favor of a free society. Otteson deserves credit for elucidating this basis.
2003.06.05
Paul J. Weithman
Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship
Weithman, Paul J., Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, Cambridge University
Press, 2002, 240pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 052180857X.
277
Reviewed by Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College
Weithman opens this book declaring his interest in the nature and ethics of
“responsible citizenship” (2-3). He asks what role churches play in preparing people to
be citizens and ponders how religious believers can be good democratic citizens (ix,
11). From the outset, Weithman expresses his discontent with “standard” versions of
public reason that stipulate a need to justify political or coercive arrangements “by
reasons which are accessible to everyone” (6). Numerous liberals propose that citizens
should rely upon accessible reasons in public debate, but the notion of accessibility is
“hardly self-explanatory,” Weithman remarks (8, 9). He stands “deeply skeptical” of
the criterion of accessibility for public reasons, and he claims, a fortiori, that an
adequate conception of accessibility “cannot plausibly be spelled out” (9, 132).
Weithman first focuses on what he calls an ethics of political participation (13). He

introduces the idea of “realized citizenship,” a standard that places psychological and
affective criteria alongside a requirement of real opportunities for citizens (14).
Realized citizenship is one element of “full participation,” Weithman avers (17). The
concept of full participation is “widely held” in liberal democracies: it is the citizenship
of “equals,” the “highest status” that can be conferred (20, 21). Full participants
contribute to society, they partake of the goods they help to produce, and they are
recognized as equal members in the enterprise (20). Full participation is conceptually
“opposed” to minority of age, statelessness, disenfranchisement, and second-class
citizenship (20). The exact standards of full participation are “politically contested,” as
is the concept itself (31, 36, 93; cf. 69-70), but Weithman nevertheless asserts that
such participation consists of “full and secure integration” into national life (29).
Within this range of contestation over full participation lie questions of exactly which
rights and privileges should be afforded to citizens, and who should get them (36).
Here Weithman emphasizes the role that religious institutions play in on-going political
discussions. He proposes that religious institutions in America make “valuable
contributions to democracy” (36, 91). Empirical evidence shows how churches provide
opportunities to participate and engage in civic argument, and means through which
people can “[achieve] the realization of citizenship” (48, 69, 85, 91). Not only did
churches help to rid America of slavery: they continue to encourage participation
among the poor and underprivileged, they contribute to civic argument and debate
over important political questions, and churches prompt community involvement with
opportunities for people to volunteer in various worthy capacities (4, 40-49, 90, 91).
What is more, Weithman argues, the Biblical language employed by Catholic bishops
or Martin Luther King, Jr. have had real “moral pay-off[s]”; such talk of sin and
seemingly offensive admonishments shake people from complacency (53-54, 81).
Catholic Church officials break the conservative stereotype: they may lobby against
“partial-birth abortions,” embryo research, and physician-assisted suicide, but they
also speak up for refugees, immigrants, and the poor (58, 60, 64). Nonetheless,
debates on full participation and citizenship “should be settled by informed political
debate”; and it is “important” that churches do not contest democratic institutions
themselves (54, 62). The good news, Weithman suggests, is that American churches
acknowledge the legitimacy of U.S. institutions. They teach reverence for American
278
history, an appreciation of religious liberty among other democratic values, and that
the country is worth dying for (63-64, 91).
With this in view, Weithman argues that people should reconsider the “expectations”
they have of religious citizens: one needs to examine how those people are “brought
to [their] convictions” (65). Since “only religious institutions” counterbalance political
resources accruing in the hands of the financially and educationally advantaged,
proponents of democracy broadly should “recognize and value” the contributions of
churches (71, 73, 91). Religiously formed preferences are an “important
counterweight” to private interest and prejudice, even under existing nonideal
conditions (90).
But what of secondary institutions advocating undemocratic principles, illiberal ideals,

or unjust laws (82)? Weithman agrees that some political outcomes are “incompatible”
with liberal democracy; but from this it does not follow that such objectionable views
should not be aired, or that religious citizens should be less involved in politics (83).
First of all, various citizens hold “undemocratic” views on gun control, immigration, or
the minimum wage; and few would suggest that those people should not be involved
in politics (84). Second, it is not clear that church advocacy against late-term
abortions or assisted suicide is anything less than a positive contribution to debates
over full participation (84).
Weithman then focuses on voting and advocacy, proposing that responsible voting
“requires voting for what one takes to be adequate reasons” (103). Advocating
responsibly is also a “good thing,” irrespective of the size of the group to which one
promotes some policy, procedure, or law (103, 108, 110-112). In public political
debate, persons should advocate “as citizens addressing other citizens”; but
Weithman realizes that decision-making is at times marked by people failing to
participate in “legitimately expected” ways (107). People may speak off topic or raise
“irrelevant” concerns—Weithman intimates that this is no small problem, where he
asks what would happen if all citizens were persuaded by “bad reasons” (107, 110).
He nevertheless concludes that political candidates, voters, and others “may” rely on
exclusively religious reasons when it comes to political advocacy or voting, whether or
not essential liberties are at stake (112-14, 116-17, 119). He elaborates two central
principles:
(5.1) Citizens of a liberal democracy may base their votes on reasons drawn from
their comprehensive moral views, including their religious views, without having other
reasons that are sufficient for their vote – provided they sincerely believe that their
government would be justified in adopting the measures they vote for.
(5.2) Citizens of a liberal democracy may offer arguments in public political debate
which depend upon reasons drawn from their comprehensive moral views, including
their religious views, without making them good by appeal to other arguments –
provided they believe that their government would be justified in adopting the
measures they favor and are prepared to indicate what they think would justify the
adoption of the measures.
279
Weithman distinguishes voting from advocacy, noting that he imposes a higher

standard on the latter (121). Advocacy is an exercise in “persuasion,” whereas voting
is “usually secret” (126, 128). (5.1) does not require that citizens “be ready” to
indicate why they voted how they did: one can vote “without having or being prepared
to offer” accessible reasons for the action (121, 129). It may be an excellence of
citizenship to be able to offer reasons for how one votes, Weithman reflects, but it is
not a duty (129). Indeed, Weithman’s two principles impose “no . . . requirements” of
having, or being prepared to offer, justifying reasons to others (131). One need only
believe that the vote or the policy one advocates is justified; being sincere but
mistaken is acceptable (131-32). (5.1) and (5.2) simply do not require accessible
reasons or arguments of citizens, clearing the way for a “much more prominent role”
for religion in political decision-making (132, 133).
For those worried about the prospects of people relying upon “exclusively” religious
reasons, Weithman underscores the important impetus of churches to the political
arguments and social movements in which American citizens engage (137). American
churches adapted to fill a real need for political participation, and they remain the only
institutions that ignite political interests for significant sectors of the population,
mobilizing people politically and helping them to identify with their citizenship (138).
It is too much to expect such persons not to have the religious views on citizenship
that they hold; indeed, Weithman submits, requiring anything to the contrary will
force those people to disengage from politics (138). Eliminating religious
disagreements would come at inevitable costs: debates would be impoverished, and
the poor and minorities would be left out (139, 140). That alternative is just “not
feasible”—asking religious people not to rely on their religious reasons would mean a
sort of “self-censorship,” or it could lead them to believe that the reasons they think
they have, which are not accessible to others, are bad (141-42). If people may not
participate “solely for” religious reasons, then some will have to withdraw from politics
altogether (65, 138). One should “accept” that some citizens will participate in politics
for religious reasons, Weithman proposes, just as some will offer religious arguments
in advocating the policies and procedures they favor (92).
Weithman contrasts his view with Robert Audi’s, whose position he describes as
relying upon the idea of “accessibility or intelligibility” in public reasons (148). He
criticizes Audi’s principle of secular motivation, which requires adequate secular
motivation for promoting a coercive policy or law. Weithman complains that Audi
neglects those aspiring to a “religiously integrated existence” (152-55). Those people
cannot treat the principle of secular motivation as one of civic virtue, since they would
act without adequate secular reason even though Audi’s principle requires that citizens
must want not to act without it (154-56). Nor does the principle of secular motivation
take account of situations where one “[recognizes] a good reason but [is not] moved
by it,” Weithman claims (159). As for Audi’s famous principle of secular rationale,
Weithman comments that liberals remain preoccupied with the notion that restrictions
on freedom must be justified to people (167-68). But liberals like Audi rely on
unarticulated, problematic views of “adequate information,” “full rationality,” or
accessibility (171, 192). Furthermore, Weithman charges, Audi’s principle of secular
rationale simply does not show what is wrong with coercing people for publicly non-
intelligible or non-comprehensible reasons (177-78). Weithman adds a final chapter
on Rawls’s work on public reason, distinguishing Rawls’s view from Audi’s (189-90),
280
and arguing that Catholic conceptions of the “common good” should count as part of
what Rawls calls the “family of liberal political conceptions” (197). Different views of
citizenship are as natural as different views of the good, Weithman maintains, and so
one can reasonably disagree with Rawls’s view of citizenship (209, 210, 212). In the
long run, liberal democracies will continue to feature deep but reasonable
disagreement about what reasons and arguments citizens owe each other (212).
There are “unlikely to be shared grounds” for liberal democracy, Weithman concludes,
but that is no cause for political concern (216).
There is much to recommend this book. Weithman rightly emphasizes the important
and worthwhile contributions of churches to American society and politics, and he
does well to incorporate empirical analysis of political participation to bolster his case.
But readers may wonder whether American religion is not more of a mixed bag than
Weithman lets on. After all, liberal democracies are marked by substantial
contingencies of theocrats and religious zealots who reject the very idea of “full
participation” that Weithman describes. Weithman at one point acknowledges that
“extreme forms of fundamentalism” exist in the world, but he merely contrasts
fundamentalism with Catholic institutions and American religion generally (61 fn. 74,
64). If the idea of full participation is conceptually opposed to second-class citizenship,
disenfranchisement, and violations of basic human rights (20, 132), then various
groups in America will reject it. Consider, inter alia, Nation of Islam’s view of Jews or
the Ku Klux Klan’s position on Catholics and Blacks in the not-so-distant past.
Weithman takes no account of such groups where he claims that religiously inspired
civil strife “seems extremely unlikely” in the United States (161). Nor does he speak
to current citizen and government suspicion of Muslims; and so Weithman’s forecast
of stability for the American political climate will leave readers cold.
Weithman’s principles are interesting and liable to spark debate. But they too are not
without their problems. First, it is not clear exactly what (5.1) and (5.2) disallow. The
principles certainly permit abortion rights to be pared back dramatically; indeed, (5.1)
and (5.2) permit that one may vote against abortion rights or physician-assisted
suicide “just because” one believes that one’s religious authority is reliable; and
citizens may even advocate restrictive policies based on some watery understanding
of natural law, with no need to add or offer complementary arguments or accessible
reasons for the measures at stake (129-31). Weithman blushes when it comes to
articulating the implications of this latter allowance (e.g., states outlawing homosexual
behavior), but here one sees broader concerns with the parameters of the principles
themselves. For quite apart from whether it should be considered acceptable for
people to participate in the ways Weithman describes, (5.1) and (5.2) are sufficiently
lax to allow religious parties to disavow any combination of rights and liberties,
procedural fair play, full participation, and even democracy itself (62, 107).
Second, Weithman is unclear on how he intends (5.1) and (5.2) to operate. Surely the
“may” in (5.1) and (5.2) does not indicate a mere formal free speech right: neither
Audi nor Rawls proposes that people in public debate armed only with religious
reasons should have their freedom of speech curtailed or their ability to vote
hampered, and no liberal worth her salt would argue as much. Rather, the question is
whether those who at best offer only religious reasons to φ may be criticized for so
doing, or whether their contributions should count as admissible, especially when
281
policies and laws directly restricting other people’s behavior are at stake. If Weithman
means to stipulate that the kinds of religious voting or advocacy allowed under (5.1)
and (5.2) entail no violation of citizens’ duties, more work will have to be done to
make the view plausible.
Third, Weithman’s argument against accessible reasons is provocative but requires

more elaboration. Interestingly, Weithman seems to think that some reasons are
accessible: he cites considerations from public health, economic growth, even “the
demands of basic human rights” as examples (132). Weithman contrasts these “clear
cases” with religious reasons; but readers will ask why the nature of accessible
reasons cannot be determined, if such reasons do in fact exist. Further, on the
question of whether any religious reasons might enjoy accessibility, one suspects that
some reasons from natural theology could meet the challenge. As for reasons which
are not accessible, it is unclear why Weithman does not follow through on his thought
that at least some such reasons are “bad” (100, 203). One is tempted to conclude
that some putative reasons are not reasons at all; even if no adequate standard of
accessible reasons were available to political philosophers, that would not imply that
no such standard could be found for inaccessibility. Consider the frothing religious
visionary claiming that God spoke to him in a dream, commanding Christians to kill
American unbelievers. Are there no available criteria by which to determine that the
putative reasons he adduces are inaccessible, bad, or not reasons at all?
Weithman seeks refuge against such criticisms in the garden of reasonableness and
reasonable disagreement. He claims that “pervasive and reasonable” disagreement
remains over a list of important issues: the nature of accessible or justifying reasons,
specific institutional arrangements of liberal democracy, the kinds of reasons that
justify government action, and reasons that citizens may rely on for voting and
advocacy (132, 135, 136). Even if Weithman were correct on all counts, it would not
be enough to justify or even recommend (5.1) and (5.2). For those two principles are
darkly silent on reasonableness: they do not mention it, imply it, or require it of
citizens who vote or advocate on controversial public matters. For that matter,
Weithman conspicuously declines to consider the burdens of judgment or whether
principles like (5.1) or (5.2) should require observance of them. Nor does Weithman
directly take up the problem of whether the religious practitioner would be
unreasonable simply to insist on the truth of his religious views when other reasonable
people do not agree; Weithman talks of “undemocratically” held positions, but he
nowhere identifies them as unreasonable (85-88). (5.1) and (5.2) just do not require
reasonableness of citizens: and that puts Weithman’s very theory at risk of being
unreasonable. For while he does not advance his arguments in an unreasonable
manner, Weithman’s principles would permit voting or advocacy for unreasonable
measures, in unreasonable ways, and on unreasonable grounds.
There is in a sense a kind of conflict in this book between Weithman and the principles
he advocates. He rightly believes that it is natural and reasonable for a liberal
democratic citizenry to be distinguished by a variety of reasonable views, and he aims
to be sensitive to that fact. But it is not at all evident that citizens may legitimately
participate in the ways Weithman allows, and readers may ultimately wonder what
would be lost if greater demands were placed on religious citizens than Weithman’s
principles require. For it is false that religious citizens mobilized by churches will be
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pushed back out of politics if their views or their reasons are questioned or criticized.
Those citizens could rethink their views, participate in different ways, or simply back
off of attempts to codify their nastier external preferences in law. Indeed, challenging
the contributions of those relying on exclusively religious reasons not easily accessible
to others can enliven and charge debate, prompting change in stagnant pools of
religious and nonreligious comprehensive doctrines and conceptions of the good. It
might even make for a more fruitful religiously integrated existence, God forbid. In
the end, Weithman does well to visit mainstream American churches for guidance on
responsible citizenship; but one must not return from the sojourn to whitewash the
past, present, and future of American religious life.
2003.06.06
Woods, John
Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences
Woods, John, Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract

Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 380pp, $26.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521009340.
Reviewed by JC Beall , University of Connecticut and David Ripley, University

of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
When physicists disagree as to whose theory is right, they can (if we radically idealize)
form an experiment whose results will settle the difference. When logicians disagree,
there seems to be no possibility of resolution in this manner. In Paradox and
Paraconsistency John Woods presents a picture of disagreement among logicians,
mathematicians, and other “abstract scientists” and points to some methods for
resolving such disagreement. Our review begins with (very) short sketches of the
chapters. Following the sketches, we respond to a few of Woods’ arguments.
Chapter Sketches
In Chapter 1, Woods outlines what he takes conflict in abstract sciences — sciences

that do not make use of empirical results — to be. He claims that there are only two
ways to decide an argument in the abstract sciences that can be effective: cost-
benefit considerations and the “method of analytic intuitions”. The former is common
(witness David Lewis’s cost-benefit arguments for modal realism); the latter, in effect,
amounts to conceptual analysis.
In Chapter 2, Woods presents and rebuts Quine’s arguments against quantified modal
logic and then turns to the arguments of relevant logicians against the Lewis-Langford
“proof” of ex falso quodlibet, claiming that such logicians have largely begged the
question against ex falso.
In Chapter 3, Woods presents one possible strategy for conflict resolution:

Reconciliation, or ambiguation. The strategy is this: discover a distinction that shows
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that there was never a disagreement to begin with; each side was talking about
something different. Woods distinguishes argument, inference, and implication, and
claims that paraconsistent logicians draw their intuitions from argument and inference
only and so should not expect implication (the chief concern of logic, according to
Woods) to be paraconsistent.
In Chapter 4, Woods outlines what he takes intuitions to be and what role they play in
argument about abstract sciences. He uses Frege and Russell as examples of
philosophers who have dealt with abstract conflict (in particular, the Russell set) in
different ways — for Frege, says Woods, the Russell set ended set theory, while for
Russell it modified set theory.
In Chapter 5, Woods sketches the present state of dialetheic set theory and
semantics, as well as the differences between truth-value gluts and truth-value gaps.
He argues that, as far as intuitions go, the dialetheist and the non-dialetheist, in
argument, must beg the question against each other. However, since the dialetheist
opposes tradition, the burden of proof rests firmly on her shoulders, and so
dialetheism is defeated. We briefly address this issue below.
In Chapter 6, Woods explores whether fiction might provide some motivation for
dialetheism beyond what has already been offered. He analyzes fiction and fictional
truth in ways that draw on his earlier work (1974) but that are significantly updated.
For example, here he deals with the possibility of inconsistent but non-trivial fiction.
In the end, however, he concludes that fiction provides no motivation for dialetheism.
We briefly comment on Woods’ discussion of fictionalism about the abstract sciences
below.
In Chapter 7, Woods presents his responses to the semantic paradoxes. These are, to
our knowledge, new responses and are discussed in more detail below. Woods
concludes that, in fact, no contradiction is derivable from Liar and Liar-like sentences
or from Curry sentences (although, for reasons we discuss below, the support for his
conclusion remains unclear to us).
In Chapter 8, he discusses normativity. He claims that there are certain conditions

that must be met for something to be an inference and that beyond those, there are
conditions for its being a good inference. He develops this view by analogy with
sentences. He also discusses the method of analytic intuitions as it applies to
normative claims.
Dialetheists Versus Non-Dialetheists
Dialetheists accept that the negation of some true sentence is true. Non-dialetheists
reject that. (Contemporary philosophy is populated by a few more non-dialetheists
than dialetheists.) Woods argues that, short of cost-benefit considerations (regarding
which, he claims, the jury is still out), the only way to resolve a debate (about
dialetheism) between dialetheists and non-dialetheists is via burden of proof.
Conceptual analysis, Woods argues, comes up empty — ultimately stalemate.
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On whom does the burden of proof rest? Woods’ answer: On the one who bucks
tradition to a greater degree. Suppose that that is right. Another question emerges:
Who bucks tradition to a greater degree? Woods’ answer: Dialetheists, clearly.
We think that that is too quick. After all, precisely what tradition does dialetheism
buck? Perhaps the best answer is that dialetheism bucks classical logic; and it does.
But how much weight does that carry?
By our lights, the weight of a traditional theory ought to be heavy only if the evidence
is correspondingly so — only if tradition is well-founded. What is the evidence for
classical logic? What, that is, is the evidence that classical logic is the correct theory of
our logical particles? (One might invoke mathematics, which, in its standard and
widespread guise, is certainly classically based; however, mathematics is also
“spoken” in an artificial language — a meager one that none the less yields
extraordinary results. The relevant concern, however, is natural language — with all
its pimples and palpable lack of mathematical precision.) By “conceptual analysis”
one’s intuitions strongly point towards classical negation, conjunction, and so on.
(Conditionals may not fare so well, but we ignore those here.) Indeed, such “analysis”
of our intuitions yields many classical principles, including that no sentence is (or even
could be) both true and false. Is that not enough evidence for the classical tradition?
Such “evidence” for classical logic — and, in particular, the “law” of non-contradiction
— would be strong were it not for one fairly conspicuous feature of their formation:
they were formed on the basis of normal cases. Suppose that you are set the task of
formulating logical “laws” (or principles, etc.) governing English. You put together a
committee of competent speakers. The principle of non-contradiction is advanced for
consideration. After a few minutes, everybody agrees that they cannot so much as
imagine a counterexample to that principle. Everyone agrees: “Our intuitions are
firmly for that principle: no truth could have a true negation.” But then a priest named
‘Eubulides’ enters the room. Seeing your principle on the board, he modestly asks
whether there mightn’t be a sentence that says of itself only that it is false. You reply:
“No, there could be no such sentence.” Eubulides replies: “But what I am now saying
is false.”
What would be the reasonable response to Eubulides? At the very least, the
committee should recognize that their “intuitions”, while probably accurate as far they
go, simply did not go far enough; such intuitions were formed on the basis of normal
sentences, not the sort of sentence to which Eubulides pointed. If, as we think, that is
the correct account of our intuitions on which classical logic is based, then such
intuitions are based on an inadequate diet — or at least an incomplete one. And if that
is correct, then invoking the “tradition” behind classical logic does very (very) little
towards establishing burden of proof.
What tradition, then, does the dialetheist buck to a greater degree than the non-
dialetheist? She bucks classical logic, to be sure; but we have already covered that —
it is insufficiently supported by intuitions (given that such intuitions were formed via
ignoring important prima facie counterexamples), and so insufficiently supported.
Unfortunately, we do not know of a well-founded tradition that the dialetheist bucks to
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a greater degree than the non-dialetheist. Pending discovery of such a tradition, we

conclude, pace Woods, that the burden of proof does not rest with the dialetheist.
Interestingly, it may well be the non-dialetheist who bucks tradition to a greater

degree than the dialetheist. Which tradition? Not classical logic, of course, but rather
philosophical inquiry itself. Tradition has it that philosophers aim to question
foundational principles as far as reasonable inquiry may go. (Of course, even that
principle is up for examination.) That, in the end, is precisely what dialetheists have
done: namely, the traditional philosophical chore of examining foundational principles
— in this case, non-contradiction. So far, dialetheists have discovered that
inconsistent but non-trivial theories have a lot going for them, at least qua models of
our naïve theories (of truth, reference, etc). But so far, non-dialetheists have yet to
evince any philosophically or rationally bad features of such (dialetheic) theories, and
yet the non-dialetheist continues to claim that tradition is on her side. While we in no
way wish to put much stock in this observation, we do think it is worth noting that the
dialetheist seems to have an important tradition on her side — the heart of
philosophical inquiry, as it were. But we will leave that observation there. As above,
Woods’ chief case for tradition (with respect to non-contradiction) is true but
irrelevant; tradition dictates burden of proof only if it is well-founded, and in the case
of non-contradiction the well-foundedness is (at best) unclear.
Fictionalism and Stipulationism
In Chapter 6, Woods discusses fiction and whether it can provide intuitive motivation
for the dialetheist. Near the end of the chapter, he also discusses fictionalism about
abstract sciences, preferring to replace it with what he calls stipulationism.
Fictionalism, taken as the thesis that the truths of some theory are “secured and
validated by analogy with how the truths of fiction themselves are secured and
validated” (196), is unattractive for the simple reason that there is no clean
explanation of how the truths of fiction are to be treated, especially when they conflict
with truths about the world.
In place of fictionalism, Woods presents stipulationism, the thesis that stipulated truth
is one kind of truth, in particular, what Woods calls a “hyphenated truth” (221), one
that is true-in-system-S, but may be untrue-in-system-S*. For example, the law of
excluded middle is true-in-classical-logic, but untrue-in-K3 (or “strong Kleene”). If we
use a system for long enough, Woods claims, we forget that its truths are
hyphenated. He looks at the example of ZF set theory. When it first arose, it was
counterintuitive enough to require hyphenation; nobody confused truths-in-ZF with
truths about sets. But naïve set theory had enough problems, or so people thought, to
make ZF an attractive replacement. As time passed and ZF became an accepted
theory, people lost track of the hyphens. As Woods says:
It is a powerful dynamic. Stipulated truths are hyphenated truths. If, as sometimes

happens, these become received truths, those who see them so fail to see their
hyphens: in fact, fail to see their hyphens even if they are made aware of the received
theory’s stipulative origins (221).
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If we use a theory for long enough, we are likely to confuse its hyphenated truths with
truths simpliciter, not from any dishonesty, but from our innate preference for
adopting the realist stance.
We endorse this claim, and with it what Woods calls benign pluralism: the acceptance
of many hyphenated truths. Disjunctive syllogism is valid-in-classical-logic and invalid-
in-LP; there is no need to abandon these hyphens, even if we are naturally inclined to
do so.
Woods on the Liar
A typical Liar sentence appears to assert of itself only that it is false (or untrue). How
can the sentence refer to itself? There seem to be at least three options: i) by name;
ii) by indexical; iii) by description. Examples of the three sorts of Liar-like sentences
are
(1) (1) is false.
(2) This sentence is false.
(3) The third-displayed sentence in the section labeled ‘Woods on the Liar’ in Beall and
Ripley’s review of Paradox and Paraconsistency is false.
Woods takes the classic presentation of the Liar to be something of type i). He dubs
the following construction ‘L’:
(1) (1) is false.
As Woods rightly points out (246-248), L is itself a baptism, and thus not itself
paradoxical; it is not the sort of thing that can easily be called either true or false.
What is paradoxical is the sentence — namely, (1) — that L baptizes. (1) seems
paradoxical because of the following argument, which uses only disquotation,
quotation (its converse), and substitution of identicals ((1) = ‘(1) is false’) (248-249):
(a) Suppose (1) is true.
(b) ‘(1) is false’ is true, by substitution in (a).
(c) (1) is false, by disquotation on (b).
(d) Suppose (1) is false.
(e) ‘(1) is false’ is true, by quotation on (d).
(f) (1) is true, by substitution in (e).
It is clear that this argument depends heavily on disquotation. What is disquotation

exactly? Woods never tells us what he takes the answer to be. He does give us some
evidence, however. He tells us (251) that we can move correctly from
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‘The cat is on the mat’ is true
to
The cat is on the mat
by disquoting. So it seems that some sort of standard disquotation is at play. We take

the following to be a standard definition of disquotational truth:
For truth to be disquotational is for it to license the following inferences, where ‘p’ is a
sentence and ‘ ‘p’ ‘ a name of ‘p’:
(DT1) ‘p’ is true / p
(DT2) p / ‘p’ is true
Certainly, the above inference (regarding the cat) conforms to this definition, in
particular (DT1); however, not all of Woods’ claims about disquotation so conform. He
claims that if truth is disquotational, the inference from
(1) is true
to
(1)
is licensed (251-252). But this inference is not of the form licensed by (DT1) or (DT2).
It is rather of the form
(MT) α is true / α,
where ‘α’ is a name — and that, nota bene, makes no sense. ‘(1)’ is the name of a
sentence; we cannot conclude a name. (In fact, so long as nothing is simultaneously a
sentence and a name of a sentence, (MT) will always fail to make sense.) Woods sees
that this is a problem, although he sees it as a problem for disquotational truth, as
defined above. Suppose, for example, that ‘9’ names the sentence ‘The cat is on the
mat’. Woods claims (253) that the sentence
9 is true
is in fact oblique; it somehow stands either for
‘9’ is true
or for
That 9 is true.
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As he rightly notes, neither of these reconstructions will do; they allow us to conclude,
if anything, ‘9’, but not 9, which is what we want. Therefore, Woods concludes, truth
as used in
9 is true
is not disquotational. But that makes little sense. After all, if ‘9’ names ‘The cat is on
the mat’, then 9 = ‘The cat is on the mat’, in which case neither of Woods’ “oblique
readings” of ‘9 is true’ is an accurate reading. We conclude that Woods’ use of
‘disquotational’ is a deviant one, and one that, unfortunately, remains obscure.
It is important to note that Woods never tells us just what, given the stipulation that
‘9’ names ‘The cat is on the mat’, is wrong with
9 is true.
Why isn’t ‘9 is true’ (given the stipulation) simply a claim about a sentence made by
using the sentence’s name? He says it cannot but be oblique because “truth is
disquotational” (253). In fact, he asserts that
. . . is true
is not really the form of an assertion of truth. Rather, it is
‘. . .’ is true.
This is because “Truth is disquotational; it is also quotational” (255; emphasis in

original). But what does it mean for truth-assertions to have the latter form? Does it
simply mean that ‘is true’ must be preceded by a name? It cannot; ‘9’ is a name, but
Woods claims that ‘9 is true’ is illegitimate (255). Does it mean that truth-assertions
must literally include quotation marks to be legitimate? It cannot; Woods mentions
with approval sentences such as ‘What Charlie said is true’. It seems to mean this:
that truth-assertions must literally include quotation marks to be taken
disquotationally. Woods claims (257) that, were we to disquote
What Charlie said is true,
we would conclude
What Charlie said.
Note that this is another inference of the form (MT), a form that is not disquotation as
usually understood. Woods follows (DT1) and (DT2) whenever a orthographically
includes quotation marks; he follows (MT) whenever it does not. This is a significant
departure from standard accounts of what it is for truth to be disquotational, and it is
entirely unargued for (as far as we can see). A usual disquotational inference involving
‘What Charlie said is true’ would look something like this (where, again, we stipulate
that ‘p’ is a sentence):
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(a) What Charlie said is true.
(b) What Charlie said = ‘p’.
(c) ‘p’ is true, by substitution in (a).
(d) p, by disquotation on (c).
Woods’ attack on such arguments is merely this: substitution is blocked because such
an assertion as (a) is oblique (254). Again, we are given no reason to conclude that
(a) is oblique. If, however, we allow standard disquotational inferences like the one
above, Woods’ argument crumbles. His attack on the Liar paradox requires
(1) is true
to fail to be a legitimate assertion; however, he gives us no reason to believe this,

besides reminders that “truth is disquotational” and an occasional inference of the
form (MT), which we have no reason to accept.
That, then, is Woods’ account of the Liar when it refers to itself by name — the
derivation fails due to opacity. Unfortunately, Woods’ “opacity”-claims turn on a notion
of disquotation that remains unclear, and in that respect his account of the Liar
remains unclear. (Note that Brian Skyrms argued in the 70s and 80s that the Liar fails
for reasons of opacity, that ‘. . . is true’ is opaque. But Woods’ position is not Skyrms’
position, as Skyrms’ argument for opacity invokes standard disquotation and turns
simply on the premise that substitution of identicals fails in the Liar derivation — it
must fail, on pain of inconsistency, according to Skyrms. It would have been useful to
see Woods’ discussion of Skyrms’ position, but Woods does not discuss it.)
Recall that the Liar can refer to itself in at least two other ways beyond using a
(constant) name: by indexical and by definite description. So even if we accept
Woods’ account of the “name Liar,” he still owes us an account of these other sorts.
Although he does not provide an account of the “indexical Liar”
This sentence is false
he does provide an account of what he calls the “Following-Preceding Paradox” (264).

If we let ‘FS’ abbreviate ‘the following sentence’, and ‘PS’ ‘the preceding sentence’,
then the following pair is often taken to be paradoxical:
FS is true.
PS is false.
We rehearse Woods’ argument to contradiction (264-265):
(a) Suppose FS is true.
(b) FS = ‘PS is false’.

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(c) So ‘PS is false’ is true, by substitution in (a).
(d) PS is false, by disquotation on (c).
(e) PS = ‘FS is true’.
(f) ‘FS is true’ is false, by substitution in (d).
(g) FS is false, by bivalence.
(h) Suppose FS is false.
(i) ‘PS is false’ is false, by substitution in (g).
(j) PS is true, by bivalence.
(k) ‘FS is true’ is true, by substitution in (j).
(l) FS is true, by disquotation on (k).
Woods advises us to be a bit more careful. ‘FS is true’, he says, can be more
perspicaciously rendered as
(4) The sentence immediately following this very sentence is true.
Likewise, ‘PS is false’ is perhaps better put thusly:
(5) The sentence immediately preceding this very sentence is false.
We should wonder, Woods claims, about what ‘this very sentence’ means. It seems
that in the first sentence,
(6) This very sentence = ‘The sentence immediately following this very sentence is
true.’
and in the second sentence,
(7) This very sentence = ‘The sentence immediately preceding this very sentence is
false.’
Thus, by transitivity of identity,
‘The sentence immediately following this very sentence is true’ = ‘The sentence
immediately preceding this very sentence is false.’
This is unacceptable; what has gone wrong? Woods claims that (6) and (7) are to
blame. He says that in identity assertions like these, “[L]eft ‘This very sentence’ refers
to itself if it refers at all. But it is not a sentence, rather an empty singular term. So is
[sic] does not refer, and the identity collapses” (266, emphasis in original).
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We think that a more natural evaluation of the problem is available. What makes
indexicals indexicals is their sensitivity to context. The above argument is insensitive
to such sensitivity. On one natural reading of the indexicals above, (6) is true given
that its context is (4); (7) is true given that its context is (5). Further, once we
become aware of context in this way, the contradiction is indeed derivable. Woods
owes us some argument against this sort of account of indexicals, but none is given.
Even if we accept Woods’ arguments regarding Liars that refer to themselves using
names and indexicals, there remains a third type of Liar sentence, one that uses
definite descriptions:
(8) The last-displayed sentence in the section labeled ‘Woods on the Liar’ in Beall and
Ripley’s review of Paradox and Paraconsistency is false.
But no account at all is given of such sentences; they are not so much as mentioned.
So it seems that Woods is left with the Liar paradox and its cousins in all three forms.
Closing Remarks
It is important for philosophers to discuss the resolution of logical disagreements.

Paradox and Paraconsistency is a good effort in this direction, and Woods’ exposition
of stipulationism in the abstract sciences is valuable. While some of Woods’ arguments
are unconvincing and his discussion of the semantic paradoxes seems to be based
upon a deviant usage of ‘disquotation’ that remains obscure, the book, on the whole,
is well worth reading. Conflict resolution in philosophy of logic, of mathematics, and of
language, is not only philosophically interesting but also practically important (for
purposes of progress). Woods’ discussion serves as a very good point of departure.
We also feel obliged to note that the book has frequent typographical errors
throughout, enough to significantly slow the reader.
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2003.06.07
John Kekes
The Art of Life
Kekes, John, The Art of Life, Cornell University Press, 2002, 288pp, $29.95 (hbk),
ISBN 0801440068.
Reviewed by Stephen Watt, The Open University
John Kekes attempts in this book to discuss one way in which life may be lived well.
He does this by analyzing a specific type of good life, that which consists in practising
the art of life to achieve personal excellence.
The book falls into three sections. Part one consists of a discussion of various types of
concrete good lives of personal excellence. Kekes gives five types of such a life: those
of self-direction, decency, moral authority, depth and honour. Each life forms the
basis of a chapter, with the main focus of each chapter being on a particular life,
actual or fictional, which embodies the value in question. Thus, for the life of moral
authority, Kekes examines the life of the sophron (wise man) in the Cypriot village of
Alona and for the life of depth, he examines Oedipus as portrayed by Sophocles. Part
two examines in four chapters the general conditions for practising the art of life and
develops some of the ideas which emerged from the examination in part one. Part
three, the final chapter, draws together the threads of the various arguments to
provide ’one possible and reasonable approach to living a good life’ (p10):
The resulting view is that one way of making lives good is the successful practice of
the art of life. This requires living and acting in conformity to a reasonable ideal of
personal excellence and developing a well-integrated dominant attitude (p239).
Given that Kekes is arguing only that the sort of life he presents is one possible good
life, not that it is the only good life, it is on the goodness of that life that I am going to
concentrate. In particular, I am going to suggest that the absence of an adequate
conception of practical wisdom or phronesis and a consequent lack of engagement
with the rationality of ends pursued undermines the goodness of this life.
Kekes has, over the years, written a number of books all of which tend to argue in
favour of an approach to ethics that both emphasizes a concern with good lives rather
than actions and, broadly speaking, favours conservative values rather than liberal
ones. The present book draws heavily on these preceding works. As such, Kekes’
approach is clearly related to that of many modern ethicists who take their inspiration
from classical ethicists, particularly Aristotle. However, Kekes distances himself
deliberately from the Aristotelian approach to ethics in at least two ways. Firstly, he
carefully distinguishes the personal excellences that he is concerned with from
Aristotle’s moral virtues. Secondly, he aims only to give an account of one possible
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way of living well, and makes no claims about the general suitability of this life for all
human beings.
Assessed purely as a matter of Aristotelian exegesis, Kekes’ basis for distinguishing

his personal excellences from Aristotle’s moral virtues appears unsatisfactory. He
gives Aristotle’s definition of a moral virtue as follows:
a moral virtue is (a) a character trait that is (b) concerned with choosing actions, (c)
based on reason, and (d) aiming at the mean between excess and deficiency (pp164-
5).
He goes on to argue that his personal excellences, whilst character traits, do not fill
conditions (b) (c) and (d) and are therefore not moral virtues in Aristotle’s sense.
They are not concerned with choosing actions, because, for people who possess that
excellence, it may be ’psychologically impossible for them to choose a contrary action’
(p165). They are not concerned with reason because they do not always or usually
involve critical reflexion on the traditions they find themselves in or the ends they are
pursuing:
For More took for granted the Catholicism that formed him; the [Cypriot] sophron had
not reflected critically on his Hellenic-Byzantine-Greek Orthodox tradition (p167).
Finally, unlike the moral virtues, personal excellences cannot be cared about too
much:
If people are committed to lives of self-direction, moral authority, decency, depth, or

honor, then it is hard to see how they could be said to feel too strongly their desire for
self-mastery, love for the tradition that nourishes them, benevolence towards others
in their context, passion for understanding, and sense of obligation (p168).
As an account of what Aristotle believed to be involved in the moral virtues, Kekes’

discussion is inadequate. Comparison with, for example, what Aristotle actually says in
his definition at 1106b36-1107a3 in the Nicomachean Ethics will quickly reveal those
inadequacies. It would be, for instance, extremely odd to think that, when Aristotle
talks of choice in this connexion, he is thinking that the courageous agent could
somehow choose not to be courageous. This is, however, of little consequence in
itself: Kekes is not trying primarily to give an account of Aristotle but rather to explain
what his personal excellences are like. So putting aside questions of how well Kekes
has interpreted Aristotle, how well do personal excellences, so characterized, serve as
constituents of a good life?
From the above, we are to imagine that people can live a good life without an
awareness that they could have acted otherwise, that they can live a good life without
critical reflexion on the tradition they find themselves in, and that they cannot care
too much about the excellences they care about. Kekes does acknowledge the role of
reflectiveness in his good life, but says little about it in this work.1 What he does say
suggests that one main function is to realize the arbitrariness of that tradition:
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Reflectiveness is directed also toward understanding that the vision of one’s own
moral tradition is merely one among many. To have this kind of understanding is to
see that here, as Peter Strawson puts it, “there are truths but no truth.” It is the
essential feature of a pluralistic society that it is generally recognized in it that the
morally acceptable visions of a good life are many. The fact remains, however, that of
the many only one is one’s own. (p52)
To help me deal with these aspects, I’m going to focus on the life of Thomas More,
which Kekes in his first chapter takes as an example of the life embodying the
personal excellence of self-direction. Before getting into the details, it’s worth pointing
out that Kekes’ coverage of the details of More’s life takes up only about two full
pages of the book. I say this, not so much as a criticism of Keke—one of the most
attractive aspects of The Art of Life is indeed its illuminating reflexion on a variety of
concrete cases—but rather to expose the unavoidable limitations of his approach: the
cases considered are not given in sufficient detail to motivate -let alone test - the
accounts given, but function rather to illustrate those accounts. Putting this aside,
More is used to illustrate the nature of unconditional commitments which Kekes
describes thus:
Unconditional commitments are the most serious convictions we have. They define our
limits: what we feel we must not do no matter what, what we regard as outrageous
and horrible. They are fundamental conditions of being ourselves. Unconditional
commitments are not universal, for they vary with individuals. Nor are they
categorical, for we may violate them. But if through fear, coercion, weakness,
accident, or stupidity we do so, we inflict grave psychological damage on ourselves
(p21).
More’s unconditional commitment was to the ’priority of his religious beliefs’ (p20).
Such unconditional commitments are to be contrasted with ’defeasible commitments’
(p22).
The difference between them [i.e. defeasible commitments] and unconditional

commitments is that nothing we recognize as a good reason could override the latter
because our judgments of what reasons are good and how strongly they weigh are
dictated by unconditional commitments. They are the standards by which we
measure, and unless we abandon the yardstick, there could be no rational
consideration that would incline us to reject conclusions that have been properly
derived from our unconditional commitments (ibid).
In More’s case, his (defeasible) commitments to family and king were overridden by
his unconditional commitment to his religious beliefs.
This appears to me to be an unfounded psychologizing of More’s commitments. More

gave up his life because God is more important than king. Given the sort of thing that
More as a Catholic supposed God to be, it would be unwise and cowardly to give in to
threats of a bullying king to betray God. If the dispute were instead about the
abolition of fox hunting, and More gave up his life rather than break his unconditional
commitment to being a huntsman, then More would have been a fool rather than a
saint. The psychological strength or otherwise of a commitment isn’t the issue here:
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the issue is whether or not the commitment is to something worth dying for—a
question answerable only by application of something like Aristotelian practical
wisdom.
This question of unconditional commitments appears linked to what Kekes, in the

second section of the book, calls dominant attitudes (chapter 8). More had a
’dominant attitude to self-direction’ (p190). This means that, in some sense, his
attitude to the personal excellence of self-direction structured his personality:
The dominant attitude, therefore, determines what really matters. It is not just the
central but also a pervasive influence on the beliefs, emotions, and motives that
constitute people’s attitudes toward their lives (ibid).
Whether a commitment to self-direction informs More’s character in general is of

course a matter for detailed biographical argument, but certainly it seems to be an
entirely inadequate explanation of the actions which led to his execution. More did not
see the circumstances of his time just ’as formidable obstacles to living the life he
wants’ (p192).2 If he did, he arguably should not have died for that. If More died for
the sake of self-direction, or for a dominant attitude valued not because of its
goodness, but because it was simply his dominant attitude, then it’s not clear he
should have done that. Only if he died for God—whether or not one accepts the truth
of his beliefs—do his actions make sense.
If you turn back to Aristotle, the differences between him and Kekes appear helpful
here. Aristotle too talks of structuring a good life around a dominant end, but anything
less than the end of living well appears to him inadequate.3 Moreover, that living well,
as we learn in Book X, is in some way bound up with the political community or
contemplation of divine things. It is noteworthy that both God and state—the usual
things people think worth dying for—seem generally disregarded by Kekes,
presumably because they transcend the psychology of the individual.
Let’s go back to the three differences between Aristotelian virtues and Kekes’ personal
excellences mentioned earlier:
1) The psychological impossibility of choosing otherwise.
2) The absence of reason in the choosing of personal excellences.
3) The impossibility of overvaluing personal excellences.
For any given individual, it is undoubtedly the case that all three of these may hold
true and yet the life remain good. But in Aristotelian terms, this is surely because such
lives are directed by others: due to weakness in their own intellects (or by force of
circumstances such as lack of leisure) their good life is achieved by taking on trust the
deliverances of the practical wisdom of others4 . In a self-reflective individual like
More, however, the possibility of such an absence in a good life seems less convincing.
More could not have chosen otherwise because he was standing for what he believed
to be true against what he believed to be false: it is no more a matter of psychology
than the belief in 2+2=4. (And had he changed his mind on the truth of those beliefs,
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he could—and should—have chosen otherwise.) As argued above, if he decided that

his dominant attitude would be an unconditional commitment to his religious beliefs,
that is because his religious beliefs were thought by him to be such things as
demanded unconditional commitment. A similar unconditional commitment to, say,
honour might be striking, but it might also be foolish (as Don Giovanni’s refusal to flee
the Commendatore is striking but leads him to Hell). The possibility of overvaluing
personal excellences, even dominant ones, is always there: it could quite reasonably
be argued that More placed too much weight on his religious views and too little on
his—in Kekes’ terms—defeasible commitments to his family. What you think of his
weighting ought to depend on what you think of the truth of his religious views. And
this involves the application of practical wisdom to the assessment of the goodness of
his ends.
There is much of value and interest in the book. In particular, the first section
containing the discussions of concrete lives is frequently illuminating and thought
provoking. Where it is particularly strong is in its depiction of lives of integration lived
in the midst of chaos. And of that sort of life, Montaigne—another concrete life dealt
with in the book—is a rather better example than More. For ultimately, More did not
think he lived in a chaos, but in a transcendent order that was worth dying for and
which would persist whatever he or anyone else did. Kekes’ vision appears to be of an
order that can only exist through the imagination and will of human beings: hence his
psychologism. If that vision is correct, then Kekes’ account of a good life gains
plausibility. But if that vision is doubted—as it is in those traditions which acknowledge
an order transcending the psychology of individuals, for example, either in the state or
in God—then the ends of his good life can appear arbitrary and self-willed. For this
reason, I suspect that Kekes’ aim of finding a life which can be seen as good from the
viewpoint of all traditions is chimerical. The Art of Life, however, remains overall a
welcome contribution to the positive trend within modern ethics to move away from
abstract theorizing towards the particular and concrete.
Endnotes
1. Kekes refers us to his Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, Ithaca, Cornell University
Press, 1995. Whether this work does adequately supplement what is said in the
present volume I shall leave for others to decide.
2. Kekes uses this phrase to characterize the possible attitude of the self-directed to
the French Revolution not to that of More. However, it does seem intended to capture
something essential in the dominant attitude of people, such as (in Kekes’ eyes) More,
committed to the excellence of self-direction.
3. I am thinking here of the discussions in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics which

argue for eudaimonia (living well) as the target of actions, and for the inadequacy of
commonly held characterizations of that target as honour, or wealth or pleasure.
4. I take this to be the kernel of philosophical truth in Aristotle’s notorious discussions

of slaves and women in the Politics.
2003.06.08
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Rodolphe Gasche
The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics
Gasche, Rodolphe, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics, Stanford

Reviewed by Rachel Zuckert , Rice University
Gasché offers here a comprehensive discussion of Kant’s aesthetics in the Critique of

Judgment, tracing Kant’s account as it unfolds from the placement of pure judgments
of taste within the general doctrine of reflective judgment in the published and
unpublished introductions to the CJ, through the characterizations of judgments of
taste and of sublimity, to the claim that beauty is the “symbol of morality,” with which
the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment concludes. His discussion focuses, however, on the
two themes announced in his title: Kant’s aesthetic formalism and (via the technical
meaning of “idea”) the “crucial role played by reason in the formation and judgment of
form” (p. 12).
Gasché argues that one ought to read Kant’s formalism not as a claim that in a pure
judgment of taste we appreciate “surface” characteristics of an object such as line or
composition, but as the claim that in aesthetic judging we apprehend the “mere form
of an object” as such, as “minimally cognizable.” Following Béatrice Longuenesse,
Gasché argues that our apprehension of such form is an act of “mere” reflection
“isolated” from its role within our usual, “reflective but also determinative,”
conceptually guided acts of judgment that render objects and experience possible. The
(successful) engagement in such “mere” reflection is pleasurable, for it is a
“precognitive” or “para-epistemic” achievement that renders “wild,” unconceptualized
objects “minimally” comprehensible.
Gasché’s treatment of the role of reason in Kant’s aesthetics touches on many of

Kant’s suggestions concerning the relationship between aesthetics and morality (or
practical reason). More controversially, drawing upon Kant’s infrequently discussed
account of the “Ideal of Beauty” in paragraph 17 and upon that of aesthetic ideas in
Kant’s account of fine art, Gasché argues that the “para-epistemic” apprehension of
form in aesthetic judgment is, itself, already guided by and directed towards reason’s
“idea of a maximum” and our rational aims to cognize particular objects, or nature, as
systematic wholes. The “prodigality” of beautiful form, the “luxuriance” of the ideas
produced by the imagination in aesthetic experience are symbolic emulations of
rational totality and systematicity, just as in the experience of the (mathematical)
sublime, on Kant’s view, the imagination, in aiming to comprehend a large sensible
object, aims also to represent sensibly the rational idea of infinity. Thus Gasché draws
unusually strong parallels between pure judgments of taste concerning natural
beauty, judgments of art as expressing aesthetic ideas, and aesthetic judgments of
the sublime: all of these judgments are apprehensions of the “minimal cognizability”
of “wild” or unconceptualized objects and are experiences of the “life of the mind,”
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oriented by and symbolic of the overarching aims of reason, and “conducive,”

“beneficial” or “enlivening” to the exercise of our rational capacities as a whole.
This book contains a number of provocative suggestions, most prominently this last,
that Kant’s judgments of the beautiful and the sublime might both be read primarily
as sensible symbolizations of rationality. Gasché’s background in literary theory and
criticism is demonstrated in interesting discussions of particular passages or locutions
in Kant’s text. For example, in Gasché’s early essay, “Hypotyposis” (reprinted in this
volume), he suggests that Kant’s denigration of rhetoric (in his hierarchical discussion
of the fine arts) should be reinterpreted in light of his use of the classical rhetorical
figure of “hypotyposis” to characterize beauty as a symbol of morality. And, drawing
upon lexicographical research, he argues that Kant’s usage of “mere” (bloss) to qualify
the a priori in the CJ, by contrast to “pure” (rein) in the other two critiques, indicates
the fragility and elusiveness of the a priori principle of reflection and of taste: “mere”
reflection does not generate a fixed, self-sufficient body of a priori knowledge (by
contrast to the understanding’s “pure” principles or the “pure” principle of practical
reason) but is identifiable only by contrast to what it “excludes,” that from which it is
“isolated” (determinate, empirical, contentful knowledge of objects). More broadly,
though not “thematized” by Gasché as a tension, Gasché’s characterization of the pure
judgment of aesthetic form as both a “minimal” or “precognitive” grasp of the object
and as a maximal grasp of the “luxuriance” of an object’s characteristics beyond
(“para”) determinate cognition identifies an interesting, underdiscussed tension in
Kant’s description of our apprehension of beauty, and in its “systematic” placement
with respect to cognitive understanding, as both less and more than empirical
knowledge.
Gasché has, however, much more ambitious aims: he writes that he has sought “to
avoid . . . a critical debate with the various and often contradictory interpretations” of
the CJ and promises that “[a]s a result of [his] reading, many of the so-called
inconsistencies and puzzles that commentators have enjoyed pointing out . . . will
appear . . . less problematic”; on his reading, Kant provides a “highly consistent set of
strong arguments” in the CJ (p. 11). And indeed, Gasché cites very little Anglo-
American or German scholarship; he does not even mention such prominent readers
of this text as Cristel Fricke, Jens Kuhlenkampff, or Paul Guyer. Instead of scholarly
debate, Gasché writes in the style of some European commentary, using extensive,
narrative paraphrase of the text, liberally interspersed with textual quotations. This
style of commentary, at its best, can (re)orient the reader’s sense of a text’s structure
and central concerns, as Gasché does, in beginning his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,
with the “third moment” in Kant’s account of the judgment of taste. On Gasché’s
reading, the justificatory questions concerning the universal yet subjective validity of
the claims of taste posed in the first two moments (and ultimately addressed in Kant’s
deduction of judgments of taste) that preoccupy most commentators on the CJ –and,
arguably, Kant himself—take second place to Kant’s descriptive aesthetics of form and
of “boundless” formlessness (in the sublime) and to the systematic importance of
Kant’s identification of the “transcendental” status of taste.
Without further analysis and reconstruction, the paraphrastic form of commentary is,
however, insufficient to clarify the frequently obscure and puzzling claims of the CJ,
much less allay philosophical worries concerning the strength of the arguments there
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presented. For example, Gasché suggests that on Kant’s view we can and do judge
works of art – as well as natural beauties – in “pure” judgments of taste, on the basis
of their “mere form.” For, Gasché argues, though we do judge these objects in terms
of concepts (and thus would appear precisely not to be judging them in terms of
Gasché’s “mere,” unconceptualized form), the concepts by which we judge art works
have been “rendered indeterminate” by the genius, who transforms them into
aesthetic ideas that contain “more” than can be determinately, conceptually
articulated; thus, our appreciation of such ideas is identical (?) to our appreciation of
the “luxuriance” of natural beautiful form. Leaving aside difficulties (often discussed in
the scholarship, but not mentioned here) concerning which kind of concept is
employed, on Kant’s view, in such judgments (representation? painting? post-
Impressionist painting? sunflower, vase, or table? the vibrancy, terror, or fragility of
life?), Gasché’s elaboration of many different possible meanings of “form” in Kant’s
discussion of the arts—from “academic” form as necessary technique for artistic
production (which, as Gasché writes, is “utterly distinct” from Kant’s usage of “form”
elsewhere in the CJ [p. 189]), to an expression “adequate” to the genius’ thought (p.
190), to arrangement, composition or delineation (p. 192), to success at
representation of a thing or the “form of thing” (p. 193)—does not persuade the
reader that appreciation of aesthetic ideas or artistic beautiful form is similar to
appreciation of natural form. This elaboration tends, rather, to render the Kantian
concept of form itself—already elusive in Kant, and on Gasché’s presentation—
indeterminate.
There are also terminological and textual imprecisions in Gasché’s discussion that will
irritate scholars and may frustrate or mislead students looking for elucidation of this
difficult text. For example, in arguing (rightly) that natural, not artistic, beauty is
central to Kant’s aesthetics, Gasché repeatedly emphasizes Kant’s claim that in order
to be beautiful, art must look like nature, but usually fails to quote, and does not
remark upon, Kant’s appended claim that beautiful nature looks like art (CJ Ak. V:
306). Likewise, in discussing Kant’s claims in the “Ideal of Beauty” that we must
produce an ideal representation of reason’s idea of a maximum as a standard for
taste, Gasché asserts that “[f]or the most part, Kant remains silent, in chapter 17,
about how to conceive of such an ideal” (p. 106). This assertion is, at the least, highly
puzzling, since Kant devotes most of paragraph 17 to arguing that the sole ideal of
beauty is the representation of a (particular sort of) human form (a claim that Gasché
ducks, as requiring “extensive discussion,” a page earlier). And, more centrally, in
discussing the relationship between Kant’s frequent denials in the CJ that the
judgment of taste involves conceptual determination of objects, and his doctrines in
the Critique of Pure Reason—how can Kant of all philosophers claim that we find
objects (somehow) intelligible without any conceptualization?— Gasché suggests that
aesthetic experience concerns objects characterized indeed by the a priori “form of a
phenomenon” promulgated in the CPR, for which, however, we lack empirical concepts
(pp. 72-3). But Gasché’s glosses here (and throughout the book) -- “a reflective
aesthetic judgment takes place in the absence of any concept that would unify . . . the
. . . manifold . . . before all logical determination, before all representation through
which the object is thought” [my emphasis]—are imprecise, given that the “form of
phenomena” of the CPR is, of course, conceptually determined by the categories. (It is
also not helpful to most current readers of the CJ that Gasché cites page numbers not
from the Akademie edition, but from an old translation [Bernard], which makes
textual double-checking onerous.)
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Though Gasché’s aim to eschew the arcana of extensive scholarly debate is

understandable and perhaps even commendable, his discussion might have been
clarified by some attention (and response, even if not in the form of scholarly debate)
to the “puzzles” raised by commentators on the CJ. One of the stronger discussions in
this work is in the opening of chapter 3, where Gasché argues against the standard
interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic formalism that it is based, questionably, solely on
paragraph 14, entitled “Elucidation by Examples” (where Kant famously, or
notoriously, glosses form as “line” or “shape”), to the exclusion of the other,
theoretically more central paragraphs in the “third moment.” Gasché suggests,
interestingly, that one ought to understand this paragraph as Kant’s address to art
critics (e.g., of the Winckelmann school), an attempt to draw upon their conception of
form in order to encourage them to endorse his own, ultimately rather different
conception of aesthetic form. Likewise, readers from the post-structuralist tradition
may find Gasché’s sympathetic characterization of the role of reason within Kant’s
aesthetics, in conversation with Lyotard’s and Derrida’s readings of the CJ and his
defense of Kant against the charge of promoting a “double” aesthetics (of beauty and
sublimity), helpful.
Similar attention to, and argument against, opposing positions in the scholarship
might have sharpened some of the unsatisfying discussion elsewhere in this work.
Thus, for example, Gasché’s glosses on Kant’s denials of conceptual determination in
judgments of taste—that they occur “only when” the subject is faced by objects “for
which no determined [empirical] concepts are available,” (p. 3)—might allow Gasché
to defend Kant against the familiar objection that on his view we ought to find all
objects beautiful. (The recent essay by Dorit Barchana Lorand in Kant-Studien,
however, endorses a somewhat similar line of interpretation with greater philosophical
acuity in response to such difficulties.) But Kant is hereby rendered vulnerable to
another familiar problem, that he seems to be committed to a deeply implausible view
that our experiences of beautiful objects are very few and far between: if we can find
an object beautiful only if we have no determinate (empirical) concept for it, then
roses, tulips, gardens, paintings, and people cannot be found beautiful (except by
young children). Since these are not only among the kinds of objects we actually tend
to find beautiful but also among Kant’s favored examples of beautiful objects, some
more precise articulation of the kind of concept that is absent in judgments of taste,
or the way in which such judgments are not based upon concepts, or the meaning of
Kant’s category of “dependent” or “accessory” beauty (judgments of which do involve
determinate concepts, on Kant’s view)—beyond the assertion that concepts are
“lacking” or “not available”—is required. Gasché offers us the interesting item of
information that at Kant’s time, tulips were new to Europe, and considered “wild”;
this, however, does not show that Kant (or other Europeans) had no concept, “tulip,”
nor does it help us understand the possibility of the judgment, “This rose is beautiful.”
Gasché’s work identifies promising directions for thinking about the Third Critique. His
emphases upon rational systematicity in relation to taste and upon Kant’s doctrines in
the “third moment”—from the claims concerning beautiful form to the doctrine of the
ideal of beauty—are welcome, since these are, arguably, the most frequently criticized
or ignored among Kant’s central doctrines in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. And
Gasché’s work takes up a position that might span the gaps between continental,
literary-critical, analytic, and historical treatments of the CJ. This work will not, I fear,
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convince doubters on these counts, but it may, I hope, prompt further, cross-
disciplinary discussion of reason and form in Kant’s rich and puzzling philosophical
aesthetics.
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2003.06.09
Pierre Hadot
What is Ancient Philosophy?
Hadot, Pierre, What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard

University Press, 2002, 362pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0674007336.
Reviewed by Donald Zeyl , University of Rhode Island
What is ancient philosophy? Pierre Hadot makes very clear what he thinks it is not: it
is not the deposit of philosophical concepts, theories and systems to be found in the
surviving texts of Graeco-Roman antiquity, the subject matter of courses of study in
the curricula of modern universities. This subject matter indeed does constitute the
“philosophical discourse” of the ancient philosophers. But that discourse is itself
merely the expression of what Hadot takes to be the essence of ancient philosophy
which, in his view, is . way of life. In the author’s own words, “Philosophical discourse
. . . originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice-versa . . . . This
existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of
philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally to justify this
existential option, as well as this representation of the world” (p. 3). Moreover,
philosophy both as a way of life and as its justifying discourse is not the attainment
and deployment of wisdom, but “merely a preparatory exercise for wisdom” which
“tend[s] toward wisdom without ever achieving it” (p. 4). It is the primary purpose of
this book to establish these claims for ancient philosophy as a whole by demonstrating
it to be true of each of its major parts.
The book is divided into three parts. The four chapters that constitute its first part
(entitled “The Platonic Definition of ’Philosopher’ and its Antecedents”) attempt to
make the case for the author’s thesis by way of a survey of pre-Platonic philosophy.
From its inception in Homer, the idea of sophia (wisdom) denoted practical skill, a
“knowing how,” and thus when the notion of philosophia makes its appearance in the
fifth century BCE, it initially denotes an interest in the practice of various such skills. It
is the figure of Socrates, as “mythically” represented in Plato’s dialogues, who
transforms the notion of sophia and hence that of philosophia. For Socrates the
practice of philosophy presupposes and is motivated by one’s awareness that one is
not wise, that one is lacking in something one vitally desires to possess or, more
accurately, to be. True wisdom is the knowledge of one’s true good. What is that
good? Hadot’s answer: it is “the will to do good,” or “the absolute value of moral
intent” (pp. 32–36). The definition of love (erôs) in the Symposium situates the
philosopher midway between the lack of wisdom and its possession: thus “the
philosopher will never attain wisdom, but he can make progress in its direction . . . .
Philosophy is not wisdom, but a way of life and discourse determined by the idea of
wisdom” (p. 46, italics in original). Socrates is himself the very incarnation of
philosophy thus understood.
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In the second part (“Philosophy as a Way of Life”) Hadot surveys not just the
philosophical discourse of Plato, Aristotle and the various post-Aristotelian schools and
movements, but also—and particularly—the communities in which that discourse
originated, the practices or “spiritual exercises” that were taught and practiced in
these communities, and the “spiritual” goals these practices were intended to achieve.
What follows are some summary comments along with a few critical observations.
Plato and the Academy (chapter 5). According to Hadot, Plato’s goal in founding the
Academy was the creation of “an intellectual and spiritual community whose job it
would be to train new human beings . . . (p. 59). The program of training and
research in the Academy from the various branches of mathematics to dialectic had
primarily an ethical aim, which was to purify the mind and to “learn to live in a
philosophical way . . . to ensure . . . a good life and thereby the ’salvation’ of the soul”
(p. 65). To achieve this aim various “spiritual exercises” mentioned in several Platonic
dialogues including, notably, the practice of death in the Phaedo (64a) and the
(practice of?) transcendence over all that is mundane described in the Theaetetus
(173d–175e) would have been instituted in the Academy. All these exercises have as
their aim the transformation of the self. Hadot recognizes that Plato’s explicit goal in
founding the Academy was the transformation of the city, not self-transformation, but
insists that for Plato these two coincide. He assumes but fails to show, however, that
Plato’s lofty descriptions of the philosophical life formed the basis or goal of a regimen
of spiritual exercises, regularly practiced by members of the Academy and intended to
enable them to achieve a particular state of the soul. And his account of the practice
of dialectic within the Academy as a “spiritual exercise which demanded that the
interlocutors undergo . . . self-transformation” (p. 62) is hardly convincing.
Aristotle and His School (chapter 6). Aristotle, according to Hadot’s account, founded
the Lyceum on the model of the Academy—at least with the same ethical goal in
mind, if not the same intellectual practices. Unlike Plato, however, Aristotle rejects the
coincidence between political transformation and the transformation of the self. The
art of politics aims at creating the conditions required for self-transformation. That
transformation consists in attaining that super-human, god-like goal of theôria so
eloquently embraced in Nicomachean Ethics Book X. This life is the life of intellectual
pursuits, and Aristotle’s purpose in founding his school was to cultivate a community
in which that ideal life was to be lived out to the fullest extent possible. Given that the
research programs Aristotle assigned to his students were in large part empirical
investigations, how is such research connected with theôria, which is the
contemplative understanding of divinity? Hadot makes the connection as follows:
research into mundane things reveals, however indirectly, divine causality, and it is
that presence of the divine that attracts us to study them. Our minds, then, are drawn
to a contemplation of the divine, and in that contemplation we realize our
transformation. It is notable, however, that in his study of Aristotle’s Lyceum Hadot
makes no mention of spiritual exercises—disciplines or practices engaged in for the
sake of achieving self-transformation. Perhaps he thinks that the various research
projects conducted in the Lyceum were themselves such exercises. If so, the concept
of a “spiritual exercise” is stretched far too thin; if not, then the absence of a regimen
of such exercises from the intellectual/spiritual life of the Lyceum constitutes a
significant exception to Hadot’s main thesis.
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The Hellenistic Schools (chapter 7). Hadot’s general thesis is most easily
demonstrated in the cases of the various Hellenistic schools which arose in the late
fourth century BCE. The idea that Epicurus and Zeno (respectively the founders of
Epicureanism and Stoicism) established their schools to create communities which
pursued some shared way of life to attain a shared spiritual goal is not new, and
Hadot demonstrates very effectively how the physical and epistemological theories of
these schools were intended to support their spiritual goals. This is true not only of
the “dogmatists” (Epicureans and Stoics as well as Platonists and Aristotelians, all of
whom affirmed positive doctrines) but also of their opponents, the “skeptics,” who
recommended the suspension of belief as the proper path to their spiritual goal. In
addition, Hadot shows convincingly that these various spiritual goals, differently
described in the different schools—for example, for the Epicureans it was a life of
stable pleasure achieved by the limitations of one’s appetites while for the Stoics it
was a life of self-coherence, lived in conformity to Nature or Reason—all involved the
goal of self-transformation. Each school had its own set of spiritual exercises designed
to lead its adherents to the achievement of its particular version of that goal.
Schools in the Imperial Period (chapter 8). The development of philosophy in the age
of the Roman Empire is characterized by two outstanding phenomena. The first is a
change in pedagogy. Philosophy classes began to be devoted to the reading and
exegesis of the texts by the school’s founders, and instructors began in increasing
measure to write commentaries on those texts to assist comprehension among their
students. The second is the eventual decline of Epicureanism and Stoicism and the
ascendancy and development of Platonism (synthesized with Aristotelianism in the
Neoplatonism of Plotinus) as the dominant philosophy of late antiquity. As Hadot
sketches the first of these developments, his focus is on the order in which the texts
of the founders were taught to the students, as illustrative of the stages in their
spiritual formation. Thus students would first be required to master texts in which the
subject matter was primarily ethical (e.g., Plato’s Phaedo), to promote their souls’
initial purification. They would then progress to texts that were physical (e.g., the
Timaeus) that pointed to a transcendent cause of the world’s order, to learn to
transcend the physical world. Finally, they would proceed to texts that were
metaphysical or theological (or “epoptical,” e.g., the Parmenides or Philebus), to
ascend to the contemplation of God or the Ultimate (e.g., the Good or the One). This
order is also the organizing principle of Plotinus’ Enneads, as edited by Porphyry.
“Each commentary was considered a spiritual exercise . . . because the reading of
each philosophical text was supposed to produce a transformation in the person
reading or listening to the commentary” (p. 155). In addition, “professors did not
merely teach, but played the role of genuine directors of conscience who cared for
their students’ spiritual problems” (p. 156). Neoplatonism, the second development,
raised the spiritual aspirations of its adherents to new heights. According to his
biographer Porphyry, “for Plotinus the goal and the end consisted of union with the
supreme deity and the process of growing closer to him” (quoted on p. 160), and
Porphyry reports several instances of Plotinus achieving this unity in non-discursive,
mystical unitive experiences.
The concluding chapter of the second part of the book (chapter 9: Philosophy and
Philosophical Discourse) —by far its longest—considers the evidence of the prior
chapters thematically. Hadot reexamines the relation between philosophy as a way of
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life and philosophical discourse, and the history and character of spiritual exercises in
all the diverse traditions. The common aim of these exercises was to achieve both a
concentration of the self (its separation from anything foreign to it and its separation
from the past and the future through ongoing self-examination) and an expansion of
the self (its “dilation” of itself to encompass the infinite totality of all that is). Thus the
study of physics is a spiritual exercise with a moral aim. Philosophical dialogue exists
for the sake of spiritual guidance. And finally, the figure of the “sage,” the rarely
attainable ideal of all philosophy, though prominent in Stoicism, is present in all the
ancient schools.
The final part of the book (“Interruption and Continuity: The Middle Ages and Modern
Times”) may be summarized more briefly. Hadot credits the rise of Christianity with
the decline of philosophy practiced as a way of life. Christianity positioned itself as a
“philosophy” (in Hadot’s sense) with its own regimen of spiritual exercises and
spiritual goals, and as this religion came to eclipse the various pagan philosophies, it
usurped their spiritual function. Eventually Christian interest in pagan philosophy was
limited to its discourse, which was pressed into service as the “handmaiden to
theology,” even as its spiritual practices were absorbed into, and substantially altered,
Christian spirituality. The prevailing modern view of limiting philosophy to
philosophical discourse is rooted in this usurpation. Despite several “recurrences” of
the ancient concept of philosophy in post-Medieval times (discernible, for example, in
Montaigne and even in Descartes as well as in Kant’s concept of “cosmic philosophy”)
the ancient ideal is now all but lost. The book concludes with a more expansive
discussion of what it means to live a philosophical life and a plea for a return to that
ancient ideal (p. 275–281).
Readers familiar with Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from
Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995) will recognize in this work a reprise and
elaboration of much of the argument of that earlier work. It is difficult to deny that the
author has successfully established his main claim. Reservations are indeed due (as
noted earlier) about his account of spiritual exercises in Plato’s Academy and
Aristotle’s Lyceum. Here the evidence is pressed into the Procrustean bed prescribed
by the author’s demonstrandum. Given that the bulk of the surviving texts from
antiquity come from the hands of Plato and Aristotle, and given the historical
importance of these two philosophers, this amounts to a serious reservation. One
might also object to specific interpretive claims made by Hadot. One is startled to read
that for Socrates (as depicted by Plato), the “will to do good” is of absolute value, and
not the knowledge of the good. Hadot’s association of Socrates with Kant in this
respect (p. 36) is historically anachronistic and seriously misleading. The author also
assumes that for both Plato and Aristotle the state in which the soul apprehends its
highest object is supra-discursive (see pp. 75 and 76, and p. 88). These assumptions
are not supported by any evidence and seem to be derived from a widely shared
tendency to read the mysticism of Plotinus back into the epistemologies of Plato and
Aristotle. Despite these caveats, it must be acknowledged that this very learned book
is a tour de force, a welcome and much needed corrective to the prevailing view of
ancient philosophy in our day.
2003.06.10
306
Louis E. Loeb,
Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise
Loeb, Louis E., Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise, Oxford University Press,
2002, 296 pp, $42.50 (hbk), ISBN 0195146581.
Reviewed by Saul Traiger, Occidental College
In this carefully crafted study of Book I of . Treatise of Human Nature, 1 Louis Loeb
offers a refreshingly new interpretation of Hume’s account of the justification of belief.
Loeb marshals substantial support for the view that Hume has a robust normative
epistemology, an epistemology that can be understood in light of the sections of the
Treatise traditionally taken as arguing for skepticism, and in light of the more
genuinely skeptical themes of Part IV of Book I. Loeb’s work is a model of Hume
scholarship. Loeb locates genuinely interesting and plausible positions in Hume’s
writings, positions that have to be carefully culled from the text and analyzed. Hume’s
metaphors are rich and suggestive, but they must always be tested in the vast and
rocky terrain of Hume’s texts. If Loeb convinces the reader that for Hume, justified
beliefs are those that have the characteristic of stability, he does so by taking the
whole of Book I into account. Loeb is guided by interpretive coherence and the
independent plausibility of the positions he discovers in Hume. His ultimate aim is to
support a theory of justification based on the notion of stability, showing both how far
Hume takes us towards such a theory, and where Hume’s account needs
supplementation and amendment.
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the project and
sets out the key interpretive constraints. Loeb holds that there is a positive
epistemological project in Part III of Book I of the Treatise but that Hume despairs of
carrying out that project in Part IV. A “two-stage” interpretation is presented to
account for the difference in the two parts of Book I. Hume’s account of justification,
in Loeb’s view, is based on Hume’s assessment of the prospects for stable belief.
While Hume endorses the view that justified beliefs are stable beliefs, he ultimately
holds that stability in belief is not achievable for the reflective person. At the end of
the first chapter Loeb provides an extremely helpful prospectus of the project,
mapping out the book with an annotated list of no fewer than twenty-one theses. This
is a great convenience , and readers will consult the prospectus often.
It is always appropriate in a work of this sort to place one’s effort in the context of
other interpretations. Most often this takes the form of the author’s criticism of
alternative approaches. While Loeb has a good deal to say about what he finds wrong
with other interpretations of Hume, in this first chapter he refreshingly emphasizes the
interpretations which anticipate or otherwise suggest the stability interpretation
developed in the subsequent chapters. I can’t think of another work on Hume in
recent years that so extensively draws from the relevant secondary literature. While
Loeb is always focused on the Treatise, the notes are filled with careful and helpful
discussions of matters of interpretation from the secondary literature.
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The second, third and fourth chapters present Loeb’s stability interpretation of Hume’s
theory of justified belief. Chapter II suggests the place of a theory of justification in
Hume’s associationist project and in the context of Hume’s treatment of causation and
causal inference. Chapters III and IV present the stability interpretation in detail. Here
Loeb emphasizes important but neglected passages in the Treatise, including Hume’s
treatment of education, the two systems of “reality” and “realities,” and the section of
Part III entitled “Unphilosophical Probability”. In these chapters Loeb argues
convincingly that Hume’s project is a normative one, that Hume formulates norms of
justified belief. Loeb is among the few interpreters of Hume’s epistemology to suggest
that Hume has something like a default reasoning account of justified belief.
Justification is the default state for belief. One does not need to actively provide
reasons in order to have justified belief. As long as a belief is not challenged by
conflicting evidence, it is infixed, to use Loeb’s term, and thus justified. What has to
be explained in a theory of justification is not how some beliefs get their justification
but rather how others fail to have it. A stability account of justification fits nicely with
this insight.
The final three chapters explicate some of the most important topics in Part IV of the
Treatise. In this final part of Book I, Hume launches his attacks on the systems of
both the ancient and the modern philosophers. If Loeb shows that Hume provides an
account of justified belief in Treatise Part III, his approach to Part IV is to show that
for Hume certain beliefs, including belief in material substratum, in the continued and
distinct existence of perceptions, and in the soul, are not justified. Thus belief is the
unifying feature of Parts III and IV of the Treatise, though it turns out that, for a
reflective person, there is no stable outcome.
In the limited space of a review I cannot take up all of the interesting controversies
that this fascinating book will stimulate for those who study Hume’s epistemology as
well as for contemporary epistemologists with some historical leanings. In what
remains I will address some of the issues that arise in the Loeb’s treatment of Hume’s
positive theory of justification. One observation, however, applies to the approach
Loeb takes in the last three chapters. It concerns the pervasiveness of belief as the
central subject of Book I. On Loeb’s interpretation, the items treated in Part IV, such
as material substratum and continued and distinct existence, are beliefs. What could
be made clearer is the fact that, for Hume, these items only take on the status of
belief in philosophical systems. The same fiction-generating mechanisms function in
the vulgar as well as in philosophers. But in the case of the vulgar such mechanisms
do not generate unstable belief. Is this just because the vulgar are unreflective? It
seems rather that for Hume, continued and distinct existence and the self function as
stable conceptual underpinnings of ordinary belief and they do so without counting as
beliefs. In his famous example of the porter, Hume says that we “suppose” the
continued existence of perceptions in order to make sense of our experience, by
connecting past and present perceptions, and then he contrasts these suppositions
with beliefs which are the outcome of causal reasoning (T 1.4.2.20, 21; SBN 195-6).
Another instance of Loeb’s tendency to extend the notion of belief can be found in his
discussion of memory. Loeb freely refers to “memory beliefs.” But Hume never uses
that term. The closest Hume comes to treating memories as beliefs is found where he
writes of “the belief which attends our memory” (T 1.3.13.20; SNB 154). Even in this
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passage he is merely comparing memories with belief in terms of vivacity. There is

still a distinction to be made between them. Clearly memories are analogous to
beliefs. Like beliefs, they are high vivacity ideas. But Hume generally restricts belief to
the results of causal inference, and in doing so emphasizes the mechanism which
brings about the high-vivacity idea more than the occurrent properties of the
perception.
That said, Loeb goes to considerable effort to craft an interpretation of Hume’s theory
of belief which emphasizes its dispositional character rather than the occurrent
properties of belief. Beliefs are “steady dispositions to display characteristic
manifestations” (p. 102). Such a reading appears to run counter to Hume’s explicit
definition of belief as “a lively idea related to a present impression” (T 1.3.8.1; SNB
98). Loeb does not deny that there are belief-related lively ideas. On his view these
lively ideas are manifestations of the steady dispositions. While interpreters may
disagree about whether it is appropriate to refer to the lively-idea-forming
mechanisms as beliefs or simply call them belief-forming mechanisms, Loeb is surely
right that this is where the normative action is. If mere liveliness conferred
justification, then Hume would not be in any position to criticize the effects of
education, poetical enthusiasm or superstition, since those effects can also be high-
vivacity ideas.
In Chapter IV Loeb looks closely at a number of passages which have not received a
great deal of attention by Hume scholars. In one such passage Hume describes a case
of situated cognition, the case of someone hung out over a precipice in an iron cage.
In spite of the evidence of safety, Hume notes that a person suspended in such a cage
can’t help feeling fear when glancing at the precipice below (T 1.3.13.10; SNB 148).
Here the stable disposition to have high vivacity ideas of one’s safety is potentially
dislodged by the circumstances. Loeb is certainly correct to see this example as a case
of potentially destabilizing conflict. But Loeb sees the conflict as one between
accidental generalizations (the circumstance of being hung out over a precipice) and
genuine regularities (well fastened chains keep iron cages from falling). This passage,
however, picks up on precipice examples discussed by Montaigne, Pascal, and
Malebranche, and it is intended to show the destabilizing effect of the direct passion of
fear on belief. Hume’s description of the case makes explicit the role of vivacity-
enhancing mechanisms that strengthen the feeling of fear and lead to a destabilization
of belief. These observations are not incompatible with Loeb’s general theses but
suggest that there are further resources in Hume, particularly in Hume’s treatment of
the direct passions, for making sense of the belief-destabilizing features of the mind.
In the normal run of life an epistemic agent, even a relatively unreflective one, will
experience belief-destabilizing situations such as precipices. Unreflective persons,
however, will not confront the destabilizing effects from conflicting evidence as often
as the reflective person, and thus will have wider ranging dispositions to stable belief
than reflective persons. Does this mean that the unreflective person has a belief
system that is in some sense more justified than that of the reflective person? As Loeb
notes, that depends on whether justification is understood as stability for any fully-
reflective person or as stability relative to the belief-forming mechanism of the
epistemic agent. Loeb argues that Hume’s notion of stability conforms to the second
of these two stability notions, and therefore the vulgar are indeed more justified than
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are reflective persons. This sets up Loeb’s interpretation of the skeptical themes in
Part IV, where Hume despairs of finding a stable epistemic position for the fully
reflective individual. While many philosophers have noted that Hume recognizes the
value of common life, Loeb’s bold interpretation of Hume’s epistemology provides one
plausible underpinning for that view.
While I have emphasized the richness of Loeb’s treatment of Part III of Book I of the
Treatise, the final three chapters grapple with some of the most difficult passages in
Part IV. Engagement with these chapters is equally rewarding. Here Loeb stretches
out a bit, developing difficulties for Hume’s views, as well as considering amendments
that might resolve those difficulties. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its
success in providing an overall interpretation that makes sense of both Hume’s
positive account of belief and justification in Part III, and his skeptical turn in Part IV.
Endnotes
1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J.
Norton (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hereafter abbreviated
“T” with book, part, section and paragraph numbers inserted parenthetically in the
text. References abbreviated “SBN” give the corresponding page numbers in the
Selby-Bigge/Nidditch version: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
2003.06.11
Bimal Krishna Matilal
Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion
Matilal, Bimal Krishna, Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion, ed.
Jonardon Ganeri, Oxford University Press, 2002, 464pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN:
0195655117.
Reviewed by Nick Gier , University of Idaho
This book is the second volume of The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal and
both should be on the shelf of any serious student of Indian philosophy and religion. I
was especially pleased to review this volume because, in my thirty years of teaching
Indian philosophy, I focused far too much on metaphysics and epistemology and not
enough on ethics. Working back from Gandhi’s ethics of nonviolence, I have been able
to repair this deficiency somewhat, but Matilal has now helped me make a substantial
improvement in my knowledge of Hindu ethics.
The ethics of the epics and a discussion of dharma ethics in general are contained in
the first two parts of the book. The controversy surrounding a literal versus allegorical
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interpretations of the Gita has long been simmering, but Matilal’s subtle and thorough
analysis of the issues takes the debate to a new level. At the beginning of the Gita the
field of battle is called the “field of dharma,” but Matilal explains this in a
nonallegorical way as “the field where the seeds of moral merit/demerit are sown in
order to bring forth the harvest of karma or just desert” (93). Matilal also observes
that it is simply not correct, as the allegorical interpretation implies, that the Kauravas
embody all evil and the Pandavas symbolize everything good. Even Gandhi, the most
famous nonliteral reader, switches to a literal reading in the end. Gandhi paraphrases
Krishna’s advise to Arjuna in this way: “You have already committed violence. By
talking now like a wise man, you will not learn nonviolence. Having started on this
course, you must finish the job.”
Matilal reminds his readers (9) that kshatriyas did not always have to kill if duty
required it. Arjuna once vowed that he would kill anyone who insulted his famous
bow. Arjuna was just about to kill Yudhisthira for this reason, but Krishna rebuked him
for making such a rash decision. On the same page, Matilal retells the story of the
sage Kaushika, who told the truth about the whereabouts of a man that some ruffians
wanted to kill. Again Krishna condemns a person for wanting to kill or allowing a death
for the sake of truth-telling or promise-keeping. Matilal contends that these virtues
are just as important for a kshatriya as are his warrior duties.
Not only does Krishna advise suspending some ethical rules to avoid a greater evil, he
also exhorts warriors to violate the rules of engagement laid out specifically in the
text. When Karna’s chariot gets stuck in the mud, Arjuna knows very well that it
would be wrong to take advantage of him, but Krishna tells him to attack anyway.
(Rama takes his own liberties by shooting Valin, one of his own devotees, in the back.
Only some very contorted arguments save him from this high crime.) Krishna also
tricks Drona, Arjuna’s revered teacher whose prowess made the Kauravas invincible,
into thinking that his son has been killed, and Arjuna takes advantage of the grieving
father to kill him. (Matilal confesses that this is “one of the darkest deeds of our ’dark
Lord’ Krishna” [95].) When Arjuna discovers the stratagem, he condemns Krishna, but
the latter counters that it is the only way that the Pandavas can win the war. This is
the same reason Krishna gives Bhima when he encourages him to hit below the belt in
his duel with Duryodhana. Krishna is expedient, antinomian, and hypocritical, but he
insists that Arjuna conform to a rigid moral standard in initiating the battle.
Matilal observes (39) that only Draupadi, the common wife of the Pandava brothers,
has any sense of human rights (including the fair treatment of women) and universal
moral law. He mentions Draupadi’s outrage at the trick that led to Drona’s death, but
he neglects to follow through with her complete indictment. Giving the lie to the idea
all the characters saw the Bharata war as inevitable, Draupadi condemns Krishna,
whom she admits to be “the Lord God, the Self-subsistent, the primal Grandsire,” for
hurting “one creature by means of another, . . . playing with his creatures as children
play with dolls” (Mahabharata 3.31.34-7). Yudhishthira is shocked at his wife’s
blasphemy and defends Krishna in ways very similar to that of Job’s friends defending
Yahweh. Are Krishna and Yahweh yet more examples of male deities behaving badly,
far worse than their own devotees?
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In defense of Krishna some argue that he did everything that he could to bring the
feuding family together, but the parties ignored his advice and continued upon the
road to war. Once the battles lines were drawn in the capitals and then on the
battlefield, it was too late to turn back. Krishna’s position appeared to be that once
war was engaged, it had to be won even with immoral and illegal means. At this point
Arjuna’s plan to go to the forest and meditate was, as Gandhi once said, just as
irrational and foolish as jumping off a train traveling at high speed. Furthermore,
Matilal also reminds us (100) that Hindu theology does not have a strong view of
divine power. In fact, just as in Greek religion, fate (daiva) rules over both gods and
humans (430). After the war the hermit Utanka criticizes Krishna’s actions, but he
defends himself by claiming that he did not have the power to stop the fighting. As
Matilal states: “He was mightier than anybody else but he was not omnipotent” (100).
Matilal finds both utilitarianism and Kantianism in the Hindu epics. A caricature of
Kantianism is found in Rama, whose inflexibility with regard to duty leads to absurd
and/or harsh decisions. As Matilal quips: “Rama’s dharma was rigid; Krishna’s was
flaccid” (47). Even though he was encouraged to do so by the sage Jabala, Rama,
unlike Krishna, was not going to break a promise, even if it meant that he could
regain his kingdom and avoid 14 years of exile. One of Rama’s lame excuses for
shooting Valin in the back was that a person has no duties to animals, Valin being a
member of Hanuman’s monkey army. (But Kant said that mistreatment of animals
was blameworthy at least as a reflection of the person’s character.) Rama’s extreme
interpretation of a wife’s duty to her husband has led generations of Indian women to
try to conform to an impossible ideal. Following Sita’s example, Indian women are
required to stay with their husbands no matter what they ask of them and no matter
how much they are abused.
The principle of utility is implied in Krishna’s justification of immoral means to prevent

the evil Kauravas from winning the war. Yudhisthira once said that there are many
dharmas and the only way to find the correct one is to follow the mahajana, which can
be translated as “the conduct of the good people.” In this term Matilal finds a
“primitive proto-utilitarianism,” which is very clearly expressed in the common phrase
“for the sake of the happiness of many people, and for the sake of the good of many”
(68). Matilal acknowledges that the greatest attraction of utilitarianism is its monism,
i.e., its assumption that all moral problems can be solved with a single principle. He
claims, however, that “dharma- morality is pluralistic”(68), and he proposes that this
view can be held without succumbing to irrationality. Matilal’s frequent mention of
“practical wisdom” as the deciding factor in moral decision-making suggests that we
should look at Hindu ethics from a virtue perspective. I propose that “the conduct of
good people” be read as a call to emulate the virtuous.
If dharma is duty then Hindu ethics should conform to something like Kantianism, but
Matilal demonstrates that is not really the meaning of dharma. If he is correct in his
historical explication of the term, the development of the term dharma is very similar
to that of the Chinese li. Both terms originally referred to a set of religious rituals that
later become more formalized as moral rules. The Chandogya Upanishad speaks of
three forms of dharma: rituals, study of scripture, and austerities (2.23.1). Even in
this expanded form, dharma is not universal moral law. Matilal quotes Robert Lingat
favorably when he maintains that dharma is never “imposed” but simply “proposed”;
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and he paraphrases Louis Dumont’s idea that dharma “reigns from above without
actually governing the world” (42). Both of these descriptions are intriguing but
vague, but Matilal at least concludes that dharma is “open ended,” a crucial aspect of
rules in virtue ethics.
The virtue interpretation of dharma comes into focus when we look at some very
specific definitions and instances of its expression. In the Varnaparvan of the
Mahabharata King Nahusha asks Yudhisthira what dharma is, and he defines it as the
virtues of truthfulness, generosity, forgiveness, goodness, kindness, self-control, and
compassion. Going completely against caste determinism, Yudhisthira contends that a
shudra having these qualities would actually be a brahman, and if a brahman lacks
them he would be a shudra.
If you think in terms of human evolution, it was the virtues that came first and only
afterward moral rules. (This is especially true if we assume that the conception of
rules requires language and that early humans, such as the compassionate
Neanderthals, had no language.) This means that moral rules are actually abstractions
from the practice of the virtues, just as moral prohibitions are abstractions from the
practice of the vices. Therefore, no moral rule could “reign from above” nor could it
even “propose” without the specific moral content that action and the virtues provide.
Interestingly enough, moral rules, even as abstractions, still preserve their normative
force. Therefore, dharma can indeed “propose” as a general guide for action, but it
must always be contextualized and individualized.
Matilal’s greatest contribution in this book is his discussion of karma and how it has
been misunderstood: “The karma doctrine requires that man’s own ’character’ be his
own ’destiny’“ (414). This statement supports my thesis about a Hindu virtue ethics
and also allows us to confront the challenge of fatalism. Matilal makes a strong case
for separating karma from caste and suggests that the concept of karma is compatible
with both reason and individual responsibility. He argues that karma was originally
introduced to solve the problem of evil and to answer the fatalism found in the Ajivaka
school (412). Karma’s link to fatalism occurred only it was linked to caste heredity.
The Buddha once said that “they who know causation know the dharma,” and I
propose that this motto relates to character as destiny and also to Matilal’s thesis that
karma supports moral freedom and responsibility. (As Matilal observes, karma is
indistinguishable from fate only if one is ignorant of all the causal threads.) Those who
know their own causal web of existence, especially noting how their actions affect
themselves and others, will be able to develop the cardinal virtue of mindfulness. If
they know the truth (i.e., the true facts of their lives), then they will then know what
to do. The truths they discover by means of this formula will be very personal truths,
moral and spiritual truths that are, as Aristotle says of moral virtues, “relative to us.”
Furthermore, the famous “mirror of Dharma” is not a common one that people all look
into together, as some later Buddhists believed, but it is actually a myriad of mirrors
reflecting individual histories. Finally, we can see how character is destiny, and as long
as a compatibilist justification for moral freedom is accepted, we can say that those
who are unmindful and do not develop the virtues are destined to experience the truth
that the vices are their own punishment.
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Matilal gives support to my virtue thesis: “A moral agent exercises his practical
wisdom, and also learns from the experiences he passes through during his life. He
has an enriched practical wisdom when it is informed by his experiences of genuine
moral dilemmas. A moral agent needs also a character which is nothing but a
disposition to act and react appropriately with moral concerns” (33). This is precisely
how Aristotle’s relative mean operates (right time, right place, etc.) and also how the
Confucian concept of yi works as a personal appropriation of the norms of li. Matilal’s
scholarship allows me to do something that I thought that I could not do in my own
comparative virtue ethics–namely, to add Krishna to the Buddha, Confucius, and
Aristotle.
The problem of course is that Krishna appears to be the least virtuous person in this
list and can hardly be seen as practitioner of the Middle Way. Nonetheless, Matilal
declares that his “dark Lord” is a “paradigmatic person . . . in the moral field,” who
“becomes a perspectivist and understands the contingency of the human
situation”(34), both necessary elements of virtue ethics. He also describes him, as
opposed to the rigid Rama or Yudhisthira, as an “imaginative poet” in the moral
realm: “He is the poet who accepts the constraints of metres, verses, and metaphors.
But he is also the strong poet who has absolute control over them. . . . He governs
from above but does not dictate.” This guarantees that Krishna’s “flexibility never
means the ’anything goes’ kind of morality” (34).
If Krishna is not omnipotent in the Judeo-Christian sense, then Matilal cannot claim
that Krishna has “absolute control over the metres”; nor is it advisable to have him
governing them from above. Nonetheless, the fine arts, I believe, give us a very rich
analogue for the development and performance of the virtues. Most significantly, this
analogy allows us to confirm both normativity and creative individuality at the same
time. A violin virtuoso does not leave out a note or instruction from the original score,
but she or he offers a unique interpretation of the piece. Even the best judges are
praised for craft excellence in their very distinctive decisions based on an unchanging
law. Similarly, every younger brother appropriates li in his own way in respecting his
elder brother. It is the virtues and practical reason that allows us to navigate the river
of law with its constant flow and identity but also its shifting banks and channels.
Not only does practical reason guide us in choosing a mean relative to us, it also
allows us to suspend the law when it is in danger of “becoming an ass” à la Dickens.
Dharma “gets fulfilled in novel and mysterious ways” (42), so it may be expressed in
violation of law or duty. For example, the Pandava brothers were so concerned about
retrieving some sacrificial sticks that they were punished for their ritualistic rigidity by
a yaksha (disguised as a stork and symbolizing dharma). (Significantly enough,
Yudhisthira, the only brother not punished, then discovers that dharma is the “conduct
of good people” discussed above.) One of my favorite examples comes from the
Confucian Mencius who said that li forbids any man from touching woman not directly
related to him; but if your sister-in-law is drowning, then by all means you should
extend your hand to save her. When we look back at the Krishna’s suspension of the
rules of war, his justification, compared to these examples, does not appear
compelling at all.
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The third part of the book deals with cultural and ethical relativism and the best
chapter is entitled “Pluralism, Relativism, and Interaction between Cultures.” Matilal
begins with some definitions and then offers some good insights about current issues
in political philosophy. He defines “singularism” as a position that denies that there
can be more than one conception of the good, whereas “pluralism” is of course the
view that there are multiple goods among which citizens should be free to choose. On
the other hand, a relativist is one who believes that the values of one society are just
as good as another’s. While some conservatives hold to singularism, Matilal believes
that this is a mistake on their part. I believe that Matilal is correct in insisting that
genuine conservatives, at least ones who wish to live in today’s liberal democracies,
should give up singularism and join the pluralists. At the same time Matilal advises
liberals that they should not be relativists.
The fourth section is a fascinating collection of articles on drugs and religion,

Transcendental Meditation, and the Hare Krishna movement, on which I will not
comment because of lack of space. The fifth and last section deals with topics in the
philosophy of religion, and Matilal’s best contributions come on the nature of evil.
Euro-American philosophers of religion will be surprised to learn that the Indian
tradition offers a middle ground between the free-will defense of evil and the atheist-
naturalist elimination of the problem. I have already commented on the qualified
omnipotence in Hindu theology and this is central to Indian theodicy. The Indians
reject creatio ex nihilo and affirm the eternity of the world and souls. This eliminates
the problem of what I call “metaphysical evil”: finitude, deficiency, corruptibility, and
nonbeing. Augustine claims that Adam and Eve fell because of their deficient wills, but
they obviously cannot be responsible for anything that God has created for them. The
typical Indian God creates each cosmic cycle from a preexisting matter that follows its
own laws, including the law of karma. Once again, if compatibilism is an acceptable
solution to the free-will problem, then agents are responsible for their own actions.
Matilal’s arguments are consistently good and persuasive and only one chapter, the
one on Ramakrishna, stands out as a failure. Matilal claims that the great Bengali
saint is an embodiment of prajna, which he translates as “practical reason.” It seems
to me that Ramakrishna does not follow the Middle Way of ancient virtue ethics;
rather, he fits very well Wendy Doniger’s idea of the Golden Extremes. (The boy
Krishna is also a good example of this.) As a failed Tantric, Ramakrishna does not go
through the full dialectic of opposites. He may appear to be what Nietzsche called the
“child,” the end result of the Three Metamorphoses beginning with the camel and the
lion. But Nietzsche’s child is a mature person who incorporates the spontaneity of the
child, while it is clear to me that Ramakrishna remains very much in an infantile stage.
Matilal also claims that Ramakrishna is “Vedanta Incarnate” (15), but his promise to
prove this thesis is unfulfilled. When Totapuri came to Dakshineswar, he tried to
convince Ramakrishna that nirguna Brahman was superior to the worship of the
Mother, but, ironically, it was a vision of the Mother that ultimately saved Totapuri
from his attempt to drown himself in the Ganges. If it is neo-Vedanta that Matilal
means, then we have much more sophisticated and satisfying expressions of that view
in Vivekananda and Aurobindo.
2003.06.12
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Mary Warnock
Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children?
Warnock, Mary, Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children?, Oxford University
Press, 2002, 126pp, $24.95 (hbk), ISBN 0192803344.
Reviewed by Anthony Ellis , Virginia Commonwealth University
Despite the subtitle of the book, Baroness Warnock’s question is not whether there is
a right to have children. Her question is rather whether those who cannot conceive—
the infertile or homosexual couples for example—have a right to assistance in
conceiving so long as they can pay for it. (She does not address the further question
of whether some at least of them have a right to such assistance without paying.) Her
answer, somewhat qualified, is that they do, or—since she professes not to believe in
natural rights—at least that they ought to be allowed to obtain it.
Baroness Warnock has been a substantial figure in British public life for some years
now. In particular, she chaired the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilisation and
Embryology, whose report was the basis for legislation in the United Kingdom in 1990
(and on whose deliberations some interesting sidelights are included in the book).
Consequently, many of those who are not familiar with her more centrally
philosophical work—she has written on ethics, aesthetics and existentialism, for
instance—will be familiar with her style: bluff common sense expressed in a bluff,
straightforward prose. Whatever else one may think of Warnock’s work it is,
superficially anyway, a delight to read; and this book is no exception.
The subtitle is—perhaps—misleading in another way, for, as I have said, Warnock

claims to think that there are no such things as rights unless they are embodied in the
positive law: “that unless there is a law conferring a right no right can exist . . . is a
view to which, unfashionably, I, on the whole, adhere” (p. 19). She dislikes the notion
of natural rights partly because it has promoted a rhetoric of whining individualism,
and one can only sympathize with her here. She also dislikes the idea that the doctor-
patient relationship should be based on rights and correlative duties rather than on
the “paternalistic” compassion that a good doctor has for his patients, though this will
elicit far less sympathy. But of course none of this goes any way towards showing that
there are no such things as natural rights, a view which I myself think desperately
implausible unless it is part of a general skepticism about morality. Warnock thinks
that the notion of natural rights is a confusion and that anything worth saying about
morality can be said without the vocabulary of rights, but I doubt this. She says that
anyone objecting to slavery, for instance, would be “asserting that slave-owners had a
moral duty to free their slaves” (p. 22). No doubt; but they would typically also be
asserting that the slave-owners had a duty to the slaves, not just in respect of the
slaves, to free them, and that is quite different and at least equally important. It
would bring with it, for instance, questions of individual compensation which the
original claim would not. And with such a thought we are well on the way to a
conception of natural rights. Of course, one could hold that the slave-owners had two
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duties, one to free the slaves and the other to compensate them. But this would
surely be to hang on to the substance of natural rights whilst letting go of the patter,
because the only plausible reason to think that the slave-owner should compensate
the slaves would be that he has wronged them and they have a claim to redress.
Certainly, a calculation of general welfare could not be guaranteed to deliver this duty.
And an appeal to the slave-owner’s virtue could not do so unless it appealed to the
virtue of giving people their due (failure to compensate could hardly be viewed simply
as meanness, for instance); but what would that mean without a doctrine of rights?
In any case, soon after proclaiming her rejection of natural rights (“on the whole”),
Warnock seems to backtrack a little. On pp. 24ff. she seems to come round to the
view that there are indeed natural rights, based upon basic need, and she indeed
addresses the question whether, so long as one can pay for it, there is a natural right
to have assistance in procreation. Whether, as I imagine, this is merely a compromise
with fashion for the sake of getting on with the substance of the argument, or a
somewhat parochial response to the fact that, as Warnock remarks and deplores,
United Kingdom law now recognizes the notion of ’human rights’, I am not entirely
sure.
The substance of the argument seems to be settled rather soon. However strongly
people may want to have children, there is no “basic need” to have them (p. 27) and
so no natural right. It is not, however, until p. 54 that this conclusion is explicitly
stated, and Warnock proceeds instead, somewhat confusingly to me at least, to
discuss and reject the argument that there is no such right because there cannot be
“a right to do what is morally wrong” (p. 30), and assistance in procreation involves
experimentation on embryos, which is itself morally wrong. She rejects this last
claim—mainly because, so far as I can see, “generally people have now come to take
[experimentation on pre-fourteen-day, live human embryos] for granted, and
moreover to regard it as something that has enormous potential for” good (p. 36).
Still, despite this defense of the possibility of a natural right to assistance in
procreation, the conclusion of the earlier argument stands: there is no such right.
Unsurprisingly however, given Warnock’s skepticism about rights, the question is
transformed and resurrected: should the infertile who wish it nonetheless be allowed
to have assistance in procreation? Her answer is, basically, that they should—both
morally and legally—and they are “entitled to expect that they will be given it” (p.
54)—a way of putting the matter which barely, if at all, avoids conceding that they
have a right to it (the entitlement in question could hardly be epistemic in this
particular context).
The discussion so far has concerned the infertile. But fertile people sometimes want
’assistance in procreation’ too. Women, not wishing to give up their careers, may wish
to bank sperm and later be artificially inseminated; or a couple may wish to choose
between different eggs when normal procreation would involve a high chance of
producing a seriously diseased child; Warnock sees nothing problematic about these
cases. Nor, sensibly, does she see anything wrong with parents who wish to have a
child through IVF if this is necessary to produce a child with bone marrow compatible
with that of a sibling in urgent need of it, for the child may nonetheless be loved for
its own sake. Homosexuals who wish to have children are given more discussion, but
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again she can see nothing intrinsically wrong with this and thinks that, like the
infertile, they should be allowed to obtain such procedures as AI or surrogacy.
Warnock thinks that much of the resistance to such things comes from two fears: One
is that “[w]ith divine law removed, the laws of nature seem more than ever
necessary, a prop to cling to” (p. 79). The other stems from the Romantic view that
we are “alienating ourselves from what ought to be our dwelling, from the place where
we want to be at home” (p. 82). But however much we should respect these fears,
they are, she thinks, a poor ground for denying people something that they
desperately want.
Surrogacy seems to trouble her a little more, mainly because it is “liable to end in
tears” (p. 90). When she chaired the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilisation
and Embryology, she also thought that commercial surrogacy was exploitative (at
least as it existed in the US at that time) and vulgarized the business of childbirth (p.
89). It is unclear whether she is still committed to these views (though I suspect that
she still has some sympathy with the latter—cf. p. 91f.); but in any case she now
favors an official, non-profit surrogacy agency because surrogacy will go on anyway
and it is better if it is regulated.
Cloning she thinks “should never be allowed” (p. 108), apparently because there is a
fundamental moral objection to it: “It suggests a false idea of the control that one
person may [permissibly?] have over another” (ibid.).
The book is, despite a somewhat confusing structure, a pleasant read; it gives useful,
brief descriptions of some factual and legal matters; and it contains more sound
common sense about moral matters than is usual in this area. But it is in the end
rather disappointing, because, at this point in time, the issue demands considerably
more sustained philosophical argument than Warnock gives. As it is, there is little
appeal to anything deeper than commonly held moral beliefs.
Here is one example. Discussing the question of whether doctors may permissibly
deny assistance in procreation to prospective parents whom they deem unsuitable on
non-clinical grounds, Warnock says this:
[t]he principle has been enunciated, and is indeed included in the 1990 Fertility and
Embryology Act, as well as in the guiding principles under that Act, that the good of
the child is paramount. Yet what exactly this principle means, what force it has, and
how the child’s future good is to be estimated have not been seriously examined, nor
did we on the Committee examine such issues. The principle sounded good, and we
adopted it. (p. 45)
The general meaning of the principle seems clear when the question is, for instance,
whether children conceived through AID should be told of this fact (p. 64 ff.). It is, of
course, considerably less clear when the question is whether or not a child is to be
conceived or not. When the prospective parents of the potential child would somehow
make his or her life worse than no life at all, it may seem plausible to claim that it
would not be ’for the good of the child’ to be born. But that is a vanishingly rare sort
of case in the context of assisted procreation. More commonly, the prospective
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parents are simply, for instance, relatively old, or disabled in some way; or they may
have a history of child abuse. It is not plausible to say in such cases that the life of the
potential child would be no better than no life at all, so that it would not be for the
good of the child to be born. So, understood in this way, the ’good of the child’
principle will have no real application. Perhaps, then, it is to be understood in some
other way? Perhaps the thought is that one should not bring into existence a child
unless the quality of its life surpasses some threshold (though it would be misleading
to announce this as the principle that “the good of the child is paramount”). But then
the nature of this threshold, and its motivation, cry out for discussion—and cry out
with particular force in a book devoted to the question whether there is a right to have
assistance in procreation. Warnock, however, is content simply to report that her
Committee did not bother to discuss the principle; it sounded good.
Professor Sir Malcolm MacNaughton tells us on the back cover that the book is
“[e]ssential reading for all”. It certainly has the virtues that we have come to expect
from Baroness Warnock. And a book on this topic from someone who has been so
involved in this issue in British public life has its own interest, for British readers at
least. But I do not think that it could really be regarded as essential reading.
2003.07.02
Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (ed.)
Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon
Reydams-Schils, Gretchen J. (ed.), Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon, University of

Notre Dame Press, 2002, 400pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0268038724.
Reviewed by Allan Silverman , Ohio State University
Plato’s Timaeus, written in all likelihood towards the end of his career, is his
contribution to the Greek tradition of writings on nature, peri phuseôs. Its introduction
of a mathematical physics alone would guarantee it a significant place in the western
tradition. But it is so much more than a work in cosmology and cosmogony: the
Atlantis Myth; the Demiurge; the status of the likely story, eikos muthos; the relation
of mind to body. Its influence on subsequent thinkers is enormous. No single volume
could possibly cover all the themes broached by Plato in the dialogue, nor canvas the
multitude of philosophers and scientists who have been influenced by their reading of
the dialogue or translations of it. That said, Reydams-Schils Plato’s Timaeus as
Cultural Icon is a paradigm of what a book of essays on the influence of a dialogue
should be. First and foremost, the articles are first-rate. Moreover, they cover an
extraordinary range of topics, thinkers and time-periods. What follows is an attempt
to convey what each of the essays is about, so that scholars with different expertises
may pick and choose as they will. But let me add that each essay is worth reading.
In `The Timaeus and the “Longer Way:” “God-Given” Method and the Constitution of
Elements and Animals’, Mitchell Miller argues that the Timaeus’ account of the cosmos
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and the items within it works on two levels. The surface meaning is directed at those
who are open to philosophical ideas or training. But at a deeper level, the Timaeus is a
contribution to the longer way towards knowledge hinted at in the Phaedo and
Republic. The crucial vehicle for this journey, according to Miller, is the God-given or
Promethean Method of Dieresis depicted at Philebus 16c, which is then illustrated in
the music and letter analogies and applied in the four-fold ontology. The Method
reveals an eidetic order embodied in a variety of continua according to a formula of
limit being imposed on an unlimited. Miller then shows how this Method can be used
to understand the Timaean creation of the elements and the animals. Miller’s
contribution is the longest, and one of the weightiest, in the collection.
The focus on the receptacle of Kenneth Sayre’s `The Multilayered Incoherence of

Timaeus’ Receptacle’ dovetails nicely with Miller’s article, where the role of the most
mysterious and hard to grasp new principle of the Timaeus goes largely unremarked.
In contrast to Miller’s constructive and optimistic account of the metaphysics of the
Timaeus and its coordination with the project of the Philebus, Sayre emphasizes the
problems inherent in Plato’s depiction of the receptacle and the anomalies present in
Plato’s account of the elements, their qualitative features and their relations to the
mathematics of geometrical Forms. The Timaean account generates four insuperable
anomalies concerning: 1) conflicting descriptions of the receptacle; 2) the status of
the traces before the universe was made; 3) unaccountable relations between shape
and quality; and 4) regrouping triangles and changing qualities. Indeed, Sayre
concludes that `Timaeus’ receptacle was part of a failed experiment and was later
abandoned for a new set of principles’, namely those provided in the Philebus.
John Dillon’s contribution begins the shift from Plato proper to the tradition. His
synopsis of the readings of Speusippus and Xenocrates highlights that these first two
successors of Plato, both of whom had worked with the author, adopt non-literal
readings of the Timaeus: it is `for the sake of instruction’. Dillon goes on to argue,
especially for Speusippus, that with the deconstruction of the creation from a
previously existing chaotic state, the notion of a creator-god `goes up in smoke’. In
its place we have a primal deity which is intellect, the content of which is a matrix of
Forms, a world soul responsible for `transmitting’ Forms, and a receptacle, though
one always informed. Effortlessly unraveling and then reweaving themes from the
Timaeus, Aristotle, Speusippus and Xenocrates, to name only the principle
contributors, Dillon shows how the notions of the One and The Indefinite Dyad, The
Decad, Soul as Self-Moving Number, and the assignment of the proper locus of The
Good to the world-soul in its executive (creative) aspect emerge from the non-literal
readings of the Timaeus. His contribution is one of the highlights of the collection.
Carlos Levy’s elegant article on `Cicero and the Timaeus’ addresses the circumstances
surrounding the composition of this first (for us) translation into Latin of a Platonic
dialogue and its philosophical relevance. Of greater interest to the philosophically
inclined is his attention to the question of how it was possible to `return to
transcendence after the Hellenistic period, in which the three major philosophical
systems had been elaborated without any reference to transcendental realities?’ As for
its date, it is sometime after 45 B.C. (between De Natura Deorum and De
Divinatione.) As for its purpose, Levy contends that it was not meant to be a stand-
alone translation, a translation for its own sake, but rather was to be used in a
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projected dialogue on physics, a dialogue designed to show how the return to classical
philosophy, i.e., Plato, would allow one to go beyond the disputes of the physicists
(Lucullus) and the Hellenistic philosophers (DND and DD). In turning to the
philosophical significance, Levy addresses Cicero’s handling in translation of three
themes, all of which point to Cicero’s philosophical predilections towards immanence
or favoring the material, human reality of this world: substituting a monologue for a
dialogue; his inability to break free from the epistemological framework in considering
Plato’s use of muthos—Cicero uses probabilia to describe his account of creation— and
his downplaying of the nature of the demiurge; and finally his conceiving of the
image/model metaphor to favor the reality of the material world, Plato’s image, over
the model. Philosophers, especially those who have worried about translating a text,
will be well served by reading Levy’s article.
Luc Brisson’s `Plato’s Timaeus and the Chaldean Oracles’ is devoted to showing how
the essential doctrines of Plato, in the form they assumed in the Timaeus, were
expressed in the context of the Chaldean Oracles, attributed to Julian the Younger in
the time of Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161-80 A.D.). In the Oracles we find a Timaeus,
interpreted in the light of Middle Platonism, used to `provide a context for the
vicissitudes of the human soul: how once upon a time it fell into the sensible world
and has to return back to its origin, above.’ As Brisson remarks, his paper addresses a
way of thinking that, if strange to us, was widespread and important in late antiquity.
His contribution furnishes an introduction to the way in which philosophy can be put to
unfamiliar uses.
David Runia’s title aptly describes the aim of his article, to examine `Plato’s Timaeus,
First Principle(s), and Creation in Philo and Early Christian Thought’. In particular,
Runia explores how the status of matter is treated in these thinkers: is it, as it
appears in an interpretation of the Timaeus, a first principle alongside the
Demiurge/God? Or did God create the cosmos ex nihilo? His contribution takes us
from the `monarchic dualism’ of Philo, Justin and Clement—where preexistent matter
is a principle though not a cause—to the emergence of creation ex nihilo in Tatian,
Theophilus and Irenaeus, where the preexistence of matter is denied lest God’s
freedom be constrained. In a brief discussion of later views, he also raises the
interesting question of how we are to understand the fact that at roughly the same
time the Platonic and Christian tradition gives up on the model bequeathed by the
Timaeus.
Richard Sorabji’s contribution, `The Mind-body Relation in the Wake of Plato’s

Timaeus’, narrates the influence of its discussion (43a6-44c2 and 86b2-87b8) of the
effects of (the) body on the movements (and nature) of the soul. These passages
imply that the soul’s movements are spatial movements and allow Plato’s successors
to disagree about the best way to describe the relation between mind/soul and the
bodily elements. For Galen, the mental states at least follow on the blends of the hot,
cold, fluid and dry, if they are not themselves blends. Alexander allows that they
supervene, whereas Plotinus and the Neoplatonists insist that not all are blends. For
readers interested in modern controversies in the philosophy of mind, Sorabji’s
masterful summary of differing positions in antiquity will shed light on how the
ancients anticipated some of the problems confronting contemporary philosophers.
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In his fascinating `Aristides Quintilianus and Martianus Capella’, Stephen Gersh gives
an affirmative answer to the question whether Martianus was influenced by Aristides
other than in Book 9 of De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a work of signal importance
in the development of the medieval quadrivium. The bulk of the article is devoted to
Aristides and four themes: the nature of music itself; the theme of the ascent and
descent of the soul; the general metaphysical context in which music is to be
understood; and the question of his sources. Only the first two are brought to bear in
his consideration of Martianus. Music, as the science of mediations, conditions both
the manner in which one understands the marriage as a fusion of music and
philosophy and helps to understand the importance of ratios in Martianus’ allegory.
Paul Edward Dutton’s `Medieval Approaches to Calcidius’ is the most philological of

the essays. His study of the manuscript tradition of Calcidius’ influential commentary,
replete with fascinating speculations on the author, his relations to Osius and Plato’s
thought, and whether or not the manuscript as we have it (ending at 53) represents
all that he wrote or intended to write, will be of interest to those more inclined to
textual criticism than the philosophical influence of Plato’s creation myth.
Another highlight of the collection is Cristina D’Ancona’s contribution: `The Timaeus’

Model for Creation and Providence’, subtitled `An Example of Continuity and
Adaptation in Early Arabic Philosophical Literature.’ It is so rich that a brief comment
cannot begin to do it justice. Her focus is on the question whether or not Avicenna
manages to establish a consistency between the kind of knowledge he attributes to
the necesse esse (largely a legacy of Aristotle’s prime mover) and the cura we have
just encountered (largely the doctrine that God acts precisely as does the demiurge in
the Timaeus). Care implies reasoning and reasoning implies weighing alternatives and
choosing the best one. But according to Avicenna on divine knowledge, there is no
such thing as a real change of cognitive status or weighing the alternatives. The
contents of the divine mind are but the divine mind itself and the intelligible features
of its effects. D’Ancona then shows how the Timaeus, or more precisely the
Neoplatonic reading of it, or most precisely the Arabic paraphrases and commentaries
on the Enneads, plays a decisive role in providing the Arabic philosophers with the
model of a first principle that, while being so simple as to be shapeless, still possesses
thought.
Michael Allen’s `The Ficinian Timaeus and Renaissance Science’ is a brief study of the
influence of Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus. Ficino is the first scholar since
antiquity (besides perhaps Bessarion) with adequate knowledge of Greek to read both
the Timaeus and Proclus, and thus his Timaeus is rather Neoplatonic in flavor. Ficino’s
main contribution is his emphasis on the mathematical physics of the Timaeus,
especially his understanding of the role the notion of mathematical proportion plays in
understanding not only the construction of the physical cosmos, but also the nature of
individual souls, and by extension cities, states and churches, i.e., collection of souls,
as well as demons. From Allen’s essay we catch a glimpse of an approach to science
and cosmology that is about to fade from history.
Rhonda Martens’ ‘A Commentary on Genesis: Plato’s Timaeus and Kepler’s Astronomy’

addresses the nature of Plato’s influence on Kepler, Koestler’s `tortured mystic’.
Beginning from a discussion of his use of the five solids to depict the planetary
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motions, Martens shows that the significance of the Timaeus for Kepler was that he
shared the idea with Plato that the creator made the world as an act of self-expression
and that the material realization of the divine is the material realization of geometric
patterns. The human mind, imprinted with these patterns, is able to apprehend the
structure of the universe through reason. Martens’ account of how Kepler uses the
Timaeus to argue for mathematical physics against the Aristotelian method of
divorcing mathematics from the study of essences is especially fascinating.
The capstone to the collection of essays is Werner Beierwaltes’ study, `Plato’s

Timaeus in German Idealism: Schelling and Windischmann.’ Relying in part on the
Philebus, Beierwaltes examines how the young Schelling is influenced by Plato’s
remarks on the limited and unlimited and the notion of ideas. “The ideas, as
originative concepts in the divine understanding of the Demiurge, are then the true a
priori and thus at the same time—through their expression—the origin of the . priori
(the freedom from aesthesis) of human knowing, though which the knowledge can
become a pure conceptual activity.” Though Schelling later came to question the
authenticity of the Timaeus, provoked in part by Windischmann’s German translation,
the Timaeus, and Plato, remain central to his conception of the dialectic of philosophy.
This is an excellent collection.
2003.07.03
Nancy K. Frankenberry (ed.)
Radical Interpretation in Religion
Frankenberry, Nancy K. (ed.), Radical Interpretation in Religion, Cambridge University

Press, 2002, 248pp, $24.50, ISBN 052101705X
Reviewed by Charles Taliaferro , St. Olaf College
Nancy Frankenberry has assembled ten original essays which will be of special interest
to those committed to a naturalistic and generally pragmatist critique of religion. The
word “radical” in the title of this collection seems a little puzzling. The essays are said
to be “radical” in the sense that they question the “root assumptions in the study of
religion” (p. xiii). The essays “move away from older models of representation and
symbolic expression to holistic ways of thinking about the interrelations of language,
meaning, beliefs, desires, and action” (p. xiv). The essays are introduced by
Frankenberry as built on the assumption that religions should be explained “in entirely
naturalist terms, rather than in supernatural or faith-based premises” (p. xiv). This
may be “radical,” though it is certainly not new or at odds with “root assumptions” of
religious studies today. The naturalistic dismissal of the truth of religious convictions
may or may not be legitimate, but it is hard to see it as fresh, bold, and out of step
with the contemporary intellectual climate. The current state of play in the
philosophical study of religion typically entertains both naturalistic and non-naturalistic
points of view. In fact, a failure to take the naturalist critique of religion seriously
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today would rightly be considered “radical” because it questions the very “root
assumptions in the study of religion” as it is firmly established in most university and
college institutions. Undertaking inquiry into religion in a “holist” way is also not novel.
Aquinas could be described as promoting “holistic ways of thinking about the
interrelationships of language, meaning, beliefs, desires and action.” I suggest that
the contributors to this collection are not radical “outsiders” challenging an entrenched
regime where an abundance of “fideisms and passing gurus have flourished” (p. xvi).
Be that as it may, these essays do address philosophically important issues
concerning the interpretation and justification of religious beliefs and practices.
In the opening essay, Terry Godlove Jr. defends the important role of belief in religion
and the study of religion. “While students of religion need not believe in God, we do
need to believe in belief “ (p. 24). I suggest that Godlove’s essay (Chapter One)
should be read in relation to Catherine Bell’s contribution (Chapter Five), where she
struggles with the difficulty of giving neither too much nor too little role to beliefs in
her study of Chinese religion. I find Godlove’s case for the indispensability of belief in
religion thoroughly convincing.
Jeffery Stout articulates the methodology of Robert Brandon’s normative pragmatism,

locating Brandon’s contribution in relation to Davidson’s and Rorty’s work. This is a
fine essay on contemporary pragmatism.
Rorty’s essay considers the cultural and political conditions for arguments about God’s
existence. Rorty holds that
Debate over . . . concrete political questions is more useful for human happiness than
debate of the existence of God. They are the questions which remain once we realize
that appeals to religious experience are of no use for settling what traditions should be
maintained and which replaced, and after we have come to think natural theology
pointless. (p. 76)
Maybe so, but Rorty’s bifurcation between political philosophy and natural theology is
open to question. One can find religious experience and natural theology to be
philosophically viable as well as privilege “concrete political questions.” In fact, there
have historically been many occasions where philosophical debate over God’s
existence has been profoundly intertwined with debate over human happiness. I
believe this to be true for the classic sources (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas), but if you
want a “modern” example á la utilitarianism, consider William Paley and his fellow
theological utilitarians. Their arguments against the slave trade and economic
inequality fit easily beside their theistic arguments.
One of Rorty’s reasons for dismissing religious experience as irrelevant philosophically

seems odd, namely that reports of religious experience need to be assessed in light of
a comprehensive philosophy, framework or world-view.
In short, God-reports have to live up to previous expectations, just as do reports of

physical objects. They cannot, all by themselves, be used to repudiate those
expectations. They are useful for this purpose only when they form part of a full-
fledged, concerted, cultural-political initiative. This is what happens when a new
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religion or church replaces an old one. It was not the disciples’ reports of an empty
tomb, all by themselves, that made Europe believe that God was incarnate in Christ.
But, in the context of St. Paul’s overall public relations strategy, those reports had
their effect. Analogously, it was not Galileo’s report of spots moving across the face of
the planet Jupiter, possibly caused by the transits of moons, that overthrew the
authority of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology. But, in the context of the initiative
being mounted by his fellow Copernican cultural politicians, that report had
considerable importance. (pp. 60-61)
Few defenders of the evidential value of religious experience would disagree.

Typically, the appeal to the evidential, justificatory role of religious experiences takes
place in the context of a comprehensive, cumulative case for a religious world view.
The only point where defenders of religious experience might diverge from Rorty
concerns how far he goes in dismissing “experience” as any sort of independent check
on one’s philosophy.
I can sum up what I have been saying about appeals to experience as follows:
experience gives us no way to drive a wedge between the cultural-political question of
what we should talk about and the question of what really exists. For what counts as
an accurate report of experience is a matter of what a community will let you get
away with. Empiricism’s appeal to experience is as inefficacious as appeals to the
Word of God unless backed up with a predisposition on the part of a community to
take such appeals seriously. So, experience cannot, by itself, adjudicate disputes
between warring cultural politicians. (p. 61)
But imagine you live in a political culture run by old-fashioned behaviorists who deny
that feeling pain is anything more than actual and dispositional behavior. I do not see
why the appeal to subjective states cannot be evidence against eliminative
behaviorism, even if the majority dismisses such a philosophical objection.
Analogously, I suggest that the appeal to the apparent experiential awareness of the
divine can be evidence in support of a religious world-view eve if the majority fails to
recognize this.
Rorty may have anticipated this objection from analogy because he illustrates his view
on the philosophical irrelevance or marginal importance of experience in reference to
current debate on consciousness.
I can make my point about the irrelevance of religious experience to God’s existence a
bit more vivid by comparing the God of orthodox Western monotheism with
consciousness as it is understood by Cartesian dualists. In the unphilosophical sense
of the term “conscious,” the existence of consciousness is indisputable. People in a
coma lack consciousness. People are conscious as long as they are walking and
talking. But there is a special philosophical sense of the term “consciousness” in which
the very existence of consciousness is in dispute. (p 64)
If you are sympathetic with Daniel Dennett, early Stephen Stich, Quine, Paul and
Patricia Churchland, Rorty’s earlier work, you may agree. But, you will disagree if you
think their philosophy of consciousness has left something vital unexplained (namely
consciousness), as has been proposed by Galen Strawson, Ned Block, Thomas Nagel,
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David Chalmers, and Colin McGinn. Incidentally, I believe Rorty may be seeking some
rhetorical support for his rejection of the appeal to experience here by suggesting that
only “Cartesian dualists” object to Dennett et al. because they deny the indisputable
existence of consciousness (in the ordinary and “philosophical sense” of the term).
None of those just cited who appeal to the apparent evident reality of experience are
Cartesian dualists.
Wayne Proudfoot offers an interesting, naturalistic understanding of William James—

challenging Rorty’s version of James. James’s conception of the cosmos in terms of a
moral order is commended by Proudfoot as a worthy, secular ideal.
We can recognize with James that imaginative ideals embodied in religious belief and
experience provide leverage that can free us from some of the desires and demands
that press in on us. But the unseen order that provides that leverage need not be, and
is not, something “not ourselves.” The moral order consists of what men and women
have put there, of Geist, and the proper way to study it is through the humanities and
social sciences, especially history. (p. 92)
Notably absent from the list of disciplines is theology.
The remaining essays highlight different resources for philosophy of religion. E.

Thomas Lawson takes stock of cognitive science. Hans Penner addresses the question
of how we should read myths. Frankenberry draws on Davidson to challenge what she
calls “the Theology of Symbolic Forms.” Jonathan Smith uses the Hebrew Bible’s
narrative of manna to test Durkheim and other sociologists of religion. Maurice Bloch
takes up the extent to which religious beliefs are counter-intuitive. He writes: “The
Counter-Intuitive is Everywhere” (p. 144).
Although the word “radical” is used in several settings in the book, there is nowhere
the radical suggestion that some non-naturalist, religious view of the cosmos might be
true.
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2003.07.04
John T. Lysaker
You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense
Lysaker, John T., You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of
Sense, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 223pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN
0271022280.
Reviewed by Herman Rapaport, University of Southampton
John T. Lysaker isn’t the first person to imagine a productive interlocution between
Martin Heidegger and contemporary Anglo-American poetry, though he is certainly
first in terms of mounting a lengthy encounter between Heidegger and Pulitzer Prize
winner, Charles Simic. Well known is that Heidegger himself was quite reluctant to
interface with just anyone, let alone poets who weren’t part of a very select group:
Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, George, and Benn. No doubt, Heidegger was after a
philosophical poetics that, for a start, disabled the distinction between the two (the
philosophical and the poetic), and he saw in Hölderlin a mighty precursor for doing
just this. It’s already here that I have some misgivings about Lysaker’s book, because
poets like Simic aren’t anywhere close to the kind of philosophical or poetic
accomplishment that would be required to deconstruct the relation between poetry
and philosophy. For example, I could imagine a study on Dante that began to broach
some of these issues, or a study on Goethe, since in these cases one is really dealing
with immense genius. But putting such a burden on figures like Simic seems
inappropriate, and, in my estimation, the book falls apart rather quickly on account of
it.
If there is something salvageable in this book, it’s Lysaker’s idea that we shouldn’t
reduce the arts to some sort of abstract research project (inspired by British
utilitarianism and abetted by Yankee know-how), but should submit to the
transformative potential of the work of art, vis-à-vis our hermeneutical encounter with
it. If one reads, say, Roman Ingarden on the cognition of the work of art, it’s quite
apparent that it never occurred to him that the work of art might actually have the
capacity to change the reader, let alone, to produce some kind of spiritual rebirth.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, too, keeps an arm’s length from books changing your life,
though I think it’s implied pretty much everywhere in his work that if we’re not
changed, we haven’t really understood much. Bildung, essentially, is the mediation of
consciousness by the tradition that transforms it, and, of course, for Heidegger the
mediation of German poetry was crucial for philosophy, because it transformed the
language of philosophy.
What has changed since the 1960s in America, and I would suppose also in Great
Britain, is the fact that poetry is no longer so highly regarded, because we’re not of
the view that it has this transformative capacity. We may enjoy reading Jorie Graham
or C.K. Williams or Rita Dove, but these writers don’t change our lives, they just
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interest us for a while. In fact, these poets have nothing to say to philosophy, because
their words reflect feelings, attitudes, situations, or conundrums that have no
intellectual force of a transcendental sort. In other words, there’s nothing wesentlich
that’s being said, because so much of what’s being discussed is quite trivial in the
broad scheme of things. This is precisely where someone like John Ashbery emerges
as a rather strong poet, given that he acknowledges this dilemma as hermeneutically
foundational, whereas someone like Simic seems merely caught in the headlights of
banality.
Conceptually, Simic isn’t very noteworthy. At least, I can’t work up much philosophical
respect for Simic’s
A worm
In an otherwise
Red apple
Said: I am. (quoted in Lysaker)
Still, let’s turn for a moment to the Heidegger part of Lysaker’s enterprise. Lysaker,
like many of us, can warm up to that incantatory talk about the open, dwelling,
nearness, the four-fold, and Ereignis. I suspect he likes it because it’s really a closeted
theology whose terms are acceptable to agnostic colleagues. Certainly, its
undercurrent is kerygmatic. Art, we’re being told, is the proclamation of a spiritual
event (a happening, advent, waiting) that opens us up to Being (really, God). The
problem is less that art is thought to do this (which is Lysaker’s emphasis), than that
Lysaker works so hard at trying to throw everyone off the theological track. He knows
we’re all scared to be caught in bed with metaphysics because we’ve been taught by
the French that it’s not the thing to do in Paris.
Analogously, in the world of Anglo-American poetry, we’ve had the problem of poets
struggling to say spiritual things in non-spiritual ways. Eliot sort of managed to keep
the high church in. But after World War II, this became much harder to sustain,
because it seemed unlikely to most intellectuals that God and the concentration camp
could exist in the same historical frame of reference. The problem after 1945 wasn’t
whether one could or couldn’t write poetry after the Holocaust, but whether one could
write credible poetry that had some serious spiritual dimension that one could respect.
So far, only a very few poets seem to have really succeeded: Celan, Bachmann,
Ponge, Char, Beckett, Auden, Prynne, Oppen, Ashbery . . . .
Lysaker’s chapters go something like this. (1) “Heidegger’s Ear” maps Lysaker’s
Heidegger onto American poets, among them, Wallace Stevens, whose poetry
exemplifies a notion of Ort or place. Ort is defined as referentiality that eludes
representation as the condition of its possibility, something that Stevens’ “The Palm at
the End of the Mind” exemplifies (in part). Ort means other things too. For example,
it’s the place of the origination of the work, its Ur condition. No problem here. And no
problem with Lysaker’s apt reference to Rilke. It’s when Lysaker decides that Garrett
Hongo’s lines (“the great albacore run of the Sixties. . .”) need to be discussed in this
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context that one will necessarily wonder if Heidegger isn’t turning over in his grave.
After all, for Heidegger a poet isn’t just someone who can scribble down some lines
that sound and look like poetry. Rather a poet is a legislator of language in the sense
of legislating the future of a Volk. Hongo (whose marketing device is that he is of
Asian descent and comes from Hawaii) isn’t legislating anything for anyone. And, of
course, the question to be asked is why, because it’s a question that would pertain to
the hundreds of would-be American poets (many with signature ethnicities) who are
on the pay roll of state and private institutions. What is it about their work that makes
it so terribly insignificant at a time when the West is in perhaps its deepest spiritual
crisis since the decline of the Middle Ages, the very same spiritual decline that
Heidegger was pointing to in his war time seminars?
(2) “Living Poetry.” Here we get some sixties-speak about poems being about poems
(remember metafiction?). But whatever Heidegger was thinking, it wasn’t metafiction.
Similarly incongruous is Lysaker’s idea that Heidegger (an ex-Nazi) and Adrienne Rich
(a radical lesbian with no use for men) are on the same page, poetically speaking.
Here I think one would be justified if one responded with incredulity. And if not at the
Rich connection, then at the connection with Ammons’ Garbage when, for example,
we’re told with a straight face that a garbage mound transforms matter to spirit.
(3) “The White of All ’I’s.’“ Here Lysaker turns to Simic who, apparently, had his own
thoughts about Heidegger. I think Simic really sounds Lysaker’s overall thesis when he
writes (apropos of Ort, the Ur poem, etc.): “Paradoxically, what is most important in a
poem, that something for which we go back to it again and again, cannot be
articulated. The best one can do. . . is give the reader a hint of what one has
experienced reading the poem, but was unable to name.” (p. 79) When all explanation
fails, Simic says, quote the poem literally. The issue is quite simple: there’s a desire to
consummate the poem in order to expunge lack. What appears irritating for Simic and
Lysaker is that the poem (really, any work of art) won’t resolve itself in terms of some
pure denotation that can be appropriated fully. Hence Heidegger is called in to
minister to this problem.
In (4) “Ink,” “Ur-poetry’s power lies in its ability to expose and figure the origins of
sense” (135), and “In Simic’s ur-poetry, origination is marked by the white, a radically
anterior event that has always already transpired by the time sense is present” (137).
The issue is poetry’s hypokeimenon, its ground, which Simic associates with “white.”
In Derridean terms this is deferral, the arche-trace. Of course, one finds it in Beckett
(Krapp’s Last Tape), in Joyce (Finnegans Wake), in Melville (Moby Dick), the upshot
being that one wonders why such a fuss about it is being made here. Hasn’t Simic just
done rather more conventionally what has been done far more aggressively and
adventuresomely in the past?
Chapters (5) “Characterizing the Cosmos,” (6) “Then Came History” and (7)
“Preserving the Possible,” carry the ur-poetics of Simic onwards. In (6) Lysaker says
of history that it is a ground word, “a figure of poetising.” Fair enough. But why then
not deal with a poet like Milton who actually was in history. Or Celan? Why are we
dealing with poets like Stevens, buried in the insurance business, or, like Simic, the
education business (which is somewhat similar)? Why all this concern with history, as
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the book enters into its latter stages? Because what came before isn’t important
enough?
This gets at a core problem with Lysaker’s book, something that is odd, given that
Heidegger is such a critical presence. The difficulty in dealing with mainstream
academic American poets is that unlike Goethe or George or Celan, they aren’t
authentic historical beings, but social bystanders who belong to the same consumerist
world of work that everyone else does. Like the rest, they’re flies trapped in the bell
jar of the American Dream, with its Martha Stewarts, its strip malls, its Pizza Huts, its
Columbines, its crass fundamentalisms, its blahed out kids, its super-this-and-that, its
shoot-em-up foreign wars. In that sense, Ammons’ term, garbage, is absolutely on
target. For it’s not that these poets don’t or can’t voice their displeasure (as Rich has;
as the whole MFA establishment in America does – which is its chief raison d’etre for
writing poetry), but that it doesn’t matter, because none of these literary figures is
willing to risk anything that would move them from being ordinary consumer citizens
to being a political thorn in the side of society; as a result, they fail to enter into
history, as, say, Catholic resisters in Northern Ireland have done.
It’s no secret that American poets desperately want to live the good life of the middle
class citizen and complain about it too. In fact this is a role that American academia
encourages, because this is the easiest way to pretend you have free speech without
its having any historical efficacy. (Stanley Fish’s: “There’s No Such Thing as Free
Speech and a Good Thing too.”) Perhaps the last time the American academy came
anywhere close to breaking into history was back in May of 1970 when students were
shot by the National Guard at Kent State University. For about 48 hours America
hovered on the brink of civil war and the government cowered. But where was poetry
then? Which poet poetized another destiny for America at that point, one in which a
nation could rise up against Kauf-Mensch and Kauf-hof, the suburb, an unpopular and
idiotic foreign war, a blatantly corrupt government, and an appalling racist society?
Why had no national poet arisen to catapult the nation into the violence of rectitude?
Of course, one could and should ask that of Heidegger himself in the dark days of the
Reich. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer protested and was murdered by the Nazis, whereas
Heidegger stayed the course at the University of Freiburg.) And, of course, that should
alert us to why it is one might want to view with some suspicion what happens when
American academics use Heidegger in the way Lysaker does: not to find a way into
history, but to implicitly justify a way of sitting it out, the rhetoric notwithstanding.
That said, there is this “other” Heidegger who also knew what it would mean for one
to step courageously into the violent stream of history in order to legislate a better
world. That Heidegger himself couldn’t live up to this task revealed an appalling
weakness in an otherwise great thinker. And from it we should learn the meaning of
the difference between what Hölderlin called Blödigkeit and Dichtermut: timidity and
courage. This is one of the philosophical underpinnings of the philosophy/poetry
connection that I find lacking in Lysaker’s understanding of the current condition of
poetry writing in much of America today.
2003.07.05
Herbert Hochberg
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Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 1879-2002
Hochberg, Herbert, Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 1879-
2002, Dr. Hansel-Hohenhausen, 2003, 280pp, '40.00 (hbk), ISBN 3826712307.
Reviewed by Richard Mendelsohn , CUNY
Professor Hochberg’s book is best characterized by his own words from the preface:
The book attempts to sketch, not work out in detail, an account of reference,
meaning, truth and intentionality that stays within the “linguistic turn” characterizing
twentieth century analytic philosophy. But it seeks to avoid following the
contemporary variants of analytic philosophy that have turned from the analysis of
things and facts to a preoccupation with and virtual worship of language and its use.
The classical focus on ontology, combined with careful and precise formulations, that
marked the writings of the early founders of the analytic tradition, has degenerated
into the spinning of intricate verbal webs of analysis. The latter supposedly yield
“theories of meaning” but more often signal the rebirth of idealism in the guises of
“anti-realism” and “internal realism.” The focus on the world, as what words are
about, is often lost as “analytic philosophers” concentrate on language itself—the
world being “well lost,” in Nelson Goodman’s honest words. . . . We shall also note
examples of a remarkable combination of arrogance towards and ignorance of the
philosophical tradition that is displayed in some writings within the analytic tradition,
including influential works.
Contrary to its title, this book is not intended to introduce analytic philosophy to the
reader. A considerably sophisticated understanding of the field and its primary
literature is presupposed. Nor does this book purport to present a scholarly and
dispassionate critical exposition of the views. It is very much idiosyncratic and
opinionated. Hochberg finds huge swaths of analytic philosophy irrelevant and empty.
To be sure, he discusses Frege, Bradley, Russell, Meinong, Strawson, Tarski, Carnap,
Searle, Donnellan, Kripke, Davidson, Dummett, and Quine. But he is unhappy with the
way in which the modern generations of analytic philosophers have cut themselves
loose from their roots, which, by the way, he traces to Meinong and Bradley as well as
to Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein. Hochberg has absolutely no sympathy with
those components of the linguistic turn inspired by the later Wittgenstein, by the
Ordinary Language philosophers, by those investigating the logico/linguistic
mechanisms of reference, and even those elaborating the work of Sellars. Kripke?
“Kripke hasn’t discovered anything at all” (p. 139).
Hochberg’s treatment of Frege reflects his bias. Here are the first two sentences of the
book:
Frege ingeniously used a few basic ideas to attempt to resolve a number of

fundamental philosophical problems. Like Bradley, he saw a problem in the analysis of
predicative judgments that led to holding that the existence of facts grounded their
truth and falsity. (p. 19)
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It is appropriate to begin the story about analytic philosophy with Frege. But Frege,
for most of his philosophical career, had little to say about the grounding of truth and
falsity; and when he did finally address the issue, he found little to like. Facts are, for
him, simply true thoughts; and their role in the service of a correspondence theory as
grounders of truth is rejected. Frege did confront an issue that has echoes in Bradley
about the unity of complex entities. Frege held that a complex whole must decompose
into at least one incomplete part. Important as this was, Frege never connected this
problem with the grounding of truth. The complete/incomplete distinction was more
intimately connected with his function/argument analysis and its attendant
compositionality principles—arguably his most significant contribution to philosophy,
but one about which Hochberg has little directly to say. Viewing Frege through
Hochberg’s prism yields a distorted picture.1
Hochberg is interested primarily in an ontology that is out of fashion, most specifically,

the way in which the various components constitute the states of affairs that ground
truth. A typical topic that garners space and passion is the existence of negative facts.
Because he is out of step with the temper of the times, Hochberg tends to be grumpy
and dismissive. But, and this is the point I would like to underscore, it is worth the
reader’s time and effort to figure out what he is up to, for there are philosophical
rewards to be found.
By way of example, I will consider his extended discussion (pp 182-92) of Davidson’s
“Great Fact argument,” as he calls it. Hochberg, if it is not already clear to the reader,
is partial to the correspondence theory and to facts. Davidson is highly dubious of
both.
The real objection to correspondence theories is simpler; it is that there is nothing for
true sentences to correspond to. The point was made long ago by C. I. Lewis; he
challenged the correspondence theorist to locate the fact or part of reality, or of the
world, to which a true sentence corresponded. . . . Following out this line of thought
led Lewis to conclude that if true sentences correspond to anything at all, it must be
the universe as a whole; thus all true sentences correspond to the same thing. Frege,
as we know, independently reached the same conclusion through a similar course of
reasoning. Frege’s argument, if Alonzo Church is right, can be formalized . . . .
[Davidson 2001: 103]. Quoted by Hochberg, pp.182-3.
Hochberg’s evaluation of the project is characteristically intemperate:
Davidson’s argument against facts is without substance or, perhaps, even content. Be
that as it may, . . . I will briefly consider [the Great Fact argument against facts] since
many still discuss what is clearly a pointless argument . . . . (p. 184)
He is not the first, and he is not the only, philosopher to criticize Davidson’s
argument;2 but he offers a perspective others have not noticed.
Davidson’s argument traces its provenance to [Frege 1892]’s argument that the truth-
values are objects named by declarative sentences. The crucial element of Frege’s
argument is a substitution principle for reference. Where d(η) is the denotation of η,
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Φα a complex containing the singular term α, and Φα/β the result of replacing α at one
or more of its occurrences by β, we have:
[The Substitution Principle] If d(α)=d(β), then d(Φα)=d(Φα/β)
The True and the False, Frege argued, are the only objects that are compositionally
related by this principle to the denotation of the parts of the sentence, and which, in
turn, are compositionally related to the denotation of larger constructions in which the
sentence is embedded.
In Chapter 0, perhaps the best formal introduction to Fregean semantics, [Church

1956] presented a beautiful version of Frege’s argument. He begins with the true
sentence
(1) Sir Walter Scott is the man who wrote twenty-nine Waverley novels altogether.
and paraphrases it as
(2) The number, such that Sir Walter Scott is the man who wrote that many Waverley
novels altogether, is twenty-nine.
(2), if not synonymous with (1), is “at least so nearly so as to ensure its having the
same reference.” But the following is also, it seems, true:
(3) The number of counties in Utah is twenty-nine.
Things equal to the same are equal to each other. So, substituting one term for the
other in (2), we get
(4) The number of counties in Utah is twenty-nine,
which must also be true, and which, via compositionality, denotes the same thing as
(1). In the transformational series from (1) to (4), the proposition expressed has
changed completely. What remains invariant? Truth-value.
Here, now, is Davidson’s formalization of [Church 1956]’s argument by way of [Gödel

1944].3 Assume that any two logically equivalent sentences have the same
denotation, and also that we have a definite description operator, say, Russell’s iota-
operator. Let “S” and “T” be two sentences that agree in truth-value. Consider the
sequence
(5) S
(6) (ix)(x=x × S) = (ix)(x=x)
(7) (ix)(x=x × T) = (ix)(x=x)
(8) T
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(5) and (6) are logically equivalent. They have the same denotation. Similarly for (7)
and (8). Only (6) and (7) remain. We get (7) from (6) by replacing “(ix)(x=x × S)” by
“(ix)(x=x × T).” Since “S” and “T” have the same truth-value, these two singular
terms have the same denotation. So, by compositionality, (6) and (7) must have the
same denotation too. Assuming that sentences denote, then, any two sentences
agreeing in truth-value must denote the same thing.
Enter Hochberg. He finds Davidson’s argument wanting. To dramatize his point, he

sets forth an argument schema he calls Dav:
(8) S
(9) T
(10) “S” designates S
Therefore
(11) “S” designates T
It would be “absurd,” says Hochberg, to infer (11) from (8), (9) and (10) alone.
Something more is required. He is right. (8) and (9) would sanction the substitution in
(10) to get (11) only if the context “S” designates were truth-functional. That’s what
needs to be established. But Davidson only shows that however much we transform
the sentence “S” using the traditional engines that are thought to preserve
denotation—(1) paraphrase, (2) substitution of synonymous sentences, (3)
substitution of logically equivalent sentences, or (4) substitution of codenotational
singular terms—truth-value remains invariant. He never shows that the context in
which the sentence “S” occurs is truth-functional.
The cogency of Hochberg’s insight is immediate in [Quine 1953]’s variant which was
designed to cast doubt on the coherence of quantified modal logic. We use the usual
symbol “ ” for Necessarily. As before, we assume “S” and “T” have the same truth-
value, but, in addition, we assume that when “S” and “T” are logically equivalent,
“ S” and “ T” have the same truth-value. We preface each step of Davidson’s
argument with a “ ”:
(12) S
(13) (ix)(x=x × S) = (ix)(x=x)
(14) (ix)(x=x × T) = (ix)(x=x)
(15) T
Since (12) and (13) are logically equivalent, they have the same truth-value. Similarly
for (14) and (15). Lastly, we get (14) from (13) by substituting “(ix)(x=x × T)” for the
codenotational “(ix)(x=x × S),” so (13) and (14) must have the same truth-value. We
334
have our conclusion: when “S” and “T” have the same truth-value, “ S” and “ T”
have the same truth-value, i.e., “ ” is a truth-functional operator.
But the argument must fail. “ ” is clearly not truth-functional. The problem can be
traced to a scope ambiguity in (13). If the description is given wide scope, the
substitution is legitimate. But if it is given narrow scope, the substitution is legitimate
only if in addition the overarching context—in this case, “ ”—is truth-functional.4 In
sanctioning the substitution, whatever the scope, Quine is simply assuming the
context is truth functional. The argument is little more than Hochberg’s Dav.
Hochberg’s presentation of Davidson’s argument is like Quine’s, but with “S”

designates in front of each of Davidson’s steps:
(16) “S” designates S
(17) “S” designates (ix)(x=x × S) = (ix)(x=x)
(18) “S” designates (ix)(x=x × T) = (ix)(x=x)
(19) “S” designates T
The reasoning is exactly the same as in Quine’s; and the question-begging assumption
is exactly the same. Hochberg’s presentation drives the point home. Here is how
Hochberg puts it:
If descriptions are treated along the lines of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions,
then the descriptive phrases are contextually defined signs. Therefore, we should
expand them to examine the argument. If we attempt to do so an immediate problem
arises about the scope of descriptions in contexts like [(17)] and [(18)]. Putting that
aside, we take the scope(s) as “secondary,” just governing the sentential expression
after the occurrence of “designates.” If one expands the definite descriptions in [the
sentences of the argument] it becomes immediately obvious that there is no way to
get to [(18)] unless one is allowed to replace an occurrence of “S” by an occurrence of
“T.” . . . Gödel had pointed out quite early that one cannot simply reason along lines
Davidson employs . . . if one employs a definite descriptive operator as a contextually
defined sign in Russell’s manner and not as a primitive sign pattern. . . . But to
replace an occurrence of “S” by an occurrence of “T” is to use a different rule, one
concerning sentences that merely have the same truth value but are not “logically
equivalent” sentences. Thus, . . . we can simply argue Dav. (pp. 185-6)
Hochberg does not address the remaining puzzling conflict between the use of the
function d(h) in the Substitution Principle and the role of designates in the expanded
Davidson argument. The solution, I believe, lies in the fact that the Substitution
Principle fails—notoriously so. Only if the context in which the complex is situated is
truth-functional does it hold. But a full discussion is beyond the purview of this review.
[Davidson 1969]’s name “Great Fact” evokes Gödel’s observation that Frege “meant”
that all true sentences denote the same thing “in an almost metaphysical sense,
reminding one somewhat of the Eleatic doctrine of the “One”” [Gödel 1944: 450].
335
Although Davidson (as well as Quine) duly note their debt to Gödel, they both fail to
explicitly acknowledge the significance Gödel saw in his precising of Frege’s argument:
it was (a) to bring to the light its reliance on definite descriptions, and (b) to reveal
that [Russell 1905]’s treatment of descriptions, unlike [Frege 1892]’s, provided the
basis for thwarting Frege’s conclusion. Davidson and Quine appropriated part (a) of
Gödel’s story, but ignored part (b). Hochberg has good reason to be a bit intemperate!
Hochberg’s critique of the argument is quite penetrating, and typical of the high
quality of his philosophical insights. But the reader must look closely at his words,
overlook infelicities, ex cathedra pronouncements and grumpiness, and be able to fill
in details—many of them sophisticated and difficult philosophical steps—to put them
to work.
References
[Barwise 1981] Barwise, J. and Perry, J., “Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising
Situations,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI (1981) 387—404.
[Beaney 1997] Beaney, M., The Frege Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1997.
[Church 1956] Church, A., Introduction to Mathematical Logic, vol. I, Princeton

University Press, Princeton, 1956.
[Davidson 1969] Davidson, D., “True to the Facts,” The Journal of Philosophy 66
(1969) 748-764.
[Davidson 2001] Davidson, D., Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford

University Press, Oxford, 2001.
[Frege 1879] Frege, G., Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete

Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Verlag von L. Nebert, Halle, 1879. Preface and
Part I translated in [Beaney 1997: 47-78].
[Frege 1892] Frege, G., “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift fñ°Ÿ hilosophie und
philosophische Kritik 100 (1892) 25-50. Translated as “On Sinn and Bedeutung” in
[Beaney 1997: 151-171].
[Gödel 1944] Gödel K., “Russell’s Mathematical Logic.” Reprinted in H. Putnam and P.
Benacerraf eds., Philosophy of Mathematics, Selected Readings, Second edition,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 447-469.
[Quine 1953] Quine, W. V. O., “Reference and Modality.” From a Logical Point of View,
2nd ed. rev., Harper and Row, New York, 1961, pp. 136-159.
[Russell 1905] Russell, B., “On Denoting,” Mind 14 (1905) 479-93.
[Smullyan 1948] Smullyan, A. F., “Modality and Description,” The Journal of Symbolic
Logic 13 (1948) 31-37.
336
Endnotes
1. Incidentally, Hochberg insists that Frege regarded concepts as ingredients of

thoughts. This is wrong. Frege regarded a concept as the referent of a concept-word,
not what it expresses. Hochberg offers no textual support for his reading.
2. Of particular significance is [Barwise 1981], who charge, in effect, a fallacy of

equivocation.
3. This version is taken from [Davidson 1969], but using definite descriptions instead
of class abstracts.
4. [Smullyan 1948] helped clarify this aspect of Russell’s treatment of descriptions.
2003.07.06
Robert Solomon
Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice
Solomon, Robert, Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice, Oxford University Press,
2003, 280pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195145496.
Reviewed by Matthew Ratcliffe, University of Durham and ,
This collection of twelve essays charts the development of Robert Solomon’s theory of
emotion, from ‘Emotions and Choice’ (1973) to ‘On the Passivity of the Passions’
(2001). As Solomon acknowledges in the Preface, several aspects of his thought, such
as an early hostility towards neurology and physiology, have undergone considerable
revision during this period. However, the claim that our emotions are ways of
experiencing the world for which we can (at least sometimes) be held responsible is
retained throughout and constitutes the core of his evolving position.
Solomon’s early view can be drawn from the first three essays, ‘Emotions and Choice’,
‘On Physiology and Feelings’ (an extract from The Passions, 1976) and ‘The Rationality
of Emotions’ (1977). In these pieces, Solomon argues against the ‘traditional view’
that emotions are mere affects or feelings. Though conceding that emotions are
ordinarily accompanied by feelings, he claims that these feelings are not an essential
part of the emotion. In his strongest statement of this point, Solomon suggests that
“the feelings no more constitute or define the emotion than an army of fleas
constitutes a homeless dog” (p. 30). This dismissal of bodily feelings motivates
Solomon’s distaste towards neurological and physiological approaches to the
emotions, which tend to emphasise affect.
In contrast to affect theories, Solomon argues that emotions are rational and
purposive, more like actions than occurrences that happen to us (p.3). This view is
supported by the observation that one’s emotions are closely tied to one’s appraisal of
337
a situation. For example, if X falsely believes that Y has been slandering her, X will
become angry with Y, but only until she realises that her beliefs concerning Y were
mistaken. Following this realisation, the feelings associated with the emotion may
persist but the emotion itself will disappear, suggesting both that the emotion is
influenced or constituted by one’s reasoned assessment of a situation and that it is
not to be identified with an associated affect (p.5). Solomon employs such examples
to suggest that emotions are not feelings but judgments. As such, they are stances
towards the world for which we can be held responsible. Characteristically emotional
judgments are singled out by their normative and often moral nature and by their
concern with self-esteem. They also tend to be urgent judgments, and Solomon
suggests that the irrationality commonly ascribed to emotions is symptomatic of the
situations to which they respond. Emotions are, we are told, urgent responses to
desperate situations (p.12). So they may appear irrational or unthinking, even though
they are actually purposive and often strategic.
The fourth and fifth essays, ‘Nothing to be Proud of’ (1980) and ‘Emotions’ Mysterious
Objects’ (1984), make clear that Solomon is offering a phenomenological theory of
emotion. That emotions are judgments might seem translatable into the claim that
they are Intentional states. However, Solomon stresses that an emotion is not an
internal, psychological state that reaches out to hook up with an external and distinct
Intentional object. Instead, turning to phenomenology, he claims that emotions are
structures through which the world is experienced. They do not connect with but,
rather, constitute their objects. An object of emotion is the object that it is because it
is experienced through the emotion: “An emotion, as a system of judgments, is not
merely a set of beliefs about the world, but rather an active way of structuring our
experience, a way of experiencing something” (p.54). Hence emotions cannot be
analysed apart from their objects and any construal of Intentionality as a subjective
state plus a distinct object to which that state is directed will mis-describe the
structure of emotional experience. Emotions, Solomon claims, are phenomenologically
unitary phenomena that cannot be adequately analysed in terms of subject/object,
internal/external or any other dualistic distinction. In discussing Davidson’s account,
Solomon is especially critical of propositional-attitude theories of emotion. An emotion
is certainly not an attitude towards a proposition; it is a web of constitutive judgments
through which things appear in a certain way.
The sixth essay, ‘Getting Angry’ (1984), discusses the cultural dimensions of emotion.
Solomon criticises anthropological applications of Jamesian theories for assuming a
clear distinction between a culture-independent physiological component of emotion
and its diverse cultural interpretations. Again resisting the idea that emotions can be
broken down into parts, Solomon suggests that cultural interpretation of an emotion is
partly constitutive of what that emotion is: “An emotion is a system of concepts,
beliefs, attitudes, and desires, virtually all of which are context-bound, historically
developed, and culture-specific” (p.87). The structure of one’s judgments is bound up
with cultural interpretation and, because emotions are systems of judgments, they will
be cultural through and through. So the idea of a physiological core and a cultural
overlay of interpretation gives way to a more holistic construal.
As the ninth essay, ‘The Politics of Emotion’ (1998), makes clear, the charge of
neglecting culture can also be applied to Solomon’s own early views. Solomon
338
acknowledges his tendency to regard emotions as ‘personal’ experiences, and, as a

corrective, he stresses that social context is essential to the structure of emotional
judgments. Emotions, Solomon suggests, are essentially ‘political’ and “many
emotions are about power, persuasion, manipulation, and intimidation” (p.153). A
pressing task is that of wedding the phenomenology of emotion to its social context.
This opens up the possibility of constructive dialogue with the social sciences and thus
moves away from the hostility towards social science that is evident in The Passions.
An increased openness to interdisciplinary perspectives is also evident in the eighth
essay, ‘Back to Basics’ (1993, revised 2001), which addresses some central concerns
of current biological thinking on the emotions. Solomon is critical of reductionist
strategies, which attempt to break the emotions down into a set of biological atoms or
basic emotions, and suggests that any list of basic emotions needs to be socially and
historically situated. For example, ethical interests will motivate very different
taxonomies from objective science, a point that can be illustrated by the contrast
between Aristotle’s discussion of emotion and recent scientific accounts of affect
programmes. Solomon suggests that many different taxonomies can inform different
contexts of interest. Hence scientific taxonomies are not privileged over all others.
Though critical of universal ‘basic emotions’, Solomon explicitly concedes the
importance of current scientific research, even admitting that reductionism, though it
needs to be constrained to its appropriate contexts, has made “enormous strides”
(p.131).
The tenth essay, ‘Against Valence’ (2001), ventures a structurally similar argument to
‘Back to Basics’ in suggesting that current and historical divisions between ‘positive’
and ‘negative’ emotions are multifarious, with very different distinctions being of use
in different contexts. In one context, a pleasure/pain dichotomy may be invoked,
whilst in another, virtue/vice might take central place. The central claim of both
essays is that emotions are complex and need to be approached from many different
angles. Thus the urge to reduce them all to a uniquely accurate set of basic emotions,
which can be crudely classified as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, should be resisted.
In the final two essays, Solomon makes two substantial concessions to his critics,
weakening his longstanding claims that we are responsible for our emotions and also
acknowledging that the bodily aspects of emotion are important. In his earlier work,
Solomon repeatedly refers disparagingly to mere affects, claiming that emotions are
not merely feelings and that affect is not even a necessary feature of emotional
experience. However, given his reliance on phenomenology, this hostility to the idea
that body states have an important experiential role is peculiar. Solomon regularly
appeals to the likes of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, all of whom draw
attention to the practical and/or embodied nature of world experience. Indeed, the
experiential role of a bodily orientation is readily apparent to any amateur
phenomenologist. The cup only appears graspable and the chair only appears
comfortable when encountered through a sense of one’s bodily capacities. This simple
acknowledgement is enough to indicate that the body plays a role in structuring at
least some of one’s experiential judgments. And it is a short step from here to the
claim that certain characteristic feelings of body states are indissociable from those
systems of constitutive judgments that Solomon calls emotions.
339
In Essay 11, ‘Thoughts and Feelings’ (2001), Solomon concedes this point and admits
that his early work is guilty of neglecting the body: “In my original theory, it was by
no means clear that the body had any essential role in emotion” (p.189). He
acknowledges that feelings are not, as previously maintained, a “secondary concern”
(p.189) and need to be accommodated into any comprehensive account of emotion.
However, Solomon does not simply resign himself to the view that emotions are
‘judgments plus affects’ but suggests instead that we should incorporate what are
traditionally called ‘affects’ into the category ‘judgment’. Appealing to Heidegger,
Solomon notes that the major part of our dealings with the world are practical and
engaged, rather than theoretical and detached. Given this, he invokes the category of
kinaesthetic judgments or “judgments of the body” (p.191) and argues that the so-
called ‘affective’ dimensions of emotion can be reinterpreted as judgments, given a
greater emphasis on practical, habitual judgments. Such an emphasis is defensible
because “it is only as an embodied and mobile social being that we have any but the
most primitive cognitions about the world” (192).
This widening of the category ‘judgment’ raises the question of just what, according to
Solomon, a ‘judgment’ actually is. Solomon first addresses this issue in detail in the
seventh essay, ‘On Emotions and Judgments’ (1988). He explains that judgments, in
his sense of the term, are not reasoned actions or conscious appraisals but largely
tacit structures that are “prereflectively constitutive of experience” (p.95). In other
words, they are structures through which a meaningful experiential world appears to
us. It is clear then that emotional judgments are not explicit choices. In fact, Solomon
notes that they are more like perceptual judgments, in that they are “pre-reflective
and inarticulate” (p.97). But this points to a problem for his account. Solomon’s
conception of ‘judgment’ does not seem to entail that all or even most judgments
involve responsibility. It is by no means clear that I am responsible, in any informative
sense, for my perceptual judgments. I would have great difficulty in making the
computer I am sitting in front of appear to me as anything other than a ‘computer’.
My perceptual judgments are the way in which the world strikes me. I might, through
various bizarre activities and with a great deal of practice, make my computer appear
to me as something else, but such an indirect conception of responsibility could
arguably be applicable to just about any aspect of life. The claim that we are
responsible for our emotions, which rests largely on the claim that emotions are
judgments that we make, is therefore threatened.
This problem is even more apparent in ‘Thoughts and Feelings’, where Solomon states
that animals make judgments, such as “whether something is worth eating, worth
chasing, or worth courting” (p.187), and also acknowledges that animals are not
responsible for their emotions. Yet, if judgment does not point to responsibility, it is
unclear how Solomon’s argument for responsibility can be sustained. What’s more, if
cases such as fish feeding and cats chasing mice are to be admitted as judgments, the
category ‘judgment’ appears broad enough to accommodate some of the most
automated behaviours. Hence the concern arises that ‘judgment’, if widened so as to
incorporate the bodily changes that are generally taken to be partly constitutive of
emotional experience, becomes so general as to risk being uninformative. Indeed, it
seems to accommodate even those Jamesian physiological occurrences that Solomon
has been excluding all along. If ‘judgment’ incorporates activities such as gaging the
height of the stairs as you’re running up them, working out the speed of a ball that
340
you’re running to catch and all other aspects of bodily ‘know-how’, then it might as
well incorporate everything. Is the dilation of my pupils during fading sunlight a
judgment?
These concerns aren’t really alleviated by Solomon’s most lengthy discussion of

judgment and responsibility in the final essay ‘On the Passivity of the Passions’
(2001). We are told that “what characterizes freedom and responsibility with regard to
emotions, one might say, is the appropriateness of the emotion not only to the
immediate circumstances but to one’s whole life and character” (p.205). But
appropriateness does not imply responsibility. Following this, it appears that Solomon
conflates responsibility for one’s judgments with ownership of those judgments. He
draws an analogy between emotions and thoughts (pp.206-7), both of which may
seem to ‘pop out of nowhere’ but still belong to one. However, it is less than clear that
we are responsible for such thoughts. What we are responsible for is the extent to
which we culture them and weave them into the narratives of our lives and, more
obviously, act on them. However, there are arguably many cases in which a thought is
‘mine’, even though I am not responsible for it. Similarly, that an emotion is ‘mine’
and that it is appropriate in the context of my life does not imply responsibility.
Solomon does acknowledge such problems to some extent and renounces any strong
claim to the effect that we are always responsible for all our emotions. Instead,
emotional judgment is “a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, some aspects of
which are clearly within our control and some of which are not” (p.210). Hence we can
admit that some habitual judgments are not ‘under our control’ in any informative
sense, whilst maintaining that other emotional judgments, perhaps the majority, are
our responsibility. This may well be the case, but the problem remains that the
category ‘judgment’ has been watered down to such an extent that the claim
‘emotions are judgments’ doesn’t really tell us very much at all. It is not even clear
that certain bodily judgments can be distinguished from what are commonly called
affects or feelings. For example, suppose I feel an intense and debilitating pain in my
leg as I approach a flight of stairs. Could one simply re-describe this feeling as the
practical or bodily judgment that I can’t get up the stairs?
So, what is left of the strong claim that we are responsible for our emotions? It seems
that we are responsible for certain emotions and to varying extents. In addition, given
that judgments are multifarious, it is not even clear that the same notion of
‘responsibility’ will be applicable to all cases. What does remain intact though is
Solomon’s longstanding pragmatic claim that it is beneficial for us to think of
ourselves as responsible for our emotions. Such a stance, he argues, can motivate us
to take responsibility in those instances where it is indeed possible to do so. It might
also widen the arena of responsibility, given that social attitudes towards emotion and
responsibility are themselves partly constitutive of the scope of responsibility.
341
2003.07.07
D'Oro Giuseppina
Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience
D'Oro, Giuseppina, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, Routledge, 2002,

192pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415239710.
Reviewed by Gary Ciocco, Wheeling Jesuit University
Giuseppina D’Oro adds to Collingwood scholarship with this small treatise devoted to
defending him and to resurrecting his Kantian heritage. The major scholarly disputes
over Collingwood are downplayed; instead, the “unusual strategy of beginning by
assuming that there is continuity between the early and the later Collingwood” is
employed (2). In Chapter Two of her ten-chapter, 142-page text, D’Oro repeats the
refrain of Collingwood scholars worldwide—that his contribution to the history of
philosophy has been largely ignored. Indeed, philosophy textbooks almost always
exclude even the mention of Collingwood. Louis Mink commented over thirty years
ago in Mind, History and Dialectic that Collingwood was probably the most widely read
neglected philosopher of our time (MHD 1). D’Oro focuses on Collingwood’s
discussions of philosophical method and of metaphysics and defends the importance
of his ideas on these matters. Part of the longstanding neglect of Collingwood’s ideas
on method and metaphysics is due to his initiative to reform metaphysics rather than
just criticize it. His attempts at this reformation occur most directly in An Essay on
Philosophical Method(EPM), An Autobiography(AA), and An Essay on Metaphysics(EM),
and these three texts, along with the perennial The Idea of History(IH), are the focus
of this book. Collingwood’s supposed “radical conversion” to historicism in his later
writings is covered, but only in order to explain the importance of philosophy as “a
reflexive activity whose task is to bring to light or render explicit what was already
implicitly known” (9).
Collingwood’s connection to Hegel is ignored as D’Oro tries to defend the claim that
Collingwood’s notion of metaphysics, and of philosophy in general, was inspired by
Kant. It is argued that Collingwood’s metaphysics of experience is grounded in the
elegantly written EPM, published in 1933, in which he unveils his idea that the method
of philosophy is neither deductive nor inductive. The philosopher begins from
experience—the first-order practice of a certain discipline, such as art, science or
history—and
uncovers principles that are a priori, not in the sense that they are necessarily true, or
cannot be denied without contradiction, but in the sense that they underpin, structure
and make possible a particular area of knowledge or experience . . . . The principles
that the philosopher advances as capturing the deep structure of a particular area of
experience are justified to the extent that they succeed in explaining the nature of the
activity singled out for attention, not to the extent that they are intuitively or
deductively true (10).
342
Philosophy is both normative and descriptive; Collingwood calls this dual nature
“criteriological” and emphasizes that the philosopher’s concern with logic perfectly fits
this nature, since logic both describes how we actually think and how we ought to
think (12). The logic of philosophy, as expressed in EPM, is based on the idea of
overlapping classes, by virtue of which, for example, a single action can be called
“pleasant, expedient and right” (15). This is so because a philosophical distinction “is
a distinction without a difference” (15; EPM 50) and subdividing a philosophical
concept into its specific classes is “a purely internal or conceptual distinction” (15). In
EM, Collingwood changes his language but not his point; he argues that the
philosopher is concerned with uncovering “presuppositions,” which are “assumptions
of a logical nature” (16). This concern is a metaphysical one, since it “arises out of the
recognition that there is an element in knowledge that is non-empirical” (16). In
Collingwood’s “metaphysics without ontology,” the philosopher does not discover
ultimate truths about reality, but the principles that govern experience.
Whether Collingwood’s method is called ’the metaphysics of experience’, ’descriptive

metaphysics’, or ’metaphysics without ontology’, it is a radicalized Kantian
transcendentalism (25). Kant and Collingwood share the following themes: an attempt
to reform metaphysics rather than just criticize it; a complicated idealism; an
emphasis on logic rather than on psychology within epistemology; and, a “regressive”
method, that is, one which proceeds from a fact of experience to its logical ground.
Unlike Kant, however, Collingwood makes it clear that philosophy does not expand our
knowledge; rather, it adds an entirely new category of propositions into the mix. In
addition to matters of fact and relations of ideas, to use Humean terms, there are
philosophical propositions, which “express the kind of explanations which are
employed by the practitioners of different discipline” (33). These philosophical
propositions are synthetic . priori, but only in a weak epistemic sense because they
are explanatorily necessary (33). Collingwood argues against epistemological
skepticism, but he also breaks with Kant by emphasizing the futility of “speaking of an
unknowable residue beyond the sphere of conscious experience” (36).
Collingwood’s anti-realism is presented succinctly in AA in the claim that “the knower

does make a difference to what is known” (AA 44). According to D’Oro, the realists of
Collingwood’s time, especially Prichard, failed to distinguish epistemological idealism
(Kant’s and Collingwood’s) from ontological idealism (Berkeley’s). Collingwood’s
idealism is epistemological, and this is gathered from his primary, if not exclusive
interest in “intentional objects, objects as known” (45). Things in themselves cannot
be described as unknown to us, precisely because “it does not make sense to speak of
knowing them at all” (47). Collingwood differs from epistemological pragmatists and
from ethical consequentialists as well, since he, unlike them, does not consider
metaphysical maxims to be “superfluous” (48). Pragmatists also hope for a non-
normative form of discourse, says D’Oro, which will not work for Collingwood, who
wants to retain, “within the framework of a metaphysics of principles, the normative
role that transcendent entities played in Platonic metaphysics” (51-2).
Collingwood’s also adopts an epistemic anti-naturalism. In EPM, he does not reify

universals, but his Platonism is found in the idea of concepts being “understood as
ideal standards against which particulars are compared” (59). Philosophical concepts
add nothing to the world; in the course of exemplifying such concepts, empirical
343
entities are described (60). In EM, Collingwood explicitly defends his idea of unique
philosophical propositions against the logical positivists who would reject them
because they are neither empirically nor analytically verifiable. Proponents of the
radical conversion often fail to notice that in EM Collingwood “chose his terminology
specifically in order to be understood by his philosophical opponents” (63). In this
vein, philosophy is not concerned with propositions which can be true/false, but with
absolute presuppositions, which “are not answers to any questions, but constitute the
condition of the possibility of providing empirically true/false answers in propositional
form” (64). As part of Collingwood’s ’logic of question and answer’, absolute
presuppositions are important because they are “not questions to which genuine yes
and no answers can be given” (65). The statement ’God exists’ is a classical example
of an absolute presupposition, specifically one of religious experience. To turn that
presupposition into the question, ’Does God exist?’, however, is not really proper—
from the point of view of religious belief or experience, a positive answer to the
question is a necessary presupposition. EPM and EM thus have the same goal—to
show that absolute presuppositions, the subject-matter of metaphysics, are not
meaningless; but, because they are not empirical, they require another method of
verification, the method of determining “whether they are true to the kind of
experience or knowledge that they make possible” (65).
D’Oro connects Collingwood’s need to defend the ontological argument with his
iconoclastic interpretation of it, in which Anselm’s famous proof “is innocent of strong
ontological implications” and is thus compatible with a descriptive metaphysics (75).
As Collingwood writes: “What [Anselm] proves is not that because our idea of God is
an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit, therefore God exists, but that because our
idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit, we stand committed to belief in
God’s existence” (77; EM 190). The ontological argument shows us the essential task
of philosophy, “that of bringing to light certain fundamental assumptions that govern
our experience, whether religious, scientific or historical” (77). D’Oro claims that the
radical-conversion theorists ignore a difference between a sociology of knowledge and
Collingwood’s descriptive metaphysics. Collingwood repeatedly claims that the
subject-matter of philosophy is explanatorily rather than metaphysically necessary,
even if he does couch it in different words in different books (84-5). What the
ontological proof really shows is that the only kinds of necessary propositions are
those which are “definitive of domains of inquiry.” Philosophy, identified with these
definitions of domains of inquiry, is a normative task which is indeed concerned with
the notion of justification and the idea of comparing knowledge claims across time.
The radical-conversion theorists claim the opposite, however. Alan Donagan, for one,
has called Collingwood’s project in EM a “depth psychology,” by which he means in
part that justification has been abandoned in favor of an inquiry into the origins of
belief (88). Donagan argues that all Collingwood cares about is finding out what
“beliefs people are compelled to hold not on account of nature (as Hume claimed) but
of history” (91). But Collingwood was interested in the justifications of our beliefs and
was interested in them from the standpoint of Kantian-style transcendental
arguments, which “compel us to accept certain conclusions as a matter of logic” (93).
Transcendental arguments are . priori, but they differ from deductive arguments
because their “premises are validated through the process of argument [unlike
deductive arguments] and have no independent justification [but] . . . establish
344
certain conclusions by accepting the interdependence of beliefs and the circularity of

knowledge claims” (93-4). Collingwood claims that presuppositions have ’logical
efficacy,’ (EM 27), by which he means that they give rise to questions. Whereas
differences in relative presuppositions “give rise to different questions within the same
mode of inquiry, differences in absolute presuppositions give rise to differences in
modes of inquiry” (96). Thus far, D’Oro has convincingly claimed mainly that (1)
Collingwood’s metaphysics is about “what we are logically committed to believe,
rather than what we actually believe,” and (2) that Collingwood was trying to save
metaphysics from the onslaught of the logical positivists and thus employed a
terminology that they would understand (99). Absolute presuppositions make
experience possible, so even though they are empirically unverifiable, they are very
meaningful. The logic of question and answer utilizes justification because it attempts
to show us what we “ought to believe,” not just what we do in fact believe.
Chapter Eight, the longest chapter in the book, shows how The Idea of History is
concerned with distinguishing between the domains of inquiry of historians and
natural scientists, thus demonstrating how absolute presuppositions can help us to
identify different modes of inquiry. For Collingwood historical knowledge explains
“what occurs as an expression of rational processes rather than as a manifestation of
empirical laws” (105). One of the absolute presuppositions of historians is that “the
real is rational,” not in the Hegelian sense, “but in the sense that only what can be
interpreted rationally is real (i.e. an appropriate subject matter) for historians” (107).
The historian’s emphasis on rational processes is brought to light in the concept of
action, which is opposed to the scientist’s concern with an ’event,’ the result of natural
necessity (108). D’Oro connects this discussion with Collingwood’s infamous theory of
re-enactment expressed in IH. According to this theory, actions have an inner,
thought dimension which events lack and which historians must attempt to re-enact in
their own minds. The theory has been criticized for endorsing private mental states
and thus investing historians “with telepathic powers of access” (110). But such critics
are wrong, argues D’Oro, even though Collingwood begs for such criticism with his
sloppy use of language in IH. The . priori logic of the historian is what the critics
ignore. The historian explains an action not by a Humean constant conjunction, but by
reconstructing “a practical syllogism in which the agent’s beliefs and desires stand to
the action as the premises of a deductive argument stand to the conclusion” (110). In
EM this idea is presented more directly, without the possible psychologistic reading
inspired by the “inside/outside” distinction used in IH.
Collingwood’s philosophy of history has been called overly intellectualistic, since not all
human actions are rational. But Collingwood simply wants to delineate the domain of
history, and non-rational actions, while they certainly exist, are not part of the narrow
definition of ’action’ presupposed by historians. And when Collingwood defines actions
as ’expressions of thought,’ “he is simply unpacking the concept of action, he is not
making a claim about the extension of the concept” (114). It has also been claimed
that Collingwood ignores non-rational conditions that affect behavior. In one oft-
criticized passage, he writes that a poor person’s actions cannot be determined by
“the fact of his children’s unsatisfied hunger, the fact, the physiological fact, of empty
bellies and wizened limbs, but his thought of that fact” (IH 315-6; 114). D’Oro
defends Collingwood here by saying that he is committed to the idea that “if objective
or material conditions are overwhelming, there simply cannot be a history of thought”
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(114). The statement that ’All history is a history of thought’ must be appreciated in
the light of the task of IH—to delineate the domain of historical inquiry. Chapter Eight
closes by discussing Collingwood’s critique of the ’scissors-and-paste’ historian, who
essentially does history by “repeating statements that other people have made before
him” (116;IH 274). This approach to history fails because it classifies across
categories. The task of a philosophy of history, according to Collingwood, “is not to
show historians how to acquire knowledge of the past, but to clarify what the subject
matter of history is by bringing to light the . priori principles or categories that guide
historians . . .” (124).
The final two chapters further clarify the importance of history for philosophy. History
is the study of mind because it presupposes the idea of an ’action,’, which involves
studying and re-enacting thought. Since thought has no spatio-temporality, the
historian and the historical agent can have one and the same thought. This holds true
because mentalistic explanations are teleological— “they are concerned with the
relationship between logical ground and consequent rather than with the relationship
between temporal antecedent and consequent” (130). Historians thus attempt to use
explanation and justification at the same time; they “connect the explanandum with
the explanans in the way in which a detective seeks to unmask a crime by looking for
motives . . .,” not by looking for causes of an ’event’ (132). History, as the science of
mind writ large, is criteriological, presupposes rationality, and is opposed to natural
science, which is the science of the body. Collingwood’s anti-realism and his anti-
naturalism are “the result of his commitment to transcendentals” (135). He defends
the autonomy of the mental only because he presents metaphysics as “concerned with
the kind of concepts and conceptual distinctions that cannot be empirically observed
but which nonetheless structure . . . [ experience]” (138).
For Collingwood method determines subject matter, and “there is no ontology that is
ultimate or more basic” (138). The mind-body problem is very real, but Collingwood
says that the problem is identified by the collision of the sciences of the mind with the
sciences of the body. This kind of problem is both persistent and particular to
philosophy, which tackles “problems that arise when concepts applicable in the
different domains of inquiry begin to interfere with each other” (141). Philosophical
problems are conceptual and are resolved . priori, by reflecting on experience, not by
accumulating new empirical data (141). Collingwood thus upholds the importance of
philosophy and explains the perennial nature of philosophical problems with his
reformed metaphysics.
The only weakness of the book is, ironically, its treatment of the pragmatists. To say
that the pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth and hope for a non-
normative discourse is shortsighted at best. M. Adler, in Six Great Ideas, puts it
succinctly and well when he states that James’ pragmatism was not a new definition of
truth, but “accepted the traditional so-called correspondence theory of truth and
proceeded to offer useful indications or criteria for determining whether a given
statement was true or false” (SGI 213). To take it even further, I personally hope
someone can meet Mink’s decades-old challenge—not yet attempted let alone met, as
far as I know—to prove Collingwood part of the same philosophical stream as both the
pragmatists and the existentialists. Mink says that Collingwood matches the two
movements in their relevance to the problematic human condition and that
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Collingwood and they have offered “ not merely expressions of it but proposals of
ways of thinking about it” (MHD 7). As parting evidence that Collingwood’s connection
to the pragmatists needs closer attention, here is a passage from Dewey, which could
easily be inserted into EM: “Failure to examine the conceptual structures and frames
of reference which are unconsciously implicated in even the seemingly most factual
inquiries is the greatest single defect that can be found in any field of inquiry” (MHD
9).
The pragmatists aside, D’Oro does a fine job of outlining what is undoubtedly the
major point of Collingwood’s collected work—the merging of philosophy and history
(Collingwood sometimes uses the word rapprochement to describe this merger).
Collingwood reforms metaphysics into an historical, criteriological science and holds it
as the highest form of philosophical achievement possible. There are larger books on
this subject, but their size is due to the fact that they try to integrate all of
Collingwood’s major works in arguing for or against his overall project. This small
book almost completely ignores Speculum Mentis, Principles of Art, The Idea of
Nature, and New Leviathan. But the text does not suffer from its conciseness. D’Oro
has proven Collingwood’s great debt to Kantian transcendentalism, with its yin and
yang trappings of rationalism and conceptualism—but not historicism. Unlike Mink and
Rubinoff, D’Oro never once uses the word ’dialectic’ and, unlike theirs and other
longer works, she eschews much of the comprehensive polemics of the “radical
conversion” and delves mainly into EPM and EM to find Collingwood’s continuity. There
is nary a single negative judgment made of Collingwood, but then she understood her
task as one of defense or apology. Collingwood is important, and this brief, lucid book
tells us so again by reconstructing his Kantian roots.
2003.07.08
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Including Texts by

Edmund Husserl, edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, Northwestern
Reviewed by Eric Matthews , University of Aberdeen
This useful addition to Northwestern’s series Studies in Phenomenology and Existential

Philosophy contains a number of related works by different authors. At its heart, and
giving unity to the whole volume, are Merleau-Ponty’s “Course Notes” for the course
which he gave at the Collège de France in 1959-60 under the title “Husserl aux limites
de la phénoménologie”, together with a revised version of John O’Neill’s translation of
the summary of this course, which originally appeared in In Praise of Philosophy and
Other Essays, published by Northwestern UP in 1988. The other works in the present
volume provide either background to, or commentary on, the Course Notes. In
particular, Part 2 consists of three essays by Husserl which Merleau-Ponty commented
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on in his course: “The Origin of Geometry”, “Foundational Investigations of the

Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature” and “The World of the Living
Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World That is Outside the Flesh”. In
his Foreword, the principal editor, Leonard Lawlor, sets Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in the
Course Notes in retrospective and prospective context: retrospectively in relation to
Husserl and Heidegger, and prospectively as anticipating Derrida. In her Afterword,
the other editor, Bettina Bergo, explores Merleau-Ponty’s deviations from Husserlian
phenomenology. Finally, there is a helpful glossary of German terms, and a note on
the history of the texts included in the volume.
It is obvious, even from this brief summary of the contents, that the volume could be
of interest from different perspectives: to students of Husserl, in showing how another
great philosopher interpreted some of Husserl’s works, and to students of the history
of French philosophy in the twentieth century, for the light it sheds on a key
transitional period in that development. But its primary interest will be for scholars of
Merleau-Ponty’s thought – not in its relation to that of other philosophers, but simply
for its own sake. Here we see Merleau-Ponty towards the end of his tragically short
life, still grappling with Husserlian phenomenology, as he had been throughout his
career, and extracting new insights from it to develop his own philosophy.
At the most obvious level, what Merleau-Ponty was offering in his lectures was a
commentary on Husserl: but we need to ask what he understood by a “commentary”
on another philosopher. As Leonard Lawlor points out in his Foreword, Merleau-Ponty
rejected the idea of an “objective”, in the sense of a disinterested, reading of a
philosopher in which we simply try to “appropriate” from the outside that
philosopher’s thoughts. This, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures what the
philosopher has to say: a thought, as he says (p.14), is “the circumscription of an
unthought”. The philosopher himself is not, as he goes on to say, “the absolute
possessor of all of his thoughts”, and we can understand what his thoughts were only
through the world on to which they open. Using a term borrowed from Husserl
himself, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “poetizing” the history of philosophy – in other
words, as the editor points out, creatively interpreting it. Merleau-Ponty’s point seems
to be that the thoughts of a philosopher emerge only from a dialogue between the
philosopher and his commentator, in which, of course, the interests of the
commentator play a part. In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s commentary on Husserl (or
anyone else) is as much a development of his (Merleau-Ponty’s) thoughts as an
exposition of Husserl.
This implies in turn, of course, that our own understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s text will
be more than a disinterested appropriation of the words on the page. It too will be the
outcome of a dialogue between ourselves as readers and the author. Moreover, there
is another, more mundane, problem. What we have on these pages are lecture notes,
rather than the continuous prose of a written treatise. Anyone who has ever given a
lecture which is more than a verbatim reading aloud of a written text will know what
that means. Lecture notes are simply brief reminders of what the lecturer intends to
say, and so are liable to be cryptic to anyone other than their author. This is clearly so
in this case. Some passages are reasonably transparent, but others need a good deal
of hermeneutic reflection to make any kind of sense at all (and it is correspondingly
uncertain what their sense might be). We can gain some help from knowledge of
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Merleau-Ponty’s other works, especially those of the same period, including, of course,
the summary of the course which is contained in this volume. But it would be
presumptuous to be anything more than tentative in our interpretation of Merleau-
Ponty’s late philosophy, as contained in these notes.
Husserl’s essay on “The Origin of Geometry” was originally published (minus the first
two paragraphs) in 1939 in Revue internationale de philosophie, 1, no 2. The editors
of the present volume suggest that hints in the first two paragraphs indicate that it
was meant for inclusion in Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology. Certainly, these paragraphs connect the problem of
the essay with Galileo, one of whose major contributions to the development of the
modern scientific world-view was his thesis that the book of Nature is written in the
language of geometry, and can be read only by those who know that language. It is
the objectivist conception of our relation to nature implicit in this thesis which is, of
course, a central source of the “crisis” of which the title of Husserl’s work speaks.
Merleau-Ponty clearly makes the connection with the themes of the Crisis volume. His
commentary on Husserl’s essay treats it throughout as an attempt to give an account,
not only of geometry but of all forms of ideality, which avoids false objectification of
ideal entities by relating them always to their base in human experience. He speaks in
the Resumé of the Course (p. 9) of the need, through meditation, to ’learn of a mode
of being the idea of which we have lost, the being of the “ground” (Boden), and that
of the Earth first of all – the earth where we live . . .’. Later on the same page, he
contrasts this with the ’Copernican constitution of the world’ which means that ’I
pretend to be an absolute observer, forgetting my terrestrial roots which nevertheless
nourish everything else’ and ’consider the world as the pure object of an infinite
thought’.
This is reminiscent of the programmatic statements at the beginning of

Phenomenology of Perception, and here, as in that work, Merleau-Ponty connects
starting from terrestrial roots with starting from the embodiment of our subjectivity
and from the access which that embodiment gives us to the subjectivity of others.
Nevertheless, it is true that these Course Notes, like his other late works, are no
longer works of “phenomenology” in the classical Husserlian sense. They are the
expression of an “ontologized phenomenology”, owing more to Heidegger than
Husserl. Or rather, as Merleau-Ponty himself says, (p.53-4), they follow what the later
Husserl was himself attempting (perhaps without fully realising it) to do, namely, to
take phenomenology up to its limits in order to transform it into ontology: we do not
really understand Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty argues, unless we follow what Husserl
was trying to do here.
What was objectionable about the original version of phenomenology, for Merleau-
Ponty, was the tendency towards rationalism inherent in its conception of
transcendental subjectivity as ’existing in the singular, beyond the plurality of humans
and the world’. Ironically, to treat the phenomenological subject in this way was
precisely to engage in the objectification of ideal abstractions, and of the world as
constituted by them, which gave rise to the crisis which Husserl identified in his last
writings. This in its turn led to an implicit idealism, according to which the world of our
actual experience was distinct from the world as it is in itself. The project of
ontologizing phenomenology, at least as Merleau-Ponty seems to have seen it, was
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that of abandoning both this idealism and its fellow-traveller objectivism and re-
affirming the links between our consciousness and the world of which we are
conscious. (In many ways, this was Merleau-Ponty’s project in his earlier works too,
but he seems to have come to think in his later life that perhaps he had not freed
himself sufficiently from “transcendental phenomenology” in his best-known works).
At the heart of this project was the need to give a non-objectivist account of ideal
entities. Geometry must be seen from this point of view as existing ’only in a space of
humanity’, that is, as resting on human acts, which made it, and other forms of
ideality, historical. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s essay suggested to him that
speech-acts played a key role, that we should see man, world and language as
“interwoven”. As in other works, he distinguishes between “spoken speech”, the
ready-made language constituted by past acts of speaking, and “speaking speech”,
language in the course of being constituted. Because we speak to others, the thoughts
expressed in language are not the contents of my individual mind, but a
“coproduction” of myself and others. They take on a life of their own, existing in
between subjects, but clearly not independent of human subjects – they are, after all,
a human creation. There are no “subjects” and “objects”, and so no subject-object
relation. It is inter subjectivity which constitutes the horizon of humanity. We are
human, Merleau-Ponty says, neither when at the pole of brute individual existence nor
when at the opposite pole of pure ideality. The horizon of humanity is “between me
and other individuals. It is not object” (p. 35). This is what Merleau-Ponty calls his
“antihumanistic humanism”, a good description of his position, implying as it does that
the position is both humanistic, in the sense of rooting ideality in human existence,
and yet antihumanist, in the sense of rejecting traditional humanist emphasis on
individual subjectivity.
In a sense, as said above, this apparently contradictory phrase could apply to the
whole of Merleau-Ponty’s work throughout his career. One of the things which is most
fascinating about the present volume is that it shows him still wrestling with these
problems at the end of his life, dissatisfied with earlier attempts, even while still using
some of the concepts he had earlier employed. For those who, like this reviewer, are
devoted to the thought of Merleau-Ponty, it will be an invaluable source for the study
of the ways in which that thought was developing towards the end of his life. The
editorial materials included are on the whole helpful, though Leonard Lawlor’s
Foreword dwells rather too much on the relation between late Merleau-Ponty and early
Derrida – two thinkers who, it seems to me, had very different preoccupations,
whatever similarities there may have been between them in some respects. The result
is that, in some parts of the Foreword, Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts are described in an
inappropriate and confusingly obscure Derridean language, which reduces the value of
the commentary. In general, however, this is a book strongly to be recommended to
all those working in this area.
2003.07.09
Alan Berger
Terms and Truth
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Berger, Alan, Terms and Truth, MIT Press, 2002, 251pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN
0262025191.
Reviewed by Robin Jeshion, Yale University
Alan Berger’s new book, Terms and Truth, makes a major contribution to the
development of the new theory of reference. This theory, initiated by Kripke, Kaplan,
Donnellan, and Marcus over thirty years ago, aims to explain how ordinary proper
names and some general terms refer to objects in the world without appealing to a
descriptive meaning or Fregean sense. The reference is supposed to be in some way
“direct”.
Although the new theory of reference (NTR) has, arguably, become the dominant
semantic theory, many questions remain alive. The most pressing perhaps are those
that focus on how it can be that reference is direct, especially in situations in which a
speaker uses a name (or certain other general terms) to refer yet has not herself ever
in effect “tagged” the name to its referent by focusing on that referent, and, indeed,
in many cases has not and cannot focus on the referent (as in our reference to
Aristotle). The name’s referent is supposed to be secured – somehow – because the
speaker stands in some historical or causal communication-chain relation to the
named object. Many have appealed to such an historical/causal communication-chain
relation, yet few have provided a rigorous analysis of it. Clearly, it depends upon a
detailed semantic analysis of anaphora. Berger’s book can be seen as an attempt to
fill this lacuna.
The book contains three main parts. The first advances a refined theory of reference
transmission and reference change. Central to this project is Berger’s account of the
two ways that rigid designators secure their reference. One is by an agent introducing
a term with the intention that it will designate the particular object that she is focusing
upon. The other is by an agent introducing a term and a description with the intention
that the term will designate whatever uniquely satisfies the description. By using
these two basic notions, Berger bolsters the NTR by explaining how reference is
preserved through communication chains and, further, how a terms’ reference can
change (as in Evans’ example of “Madagascar”). Berger also uses his analysis to solve
what he claims to be a new puzzle about identity statements.
The second part is about propositional attitude attributions. In it, Berger advocates
basic principles of attitude attribution. He devotes a chapter to the current and
especially interesting issue about belief attributions with empty names. And devotes
another to the problem of intentional identities, giving an analysis of how attitude
attributions can express an agent’s particular epistemic perspective on the world.
The last part of the book contains an analysis of anaphorically used pronouns. Berger
argues that such pronouns are rigid designators, and advances a formal semantics for
sentences containing anaphoric expressions. He delves deeply into the linguistics
literature on anaphorically used pronouns, especially the Discourse Representation
Theory (of Heim and Kamp). This part is considerably less philosophically oriented
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than the rest of the book (and for this reason will be largely ignored below), though
will be of great interest to many who are working at the intersection of philosophy and
linguistics.
Much of the terrain here is familiar: the problems are well-known and the basic
distinction between the two types of rigid designation with which Berger aims to solve
the problems has roots in Kripke. Furthermore, Berger is not exactly staking out a
new position. The importance and strength of the book is in the superb detail with
which Berger develops his theory of anaphora, and his attempts to prove its power by
analyzing instances of reference change.
One of the most significant parts of Berger’s account is his careful analysis of the
conditions for a successful reference-fixing of a term, either by focusing (F-style) or by
description (S-style). One key claim is that in F-style reference-fixing, the reference-
fixer may ascribe certain properties to the object that is focused on, but it is
(generally, says Berger) the focusing itself that picks out the object as the referent,
not any descriptions (that capture the properties ascribed by the reference-fixer). On
the face of it, this seems quite plausible. Although the ancients assumed that
“Hesperus” designated a star and not a planet, this did not invalidate their reference-
fixing, for it was secured not by any assumptions in their celestial theorizing, but
rather because they focused on that object shining in the evening sky. It is this fact
that plays one of the key roles in differentiating F-style and S-style reference-fixing.
Berger articulates a complex apparatus associated with each instance in which a term
has its reference fixed. For each act of introducing a term, there are, according to
Berger, anaphoric background statements (A-B statement), anaphoric background
conditions (A-B conditions), and presuppositions that all play a role in determining an
introduced term’s reference and in accounting for reference change and transmission.
An example of an A-B statement for an F-type introduction of the name “Hesperus” is
“There is (something taken to be) a very bright star out tonight. Let us call it
’Hesperus’“. A-B conditions are conditions that a name must satisfy at the initial
introduction into the language in order for it to designate. In our example, one such
condition is that the reference-fixer must in fact focus on the object (the very
heavenly body) she intends to designate with the name “Hesperus”. Presuppositions
are assumptions that a reference-fixer of an F-type term makes about the object she
intends to name. These involve classifying the intended object by means of some
sortal or other, as in parents’ assumption that the baby they are now focusing on is
their baby.
Berger lays down these notions, but typically does so primarily by offering up
examples. This leaves a number of unanswered questions about—and possibly also
difficulties with—his analysis. What is the difference between an agent ascribing a
property to an object and an agent presupposing something about the object she is
focusing on? And what is the semantic difference, if any? Berger claims that,
generally, ascriptions themselves neither secure the reference nor invalidate the
reference-fixing by focusing (in an F-type case), as in the case of “Hesperus”. Yet he
also claims that an act of naming by means of a focusing may be annulled if a
presupposition is violated, as in a case in which a parent assumes that the child before
her is her own baby, yet unbeknownst to her, the doctor initially brought in the wrong
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baby. According to Berger, if the error is soon discovered, the initial naming may be
annulled. It seems he thinks this annulment ought to be attributed to the
presupposition made by the reference-fixer. Yet since Berger does not offer an
analysis of what distinguishes presuppositions from assumptions made and then
ascribed to an object, we still stand in need of an account of what it is that has the
“power” to annul or redirect reference. Consider this case: suppose I’m a billionaire
and I am interested in buying a small island because I believe it is the most oil-rich
island on the market. When I buy my island, I visit it (focus on it) and name it, and
also I think of it as my oil-rich island. If I’ve been duped, have I not named my island?
It seems I have. (And it is implausible to suppose that the naming may be annulled
because of my mistake.) But it also seems that at a psychological level, my thinking of
my island as oil-rich is entirely analogous to a parent thinking that this baby is her
baby. Perhaps the divide cannot be made out psychologically. Maybe what is doing the
work is something social. (Berger might well by sympathetic with this social type of
diagnosis.) In any event, what is needed is some way to differentiate presuppositions
and ascriptions and their associated semantic powers.
A related question can be illustrated by considering a counterfactual scenario

concerning the reference-fixing of “Neptune”, which in fact originally had its reference-
fixed descriptively (S-type) as “the planet causing such-and-such discrepancies in the
orbits of the other planets” and came to assume the status of an F-type term once
astronomers telescopically identified the planet that satisfies that description. In the
counterfactual scenario, we now learn that the planet telescopically identified (focused
on) by astronomers is not in fact the planet that satisfies the initial reference-fixing
description. Some other planet satisfies that description. Berger claims that in this
scenario, we’d maintain that the planet focused on is the referent of “Neptune” despite
the fact that we knew it failed to satisfy the description used for the initial introduction
of the term in S-type rigid designation. We would not claim that the planet that does
satisfy the description is Neptune. He seems to think that the focusing being a
focusing ensures that we’d say this. I’m willing to grant Berger’s intuition that this is
what we’d say about this case, as described. But I wonder whether he has advanced
the correct diagnosis as to why we’d say this. What if it was only a single day between
the time when scientists focused on the planet and their recognition that it was not
the cause of the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets? Then I’d be inclined
to think that we would say that the planet focused on is not Neptune, that there has
been a mistake, and another planet is Neptune. Yet all that has changed between the
two scenarios is the time when we make our discovery. Here, the case seems just like
the case of the baby. What then accounts for the different intuitions stemming from
the time interval? Is the A-B condition for the S-type naming now a presupposition?
Perhaps. And perhaps an initial presupposition loses its power to annul once enough
time goes by and the community takes the object as satisfying the relevant
presupposition. Is the presupposition then just converted into an ordinary property
that people think the object has, losing its capacity to annul or redirect reference? If
so, why is this?
Berger introduces what he calls a new puzzle concerning identity statements. Since
the identity relation is symmetrical, how can proponents of the NRT maintain that
being H2O is an essential property of water but being water is not an essential
property of H2O? He claims that this puzzle gains backing from the linguistic intuition
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that “Cicero” is a name for Tully and “Tully” is a name for Cicero, yet it seems that
while “water” is a name for H2O, the name “H2O” is not a name for water. But since
water = H2O, it seems that it must be.
I have difficulties calling this a novel puzzle concerning identity statements, and I
have doubts about the linguistic intuitions (I am inclined to think that “H2O” is a name
for water.), but it is clear what Berger is trying to get at and the point is an important
one. He holds that it seems that there is some variety of semantic content in terms
like “H2O” that is not had in ordinary names like “Cicero”. Yet he thinks that we will
share his intuition that they are names all the same, not abbreviations for definite
descriptions. Berger’s very plausible solution is that terms like “H2O” and “Au79” are
S-type names, names whose reference was fixed with a definite description, yet
functions like an ordinary name. He calls them structural descriptive names. I am
inclined to agree with Berger that such terms are not abbreviations for their
introducing descriptions, but I think this is exceptionally controversial, and one would
like to see an argument as to why they are not. (By way of support, Berger cites
Kripke’s claim that numerals are not rigid definite descriptions, but this does not help
since the point about numerals is every bit as controversial.)
I do not think that these present any insurmountable problems for Berger. I press
them here because I think even more work needs to be done in providing an analysis
of the roots of reference for the NRT. What Berger has done already is substantial and
impressive. This book is a high-level, penetrating development of the epistemic
background for and the semantics of anaphora – definitely required reading for those
interested in the theory of reference.
2003.07.10
Thomas Williams (ed.)
The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus
Williams, Thomas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, Cambridge

Reviewed by Stephen D. Dumont, University of Notre Dame
With this installment of The Cambridge Companion, the series now provides volumes
on all three of the principal scholastic figures: Thomas Aquinas (eds. Kretzmann and
Stump, 1993), William of Ockham (ed. Spade, 1999), and John Duns Scotus (1266-
1308), who falls chronologically and, in a sense, intellectually between the other two
great medievals. The need for a Companion on Scotus was arguably greater than for
one on either Aquinas or Ockham, not only because Scotus remains less familiar, even
among specialists, but because there has not been a comprehensive book on his
philosophy in a half-century. (Richard Cross’s recent Duns Scotus [Oxford, 1999]
comes to mind, but it was expressly written as a survey of Scotus’s theology, not his
philosophy.) For the last such study on Scotus one must go back fifty years to Étienne
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Gilson’s mammoth but ill-timed Jean Duns Scot. Introduction à ses positions
fondamentales (Paris: Vrin, 1952), which was outdated before it even appeared.
Readied for press just as the initial volumes of the first critical edition of Scotus’s
writings were published, Jean Duns Scot was not only the last comprehensive study of
Scotus’s philosophy, but also the last major study on Scotus of any kind not based
upon a single line of any modern version of his notoriously unstable texts. Such was
the discrepancy between the Scotus of Jean Duns Scot and the one revealed in the
newly established texts, that Gilson himself warned readers in the preface that his
Scotus did not conform to historical reality. The appearance of the Cambridge
Companion to Duns Scotus is therefore welcome and important. Having replaced the
flawed Jean Duns Scot, it is currently not just the first place to go for a comprehensive
work on Scotus’s philosophy, but the only place.
What kind of replacement this volume forms is clear from its abstract on the flyleaf:
“The essays in this volume systematically survey the full range of Scotus’s thought.
They . . . explain the technical details of his writing . . . and demonstrate the
relevance of his work to contemporary philosophical debate.” This is entirely accurate.
The book is a systematic rather than historical survey of Scotus’s thought that is on
the whole technical and directed at the professional philosopher.
The volume is indeed comprehensive. It contains an introduction to Scotus’s life and

works (Williams) and twelve substantial chapters arranged broadly according to
present-day systematic areas of philosophy. The lead and anchor chapter of the
volume is an extensive overview of Scotus’s metaphysics (c.1, Peter King), followed
by entries on three metaphysical topics: space and time (c. 2, Neil Lewis), universals
and particulars (c. 3, Timothy Noone) and modality (c. 4, Calvin Normore). The next
largest area is philosophy of religion, which comprises two chapters: one on God’s
existence and attributes (c. 6, James Ross and Todd Bates) and another on our
knowledge of God (c. 7, William Mann). Perhaps the most active area of recent
research on Scotus has been in his ethics, so there are three chapters covering that:
natural law (c. 10, Hannes Möhle), metaethics (c. 11, Williams) and virtue theory (c.
12, Bonnie Kent). The area treatment of the volume is rounded out with single
chapters on Scotus’s philosophy of language (c. 5, Dominik Perler), mind (c. 8,
Richard Cross) and knowledge (c. 9, Robert Pasnau). The only area not covered is
political and social thought, which, while not non-existent in Scotus, is not prominent
either, and in any case does not begin to approach the contributions of Aquinas and
Ockham.
Of course, the divisions of modern philosophy do not carve medieval topics at the
joints, but the volume succeeds fairly well in canvassing Scotus’s more important
contributions: the univocity of the transcendental concepts, the reality of universals,
the formal distinction, the modal proof for the existence of God, synchronic
contingency, the abandonment of illumination and the positing of an intellectual
intuition. Nonetheless, because the modern and medieval philosophical grids do not
align, there is some repetition and piecemeal treatment, so that for instance Scotus’s
arguments for univocity are taken up twice (pp. 18-21, 246-47) and his proofs for the
existence of God three times (pp. 43-46, 137-140, 198-209). As noted below, some
topics drop out altogether. On the positive side, the organization by area has paid off
by producing two excellent chapters on topics rarely discussed in works on Scotus, his
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physics (Lewis) and semantic theory (Perler), although recent books by Richard Cross
(The Physics of Duns Scotus [Oxford, 1998]) and Giorgio Pini (Categories and Logic in
Duns Scotus [Leiden, 2002]) have now put these areas more squarely on the Scotus
map. Despite all this coverage, there are some gaps.
In a general vein, there is no chapter giving an overview of Scotus’s historical period

and his position in it, such as those by William Courtenay and Jan Aertsen in the
Ockham and Aquinas Companions respectively. Williams’ introduction rehearses in
some detail Scotus’s academic career and works, but this does not place him in any
historical or intellectual context. What the reader requires is a sketch of Scotus’s
relation to other major figures in the period, his intellectual influences, the debated
issues and intellectual currents of his time, the chief tendencies of his thought and so
forth. Ideally, such a larger picture provides a framework to integrate the ensuing
chapters that otherwise become discrete discussions. At the other end of the volume,
a closing chapter on the legacy of Scotus in modern philosophy, which is substantial
and increasingly appreciated, would have been appropriate and highly useful.
Perhaps most conspicuous is the absence of a chapter, or even dedicated section of a

chapter, on Scotus’s concept of will. To be sure, there are discussions of various
aspects of Scotus’s theory of will scattered across the contributions, but in them the
will is subordinated to other issues. Moreover, some important aspects, such the
causal relation between intellect and will, are not dealt with at all. Given both the
universally recognized importance of Scotus’s concept of the will and the defining
character of voluntarism in his thought, some more extended, express treatment
seems demanded. Such a dedicated chapter seems to have fallen between the cracks
of the systematic areas into which the volume is divided. Other standardly important
results that one might have expected to see treated or treated more prominently
within chapters are Scotus’s rejection of the Boethian-Thomistic model of divine
foreknowledge and his diminution of the reality of the divine ideas with the resulting
elimination of exemplarity as a separate genus of cause.
The contributions themselves are on the whole of a high quality. They are largely well-
written, informed and reliable accounts of Scotus that refrain from advancing novel
interpretations or revising widely accepted ones. Overall, however, they seem shaded
toward the specialist. Four of the entries approach or exceed 100 endnotes, while the
volume as a whole has a scholarly apparatus of more than 900 notes in addition to in-
text citations. At places, the reader is expected to be acquainted with some of
Scotus’s lesser known contemporaries, deal with Latin or manuscript citations in the
notes and follow intricate argument or refined conceptual analysis. Certainly, not all of
the pieces lean toward the specialist. Bonnie Kent’s chapter on Scotus’s virtue theory
is a model of synoptic treatment. Abstaining from technicalities, it puts into relief
distinctive features of Scotus’s doctrine of the virtues against the larger background of
Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas. At the same time, it is not a mere summary, but
manages to be instructive to the specialist while accessible to the non-specialist. At
the other extreme is the Ross/Bates article on natural theology. Lacking even an
introductory paragraph, the chapter immediately plunges the reader into seven
technically stated claims about Scotus’s proof for the existence of God and theory of
the divine attributes. The piece is densely written, heavy with both scholastic and
contemporary terminology and crowded with topics. It provides virtually no general
356
view at all, only detail. Other pieces, while providing an overview, descend
occasionally to levels of detail that could interest only the specialist, as when King
teases apart how Scotus defines Aristotle’s third class of relation (pp. 36-37). Thus,
while the quality of the pieces is on the high side, at places so is their level of
difficulty, at least relative to the intended audience of the Cambridge Companion
series.
Although the entries are reliable, a few misstatements, or at least misleading

statements, of Scotus’s positions have crept in. For instance, according to Normore,
Scotus holds that God is not the partial co-cause of volition in the rational creature,
but the cause only of the will, which in turn is the sole cause of its act: “Hence, while
God causes any given human will, God does not cause the willing of that will. . . .
Scotus seems to think that the only efficient cause of a willing is the will that does it.
God is not another, partial, efficient cause of that willing” (p. 144; cf. p. 139). In fact,
Scotus seems to have thought just the opposite in his important text on the problem,
on which his secretary and literary executor, William of Alnwick, later remarked. In 2
Ord. d. 34-37, Scotus entertains at some length the view that God is only the mediate
cause of volition in the created will, so that God causes the will, but it remains the
total cause of its own act. Although, as Alnwick observes in his remark, Scotus thinks
this view has some merit, he ultimately rejects it as inconsistent with both divine
omniscience and omnipotence. In the end, Scotus sides with the more common
opinion that God is the immediate, partial co-cause of volition. (The issue of divine
cooperation in volition is, of course, separate from the question of whether, within the
rational creature, the will as opposed to the intellect is the total cause of volition,
which Scotus takes up in another important text also remarked on by Alnwick.)
The Ross/Bates entry asserts that one of the “distinctive claims” of Scotus’s natural
theology is that “. . . an a priori demonstration of the existence of God is impossible
because there is nothing explanatorily prior to the divine being; thus, reasoning must
be a posteriori from the real dependences among things we perceive . . . .” (p. 192).
If a priori and a posteriori here refer to the Aristotelian notions of propter quid and
quia demonstration respectively, then one of Scotus’s distinctive claims is much the
opposite. Although Scotus agrees with Aquinas that in the present state there can only
be a quia demonstration of God from effects, he disagrees with Aquinas that a strict
propter quid or causal demonstration of God’s existence is impossible in principle,
depending on what the term ’God’ signifies. Rather, Scotus claims that when the term
’God’ refers to any concept naturally available to us, such as infinite or necessary
being, there can be a propter quid demonstration of the proposition ’God exists’
through the divine essence itself as a middle term. (Scotus holds that the created
intellect can have a distinct knowledge of the divine essence short of beatitude,
although obviously not through natural means.) In fact, the absolute possibility of
such a propter quid demonstration is how Scotus argues against Aquinas that, when
the term ’God’ goes for any naturally available concept, the proposition ’God exists’ is
not only not self-evident to us but not even in itself, a distinction Scotus accordingly
discards. This is a special case of Scotus’s very distinctive and radical conception of
theology as a strict, propter quid science in itself, at least as regards necessary truths
about God, a conception Ockham would later attack at length.
357
On the scholarly side, there are some slips and omissions in the introduction and front
matter. Scotus’s Expositio or literal commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics is not lost
(p. 9), but was uncovered by Giorgio Pini in 1996 and is now nearing publication.
Scotus’s so-called Quaestio logica is not listed among his works, although King cites it
(p. 60 n. 34). It is not clear how complete the list of translations on pp. xv-xvi is
intended to be, but several large items are missing: 1 Lect. d. 39 (Vos), which is used
by Ross/Bates, 2 Lect. d. 3 (Wolter), selections on the formal distinction from 1 Ord.
d. 2, d. 8 and the Quaestio logica (Tweedale) and 4 Ord. d. 15 q. 2 (Wolter), among
others. No mention is made of the nineteenth-century Vivès enlargement of the
Wadding edition, although it is the more widely cited of the two.
As indicated, the volume contains substantial documentation in the endnotes. Their

usefulness, in my view, has been diminished by the decision to refer to passages in
Scotus’s works only by a general, internal citation without supplying either the edition
of the work cited or a volume and page number. Given the complexity and
unfamiliarity of Scotus’s corpus and the variation in internal organization between
different editions, even for the same work, such a bare reference is often not enough
for any but the expert to locate easily. The situation is aggravated because it is
stipulated (pp. xiii-xiv) that the references will be given according to the Wadding,
Vatican, or Bonaventure editions, depending on the work or part of a work cited –
which of these editions is intended for any given reference the reader must already
know or deduce from the introduction – but this is not applied to the Quodlibet and De
primo principio. These are instead cited according to the paragraph numbers of
Wolter’s more recent editions, not that of the older Wadding text. In short, Scotus’s
works simply cannot be cited in the compressed manner of Aquinas’s Summa without
confusion.
One final point of scholarship deserves mention. The volume contains references to
inauthentic sections of the second book of the Ordinatio printed in the Wadding-Vivès
edition, which sections include notably distinction 12 and all of distinctions 15-25 (cf.
p. 60 n. 31; p. 66 nn. 89, 93; p. 67 nn. 97, 99, 100, 103, 105, 107; p. 280 n. 22; p.
281 nn. 28, 30, 31, 35-37, 39; p. 351 n. 32). The recently published critical edition of
2 Ordinatio omits these distinctions, among other material, as interpolations. The
unfortunate state of Wadding’s text at these places has been known for some time,
and ten years ago the modern editors gave a detailed listing of all authentic questions
in Scotus’s commentaries on the Sentences for the first two books (ed. Vat. XIX.55*-
73*). Even if in the present cases no mistaken point of exegesis hangs on the citation
of these extraneous passages, nevertheless every precaution should have been taken
to avoid propagating Wadding’s mistake, which has historically been the source of so
much confusion and misinterpretation.
These complaints do not seriously jeopardize the overall quality of the book. Its
extensive coverage, substantial detail, clear style and largely uniform approach ensure
that it will be the standard entry into Scotus’s philosophy. It is an entry that students
and generalists will likely find difficult, but this is perhaps unavoidable in a book on a
most technical thinker of a most technical period. At the same time, there is certainly
room for another replacement to Jean Duns Scot, one that would set Scotus and his
thought more explicitly in the intellectual context of his period and step back from
isolated results to bring an intellectual portrait of him into focus. This, of course, could
358
only be the book of a single author, not thirteen, which probably explains why after
more than fifty years it has yet to be written.
359
2003.07.11
Nagel, Thomas
Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays
Nagel, Thomas, Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays, Oxford University
Press, 2002, 256pp, $25.00 (hbk), ISBN 019515293X.
Reviewed by John Gardner, University College, Oxford
n Concealment and Exposure, Thomas Nagel collects eighteen previously published

essays of varying length and importance. Most are works of moral and political
philosophy, although the final five (which I will not discuss) relate to his other main
area of philosophical interest, the relationship between mind and reality. Among the
papers in moral and political philosophy, a few might equally be classified as works of
cultural commentary, and a couple perhaps even as works of social psychology. Five
were published in scholarly books and journals, but the rest appeared in newsstand
periodicals such as The New Republic and The London Review of Books (which gives
us some reason to be more optimistic about public culture than Nagel is himself).
More than half are review articles, mostly, but not only, discussing works by other
philosophers.
Ever since his famous 1973 critical notice of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Nagel has
been the acknowledged master of the philosophical review article. His collection Other
Minds (1999) had, and needed, no other raison d’être than to collect together his
classic review articles from the previous quarter of a century. In a way Other Minds
was a book about the art of criticism in philosophy. Concealment and Exposure has no
similar singularity of purpose. Even disregarding the final five essays, the book is
eclectic both in what it talks about and in how it talks about it. Nevertheless it is a
wonderful book. It is wonderful partly for the further excellent review articles that it
adds to the Other Minds archive, and partly for the lively and accessible introduction it
provides to Nagel’s own thought and intellectual personality.
Nearly thirty years on, Nagel returns – in two very different essays – to Rawls’
writings. One, written before Rawls’ death but reading like an intellectual obituary,
surveys (for a general readership) Rawls’ published work from 1951 to 1999. The
Nagel:Rawls page ratio here is 12:1904. One begins to understand how a ten-day
coach tour of Europe must feel. Fortunately one is travelling with the world’s number
one tour-guide, so one always enjoys the grandest view of the very few things that
one gets to see. In the other essay on Rawls, Nagel serves as our topographer. For an
informed student readership, he sets about locating Rawls’ two principles of justice in
the liberal tradition of political thought. Not just in, I should say, but at the centre of A
Theory of Justice, for Nagel, lies at the confluence of all of liberalism’s great
intellectual rivers.
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In both essays, what strikes one most is Nagel’s own sense of belonging to the
landscapes through which he guides us. He is an unapologetic liberal, and a proud son
of the Rawlsian enlightenment. Several of the other essays in the book, not billed as
writings about Rawls, nevertheless exhibit Nagel’s profound loyalty to the general
tenor of the original Rawlsian project. And yet the essays also testify to various
doubts, difficulties, and differences of opinion. I will mention a few.
1. The separateness of persons. Nagel shares Rawls’ commitment to the

deontological aspect of justice. What is just is not just because it is worth doing.
Rather it is worth doing because it is just. In matters of justice the right, as Rawls put
it, is prior to the good. Rawls thought that it follows that justice has an agent-relative
aspect, affecting the extent to which one person can justly be sacrificed for the sake
of others. Nagel appreciates that this does not follow. Amartya Sen, Derek Parfit,
Joseph Raz and others have argued that it is more natural to interpret deontological
principles agent-neutrally. If the fact that an action treats someone justly makes it
worth doing, then aren’t two such actions always more worth doing than one? So
shouldn’t I treat someone unjustly if thereby I can make it the case that two other
people will not be treated (similarly) unjustly, whether by myself or another? This
obviously doesn’t make the treatment just, but doesn’t it make it a justifiable
injustice? In his review of Raz’s Ethics in the Public Domain (1994) Nagel sides with
Rawls and against Raz in denying this conclusion. But strangely his reasons for doing
so still seem only to support the existence of agent-neutral deontological principles
(which Raz accepts) not agent-relative ones. In his review of Scanlon’s What We Owe
to Each Other (1998) Nagel tries to bring out the merit in Scanlon’s contractarian
defence of agent-relativity, but again he seems to turn it into no more than a defence
of agent-neutral deontology. One needs to turn to Nagel’s splendid essay ’Personal
Rights and Public Space’ to find any authentically agent-relative thoughts. Here Nagel
endorses Frances Kamm’s answer on behalf of agent-relativity: ’not only is it an evil
for a person to be harmed in certain ways, but for it to be permissible to harm the
person in those ways is an additional and independent evil’ (38). One may doubt
whether this argument succeeds (the claim made by the agent-neutralist is not one of
permissibility but of justifiability). But at least the argument, unlike those invoked by
Nagel in discussing Raz and Scanlon, does have agent-relative implications if it does
succeed. If successful it yields an agent-neutral value that can only be served through
agent-relative constraints (by maximising the number of people of whom it is true
that it is impermissible to harm them even to minimise the number of people that are
harmed).
2. Equality and luck. Nagel thinks of himself and of Rawls as egalitarians. But in the
more fined-grained classification introduced by Derek Parfit, he and Rawls really count
as ’prioritarians’. They both think that in a world of scarcity the position of the worse-
off should have priority for improvement. But they see no reason to spoil the position
of the better-off except to secure such improvement. Unlike strict egalitarians they do
not think that the fact that wheelchair-bound people cannot enter certain public toilets
is a reason to close those toilets without replacement (126). But they might well think
that builders of new public toilets should give priority, all else being equal, to making
them wheelchair-accessible (on the ground that the wheelchair-bound have fewer
toilet facilities than others). Rawls was animated in his prioritarianism by what might
be called the ’social insurance’ objective: protect people from disadvantage that is no
361
fault of their own. Nagel shares this objective. But in his 1996 H.L.A. Hart lecture
’Justice and Nature’ he clarifies its relationship to justice. Rawls quickly concluded
from the fact that disadvantage is not the fault of the person who experiences it that
it should, in justice, be collectively borne. Nagel has come to think that this is too
quick: there must be an intervening step in which the disadvantage is found to be the
fault of society instead, leaving a range of ’natural’ disadvantages which are nobody’s
fault and which justice does not require anyone to remedy (even if they should
sometimes still be remedied on other grounds, e.g. in the name of decency). The
intervening step is needed, thinks Nagel, to respect justice’s deontological structure: it
is not disadvantage as such that justice abhors, but the unjust infliction or toleration
of it by someone. Nature, thinks Nagel, cannot be that someone. Of course one may
always argue that the someone in question is someone who had the duty to furnish
what nature denied. Nagel does not doubt this. He merely suspects, pace Rawls, that
we cannot by-pass the need to identify that someone before we can think of a
disadvantage under the heading of justice.
3. The priority of justice. The challenge encapsulated in the title of G.A. Cohen’s If
You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re so Rich? (2000) makes Nagel pause to ask
whether he really is an egalitarian. I have just given a reason to doubt whether he is.
But Cohen’s challenge can be generalised to apply to prioritarians as well. Many
relatively well-off people think that we live in an unjust society or an unjust world.
They think that it would be a more just world if they themselves were made less well-
off in order to make some worse-off people better-off. They regard it as a scandal that
the government doesn’t require them, and others like them, to sacrifice more for the
good of others. Yet they do not regard it as a scandal that they, and others like them,
fail to make the same sacrifice without being required by the government to do so. Do
they have a defensible moral position? Rawls leaves room for one by defending a
division of moral labour: the actions that make an individual just are different from
those that make a social institution just; besides, social institutions should give
priority to being just whereas individuals need not. But Nagel seems to rule out such a
division of moral labour with his more sweeping prioritization of justice: ’to appeal to it
is to claim priority over other values’ (113). No wonder, then, that Nagel feels tested
to the limit by Cohen’s challenge, whereas many Rawlsian readers are simply baffled
by it. (As one who does not think that even social institutions should give priority to
being just, I feel its force even less.)
4. Public culture. Nagel’s sensitivity to Cohen’s challenge may also reflect a shared
appreciation of the relative impotence of the liberal state in the face of an inhospitable
public culture. While Cohen emphasises self-indulgence and hypocrisy as obstacles to
our living at ease with ourselves, Nagel emphasises prurience and judgmentalism.
Contemporary culture’s erosion of the division between public and private life – an
erosion thought by Nagel to be oppressive – is a theme of the first few essays in the
volume, most interestingly the title essay. This is where Nagel’s work drifts furthest
away from its Rawlsian roots, both in style and in preoccupations. It reminds one
more of Mill. It cautions against ’confrontation in the public space over different
attitudes about the conduct of personal life’ (25), and offers ’an anticommunitarian
vision of civility’ (26) in which liberal-minded people do not make it their programme
to replace people’s illiberal private attitudes with liberal ones by permeating the
culture with liberal moralising (anti-racist, pro-gay, etc.) but rather concentrate on
362
leaving people’s private attitudes well alone. This claim is rather undertheorised until
Nagel links it with Kamm’s modest agent-relativism, which he presents in support of a
kind of citadel of the soul, not amenable to public moral scrutiny or sacrifice.
Gradually he also ties the same idea in with gender politics, on which he proves
himself a sensitive and balanced commentator. What might have struck some
feminists as an alarming throwback to a discredited public-private distinction turns out
to be nothing of the kind. Like Mill, Nagel appreciates that appeals to privacy are a
double-edged sword and have been used to mask grotesque abuses as well as more
subtle methods of disempowerment. He is no reactionary who longs for a reversal of
the sexual revolution, and he has no time for the risible Stepford Wives nostalgia of
Wendy Shalit’s Chastity (1999), a short review of which is also reprinted here. As we
know from his bruising encounter with Cohen, Nagel offers no hiding-place for
privately-inflicted injustices. He merely warns today’s sexual Zapatistas (and the
Clinton-baiting tabloid journalists who are their unexpected and unwanted bedfellows)
against the opposite excess of an impoverishment of human sexuality by casual
disrespect for the boundaries of intimacy.
5. Sex as social construct. It is in the domain of sexuality that several of Nagel’s

themes converge. His remarks on human sexual life, at various points in the book,
exhibit a tenderness and a subtlety that suit the subject-matter as well endearing one
to their author. He resists dogmatic simplification and does not fear being
intellectually unfashionable. In his otherwise sympathetic review of Martha
Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice (1999), for example, he takes issue with
Nussbaum’s lurking affection for the excessively boiled-down idea that sexual relations
are socially constructed. Not all differences between men and women in matters of
sexuality should instantly be interpreted as symptoms of acculturation, and hence as
tainted by the pervasively and persistently unjust treatment of women. Human beings
are also animals with bodies, doing their animal stuff with their bodies. Anatomy is not
destiny but nor is it without influence. This idea helps to lay the groundwork for the
argument, central to ’Justice and Nature’, that – from the point of view of justice – we
need to concentrate on putting right the unjust things that we have done with natural
difference, rather than trying to compensate for natural difference itself, even where
the natural difference is itself differentially advantageous. That only women can give
birth is not an injustice. That they are fired from their jobs for it is.
Such familiar Rawlsian preoccupations are never far from our minds as we read this
book. Through everything Nagel still stands up for the classic Rawlsian conception of
the political: ’The important battles are about how people are required to treat each
other, how social and economic institutions are to be arranged, and how public
resources are to be used’ (26). And yet Nagel also insists, in a way that is unusual
among today’s political philosophers, that these are not the limits of inquiry. He wants
us to understand how the intensely personal aspects of human life – even our fantasy
life – can engage with, and yet at the same time resist, the tentacles of justice. The
result is that the essays in this volume, taken together, do more than any other
philosophical writings known to me to bring out the complex and treacherous truth in
the old maxim that the personal is political.
2003.07.12
363
Richard Kearney
Strangers, Gods and Monsters
Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Routledge, 2002, pp. 304, $24.95
(pbk), ISBN 0415272580.
Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Kosky , Washington & Lee University
Strangers, Gods and Monsters is part of a three-volume work also including Richard
Kearney’s two recent publications, On Stories and The God Who May Be. If we think of
this triptych according to philosophical disciplines, the other volumes might constitute
Kearney’s anthropology and theology while Strangers, Gods and Monsters would be
his ethics; for it is pervaded by questions bespeaking unmistakable ethical concern:
How do we respond to the enigma of otherness represented by the forms named in
the title? And, just as importantly, how is concern for others balanced by the need to
heal our own fragmented lives?
Kearney’s exploration of our relation to these others passes through readings of

philosophy, literature, film, and media portrayals of current events. He is one of the
rare philosophers who can write as deftly on the socio-politics of René Girard and the
philosophy of Jacques Derrida as on Hamlet and James Joyce, without neglecting icons
of popular culture such as Apocalypse Now Redux and Aliens. All of these topics are
included in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. The chapter reflecting on the attacks of
September 11, 2001, bears special mention for both its probity and its useful review
of responses penned by noted cultural figures such as Jean Baudrillard, Noam
Chomsky, and Ian McEwan. Reading Richard Kearney, one begins to doubt the claim
that nobody since the nineteenth century has read all the books in the world; perhaps
Richard has! And to top it off, he’s an excellent photographer, as demonstrated by the
frontispieces to several chapters.
In taking the question of otherness to be fundamental to a reflection on who we are,

Kearney assumes the critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject
of modern metaphysics. Following the positions of Emmanuel Levinas and the ethical
turn of criticism in thinkers such as Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and
John D. Caputo, Kearney argues that “the modern idolatry of the ego” (229) involves
injustice to the other. He analyzes this injustice as it is enacted in cultural practices of
sacrifice and scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of
demons and monsters, and the reduction of the other to the same in laws of
immigration.
Nevertheless, the real target of Strangers, Gods and Monsters turns out to be those
very postmoderns whose critique of the subject first raised the question of the other.
Turning his critical apparatus against them, Kearney aims to depart from the
“postmodernist obsession with absolutist ideas of exteriority and otherness . . . lest it
lead to a new idolatry: that of the immemorial, ineffable Other” (229). What he fears
is that the emphasis on unsettling the self in order to open the self to the other will
364
leave us paralyzed, unable to act because, more fundamentally, we are unable to

make judgments that would discern good and evil, the holy stranger and the wicked
villain, God and the nihilistic abyss.
The supposed postmodern paralysis stems from two related strands of thinking. The
first is found in thinkers such as Kristeva and Lyotard for whom the other is given in a
sublime experience of infinite transcendence. Before this absolutely other, “the human
self finds itself reduced to nothing, exposed to the inhuman feeling of [quoting
Lyotard] ’being dumb, immobilized and as good as dead’“ (p. 93). Levinas, too,
betrays an affinity with this postmodern sublime in that, according to him, the Other is
given in an experience of responsibility which borders on horror—since the self is
haunted by a spectral, absent other that was never present but will always remain
immemorial. In all cases, Kearney argues, otherness is inflated to the point that its
appearance entails violence against the self and leaves the overwhelmed self unable
to act in response.
The second, related source of postmodern paralysis is emphasized by the

deconstructive ethics of thinkers such as Derrida and Caputo. Starting from the
sublime model of absolute alterity, these thinkers leave human action dangling in
undecidability. Since the sublime other
surpasses all our categories of interpretation and representation, we are left with a
problem—the problem of discernment. How can we tell the difference between benign
and malign others? . . . How do we account for the fact that not every other is
innocent and not every self is an egoistic emperor? (67).
For Kearney, deconstructive ethics is unable to answer these questions—indeed it is

premised on the idea that these questions evade the dilemma that constitutes the
very unconditionality of ethics. To ask to know who the other is, to demand that the
other identify itself before I accept or reject obligation is, on their reading,to make
ethical obligation conditional on me and my knowledge of the other. Ethics, however,
must not discriminate; it must be open to indiscriminate otherness so it always risks
opening the door to its own undoing.
Now for Kearney, when Derrida and Caputo talk of undecidability, they are avoiding
questions fundamental to ethical action. “For deconstruction [Kearney writes] aliens
only come in the dark; and we are always in the dark when they come . . . . If all
reading is in the dark how can we even begin to discern”, between, for instance,
Abraham’s leap of faith in response to God and madmen like Jim Jones, David Koresh,
and Muhammad Atta “who believe they are recipients of messianic messages from
some Other they call God” (70-71). Above all, Kearney wants to preserve the
distinction between faith and madness, justice and injustice, God and Satan. For, he
argues, ethical action depends on the clarity and certainty with which we can ascertain
these distinctions.
Between the modern and postmodern extremes, between affirmation of the

autonomous self at the expense of the other and the infinite inflation of the Other to
the detriment of the self, Kearney seeks a middle ground where “the self walks at sea
level with the other” (11). This middle ground, he argues (with indebtedness to his
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teacher, Paul Ricoeur), is charted by a diacritical hermeneutics that champions

dialogue and conversation where welcoming alterity alters the self. Proposing the
encounter of self and other as neither a fusion of horizons resulting in a community of
like minds nor an abandonment of horizons culminating in the fragmented world of
complete separation, diacritical hermeneutics “ensures that the other does not
collapse into sameness or exile itself into some inaccessible alterity; hermeneutics
keeps in contact with the other” (81).
We stay in contact with others, according to Kearney, in and through the hermeneutic
struggle to better understand them. But understanding the other is only possible for
one who “is careful to discern, in some provisional fashion at least, between different
kinds of otherness” (77). This critical discernment, Kearney suggests, “lets the other
be other in the right way” (8)—where the adverbial phrase “in the right way”
distinguishes diacritical hermeneutics from radical hermeneutics (Caputo), where
undecidability reigns, and from radical ethics (Levinas) where the other is the norm of
rightness and so is always in the right way. Kearney’s hermeneutic supplements the
postmodern critique of subjectivity with a critique of the other that aims to free the
criticized self from the tyranny of the other. This furthers the ethical task of making us
more hospitable to strangers while ensuring that our hospitality will not be our
undoing.
A second, and related, tool that Kearney mobilizes in his critical hermeneutic of action
is the narrative imagination. He agrees with the postmoderns that ethics answers the
question “what is to be done?” not on the basis of theoretical knowledge of an
abstract or universal Good, but with a practical understanding of the singular situation
confronting us in the here and now. This opens a place within ethics for the narrative
imagination, in that narrative transfers the ethical problem from the realm of theory
to the realm of practical understanding. We make sense of the singular situations in
which life is lived by telling stories, for fiction grasps the representational particularity
of events. Though we might not know what evil is as such, we can tell stories that let
us identify particular evils and ground action against them.
The narrative imagination, however, is ultimately turned against postmodernist ethics

in that, for Kearney, it allows us to escape the paralysis of action resulting from
another category by which the sublime other is articulated: the Ineffable Immemorial.
Kearney identifies two related ways in which the Immemorial and Ineffable is invoked.
In the first, thinkers such as Levinas use the Immemorial to interrupt the self’s
presence to itself, a self-presence by which the self assumes the position of subject or
ground underlying all that is. Lying beyond recollection, the Immemorial protects the
alterity of the other by refusing to allow it to be represented in the present where it
can be grasped, domesticated or appropriated to a subjective project or experience.
Secondly, the Ineffable Immemorial is invoked by Holocaust thinkers. The dead are
dishonored by the attempt to retrieve the past and make it available for historical
explanation—since to explain the horrors is to suppose that they had a purpose or
reason and to make them comparable to other historical events, thus denying, again,
the unspeakable singularity of the horrors suffered in Auschwitz.
According to Kearney, however, this supposedly ethical invocation of the ineffable and
immemorial leads to paralyzing the subject of action. Best dramatized in
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Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the valorization of the immemorial results in an impossible

mourning and incurable melancholy, like that which plagues the prince of Denmark
from the opening scene where he is haunted by the secret of his father’s ghost, a
secret he is forbidden to reveal. Bound to, and by, the Immemorial, the subject, like
Hamlet, is doomed to an obsessive repetition of traumatic events that only defers real
action in the present. What cures the subject, according to Kearney, is cathartic
remembering belonging to narrative imagination—like that which Hamlet experienced
in the graveyard scene when he confronts the “original forgetfulness that has blighted
the kingdom” (154). In its backward movement of remembering, the narrative
imagination thus gives the past hope for a future by inhabiting a present moment “of
transfiguration [that] turns a paralysed melancholic into a wise subject of action”
(157).
Now, transfiguration and clear decisiveness are comforting and empowering. But I
cannot avoid the suspicion that Kearney purchases them at the price of
misrepresenting the undecidable and the immemorial, which is to say that he has
provided answers by altering the question posed by the postmodern condition.
As Caputo has reminded Kearney, undecidability is not the same thing as not deciding.
Rather, undecidability is the condition for the possibility of decision. There would be no
need for human decision if it were clear what is to be done, what is good and what is
evil, who a saint and who a villain. In that case, human action would be simply a
programmed result or the application of a technique that would apply in all similar
situations. Decision is called for, however, because the singularity of events means
that each situation exceeds, or falls short of, the universals uttered by the rule or the
law which let us know what to do. Because we always have to act before all the
information is in, every decision springs from undecidability. In this sense,
undecidability does not paralyze action. It does, however, imply that action is haunted
by the shadow of a doubt.
Kearney, however, seems to take all the agony, all the acuity out of a decision. He
leaves no scission in decision, no cut that cuts off other possibilities. While this may be
a sure way to sleep easier and live with a clean conscience, it omits the central place
of guilt in ethics—as if in choosing to act I did not abandon another life-path or
sacrifice another other, paths or others that humility would admit might also be right
or equally demanding of my attention.
I have the impression that for Kearney the decision has already been decided, that I
have arrived after the decisive moment. How else could the problem be posed in
terms of an alternative between the terrorist and the needy stranger? This way of
putting it omits the harder but perhaps more everyday occurrence of having to choose
between two relative goods—between, as Derrida puts it in The Gift of Death, my cat
and all the other starving cats. This choice is made every day, though the everyday is
founded on forgetting the moment of decision as we reach for the bag. It cannot be
justified (why did I let those others die by failing to feed them?), though reason can
surely rationalize it (trying to feed them all would be my own undoing and then none
would be fed). By posing the dilemmas he does, Kearney avoids these everyday
situations where guilt (letting those other cats die in responding ethically to this other)
is inseparable from responsible action—even when deciding for a Good. In this
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avoidance of the cut of decision and the inevitability of guilt, Kearney would evidence
a very modern anthropology. We have an ethical conscience, but an easy one—that is
to say, a conscience that is easily put at ease by the conviction that we are doing
Good.
A similar easy ease is evident, too, in Kearney’s treatment of the Immemorial. Yes,
the immemorial calls for stories; only by authorizing fiction can we approach a cure.
But our narrative reckonings with the immemorial are never final, our cure never once
and for all, our analysis never terminable. The immemorial gives rise to storytelling,
but it also frustrates storytelling—dooming narrative to incompletion and making it
necessary to retell the story again and again since no one version could ever be
adequate to what cannot be remembered. It is not that about which we keep silent,
but that about which we must speak again and again precisely because no story is
ever adequate to it. Strangers, Gods, and Monsters gives the impression that, through
stories, we say to the Immemorial, “Get thee behind me,” when in fact the
immemorial means precisely what cannot be gotten over once and for all and so what
always remains ahead of me as part of my never-ending story still to tell.
The challenge that the immemorial poses, then, is not how to achieve redeeming
transformation or transfiguration, but how to get on without transformation or
transfiguration. How are we to act, we for whom such transfiguration does not arrive?
Where are we to find the courage to act without redemptive transformation? This is
not the issue that Kearney addresses, but it is a crucial constituent of the postmodern
world. The ethics that Kearney criticizes, precisely because it endures a lack of
transfiguration, is more attuned to the difficult situation out of which action must
spring.
Granting these reservations, it is clear that Kearney has done much to help clarify the
ethical intentions of thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, and Caputo. His objections
have pushed toward clarification of the difference between undecidability and
indecision, and in doing so have reminded us of the necessity of deciding and doing,
the need to distinguish between willed allegiance to the supposed immemorial and
ethical subjection to the immemorial.
2003.07.13
Bruce Kuklick
A History of Philosophy in America 1720-2000
Kuklick, Bruce, A History of Philosophy in America 1720-2000, Oxford, 2001, 346pp,

$19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199260168.
Reviewed by Richard M. Gale , University of Pittsburgh
This history of American philosophy from 1720 through 2000 displays the erudition,
philosophical sensitivity, and boldness that we have come to associate with the work
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of Bruce Kuklick, the premier historian of American philosophy. The great density of
the account precludes anyone just reading through the book (twenty pages a night is
about all you can manage), but it is an invaluable reference source. The book’s
dustjacket misleads when it says that “here at last is an American counterpart to
Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.” For whereas Kuklick never displays
Russell’s philosophical genius and does not confine himself just to the famous
philosophers, he would not be fair game for a law suit if some of the people he wrote
about should come back to life. A better comparison would be with John Passmore’s
One Hundred Years of Philosophy with regard to detail and ability to say a lot in very
few words – a history of philosophy without foreplay.
Kuklick’s initial definition of “philosophy” as a “more or less systematic writing about

the point of our existence, and our ability to understand the world of which we are a
part” (x) might explain some significant and, in my opinion, highly questionable,
omissions. Not a word is said, for example, about the work of Reichenbach,
Grünbaum, Earman, Sklar, Friedman and Malament on space and time, or about the
efforts of Hempel, Salmon and a host of others to analyze explanation, as well as the
development of modal logic and the semantics of possible worlds by Kripke and Lewis.
What makes these omission especially irksome is that many of the philosophers to
whom considerable space is accorded are not worthy of erasing the blackboards or
emptying the waste baskets of these philosophers. The title of the book needs to be
restricted so as to let the reader know that it does not cover the more technical work
that has been done in the philosophy of science and logic. Another serious omission,
but one that is not due to Kuklick’s big-picture definition of “philosophy,” is his
completely ignoring the golden age of philosophical defenses of theism by analytic
philosophers in the last third of the twentieth century, led primarily by Plantinga and
Alston and a very large cast of able supporting players.
At the outset Kuklick declares that “it is not clear that anything unique characterizes
American thought” (xi). Although he places great emphasis on the background culture
of a philosophy, he adds that “I am not certain that a causal relation always exists
between this matrix and the thinking” (xi). Thus, Kuklick makes no attempts, as many
have, to show that classical pragmatism, at least at the time it was formulated, was
an expression of something uniquely American. Kuklick’s caution may disappoint some
readers, but maybe he is right about this. The underlying thesis of the book is that
American philosophy displays a “long circuitous march from a religious to a secular
vision of the universe” (xi). “One might presume that the march would diminish the
role of the mental, often a term only a step away from the spiritual or religious. But
despite the growing emphasis on the nonreligious, the deference to one or another
kind of idealism has meant in America that realism (the view that physical objects at
least exist independently of mind) has often been on the defensive, although a
constant option. The eccentric journey away from religion has meant only the slow
growth of what is often thought to be realism’s cousin, materialism – that monistic
position opposed to idealism stipulating that the mental world is reducible to the
physical” (xiii).
Part I deals with speculative thought in America from 1720 to 1868. There are
separate chapters on Jonathan Edwards, who is the only one in the bunch who comes
across as worth reading, philosophy and politics, the theological disputes involving
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Joseph Bellamy and Nathaniel William Taylor, collegiate philosophy from John
Witherspoon to Noah Porter, and innovative amateurs, in particular James Marsh. Part
II deals with the age of pragmatism from 1859 to 1934 and sees Darwin as the critical
factor in the demise of the religious orientation of American philosophers. It is here
that the book comes to life. The two major figures in the dominance of idealism from
1870 to 1900, Royce and Dewey, are featured. Some might have preferred a
continuous account of Dewey’s development, rather than Kuklick’s disjointed one,
since so many of the key doctrines of the early Dewey are retained in his later
instrumentalism. Royce is made to appear more important than he was by the vastly
exaggerated claim that the arguments he laid out early in his career “would dominate
epistemology for well over a century” (122). This overestimation of Royce also is
found in Kuklick’s decision to rate “Josiah Royce over Alfred North Whitehead” as a
metaphysician, and thus to consider Royce’s metaphysics to the exclusion of
Whitehead’s (xii). This is most unfortunate, for, not only is there no need to deal with
one of them to the exclusion of the other, there is no doubt that Whitehead has had a
far greater and lasting impact than has Royce, which is the only criterion for
measuring the greatness of a philosopher. Two chapters are devoted to the
pragmatism at Cambridge from 1867 to 1923, which includes the Metaphysical Club,
Peirce, and an especially insightful exposition of James. This is followed by a chapter
on instrumentalism in Chicago and New York from 1903 to 1934. Part III concerns
professional philosophy from 1912 to 2000. An excellent exposition is given of
professional realism from 1912 to 1956, in particular the New Realism and Critical
Realism. Of special note is the insightful manner in which Kuklick brings out the
connection between Roy Wood Sellars and his son, Wilfrid Sellars. The next chapter
traces Europe’s impact on the United States from 1928 to 1964 as a result of the
Frankfurt School, logical empiricism, and existentialism. The connection between
Harvard and Oxford from 1946 to 1975 gives prominence to Goodman and Quine and
the rise of analytic philosophy. The book ends with a brilliant chapter on the
tribulations of professional philosophy from 1962 to 1999, which is must reading for
everyone in the profession of philosophy.
2003.07.14
Rea, Michael
World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism
Rea, Michael, World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism,

Oxford University Press, 2002, 245pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199247609.
Reviewed by Troy Cross , Yale University
In this provocative book, Michael Rea argues that naturalists are committed to
substance dualism, antirealism about material objects, skepticism about other minds,
and the suspension of judgment about idealism. His hope is that supernaturalism,
which carries none of these unattractive commitments, will prove appealing by
contrast.
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What is naturalism? Despite a vast literature on the topic, no single, precise

formulation has gained wide acceptance. Rea suggests this is for good reason,
namely, that any substantive formulation, if it is to remain true to the spirit of
naturalism, is doomed to incoherence. The naturalist tradition is staunchly committed
to follow science wherever it leads, thus placing naturalism itself beyond the reach of
scientific refutation. At the same time, the naturalist tradition is committed to the idea
that all substantive philosophical doctrines – naturalism included – stand at the mercy
of science.
This internal conflict reveals itself in both the metaphysical and epistemological
varieties of naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is supposedly the view that the
sciences paint a complete and accurate ontological picture of the world; there are
quarks, molecules and organisms, but not ghosts and gods. If naturalism is to follow
science wherever it leads, however, it cannot rule out specific kinds of entities before
science is complete. More generally, the problem is whether the science providing
ontological guidance is current science or ideal science. If it is current science, then
naturalism is probably false. If it is ideal science, then naturalism is metaphysically
vacuous.1 Epistemological naturalism fares no better. If it is at the mercy of future
developments in science, it cannot follow science wherever it leads. But if it is immune
to empirical results, then it is self-refuting, because it is just the sort of hypothesis
that epistemic naturalism insists must be grounded on scientific investigation rather
than armchair theorizing.
According to Rea, charity suggests that we treat naturalism not as a doctrine to

profess, but as a method to practice, a research program, i.e., a complete set of
dispositions to treat certain types of sources as basic evidence. Because evidence is
only recognized as such from within a research program, research programs
themselves are “not adopted on the basis of evidence”, but are instead “. . .something
we bring to the table of inquiry” (4-5). What naturalists bring to the table is the
disposition to treat all and only the methods of science as evidentially basic. At
present, these methods include perception, memory, testimony, standard criteria for
theory choice, as well as the appearance of mathematical, logical, and conceptual
necessity. Excluded are rational intuition and religious experience.
Naturalism thus construed is coherent, because one may be disposed to follow science
wherever it leads and also hold that justified philosophical beliefs are at the mercy of
science. But it is also defanged, because research programs cannot be argued for or
adopted on the basis of evidence. They are rather the frameworks within which
rational arguments take place, and within which it is decided what counts as evidence.
Hence, the only way to urge the adoption of research program is to point out its
pragmatic benefits. To urge against the adoption of a research program, one must
either point out its pragmatic deficits or else show it to be self-refuting. Rea takes the
former course with naturalism, arguing that among its dire consequences are the
rejection of realism about material objects, the adoption of dualism, skepticism about
other minds, and suspension of judgment about idealism.
Trouble begins with what Rea calls, the “discovery problem,” which “is just the fact
that intrinsic modal properties seem to be undiscoverable by the methods of the
natural sciences” (77). Our ordinary beliefs about material objects carry modal
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commitments. A statute, for instance, cannot survive smashing, but a lump of clay
can. Such persistence conditions are integral to our very concepts of material objects.
But how can a naturalist account for our knowledge of these modal properties? A
naturalist observes a region of matter arranged statue-wise. Without appealing to a
faculty of intuition, how can she justifiably infer that something in that region cannot
survive smashing? There is only one way, according to Rea, and that is to adopt
conventionalism: our conventions make it true that wherever there is some matter
arranged statue-wise, there is something that cannot survive smashing. But
conventionalism renders modal properties extrinsic, existing only in relation to us and
to our mental activity. If minds like ours had not existed, then neither would these
modal properties or, consequently, the objects that have them. That, says Rea, is just
antirealism.
From antirealism follows a host of evils. First, substance dualism. If dualism were
false, then minds could not exist unless material objects like brains existed. But by
conventionalism, such material objects could not exist unless fairly advanced minds
already did. Since at least one mind exists, dualism is true. Second, given that
naturalists think non-physical minds play no role in the explanation of behavior, and
given their newfound dualism, they must be skeptics about the existence of other
minds. Third, without appeals to intuition, naturalists find themselves with no grounds
for ruling out idealism. For, even if the hypothesis that there is a mind-independent
external world is simpler than idealism, naturalism provides no reason to think that
simpler hypotheses are more likely true.
If a naturalist has followed Rea to this point, she will no doubt be casting about for
some weaker position that nevertheless stops short of Rea’s own supernaturalism, and
a natural stopping point is intuitionism. If the naturalist adds rational intuition to the
stock of basic evidential sources and says we rationally intuit intrinsic modal
properties, she thereby protects the justificatory status of our beliefs about the
instantiation of intrinsic modal properties and staves off conventionalism, dualism, and
idealism.
But intuitionism is self-defeating. Adapting an argument from Plantinga, Rea makes

the case that “. . . we have no reason to think that evolutionary processes could give
rise to creatures that have reliable rational intuitions and, apparently, good reason to
think that they could not” (194). For the purpose of survival, it seems not to matter
whether we believe that S5 is the correct modal system or that material objects
cannot be co-located. Furthermore, intuition, at least outside of logic, math, and
conceptual truth, has an abysmal track record. Given the belief that our cognitive
mechanisms are the products of evolution and given in addition the poor track record
of intuition, one has a defeater for intuition-based beliefs; even if such beliefs are
prima facie justified, their justification disappears upon reflection.
With the demise of naturalism and intuitionism, we are left with only supernaturalism,
which grants religious experience basic evidential status. On the basis of religious
experience, we may justifiably believe that the world is the creative work of a being
“relevantly like the God of traditional theism,” and that this being has provided
humans with a reliable means of detecting intrinsic modal properties (222-223). Such
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a supernaturalistic strategy offers the “only hope” for saving realism about material
objects (225).
Many of the links in Rea’s chain of inference are objectionable, but I will note only a
few. Most important is the characterization of naturalism. Obviously, a naturalist
should not think that everything is at the mercy of science and also that naturalism
itself is not. Rather than abandoning naturalism as a substantive thesis, however, she
can weaken one of the conflicting theoretical commitments, holding for instance, that
naturalism could be empirically refuted in some far-fetched scenario. This is certainly
the right approach to metaphysical naturalism, where Rea’s forced choice between an
inaccurate current science and a vacuous ideal science is overly simplistic. Here are
three unoriginal suggestions that thread the horns of Rea’s dilemma: (1) the relevant
science for naturalistic ontology could be “loosely tied” to current science, yielding a
vague but still substantive position; (2) metaphysical naturalism could be opposed to
metaphysical supernaturalism, where we have no tidy set of necessary and sufficient
conditions to identify the supernatural, but we have paradigms – God, angels, fairies –
and widespread, albeit imperfect, agreement on new cases; (3) following Jeffrey
Poland’s work on physicalism, the relevant idealized sciences could be characterized
by their specific questions and concerns.2
Epistemic naturalists, on the other hand, must make a choice if they wish to save
naturalism as a substantive thesis. They must either constrain rationality to methods
not radically different from those currently used in the sciences, or else say naturalism
is knowable a priori and place naturalistic constraints on a priori knowledge. These
suggestions may fall short of some purist vision, but they are substantive, coherent,
and clearly, still forms of naturalism.
Rea’s “charitable” proposal on naturalism’s behalf, by contrast, is to be avoided at all

costs. It is strange, first of all, that the naturalist is consigned to practice an
epistemology she cannot rationally advocate or justifiably believe. But equally bizarre,
none of the consequences of naturalism Rea reveals is supposed to carry any
epistemic weight. Rea’s argument is not of the form: there are material objects,
therefore, naturalism is false. That would be using the existence of material objects as
evidence against naturalism. On Rea’s construal of naturalism, only a very restricted
set of our beliefs can count as evidence, and the belief in the existence of material
objects, like the belief in the existence of other minds, is not in the privileged set. But
if it were stipulated that some view entailed that there are no material objects, that
materialism is false, that we must be skeptics about other minds, and so on,
naturalists would clearly consider these epistemic reasons against that view.
Naturalists do not merely find these consequences unappealing from a pragmatic
perspective. Rather, they think any view entailing such things is likely to be false,
which is to say that if Rea is right about what naturalism is, virtually no one is a
naturalist.
Moreover, the epistemological dispositions Rea foists upon the naturalist are
foundationalist rather than coherentist and methodist rather than particularist. Neither
of these strategies is compulsory for naturalists and both are required to generate
Rea’s skeptical problems. A naturalist can be a coherentist, all of whose beliefs have
prima facie justification, but who gives special weight to those beliefs that are highly
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confirmed by science, and a naturalist can be a Chisholmian particularist, testing

proposed epistemic methods against paradigmatic cases of knowledge, with instances
of scientific knowledge figuring centrally. A coherentist or particularist could ward off
Rea’s skeptical attack by simply refusing the task of justifying our beliefs about the
existence of material objects and other minds in terms of some sparse epistemic base.
But Rea accuses one such approach, that taken by Kai Nielsen, of “conflating the
naturalist tradition with the tradition of materialism and atheism” (71) and dismisses
another moderate view as half-hearted naturalism (49). Rea says he is interested in
the consequences of “full-blown adherence to naturalism, not the consequences of
partial or half-hearted adherence to naturalism” (49). We can all agree that whatever
naturalism is, the interest lies in the commitments engendered by full-blown
adherence to it. But the relevant question is what follows from a full-blown adherence
to an epistemically sensible naturalism. After all, when Rea is offering supernaturalism
and traditional theism as our “only hope” against radical skepticism, we cannot simply
ignore more moderate naturalistic options (225).
Let us grant Rea’s characterization of naturalism for the moment and ask whether
naturalists are then justified in believing in the reality of material objects. Perception
is a science-approved basic source of justification, and on a suitably robust notion,
perception delivers real material objects, not merely sense data or mind-dependent
objects. If we accept Rea’s argument that our concepts of material objects contain
persistence conditions, we can infer, by conceptual analysis, that anything satisfying
those concepts has the persistence conditions in question. I see a statue, for instance.
Then, by conceptual analysis (perhaps together with some straightforwardly empirical
investigation) I infer the persistence conditions of statues. If by conceptual analysis it
is also determined that a real statue must have its modal properties intrinsically, then
since I have seen a real statue, I can infer that it has its modal properties intrinsically.
So if we begin with a sufficiently robust notion of perception and appeal to Rea’s own
promised conceptual connections, we have no “discovery problem”. We simply tollens
the skeptical ponens.
Rea neglects this sort of reply because he assumes a highly impoverished notion of
perception on which we do not see objects per se, but arrangements of matter, and
then infer the existence of objects from general beliefs about the connections between
arrangements of matter and the instantiation of modal properties (84, 105).
Naturalists should simply reject Rea’s anemic, skeptic-friendly theory of perception
and the artificial story about how we form material-object beliefs.
Coherentism, particularism, and a robust theory of perception thus each provide

ample epistemic shelter from Rea’s skeptical attack. But there remains a problem. It is
not a problem of justification, per se, but a problem of explanation. How do we
account for the coincidence between some of the modal properties of objects (their
persistence conditions) and our beliefs about them? Here, the hypothesis that the
world is the product of a benevolent and intelligent designer provides a ready answer.
Even if it is not strictly required to avoid skepticism, naturalists would do well to have
an answer too. But Rea argues that no such answer is possible; the only
naturalistically acceptable theories of the persistence conditions of objects are
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conventionalist, thus rendering extrinsic those properties and the ordinary objects that
have them.
There is a familiar reply to this sort of anti-conventionalist charge: rigidification. Do

not reduce the persistence conditions of objects at a world, w, to relations between
the mind-independent ingredients of w and the mental activity at w. Instead, reduce
persistence conditions to dispositions of the mind-independent world to cause a
certain kind of response in minds like ours as they are in the actual world, in
accordance with our actual conventions. Thus, just as the color that is actually my
favorite would have existed even if I had not, so persistence conditions, as well as the
ordinary objects having them, would have existed even if there were no minds. This is
one overlooked strategy. Another is a reductive linguistic ersatzism paired with
counterpart theory. Of course, naturalists owe a detailed account here, but the point is
that there is no reason to think they face an explanatory problem they are in principle
unable to solve.
Rea fails to make a convincing case against naturalism. Antirealism, dualism,

skepticism about other minds, and the like do not clearly follow from epistemically
sensible forms of naturalism. But he succeeds in aiding and motivating the
construction of naturalistic theories. His dilemma forces naturalists to choose between
two entrenched commitments. His skeptical argument warns against the dangers of a
radically empiricist epistemology and highlights the urgent need for naturalistic
theories of modality in general and of persistence conditions in particular. There is
much more that is worthwhile besides – succinct and penetrating discussions of proper
function, pragmatic rationality, Plantinga’s case against naturalism, and the “fine
tuning” argument for God’s existence. Thoroughly researched and richly argued,
World Without Design will prove valuable to anyone interested in the naturalistic
tradition.
Endnotes
1. See Tim Crane and D. H. Mellor, “There Is No Question of Physicalism,” Mind 99

(1990).
2. Jeffrey Poland, Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundation (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994).
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2003.08.01
R.M. Sainsbury
Departing From Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language
Sainsbury, R.M., Departing From Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language,

Routledge, 2002, 256pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415272556.
Reviewed by Dean Buckner, unknown
The title both masks and reflects the problem inside. Once (as Ivor Grattan-Guinness
has argued) there was a mathematician who wrote in German, whose preoccupation
with founding mathematics on a Platonic theory of meaning “rules him out as a
founder of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytic philosophy of this century”1 . Later,
there was a philosopher of language and the founder of the Analytic Tradition, to
whose development the “massive Frege industry” is devoted. The central theme of
Mark Sainsbury’s book is a departure from Frege by means of a “pared down
Fregeanism”. But which Frege is Sainsbury paring down, and which are the parts is he
paring?
Frege the mathematician held that proper names signify objects directly. Indeed, he
transformed logic by introducing proper names. In traditional logic, proper names
were represented as common nouns, “Venus is a planet” being written as “every
Venus is a planet”2 . Frege showed that proper and common names are fundamentally
different. A proper name signifies or refers to (bezeichten, bedeuten) an object such
as Venus, a predicate signifies a concept. A sentence such as “Venus is a planet” is
about (von, wovon) a particular object, saying of it that it satisfies3 a certain Concept,
of being a planet. Proper names and predicates stand to objects in quite different
ways: a predicate indirectly, via the Concept that the Object satisfies, a proper name
directly, by signifying or referring to the Object. It is fundamental to Fregean logic
that proper names cannot be empty in the sense that predicates are empty. We can
say “there are no planets” but not “there is no Venus”4 .
The word “planet” has no direct relation at all to the Earth, but only to a concept that
the Earth, among other things, satisfies; thus its relation to the Earth is only an
indirect one, by way of the concept; and the recognition of this relation of falling
under requires a judgment that is not in the least already given along with our
knowledge of what the word “planet” means.5
This notion was of fundamental importance to the development of logic and

mathematics, leading to the ideas of an element, of a set, of the membership relation
between element and set, and of empty and infinite sets6 .
By contrast, Frege the philosopher held that proper names do not signify objects
directly. We can report what is said by the use of an empty name using a subordinate
or “that” clause, therefore such clauses and their constituents must signify their own
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meaning or sense (Sinn). Proper names signify Objects indirectly, via their sense. This
aspect of Frege’s work had almost no influence on the development of mathematics,
though it had a great impact on philosophy when it was rediscovered in the 1950’s.
The two positions: (i) that proper names signify objects directly and cannot be empty,
and (ii) that they have a “sense” or meaning, even when empty, are difficult to
reconcile. Practically all contemporary opinion assumes (for good reason) that they
are incompatible. Yet, in this interesting and challenging book, Sainsbury has taken
both as a starting point. We are not forced to choose between them (p.19). The
distinction between descriptive terms and proper names is fundamental. But a proper
name can be empty: there can be “sense without reference” (Essay XII). There is an
“overlooked option”.
It is not wholly clear what the option is. The book consists of 12 essays written over
more than twenty years (during which it is uncertain that Sainsbury always held the
view advocated here). They are not significantly changed, and it is sometimes difficult
to discern the thread. I summarise it here.
The book is dominated by the puzzle of how empty singular terms can be intelligible.
Sainsbury is clearly struck with an analogy between empty predicates and empty
proper names. Asserting “John is happy” commits me to the truth of John’s being
happy and commits me to “John” having a referent no less than it commits me to
“happy” having a satisfier.
We can use a predicate with no satisfiers to state serious truths, like that there is no
round square (Frege 1895: 227), but the same goes for names: there is no such
heavenly body as Vulcan. (p. 13)
But is there an analogy? On the early Fregean view, a predicate is empty because the
Concept it signifies is empty. For the analogy to hold there must be empty Objects!
Sainsbury argues (following Burge, 1974) that successful reference is just satisfaction
“under a condition”7 , namely the condition of being the Object signified. The name
“Venus” signifies x if and only x is Venus. The first problem is that this was not Frege’s
view. The entire point of the distinction between proper and common nouns is to
distinguish propositions in which one concept is “subordinated” (untergeordnet) to
another, for example
{x: x is a planet} {x: x is a heavenly body}
from propositions where an object is subsumed or falls under (fällt unter) a concept:
Venus ε {x: x is a planet}
It is pointless, therefore, to symbolise “Venus” as “{x: x = Venus}”. The insistence on

the distinction between ε and the relation of part and whole between classes
symbolised by is due to Frege and underpins the whole technical development of
8
set theory . It is essential to almost everything that Frege wrote. In departing from
this, there is nothing in Frege we would be departing from.
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With a concept the question is always whether anything, and if so what, satisfies it.
With a proper name such questions make no sense.9
The second problem is that we still need to say that Venus satisfies the concept of
being Venus. What does “Venus” signify? If the Object, the game begins again: proper
names signify directly. If not, the distinction between a set and its members
collapses10 . We cannot depart from the founder of modern mathematics in this way,
without abandoning him entirely.
Still, Sainsbury provides compelling arguments. Our natural view (Essay XII) is that
an empty name is intelligible, so having a referent is not part of its semantics. A
semantic theorist need not be an astronomer, “which he would have to be to
distinguish “Neptune” from “Vulcan”; nor a theologian, which he would have to be to
determine which, if any, of his subjects’ names for gods are empty” (p. 209), and so
on. “Semantic theory is one thing, specialist knowledge of non-semantic fact another”.
If a word like “Homer” is empty, how can semantic theory have nothing to say about
it?
There are well-known objections, but there are convincing replies (Essays VIII, IX,
XII). We can report the content of what is uttered using an empty name11 . Le Verrier
said that there was a planet called “Vulcan” and said that Vulcan orbited between
Mercury and the Sun. Reporting what is said using empty names makes perfect sense.
Otherwise there would be nothing to report:
Suppose the story-teller says “And then Alice came to the dragon’s cave, and said the
magic formula the friendly genie had given her, and which no human ear could
understand: “erty uiop asd”. The dragon heard and realised he was not to attack
Alice”.
We can pretend that the dragon’s sounds were meaningful, but we cannot report what
he said, using those very sounds. We cannot even pretend to report nonsense12 using
a “that” clause.
Another objection, due to Kripke, is that name-using practices start with a baptism
and so connect the use of a proper name to the baptised object. Sainsbury’s reply
(Essay XII) is to adopt the Kripkean picture about transmission, while eliminating the
object. A “baptism” may be a baptism of nothing: a name can be intelligibly
introduced even if it names nothing (p. 212). The causal chain we associate with the
use of proper names may begin merely with a “journalistic” source (p. 165). Our
practices concerning empty names are portrayed here in detail and depth.
Of course, the intelligibility of empty names is perfectly consistent with a description

approach, but Sainsbury also holds that proper names are not “descriptions in
disguise”. How can a truly significant expression have no descriptive content and yet
signify no object? He presents two lines of argument:
(i) In Essay VII, he builds on the Fregean idea13 that we recognise something common
to thoughts that correspond to the same proper name. This is sameness of sense, or
“guaranteed sameness of referent”. He defends this against the objection that,
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absurdly, this presupposes infallible capacities for recognising sameness and

difference among senses. Unthinking reliance of sameness of reference underpins our
whole system of thought and reasoning. Consider (p. 135)
Fa
a=b
:. Fb
In accepting the validity of this argument, we assume that expressions that are the
same make the same contribution to validity. But different occurrences of identical
expressions may differ in meaning. (This explains the “Paderewksi” problems, he
argues14 .) Simply to state that the same person is in question, we must use an
identity statement, using fresh tokens of the same expression, one of which we must
assume to have the same reference as before. There is no escaping this reliance
(p.135). When this identity is guaranteed by what is involved in understanding, the
relevant tokens have the same sense. (I am not sure the idea of “same sense” is not
redundant. Is it not simply enough to say that the meanings of certain tokens can be
such that, whoever grasps them, grasps that they have the same referent, if they
have a referent?)
This is consistent with our idea that there is information locked up in a proper name,
or in its context of use, that tells us which individual bears it. It is difficult, however,
to reconcile with the idea of Essay XII, that the source of a piece of information is in
some way essential to its semantics. The source of our information is not usually part
of the information itself.
(ii) In essay XX, Sainsbury argues for a kind of a semantic content that is neither
straightforwardly descriptive nor referential, because it is non-detachable. Sometimes
we are able to report adequately what was said by means of an utterance which is
not, as it were, self-standing (p. 141). We are able to split the report of what was said
into a scene-setting part such as (my example) “Crusoe got up one day”, then a
content-ascribing part “he said they would need to get food that day”, containing
terms that are anaphorically dependent on the scene-setting part. In these cases we
cannot detach the content-ascribing part from the scene-setting part. We have
reported something Crusoe said, but not something that can be adequately expressed
independently of context. For example, we cannot replace “on that day” by “on
October 26, 1659”. Possibly Crusoe had no idea of the date. Perhaps he just got up
one day and said “we must get food today”.
Non-detachability poses a problem for any kind of description theory. The essence of
such theories is to attach a specific meaning to all tokens of a certain type (p. 143),
by whose means we construct a sentence that has a truth-value “in its own right”. The
essence of general terms is that they are in dictionaries, that we learn their meaning
as a part of learning a language. The meaning of the word “green” is essentially self-
standing. But clearly we cannot explain non-detachable expressions using descriptive
semantics. And we cannot explain it by semantic dependence on objects either. If I
write, “The King had a sister called ’Matilda’“, my audience is in a position to use the
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name “Matilda”. Yet the name has been patently introduced on the back of mere
existential quantification (p. 149). Grasp of its meaning does not seem to require a
semantic relation with any object 15 . Or consider the following, adapted from
Sainsbury’s example.
A: The King had a sister
B: I suppose she got married young
Suppose B has no idea who Matilda is. We must regard “she” as anaphoric on A’s use
of “a sister”. But if Matilda is present one day later, and I point to her, it would be
incorrect to report B as having said that he imagined that princess had got married
young.
Even our dependence on physical contexts such as images or sounds to achieve

reference can be explained by context-setting. Jane (my example) watches a scene of
a man robbing a bank. Later she says, “that man was driving too fast”, where it is
clear from the context that she “means” the robber. The role of scenes in a film is
analogous to scene-setting remarks, such as “Jane watched a scene of a man robbing
a bank”, followed by content-ascribing remark such as “Later she said that the man
was driving too fast”. The difference between verbal and visual scene setting is merely
accidental, between naturally occurring and deliberately contrived contextual features.
If we know what was said, there are always words that will achieve the appropriate
scene setting, moreover, in the absence of a physical context (images, sounds) it is
only by words that we can do this (p. 149). This essay contains some of the most
interesting ideas in the book.
The themes of meaning and compositionality (Essays I, V, X, XI) and reference

(Essays VII, VIII, IX, XII) occupy much of the book. There are also two essays on
vagueness and boundaries of predication (III, VI). Two are exegetical, on Russell’s
theory of descriptions (IV), and a welcome inclusion of his 1984 review of Evans’
seminal work, The Varieties of Reference. There is significant new material in the
lengthy introduction
None of this quite addresses the underlying problem, that there cannot be conditions
of satisfaction for a referring term. Satisfaction presumes a relation between two
objects, the referent of a proper name and the referent of a predicate, and thus
presumes that the proper name has a referent. Nevertheless, it is a very good book; if
its main argument had not been obscured within a collection of artistically
unconnected essays, it might have been a great book. It skirts the sterile debate
between “descriptive” and “referential” positions and suggests at least the blueprint
for a radically new proper-name semantics. The idea that such a semantics must be
blind to the distinction between fiction and other uses seems particularly important. Is
it possible that this book will, as Sainsbury said (p. xx) of Evans’ book “be central to
discussions of reference and singular thought for years to come”?
Endnotes
1. The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870-1940, Princeton 2000, p. 177.
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2. As a glance at any logic textbook published earlier than about 1890 suggests. See,
for example, Ueberweg, System of Logic and History of Logical Doctrines, 1871, Â§ 70
which Frege seems to have read. See also Mill (Logic p. 109), and Kant, Kritik Â§ 9,
A71. Frege’s arguments in “On Concept and Object” should be understood as a
critique of this forgotten theory.
3. Literally “falling under”, as in das Fallen eines Gegenstandes unter einen Begriff.
4. For example, “Über Begriff und Gegenstand” in Vierteljahresschrift für

wissenschaftliche Philosophie 16, 1892, S. 192-205, p. 201, transl. as “On Concept
and Object”, in Geach & Black 1952 pp. 42-55, p. 50; also “Notes for Ludwig
Darmstaedter”, Nachgelassene Schriften p. 274.
5. “A critical elucidation of some points in E. Schroeder’s Vorlesungen Über Die

Algebra der Logik”, Archiv fur systematische Philosophie 1895, pp 433-456, p. 454,
transl. Geach, in Geach & Black 86-106, p. 105. Sainsbury quotes this piece as though
the date of 1895 were significant. In reality, the piece repeats arguments of the
Grundlagen (published in 1884), although in a way that throws interesting light upon
the development of set theory in the 1890’s.
6. The review of Schroeder (ibid) outlines these connections. See also Russell,
Principles of Mathematics, Â§ 21 where he attributes the invention of the set-
membership relation to Frege, and sections Â§ 475 to Â§ 496 on “The Logical and
Arithmetical doctrines of Frege”.
7. p. 207, see also p. 108.
8. Though the extent of Frege’s direct influence on set theory after 1900 is difficult to
determine, his indirect influence via Russell is beyond question.
9. Grundlagen Â§ 51 p.63-4. See also the passage in “On Concept and Object”, where
Frege argues that “being (no other than) Venus” really stands for a concept, under
which Venus falls, and which is therefore something distinct from Venus. (ibid p. 194,
Geach & Black p. 44).
10. Another problem is the Scotist idea of haecceity that this implies. Is there really
some sort of property or essence, of being the planet Venus? Is there such a property
belonging to Venus, the ancient goddess?
11. As Frege also knew. (“Logic”, Nachgelassene Schriften, p. 141, quoted in Evans p.
29.)
12. Geach, P. Mental Acts, London 1957, p.11.
13. Mentioned in a letter to Philip Jourdain of 1914 (Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel,

pp.127-8). If we find the same word in two propositions, we recognise something
common to the corresponding thoughts, something corresponding to the word.
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14. Kripke, Saul (1979). “A puzzle about belief.” In Margalit, Avishai (eds.) Meaning
and Use, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 239-83.
15. His challenge to the distinction between quantification and reference evokes the
work of Fred Sommers. See e.g. The Logic of Natural Language, Oxford 1982, p. 82
and passim. The example on p. 147 is similar to one discussed by Sommers and
Geach (Reference and Generality, pp. 126-7).
2003.08.02
John M. Doris
Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior
Doris, John M., Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, Cambridge
University Press, 2002, 284pp, $60.00, ISBN 0521631165.
Reviewed by Lawrence Blum, University of Massachusetts, Boston
John Doris’s Lack of Character argues against the virtue theoretic trend in
contemporary moral theory. Following Owen Flanagan’s pioneering work, Varieties of
Moral Personality (1991), Doris draws on the literature of experimental social
psychology to make a case that virtue theory and the language of character on which
it draws are committed to various unsustainable empirical claims about human
behavior. He recommends jettisoning thinking about human behavior and moral
capacities in terms of broad traits of character such as “honesty,” bravery,” and “self-
reliance.” Lack of Character is engagingly and accessibly written, provocative, non-
dogmatic, chock full of interesting arguments. It is a terrific and important
contribution to moral theory and moral psychology.
In Chapter 1: Joining the Hunt, Doris appropriately chides moral philosophers for
ignoring psychologists ’ explorations of the psychology of moral personhood, even
while turning to its own brand of philosophical moral psychology. As moral
philosophers turned toward character and virtue, social psychology in the 1960’s and
1970’s was problematizing those very notions. Disciplinary narrowness and a
misunderstanding of the autonomy of ethics fed this failure of cross-disciplinary
engagement. Doris provides a modest defense of social psychology against challenges
to its scientific status and relevance to philosophical moral psychology, but no more
than he needs to maintain that it contributes to our understanding of human behavior
in a manner pertinent to philosophical moral psychology.
Chapter 2: Character and Consistency sets out Doris’s main contentions. The
predictive, descriptive, and explanatory appeal to traits, such as is generally
understood as entailed by the notion of “character,” is “confounded by the
extraordinary situational sensitivity observed in human behavior” (15). Doris calls the
conception of character he opposes “globalist,” involving three features. 1)
“Consistency”: to possess a trait involves exhibiting trait-relevant behavior in a wide
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variety of trait-relevant “eliciting conditions.” (Doris means “appropriately eliciting”

rather than “actually eliciting.”) 2) “Stability”: Character and personality traits are
reliably manifested by a given agent in trait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of
similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions. (So consistency implies stability, but not vice
versa.) “Evaluative integration”: “In a given character or personality the occurrence of
a trait with a particular evaluative valence is probabilistically related to the occurrence
of other traits with similar evaluative valences.” (The honest person will tend to be
compassionate rather than callous.) So globalism construes personality as an
evaluatively integrated association of robust traits.
Against globalism, Doris sets his “situationism,” a term derived from social
psychology, and associated with the views of Mischel, and Ross and Nisbett, who are
referred to frequently in the book. Situationism holds that behavioral differences are
due less to individual dispositional differences than to situational ones; that “to a
surprising extent,” people behave similarly in similar situations; that people “typically”
behave without the consistency required for trait attributions; that evaluatively
inconsistent dispositions may cohabit in a single personality. (Despite occasional
attempts, Doris provides no satisfactory account of what counts as a “situation.”)
Personality structures are fragmented rather than integrated. Doris is not saying that
no one possesses a robust trait. He is claiming only that such traits are much rarer
both than ordinary discourse appears to imply, than people ordinarily think, and that
virtue ethics appears to require.
As the argument progresses, Doris makes it clear that he is not rejecting trait
ascription as such, though he sometimes talks as if he does. Rather he is rejecting
“robust traits”—the standard fare in virtue ethics—but not “local traits.” So Henry
might not be “honest,” full stop, but Doris allows that he might be honest (reliably and
consistently) in certain contexts, for example at work, but not in others such as his
home life or with his friends. The level or type of localism is not specified. Perhaps the
relevant local trait should be even more differentiated—”honest with respect to
matters involving financial disclosure,” or “honest with respect to matters bearing on
personal ambition.” Doris’s theoretical commitments do not provide any particular
reason for expecting dispositional consistency in the domain types he specifies; yet his
concession of some forms of dispositional consistency in moral behavior, however
undertheorized, is reasonable.
In chapter 3: Moral Character, Moral Behavior, Doris supplies the social-science

research that supports situationism—in particular, that morally irrelevant or trivial
situational factors have a large impact on morally relevant behavior— against
“characterological moral psychology”. Doris focuses on compassion-relevant behavior,
or what is generally known in social psychology as “prosocial” or “helping” behavior.
In one experiment, 87% of subjects who found a dime in a phone booth helped an
experimental confederate who dropped her papers, while only 4% of those who did
not find a dime helped. The presence of two confederates who were passive in the
face of what could plausibly be seen as an emergency reduced the subjects’
appropriately responsive behavior from 70% to 7%. A third experiment involved
students at Princeton Theological Seminary being told they were in a high, low, or
medium “hurry” to report for the second part of an experiment. This variable had a
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large impact on their willingness to help a seemingly distressed person on the path to
their destination (10% help for high hurry, 63% for low).
It is indeed troubling that people would be influenced by such morally trivial factors in
their choice whether to provide low-cost assistance to others. Doris raises the issue of
“ecological validity”—do experimental findings reflect phenomena found in natural
contexts. He recognizes that these results are counterintuitive to the way most of us
think about morally relevant behavior. But I think he is correct in suggesting that the
experimental situations may just highlight situational effects that apply in real life but
are often masked by the wider complex of factors in real life contexts.
Doris maintains, moreover, that behavior toward intimates may exhibit a greater
consistency than the stranger-related behavior in the experiments. He counts the
affective ties as defining a distinct “situation,” as if doing so made such consistency an
instance of situationism. This seems confused to me. Why would friendship not be
subject to its own forms of (sub)situational variation (mood, hurrying, situational
definition issues)? (Doris cites no empirical evidence on this matter.) The unclarity and
arbitrariness in what constitutes the “situation” and on which level or in which domain
the local traits are envisioned to operate is a weakness in Doris’s argument.
Most telling for the power of situationalism are the results of the Milgram experiments
of the early 1960’s. Subjects from different socioeconomic groups and of
(subsequently determined) differing personality types were to an alarming degree
willing to press a buzzer that had the apparent result of causing a confederate in
another room to experience great pain and distress for giving a wrong answer to a
test question. When the subjects raise questions about what they are being asked to
do, the experimenter applied mild pressure in the form of appealing to the need to
complete the experiment. Doris runs through various reassuring explanations of
Milgram’s results and criticisms of the experimental methodology, and convincingly
finds them all wanting or at best mildly ambiguous. “Whatever compassionate
dispositions the subjects had were not especially robust,” he dryly remarks. Yet his
overly vague notion of situationalism seems to provide a more salutary, if arbitrary,
interpretation; the Milgram subject could see himself as being uncompassionate in
situations comparable to those in the experimental situation, without this having any
implication about his compassionate behavior in myriad other kinds of situations.
As Doris mentions, some Holocaust scholars (most famously Christopher Browning)

have drawn on the Milgram results (and those of Zimbardo as well) in partial
explanation of the willingness of middle-aged, non-military German police (the “order
police”) to massacre Jews in occupied Poland, when the penalty for refusing to do so
was confined to shaming by one’s fellow officers. Studies of Holocaust perpetrators
often uncover the kind of personality fragmentation and/or domain specificity of
behavior that Doris suggests—murderers by day, good fathers at home; kindness
toward prisoners, but willing participation in their murder. A confrontation with the
Holocaust seems to me to lend support to situationism with regard to evil—morally
average persons can be led to commit terrible actions in certain conditions.
Interestingly, studies of rescuers during the Holocaust lends much less direct support
to situationalism; Doris’s discussion on this matter is misleading. It is true, as he
384
notes, that there were large national differences in the degree to which non-Jewish
populations assisted Jews; but these differences were often morally quite pertinent
rather than trivial—for example, for helping a Jew, a non-Jew would be killed in Poland
but not in France or Denmark. The depth of direct Nazi rule, hence the likelihood of
being discovered and punished, also differed nationally. Yet among rescuers who were
(in contrast to the Danes, or the French village of Le Chambon) not part of communal
rescue operations, Samuel and Pearl Oliner find a small number of stable personality
types—some showing strong empathy for other human beings in general, others
exhibiting a pattern of social commitment and responsibility.1 Doris’s general
skepticism about the value of self-report (which he applies to the Oliners’ work) seems
unconvincing in this context; the Oliners’ subject were not simply reporting their
feelings but their behavior over a fairly substantial stretch of time, and had no
particular reason to deceive themselves or their interviewers about their behavior
before their rescue activities. Yet, even if they did possess robust traits of compassion
or social responsibility, that there were so few rescuers should not pose a problem for
Doris’s general skepticism about character. But his failure adequately to distinguish
morally relevant from morally irrelevant features of situations may lead him to
overstate the absence of robust traits.
Chapter 4: The Fragmentation of Character elaborates Doris’s argument for

personality fragmentation by criticizing several trends in personality psychology
(Mischel’s Five-Factor model, “Social-Cognitive” theory, and others). Doris emphasizes
that his account does not deny consistency in people’s attitudes, goals and values, but
only in the behavior that expresses them.
Chapter 5: Judging Character describes experimental evidence that people expect

much greater behavioral consistency than in fact obtains. They postulate personal
attributes rather than situational factors as explanations of behavior. “Apparently,
people are quite put off by personal inconsistency and devote considerable ingenuity
to reorganizing incongruent stimuli into an integrated whole” (96). Later Doris notes
that this tendency, which he calls “overattribution,” is stronger in Western than
Eastern countries.
In chapter 6: From Psychology to Ethics, Doris explores implications of his empirical

claims for normative ethics. He is not engaging in a radically revisionist project.
Judgments of rightness or wrongness, good and bad action, need not be affected by
jettisoning of trait/character language. (Doris does not explore whether virtue
language could be retained in application to acts—”a compassionate act.”) If
characterological moral psychology is seen as offering a focus of ethical aspiration, it
is even empirically possible that virtue talk will provide the best way to induce agents
to behave well. (But in chapter 7, Doris argues convincingly that an actual person
should not always emulate the actions of an ideally virtuous person, since, given his
actual psychology, his attempting to perform such action may have undesirable
results.) It might make us queasy to contemplate the moral luck implication that had I
been placed in circumstances like those of the German order police, I might have
become a murderer; but this does not preclude attributing local traits as a mode of
person evaluation. Doris rightly criticizes the current fad of “character education” for
its weak empirical base, but acknowledges that appeal to character-based narratives
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might have a salutary effect in promoting moral behavior and perhaps (though he
does not say this) admirable local traits.
In chapter 7: Situation and Responsibility, Doris rejects the in any case quite
implausible view (which he finds in Hume) that we are morally responsible only for
actions that flow from stable character traits. Even a conventional virtue theorist
should not be saddled with the view that all of our attributable actions flow from
traits. Some people are neither honest nor dishonest on standard understandings, yet
may act honestly. Doris finds troubling for a theory of responsibility the situationist
finding that people are generally, or anyway often, unaware of the influences on their
behavior. But why not say that whatever those influences are, we know that we
should act on consideration X (e.g. that someone in our vicinity is in danger of rape)
to perform action Y, and we are capable of being so motivated, so we are morally
responsible for doing so or failing to do so? Instead, Doris propounds the implausible
view (about which he seems defensive and uncertain) that we are morally responsible
only for motives that we would embrace (“identify with,” in Harry Frankfurt’s sense) if
subjected to reflective scrutiny. His heroic attempts to show how people would
embrace morally bad motives in this sense are unsuccessful, though some genuine
moral insight is displayed along the way. Doris provides a helpful discussion of
excusing conditions, rightly arguing that excuse can not be dependent on the
frequency or commonality of the behavior in question in those circumstances.
Doris draws from situationalism the lesson that our ethical attention should be focused
on a kind of “self-manipulation”—avoiding situations in which we may well be
influenced to behave badly—rather than attempting a personal transformation in
global situation-independent traits. But his rejection of globalism needn’t take him in
such a purely consequentialist direction, and one that barely construes the human
person as a responsible moral agent. Why, for example, does Doris not talk about the
cultivation of local traits—honesty with colleagues, loyalty to friends, compassion to
strangers? Moreover, eschewing global traits for concrete actions hardly precludes
aiming at good deliberation; indeed, it supports the more concrete focus on action
rather than the broader and vaguer one on traits. Recognition of the often
unsuspected influences of situations enlarges the scope of what needs to be taken into
account in such deliberation (a point Doris emphasizes elsewhere). As occasionally
elsewhere in the book, Doris here sets up a dichotomy between situations and traits
that omits other determinants of action such as motives, desires, and intentions.
In the final chapter, 8: Is There Anything to Be Ashamed Of, Doris argues, drawing on
Conrad’s Lord Jim, that a sense of shame yoked to a globalist conception of a person’s
character is (not only premised on a false notion of character but also) morally and
personally debilitating. Our focus on self and others can and should recognize lack of
personality and character integration, and this fragmentation does not preclude a
narrative unity from the inside nor a love for the other as a whole person, taking all
her characteristics into account (but not being required to pretend that these form an
integrated unity of personality).
Endnotes
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1. Samuel and Pearl Oliner, “The Altruistic Personality” in Donald Niewyk (ed.), The
Holocaust, 3rd edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p. 228f).
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2003.08.03
Kai Hammermeister
The German Tradition in Aesthetics
Hammermeister, Kai, The German Tradition in Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press,

2002, 278pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521785545.
Reviewed by Paul Guyer, University of Pennsylvania
This book is a brief history of German aesthetics from Baumgarten and Mendelssohn
in the mid-eighteenth century to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Adorno in the mid-
twentieth century--although, as the author notes, it should be called a history of
Germanic aesthetics, since it includes Søren Kierkegaard, a Dane, György Lukács, a
Hungarian who wrote in German, and Herbert Marcuse, who did the work discussed
here in the U.S. (pp. x-xi). The author defends the restriction of his work to this
tradition because, he claims, the “German aesthetic tradition is resistant to outside
influences to an unusually high degree” -- a claim that I would deny in the case of all
of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers he discusses, and for at least some
of the twentieth-century ones -- and because “philosophers outside this discourse
respond to German concepts without themselves having a significant influence in
shaping the tradition” (p. x) -- again, I think, a dubious claim in at least some cases.
Hammermeister states that he will organize his discussion of the individual figures
around three issues: “the philosopher’s ontological discussion of art, the...epistemic
role attributed to art and beauty, and...the practical function the writer locates in
artworks” (p. xiv). He fulfills this promise more in some cases than in others. The
thesis of the work is “that paradigmatic positions in aesthetic philosophy were
established during the period of German idealism and romanticism, that these
paradigmatic positions were subsequently challenged by writers in the nineteenth
century” -- though he has to twist himself into a pretzel to make Schopenhauer’s
challenge subsequent to Hegel’s paradigm (pp. 111-12) -- “and that in the twentieth
century all the positions were renewed precisely in the order in which they first
emerged” (p. xii). I found the author’s discussions of the figures he treats less
systematic than these two claims would suggest and did not always find a clear
statement of the paradigms the authors in the period from Kant to Hegel were
supposed to have established. His statement of the historical thesis of the work is
particularly misleading because his discussion of Adorno, the last major figure from
the twentieth century treated, aligns him with Schelling and describes him as
emphatically rejecting the Hegelian view that art (or anything else) contributes to the
emergence of an unified, integrative view of reality.
Hammermeister begins with a brief discussion of Baumgarten and Mendelssohn,

maintaining that neither broke significantly from the framework of Leibniz and Wolff,
although Baumgarten emphasized the cognitive value of perception and Mendelssohn
recognized the value of the artistic expression of emotion in a way that his
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predecessors had not. I think this account underestimates the significance of

Baumgarten’s conversion of the Wolffian definition of pleasure as the “sensitive
cognition of perfection” into the “perfection of sensitive cognition,” which really makes
Baumgarten’s account of the potential pleasures in the use of our perceptual powers
independent from the Leibnizian metaphysics of perfection; and I think he also
underestimates the significance of Baumgarten’s conception of aesthetic experience as
“clear but confused” -- or as some translate “fused” -- perception, which had a
tremendous influence on conceptions of the syntax of aesthetic objects from the
“aesthetic ideas” of Kant through Hegel to Suzanne Langer and Nelson Goodman. I
believe that Hammermeister also underestimates the power of Mendelssohn’s complex
model of the sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience. But the focus of
Hammermeister’s first chapter is on Kant. He presents Kant as “subjectivizing”
aesthetics by focusing on the experience rather than the work of art, as advocating
the “autonomy of art,” and as being unable to reconnect aesthetics and morality once
he has sundered them. As the contrast between the “subjective” and the “objective” is
a central theme of the work, with the progress of Schelling and Hegel over Kant and
that of Heidegger and Gadamer over Ernst Cassirer being alleged to consist in the
move from “subjectivist” to “objectivist” conceptions of the aesthetic, I think that both
the charge that Kant “subjectivized” aesthetics and the contrast itself need a far more
careful examination than Hammermeister gives them; he seems to accept uncritically
Gadamer’s view that Kant is the source of this sin. His account also confuses Kant’s
conception of the autonomy of aesthetic judgment -- the idea that such judgment
must be made entirely on the basis of one’s own feeling even though it aims at
intersubjective validity -- with the idea, a century later, of the autonomy of art. I don’t
believe that Kant ever entertained the later idea of “art for art’s sake”; rather, he
confidently held that where art does not have moral significance it quickly becomes
distasteful to us.
Hammermeister next presents Schiller as introducing a moral function for art --

holding out to us an ideal of a world that is better than the one we currently occupy
but attainable -- which also allows “the beautiful to transcend the subjective sphere”
(p. 55). He begins his chapter by stating that Schiller introduces an “anthropological
and historical foundation” rather than “transcendental grounding of beauty” (p. 43),
but ends up claiming that Schiller is unable “to successfully fuse the historical and the
formal aspect of his aesthetic theory” (p. 69). He then argues that Schelling develops
a more successful account of how art allows the individual (subjective) consciousness
to achieve identity with an absolute (objective) object, through the history of the
development of art (which, as he notes, Schelling borrows wholesale from A.W.
Schlegel), which represents “the harmony of conscious and unconscious activities” (p.
70). But Schelling’s account (at least through the 1800 System of Transcendental
Idealism) overemphasizes the significance of art as the only genuine “organon” (as
Schelling says) of truth, and it is up to Hegel to provide an account of the genuine
cognitive and moral, objective significance of art, which however places art in a proper
position of both historical and theoretical subservience to philosophy. Hegel’s key
insight, according to Hammermeister, is that while art is genuinely objective, it “can
only retain its claim to truth if it is not considered as containing the truth of totality,
but that of the multiplicity of the real” (p. 104). I do not think that Hammermeister
recognizes how dependent Schelling’s conception of art as bridging the unconscious
and the conscious is on Kant’s conception of genius, and thus how problematic the
basic distinction between “subjectivist” and “objectivist” conceptions of art really is;
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and while he recognizes that Hegel’s “death of art” thesis puts into question whether
art actually has enduring objective significance on Hegel’s account, I found his
discussion of this threat (pp. 101-5) quite inconclusive.
In Part II, “Challenging the Paradigms,” Hammermeister discusses Schopenhauer,

Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. On his account, Schopenhauer reverts to a “subjectivist”
standpoint even more extreme than Kant’s, and with his emphasis on art as a tool for
the individual alleviation of suffering gives up all effort to connect the aesthetic to a
communal morality. Kierkegaard, with his radical distinction in Either/Or between
“aesthetic” and “ethical” attitudes, likewise gives up on any serious effort to connect
the aesthetic and the ethical. Nietzsche, conversely, especially in his works of the
1880s, “aestheticizes” philosophy itself, although without providing precise definitions
of his central categories of taste, beauty, and “aesthetics as physiology” (p. 149).
Although Hammermeister does not make explicit any connections between Nietzsche
on the one hand and the paradigms of Schelling and Hegel on the other, on his
account Nietzsche could be seen as parodying Schelling’s early claim for the
superiority of art over philosophy and rejecting Hegel’s position that art is essentially
a stepping-stone on the way to philosophy. Instead, Nietzsche’s cardinal sin is to
reduce all philosophy to a matter of personal taste -- the ultimate in “subjectivism.”
In Part III, “Renewing the Paradigms,” Hammermeister presents Cassirer as a neo-

Kantian, Lukács as a neo-Schillerian, and both Heidegger (with his disciple Gadamer)
as well as Adorno as neo-Schellingians -- there is apparently no room for a revival of
Hegel in the twentieth century. He criticizes Cassirer for reviving, in his own theory of
symbolic forms, Kant’s alleged separation of art from both science and morality,
rather than allowing that Cassirer may also be exploring commonalities among these
human enterprises by analyzing them all as forms of symbolic expression. Lukács
“echoes” Schiller in seeing art as a “transhistorical aesthetic norm” for a better human
life but makes no attempt to “deduce” this norm nor offers any clear way to “square
this notion with a thoroughly materialist aesthetics” (p. 165). Heidegger “insists with
Schelling on art as a Wahrheitsgeschehen...an occasion when truth becomes
conspicuous,” and, while not insisting with Schelling that art offers “the only access to
truth”, he nevertheless places it “above the propositional correctness of science, and,
hence, some versions of philosophy” (p. 173). Hammermeister does not question
Heidegger’s assumption that there is some deep “truth” about “being” -- as opposed
to many truths about many beings and our experiences of them -- for art to reveal,
nor does he question Heidegger’s Luddite hostility to modern science and technology -
- as if the solution to the ills of the twentieth (or twenty-first) century were to turn the
calendar back to some premodern page rather than to learn how to use politics and
diplomacy to control arms-races and instead put the potential of modern science and
technology to work for the betterment of ever larger numbers of individual human
beings. On the connection between art and morality, Hammermeister credits
Heidegger with continuing “that idealist tradition that had always regarded art as a
communal event” and seeing that art not only “breaks down the barriers between
men” but is also “one of man’s primary activities on which all social life is based” (p.
184). Hammermeister treads remarkably lightly on Heidegger’s Nazism, claiming that
there is nothing about Heidegger’s praise for the community-building function of art
that “makes this concept specific for a National Socialist aesthetics,” but that
“nevertheless, the fact that Heidegger drops the political references in his writings on
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art in the in the 1950s and 1960s could be understood as a result of his
disappointment with the National Socialists” (p. 185). Poor Heidegger -- disappointed
by the “National Socialists”! I have to say that the use of this term rather than the
blunt “Nazis,” thereby suggesting that the Nazis were just some sort of ordinary
political party, makes me shudder. Following the discussion of Heidegger, Gadamer is
given a few pages, in which he is described as taking “up those interpretations of art
that consider it as a form of play” (p. 190) and recognizing that “art provides order in
a disorderly, chaotic world” (p. 192). When Schiller (or for that matter Lukács)
characterize art as holding out to us an image of how a better world might be, that is
apparently “subjectivist” and utopian; but when Gadamer says that art does provide
order in a chaotic world, there is apparently no need for criticism.
Finally, Hammermeister’s account of Adorno is fraught with tension. On the one hand,
he claims that for Adorno, like Schelling but opposed to Kant, “not only does art offer
cognition, but it also offers such cognition where the philosophical concept falls short”
(p. 205). On the other hand, all that art can do with its alleged cognition is to keep
alive “the hope for a better life in a better world” by saying “’No’ to the present” (p.
201), and “art can only be political by completely refusing to participate in all matters
social -- it must negate communication” (p. 207). Something has to give here --
although I am prepared to think that these tensions are Adorno’s, not
Hammermeister’s -- for if art can offer some cognition, even only cognition that there
must be some way in which the world could be better than it is now, then, one would
think, it must have some way of communicating this cognition, while if art must
negate communication, then one might think that it must also negate cognition. Of
course, maybe there’s some deep sense of “cognition” independent of all possibility of
communication that I’m failing to understand here, just as I fail to understand some
deep sense of “being” independent of all particular beings.
Hammermeister clearly feels that there is something profoundly wrong with

“subjectivist” and “ahistorical” aesthetic theories and something profoundly right with
“objectivist” and “historical” theories. But he does not offer any general account of
what the aims and tasks of aesthetic theory should be which would allow us to see
why this must be so. And while he is explicit in his criticism of those whom he regards
as “subjectivists,” he allows the most implausible claims of his “objectivists” to pass
without any critical examination at all. The historiography of the whole work, as I have
already suggested, is very much based on Gadamer’s view that Kant sent modern
aesthetics down the wrong path by his “subjectivizing” emphasis on aesthetic
experience rather than aesthetic objects. But Hammermeister never asks whether
there is really anything we need to say about aesthetic objects that we can’t say by
talking about what is distinctive in our experience of such objects, including the social,
political, and historical conditions and significance of such experience, or, conversely,
whether there is anything we have to say about aesthetic experience that we can’t say
by talking about what is distinctive about the objects of such experience, including
their social, political, and historical functions. In other words, Hammermeister never
subjects to critical scrutiny the dichotomy on which his book is based. This is a serious
limitation on the philosophical value of his work. The book provides brief introductions
to the works of its subjects, which could certainly be of some use to new students of
aesthetics if they are guided by well-seasoned teachers, but it does not attain the high
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level of the scholarship on the history of aesthetics that has been produced by
philosophers in the last several decades, let alone advance that scholarship.
2003.08.04
Martin Weatherston
Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality
Weatherston, Martin, Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and

Temporality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 209pp, $62.00 (hbk), ISBN 0333994000.
Reviewed by Robert Hanna, University of Colorado, Boulder
In Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant, Martin Weatherston closely and critically

examines Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason--recently translated from vol. 25 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe--in order to
correct the somewhat one-sided impression we may get from Heidegger’s notoriously
tendentious reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (also known as
“the Kantbuch”). Weatherston’s interesting study is in effect a prolegomenon to the
deeper and more difficult project of comparing, contrasting, and evaluating Kant’s
transcendental idealism in the first Critique and Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology in Being and Time.
It is well known that in the Kantbuch, Heidegger strongly emphasizes Kant’s theory of
the imagination and makes the controversial claim that for Kant the cognitive capacity
of imagination is the “common root” of the capacity of understanding (the faculty of
concepts) and the capacity of sensibility (the faculty of intuitions). In fact Heidegger
even more controversially claims that the representational spontaneity of productive
imagination is at bottom identical to the volitional spontaneity of practical freedom.
And most controversially of all, Heidegger also claims that Kant’s transcendental
theory of the imagination anticipates but still falls short of his own existential-
phenomenological theory of “temporality” (roughly, human intentional agency) and
“freedom” (roughly, decisive personal commitment with a view to achieving
“authenticity,” or psychological coherence and personal integrity over an entire finite
human life). These bold interpretive assertions have frequently drawn the accusation
that Heidegger unfairly distorts and even does “violence” to both the letter and the
spirit of the Kantian texts.
Weatherston quite rightly does not try to deny that Heidegger’s reading of Kant is
tendentious: it is tendentious. What he does instead, by getting deeply into the
Phenomenological Interpretation-- the text of a lecture course from 1927-28--is
painstakingly to reconstruct the philosophical rationale behind Heidegger’s reading of
Kant by showing how it prefigures and rehearses the central themes of Being and
Time, which was published in 1929. To understand all is to forgive all. In fact,
Heidegger was only doing what every first-rate post-Kantian Austro-German
philosopher in the early 20th century had to do or else become a mere Kant scholar or
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a neo-Kantian: somehow claw his way out of Kant’s system and find his own
philosophical place in the sun. Frege did this in the 1870s and 80s by writing the
Foundations of Arithmetic, the Begriffsschrift, and Basic Laws of Arithmetic and by
undertaking to reduce arithmetic to pure logic, thus refuting part of Kant’s thesis that
mathematics is non-logically necessary because it presupposes the pure intuitions of
space and time. Wittgenstein did it in 1919 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by
latching onto the elementary and non-paradoxical part of Frege-Russell logic and by
substituting that for Kant’s theory of intuition. Carnap did it in 1934 in the Logische
Syntax der Sprache by latching onto Tarski's brilliant semantic and meta-linguistic
triage for Gödel incompleteness and the Liar Paradox, together with what was left of
Frege-Russell logic, and by substituting higher-order function theory (the theory of
types) for Kant’s theory of intuition. And Heidegger did it in 1927-28 in the
Phenomenological Interpretation by engaging in a direct “dialogue” with Kant in which
Heidegger got to do all the talking, by substituting a radically realist, externalist,
noncognitive, and pragmatic version of the Brentano-Husserl concept of intentionality
(which Heidegger generally labels “care”) for Kant’s theory of intuition, and by adding
the existential-phenomenological theory of temporality and freedom. If this is
philosophical “violence,” then thank god for philosophical violence, and to the devil
with good Kant scholarship! It is however instructively ironic and grist for the
sociology of philosophy that if anyone less brilliant than the Heidegger of Being and
Time had written Phenomenological Interpretation or for that matter the Kantbuch,
those two books probably would never have been published.
According to Weatherston, Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Kant has

two basic themes--(i) Kant’s logic (both formal and transcendental), and (ii) Kant’s
doctrine of the imagination (especially the productive imagination)--both of which
Weatherston then traces through Heidegger’s analysis of central topics of the first half
of the first Critique: the nature of metaphysics as a science (ch. 1), the
Transcendental Aesthetic and the unity of the faculties of understanding and
sensibility (ch. 2), transcendental logic and the nature of judgment (ch. 3), the
metaphysical deduction and the relation between categories and synthesis (ch. 4), the
Transcendental Deduction of the categories (ch. 5), and finally apperception,
objectivity, and temporality (ch. 6). Weatherston spells out the basic themes clearly
and in much detail; his interpretations of Kant and Heidegger are on the whole
accurate, illuminating, and convincing; and his point-by-point critique of Heidegger’s
reading of Kant is similarly cogent.
Nevertheless there are still a few isolated knotty cases in which, I think, neither
Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, nor Weatherston’s interpretation of Kant’s
texts, nor Weatherston’s criticism of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, is
correct. For example, Heidegger says that for Kant “formal intuition” (i.e., formale
Anschauung, not to be confused with “form of intuition” or Form der Anschauung--see
Critique of Pure Reason B160-161 n.) should be understood as essentially
imaginational and nonconceptual, which I think is incorrect; then Weatherston says
that there is no sense in which sensibility is spontaneous, which I think is also
incorrect; and then Weatherston criticizes Heidegger for failing to see that there is no
sense in which sensibility is spontaneous, which I think is yet again incorrect. For
Kant, formal intuition is the joint result of what in the B edition he calls (1) the “pure
intellectual synthesis of the understanding” and (2) the “pure figurative synthesis of
393
the imagination” or “synthesis speciosa,” so it is necessarily both conceptual and

nonconceptual. Moreover the sensibility has its own “lower-level” or nondiscursive
type of spontaneity, which thus complements the “higher-level” or discursive
spontaneity of the understanding, to the extent that the forms of intuition are
generated by what Kant in the A edition calls the “synopsis” of the manifold in sensible
intuition, which I would identify with the “pure synthesis of apprehension” in the A
edition, and also in turn identify with the pure figurative synthesis of the imagination
or synthesis speciosa in the B edition.
Of course all of this heavy Kantian transcendental machinery is an attempt to answer

the $64,000 question: how can the logical functions of the understanding (and in
particular, categories, judgments, and empirical concepts) apply to the objects given
in sensibility? Here I think that the correct answer is that sensibility is directly
nonconceptually acquainted with those given objects--which are “appearances” or
“undetermined objects of empirical intuition”--by means of empirical intuition in inner
or outer sense, and that the special cognitive role of the understanding is then to
“determine” those objects, that is, correctly characterize them by means of concepts
and judgments. In other words, for Kant empirical cognition or the objective
representation of the natural world is the joint product of “bottom up” lower-level
nonconceptual processing by sensibility and “top down” higher-level conceptual
processing by the understanding. Each faculty directly contributes its own distinctive
sort of representational form and content to the outputs of the other faculty, for the
overall purpose of cognizing a determinate object: so they operate interdependently.
Empirical cognition is thus a global achievement of the several interdependent
faculties of a single unified self-conscious rational animal in dynamic interaction with
its surrounding world. The trick is to avoid the dual mistake of holding that sensibility
is purely passive and that the understanding does all the cognitive work, although this
is the interpretation that Weatherston favors (see, for example, pp. 17, 96-98, 104,
116-120, 160, and 174).
Also I wish that Weatherston had tried to get more deeply into the dialectical interplay
between Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views. In his Conclusion he says tantalizingly
that both Kant and Heidegger recognized the importance of the finitude of human
cognition and that they traced the source of this finitude to human intuitional
cognition (p. 176). I agree completely. But that is all he says. So his discussion raises
at least two important questions: (I) Are Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views in fact
fundamentally different from one another? and (II) How should we evaluate the truth
of their views?
As to the first question, it seems to me that in fact there are at least four ways in
which Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views are deeply similar. (1) Weatherston himself
notes the obvious parallel between Kant’s empirical vs. transcendental distinction, and
Heidegger’s ontic vs. ontological (or beings vs. Being) distinction (p.165). But there is
also (2) Kant’s theory of nonconceptual (i.e., intuitional) content in inner sense and
outer sense, feeling or affect, imagination, perception, judgment, desire, and volitional
intention, which Heidegger develops at length in Being and Time under the rubric of
“care”; (3) Kant’s thesis (implicit in the first Critique but explicit in the Critique of
Practical Reason) of the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, which
Heidegger treats via his doctrines of temporality, freedom, and authenticity; and also
394
(4) Kant’s observation in the Jäsche Logic that the fundamental question of philosophy
is “what is a human being?,” which Heidegger attempts to answer via the existential
analytic of Dasein. Furthermore it is arguable that (1*) Kant’s transcendental vs.
empirical distinction is just the distinction between humanly essential fundamental
cognitive capacities (i.e., understanding and sensibility) and their actual application to
the world; (2*) that Kant’s theory of nonconceptual or intuitional content is the key to
understanding his theory of cognition in the first half of the first Critique; (3*) that the
primacy of the practical is the key to the understanding Kant’s theory of reason in the
second half of the first Critique and in the second Critique; and finally (4*) that
anthropocentrism is the key to understanding Kant’s transcendental idealism in all
three Critiques. Now all four of these ideas are basically shared by Heidegger. So in
this light it seems to me accurate to say that the Heidegger of Being and Time has
“existentialized,” “externalized,” “noncognitivized,” “pragmatized,” and more generally
flattened out Kant’s transcendental idealism, but still has not really deviated in any
deep way from the Kantian framework.
As to the second question, it seems to me that while there are good reasons to prefer
some of Heidegger’s views over some of Kant’s, nevertheless there are even better
reasons strongly to prefer Kant’s views to Heidegger’s, all things considered.
To the extent that Heidegger tries to show how logic, judgment, and conceptualization
all presuppose practice, affect or emotion, and engaged intentional agency, or in other
words to the extent that Heidegger tries to show how cognitive intentionality
presupposes “care,” I think that Heidegger is both correct and also has gone
philosophically somewhat beyond Kant. Moreover I think that Heidegger is correct that
logic, judgment, truth, conceptual representation, science, and theoretical reason are
shot through with normativity. Kant of course recognizes the intrinsic normativity of
theoretical reason too--he holds that formal logic is the science of how we ought to
think, for example, and there are deep connections between Kant’s views on truth (as
formal correspondence with the actual facts) and his views on truthfulness (as
sincerity and the concern for accuracy)--but not as explicitly or as fully as Heidegger.
Nevertheless Heidegger--like Nietzsche, Dewey, and the later Wittgenstein--is

engaged in a radically deflationary philosophical project. As Rorty has pointed out, this
project is eliminativist without being reductive. But many things, properties, and facts
that really and truly matter to creatures like us are trashed along the way. What
happens in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is that logic, judgment, conceptual
thinking, truth-as-correspondence, science, and theoretical reason all lose their
ontological, semantic, and epistemic integrity in the face of their corresponding
existential-phenomenological foundations. In effect, the logos sinks without a trace
into the Lebensphilosophie. In this respect, I think, Kant’s general notion of a
“transcendental deduction” (i.e., a proof that some a priori representation R has
“objective validity,” or empirical cognitive significance, by means of showing how R is
presupposed by some other representation R* that has objective validity by
assumption) is superior to Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological analytic, precisely
because--whatever we might think about Kant’s idealism--a transcendental deduction
at the very least fully preserves the ontological, semantic, and epistemic status of
what it purports to explain.
395
Furthermore and perhaps even more importantly, Kant’s basic concern throughout the
Critical philosophy with rationality, consistency, truthfulness, strict obligation, and
universal moral principles is a fundamental corrective to and an appropriate constraint
on Heidegger’s highly subjective or first-person-centered and in effect emotivist and
anti-rationalist existential ethics. The sad and sometimes tragic fact is that living
freely and authentically (and even more so, attempting to live freely and
authentically) in the existential sense will not guarantee that you do the right thing.
This is because it is quite possible to be authentic in the existential sense and deeply
evil: witness Nietzsche’s imaginary Übermensch, and (50 years later, catastrophically
in real life) the wannabe-authentic Nazi thug.
This is not however to say that the Heideggerian ethics of authenticity should be
rejected out of hand. Indeed, Kant’s notion of an (imperfect) duty to develop one’s
talents can be deepened if one reads it as the obligation for all rational human animals
to seek authenticity in the face of their own inevitable deaths. More generally, the
Kantian notion of autonomy as moral self-legislation, or willing in accordance with the
Categorical Imperative, can also be deepened by the Heideggerian notion of authentic
freedom. Kant is surely correct that the highest good for creatures like us is to will in
accordance with the Categorical Imperative: but it also seems plausible to me that the
complete good for creatures like us is to have a good will, plus happiness, plus
authenticity.
Therefore at the end of the day I would want to say that Kant is the much greater
philosopher of the two--and correspondingly, that the Critique of Pure Reason is a
much greater book than Being and Time--precisely because Kant’s Critical philosophy
or general theory of human cognition, human volition, and the limits and scope of
human theoretical and practical reason, comes much closer to the truth about the
nature of creatures like us than Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. Nevertheless,
Heidegger’s tendentious interpretations of Kant do open up some otherwise latent and
previously unexplored aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy--and this has paid
dividends in recent “continentally” inspired scholarly work on Kant by, for example,
Béatrice Longuenesse and Wayne Waxman. It also remains true that some of
Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological insights into the human condition
significantly enrich Kant’s theories of cognition, volition, and reason. So by all means
read Kant, read Heidegger, read Heidegger on Kant (and here you may also want to
consult Weatherston’s useful book), then read Kant again. Then throw away your
Heidegger and teach Kant to your students.
2003.08.05
Lorraine Code (ed.)
Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer
Code, Lorraine (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Pennsylvania

State University Press, 2003, 424pp, $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 0271022442.
Reviewed by Robert J. Dostal, Bryn Mawr College
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This collection of essays on feminist interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thought

is inevitably as much about feminism as it is about Gadamer’s hermeneutical
philosophy. Lorraine Code, the editor, has brought together fifteen essays by sixteen
authors (one essay is jointly written) from the U.S.A., Canada, and Europe. Many of
the contributors’ names are familiar to the philosophical readership. The book is part
of the Pennsylvania State Press series, “Re-Reading the Canon,” edited by Nancy
Tuana, who contributes to this volume a brief preface which speaks to the series. The
book has two parts: “Part One--Hermeneutic Projects, Feminist Interventions:
Engendering Gadamerian Conversations” and “Part Two--Feminist Issues: Enlisting
Gadamerian Resources,” though this reader does not find that the division marks
much of a difference in the essays.
Code frames the collection well with her helpful introduction, entitled “Why Feminists
Do Not Read Gadamer.” Her introduction concludes with a section on “Why I Read
Gadamer.” The book, for the most part, constitutes an attempt to persuade feminists
to read Gadamer. The authors largely assume that feminists either ignore or are
hostile to Gadamer’s work. The authors who defend Gadamer present his philosophical
hermeneutics as a “fruitful resource” (Susan-Judith Hoffman, “Gadamer’s Philosophical
Hermeneutics and Feminist Projects”) for feminist theorizing. The essays are
exclusively concerned with Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. There is no
attention given to his work on ancient philosophy or to his many essays on aesthetics
and the philosophy of art. Understandably, the work that concerns all these readers is
Truth and Method (1960). Many make reference to the Gadamer/Habermas exchanges
in the 60’s and 70’s and to the Gadamer/Derrida exchange in 1981. A few make use
of some of his other essays as they are relevant to or exemplary of his philosophical
hermeneutics. For example, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, in her essay, “Questioning
Authority”, makes use of Gadamer’s essays on health and medicine, The Enigma of
Health (1996), to illuminate the question of authority. The authors refer to a wide
range of feminist thought, though Judith Butler and Donna Haraway are perhaps the
most cited feminist writers.
There is a large agreement among the contributors, pro and contra Gadamer, about
what is positive about Gadamer’s hermeneutics and what is problematic. They all
agree that Gadamer does not address the questions of power and gender and that he
is largely silent on political issues. Some find these silences indicative of masculinist
philosophy, which veils its repression of the feminine with universalist claims and with
silence about gender and power. Others acknowledge the silence but think that
Gadamer’s thought can be put to use to support feminist explorations of power,
gender and politics. What these commentators uniformly find positive is Gadamer’s
critique of positivist, scientistic thought and his refusal epistemologically to assume a
God’s-eye point of view. Feminists, we are told, appreciate Gadamer’s account of
human experience and human knowing as engaged, situated, historical, and
dialogical, though the negative voices in this book warn feminists not to be deceived
by this seemingly proto-feminist account. What these feminist philosophers find
problematic are Gadamer’s rehabilitation of a set of three concepts (authority,
prejudice, and tradition), his claims for the universality of hermeneutic experience as
he describes it, and the status of difference, alterity, and the Other in his account.
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Gadamer defines “understanding” (Verstehen) as coming to agreement. His emphasis

on agreement, unity, and continuity runs contrary to the valorization of rupture and
difference among feminist thinkers. Several contributors state simply that Gadamer is
found to be a conservative thinker.
Let’s look briefly at the individual essays and begin by turning to the four essays
which are strongly negative about Gadamer’s philosophy and its relation to feminism.
Marie Fleming (“Gadamer’s Conversation: Does the Other Have a Say?”) writes that it
is a “grave mistake to think of Gadamer as a potential friend” (110). Gadamer’s view
of interpretive understanding “is deeply hostile to feminist values” (111). The primary
reason she finds Gadamer’s work so hostile to “feminist values” is that, on her
account, “Gadamer’s hermeneutical courting of the other is purely instrumental”
(111). His need for unity and the assimilation of the other relegates the other to the
position of a useful provocation. Gemma Corradi Fiumara (“The Development of
Hermeneutic Prospects”) contests the primacy of the question that she finds in
Gadamer’s hermeneutics. By proclaiming this primacy, Gadamer “seems to produce
the hermeneutic rendition of our logocratic classicities” (133). Fiumara proposes what
she calls “epistemophily,” which is open to both listening and questioning. She finds
that Gadamer ignores listening. On her account, “women’s interrogatives represent
something that cannot be included” in the Gadamerian questioning. She does note an
important assertion of Gadamer that openness and listening are necessary for any
human relationship, but she counters that this “unexpected remark” is only an
indication that “epistemophily is an incoercible propensity that at times makes itself
evident even in inhospitable scenarios such as Gadamer’s outlook” (138). Grace M.
Jantzen (“Gadamer, Heidegger, and the Limits of Existence”) finds Gadamer
“profoundly anti-feminist” (286), even though he might appear to have affinities for
feminist standpoint theory. She calls for developing “a symbolic of natality” (286). The
focus of her critique lies with Gadamer’s dependence on Heidegger, whose account of
human existence rests on mortality and death. According to Jantzen, death has been
used in the Platonic-Christian tradition to develop a rationality that is disembodied and
disembedded in material and social reality. Finally, Robin May Schott (“Gender,
Nazism, and Hermeneutics”) looks at Gadamer’s biography and raises broad questions
about his universal hermeneutics. She accuses him of complicity and accommodating
himself to Nazism as he made his career in the 1930’s and 40’s in Nazi Germany. This
is a very short essay and the only essay that is a reprint (from “Library of Living
Philosophers” volume on Gadamer, edited by Lewis Hahn, 1997).
The other eleven essays find Gadamer’s thought a good resource for feminist thought,
though some (Veronica Vasterling, Robin Pappas and William Cowling, Johnson, and
Meili Steele) carefully qualify and limit its appropriateness. Vasterling writes, for
example, that the “wholesale adoption of Gadamer’s solution is out of the question for
feminists” (150). A common topos is the question of Gadamer in relation to
postmodern thought. A version of this question is the contrast between a
hermeneutics of suspicion (postmodern) and a hermeneutics of trust (Gadamer).
Kathleen Roberts Wright (“[En]gendering Dialogue Between Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
and Feminist Thought”), for example, argues that we need to get beyond a
hermeneutics of suspicion when we are confronted with the non-Western. Our very
global and transnational world calls for a turn to Gadamerian hermeneutics. Georgia
Warnke (“Hermeneutics and Constructed Identities”) argues that it is philosophically
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sounder to think of gender identity as being interpreted (Gadamer) rather than as

constructed (Butler). Hoffman’s thesis is that Gadamer’s hermeneutics provides an
account of knowledge that allows us to conceive of power as formative without
reducing meaning to power. Vasterling attempts to “rescue the idea of situatedness
and all that it implies from Gadamer’s harmonizing and universalizing tendencies”
(178). She finds Gadamer’s over-emphasis on harmony and unity to be rooted in his
reliance on Hegel. She further argues that Gadamer fails to distinguish understanding
from evaluation. On her account, this distinction is important for a critical approach to
one’s situatedness.
Susan Hekman (“The Ontology of Change”) finds that Gadamer offers a positive
theory of change in contrast to the negativism of Butler and Derrida. According to
Hekman, Gadamer’s hermeneutics provides three additional distinct advantages over
postmodernism: 1) for Gadamer, language opens a world to us rather than closing us
into a situation; 2) Gadamer, through the concept of “horizon,” makes better sense of
the position of the social analyst than the postmodernists, who are in danger of
assigning themselves an Archimedean point outside the world; and 3) Gadamer’s
ontology is not nihilistic.
The title of the paper written jointly by Robin Pappas and William Cowling is the
subtitle of Vasterling’s paper: “Toward a Critical Hermeneutics.” They point out that
Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not gendered and that he does not “thematize the body.”
Their task is to lay out a project of engendering this hermeneutics and making it
critical. They attempt to carry this out, they tell us, by “reading Gadamer’s
hermeneutics, in part, through the lens of Donna Haraway’s concept of ’situated
knowledges’,” which are always embodied, historical, and material.
Both Linda Martín Alcoff (“Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology”) and Silja Freudenberger
(“The Hermeneutic Conversation as Epistemological Model”) find the basis of a
promising epistemology in Gadamerian hermeneutics. Alcoff discusses Gadamer’s
hermeneutics in relation to Donald Davidson. Freudenberger limits herself, for the
most part, to Anglo-American feminist epistemology. Both find Gadamer useful for
feminist theory. Alcoff considers “some of his central positions” to be “nascently
feminist,” (232) while Freudenberger writes that Gadamer contributes nolens volens
to feminist epistemology (260). For Alcoff there are four central features of Gadamer’s
“more realistic, less alienated” conception of reason that are useful to feminism: 1)
the openness to alterity; 2) the move from knowledge to understanding; 3) holism in
justification; and 4) immanent realism. The primary objection to Gadamer’s
hermeneutics is, on her account, the “monotopic” character of its treatment of
tradition. Following Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel, she calls for a pluritopic
understanding of tradition. Freudenberger focuses on Gadamer’s treatment of
conversation and the central importance of openness and situatedness for this concept
of conversation.
Unlike any of the other essays, Meili Steele (“Three Problematics of Linguistic
Vulnerability: Gadamer, Benhabib, and Butler”) addresses a prominent controversy
within feminist thought that exists independent of Gadamer. His essay is the longest
and the most detailed in this collection. The controversy is that between the critical-
theory position of Seyla Benhabib and the postmodernist position of Butler. Steele
399
argues that “both Benhabib and Butler, in opposing ways, remain caught in the
Enlightenment desire to achieve liberty, justice and clarity by setting up a
philosophical problematic over and against a historical phenomenology, by trying to
leap out of the hermeneutic circle” (336). He finds Gadamer’s hermeneutic
phenomenology to be indispensable for feminist political theory. Steele provides an
excellent account of the differences between Benhabib and Butler. His argument is
dialectical in that Gadamer provides a third position that is able to mediate the
differences between these two important feminist thinkers. Benhabib separates
individual agency and language while Butler gives us linguistic agency without
persons. Gadamer, according to Steele, shows us how we can live through our
linguistic heritage. Understanding, on his account, trumps genealogy. Like Hekman,
Steele argues that a basic difficulty with Butler’s position concerns how she can
account for it. He writes:
There is a limit to how far we can read our predecessors and contemporaries as
“dupes” of processes that they do not understand but that are available to the critic
armed with a theory and a therapeutic interest. We have to be able to account for our
own ability to escape and for the values that drive this effort. . . . Butler’s problematic
offers no way to discriminate among languages that empower and those that do
damage, for this would require more guidance than is available from reference to a
transcendental generator of liberty through effects (354).
Steele finds the limit of Gadamer’s thought in his “insensitivity to the multiplicity of
traditions and to the different effects of power” (347).
There are a few moments in the book that are personal or confessional. Fleming
confesses that she has given up the “sisterhood ideal.” Johnson discusses the question
of authority through the example of her becoming department chair. Laura Duhn
Kaplan in the volume’s concluding essay (“Three Applications of Gadamer’s
Hermeneutics: Philosophy-Faith-Feminism”) writes that in her life her philosophy, her
faith, and her feminism come nicely together in a Gadamerian way: “In my
philosophy, my faith, and my feminism, I practice understanding as Gadamer has
described it. I place myself within a tradition, and then continuously fuse past and
present as I negotiate a modern life within traditional horizons” (368). Her statement
that “sometimes I think I am driven by a blind imperative to preserve Jewish tradition
at all costs” would seem to support the negative critics’ views about the
“traditionalism” and conservatism of Gadamer’s thought and would run contrary to the
reading of Gadamer on tradition that is not traditionalist (Johnson, Alcoff).
The brevity of most of these essays does not allow for either careful examination of
Gadamer’s texts or for engaging current feminist thought. More than one essay lays
out a “project” but can only sketch it and not carry it out in this format. This is, of
course, not the fault of the authors but simply the nature of the beast—a collection of
essays. The rhetoric of the appeals to feminism in this volume I often found puzzling
and seemingly self-contradictory. Though some of the contributors like Alcoff carefully
qualify what they mean when they use terms like “feminine,” “woman,” or “feminist,”
others make pronouncements about what feminism is or what feminists think in
apparently stereotypical and totalizing ways. Perhaps it is self-conscious and meant to
be provocative. Perhaps not. Gadamer is attacked for using the first person plural, a
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“we” that illegitimately means to speak for women. Yet several of the authors in the
volume do not seem to hesitate using “we” to speak for feminists generally. This too
seems to be the nature of the beast—essays that are to consider a philosophical
position from the perspective of an “ism”—in this case, feminism.
Nonetheless there are things to learn in this volume about Gadamer and about
feminism. The consensus of the volume is that feminism is largely “postmodern.” The
authors of this volume, for the most part, are suggesting in a variety of ways that this
state of affairs should be modified or substantially changed—and that Gadamer’s
hermeneutics helps show the way.
2003.08.06
John O'Callaghan
Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of
Existence
O'Callaghan, John, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect
Form of Existence, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, 392pp, $59.95 (hbk), ISBN
0268042179.
Reviewed by Susan Brower-Toland, Saint Louis University
There is a well-known tradition in the philosophy of mind and language that attempts
to explain the representational properties of expressions in natural language as
derivative from the representational properties of the mental states of their users.
According to this tradition, words represent by being conventionally associated with
concepts or mental representations. This picture of mind and language, often dubbed
“mental representationalism”, has a long and distinguished history, going back at least
to Aristotle’s famous discussion in De Interpretatione and continuing even to the
present. This traditional picture has increasingly come under attack, especially from
philosophers influenced by the Linguistic Turn, a movement whose general
methodological position reverses the priority of thought over language. Such
philosophers reject the traditional “Aristotelian” account of linguistic meaning and
mental representation, placing language itself at the very foundation of traditional
problems of philosophy.
It is against this background that Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn must be
understood. In this book John O’Callaghan presents and develops Thomas Aquinas’s
account of mind and language with the specific aim of distancing one of Aristotle’s
greatest followers from the so-called Aristotelian tradition of mind and language, and
thereby showing that at least the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition may be brought into
fruitful dialogue with contemporary discussions influenced by the Linguistic Turn. As
O’Callaghan himself describes his project, it has both a positive and a negative aim,
namely, to “make some progress toward a better understanding of what the
Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition does and does not claim about the relations that hold
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among words, thoughts, and things” (3). O’Callaghan’s discussion is rich and, in many
ways, compelling. As we shall see, however, it succeeds more in accomplishing its
negative aim (that of showing what Aquinas does not hold) than it does in
accomplishing its positive aim (that of making clear what Aquinas’s positive views
are).
The book can be divided into four parts. In the first part (chaps. 1-2), O’Callaghan
considers Aquinas’s treatment of the famous De Interpretatione passage (16a3-8) in
which Aristotle sets out his “semantic triangle.” In this passage Aristotle claims that
words signify thoughts, which in turn are likenesses of things. This passage is
traditionally interpreted as providing the genesis of a semantic theory according to
which words signify concepts primarily and things only secondarily (i.e., only through
the mediation of such concepts).
O’Callaghan argues convincingly that Aquinas does not interpret Aristotle’s semantic
triangle as identifying the significata of natural language expressions with concepts.
On the contrary, Aquinas simply takes for granted (and assumes that Aristotle does as
well) that words primarily signify extra-mental things. According to Aquinas, the only
reason Aristotle mentions concepts in the De Interpretatione passage is to explain
how universal expressions can signify things. Since, according to Aquinas, there are
no universal things to be the significata for such expressions, their generality has to
be accounted for in some other way. It is for this purpose, he says, that Aristotle
introduces concepts as the “modus significandi” of universal words—the manner in
which they signify particulars. Thus, according to O’Callaghan, “were it not for the
manner in which general words signify, intellect [and its concepts] would not play a
part in the analysis of signification” (22).
On the basis of all this, O’Callaghan concludes that “St. Thomas is not subject to the
charge [of mental representationalism] at the level of his textual interpretation of
Aristotle” (77). However, as he immediately goes on to point out, “simply showing
that St. Thomas is not subject to the charge at the level of his textual interpretation of
Aristotle does not bring an end to the matter since his substantive philosophical
discussion might still fall prey to it” (77). In the remainder of the book, therefore,
O’Callaghan goes on to argue that even in his more “substantive philosophical
discussions” of mind, what is on offer in Aquinas is not any form of
representationalism.
As a way of setting the dialectical stage for his argument, O’Callaghan provides, in the
second part of the book (chs. 3-5) an overview of early modern and contemporary
representationalist theories of mind together with a survey of the some of the most
important criticisms lodged against such theories (especially by Hilary Putnam). This
part includes: a brief survey of empiricist views about mind and language (specifically
as found in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), as well as early criticisms of these views by
thinkers such as Reid, Husserl, Frege, and Wittgenstein (chap. 3); an outline of Jerry
Fodor’s attempt to revive the empiricist tradition via his account of mental
representation and the Language of Thought (chap. 4); and a overview of Putnam’s
characterization and criticism of this broadly “Aristotelian” tradition (chap. 5).
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O’Callaghan uses the discussion in the second part of his book to draw out three
“philosophical assumptions” or “substantive theses” that he thinks lie at the heart of
representationalism and the criticisms of it. He then argues in the third part of the
book (chaps. 6-8) that Aquinas rejects each of these theses and hence escapes not
only the criticisms that are associated with them, but also “the charge of
representationalism” itself. The three theses and O’Callaghan’s reason for thinking
Aquinas rejects them may be briefly summarized as follows:
Thesis I: “there are things or objects in the mind that may be akin to pictures,
appearances, effects, or some other mode of representation of things outside the
mind” (155). O’Callaghan calls this the “Third Thing Thesis” and argues (in chap. 6)
that Aquinas rejects it on the grounds that for Aquinas “a concept is [nothing but] the
informed activity of the intellect as it grasps res extra animam” (168). Thus, just as in
grasping a pen in order to write “there is no third thing that exists between my hand
and pen . . . [s]imilarly, there is no third thing other than the conceiving intellect and
the res extra animam” (169-170).
Thesis II: “the mind in its activity of thinking directs itself to these internal objects as
what it primarily knows or attends to, or is related to” (156). O’Callaghan labels this
the “Introspectibility Thesis” and argues (in chap. 7) that Aquinas explicitly rejects
something similar to it. What O’Callaghan has in mind is Aquinas’ contention that
intelligible species are not what the intellect understands, but that by which it
understands. Moreover, since that by which the intellect understands is not (except in
cases of introspection) itself an object of cognition, it is not an object of
consciousness.
Thesis III: “there is no intrinsic or necessary relation between the so-called ’mental
representations’ in the mind and the represented things outside it” (156). O’Callaghan
calls this last thesis the “Internalist Thesis”. He attempts to show (in chap. 8) that
Aquinas rejects it, arguing that since Aquinas holds (1) that in cognizing the intellect
becomes formally (or structurally) identical to the things cognized and (2) that “the
structure the intellect takesÂ…is a result of the particular way in which the human
person interacts causally with its environment,” (249) he must be conceived as an
externalist about mental content.
In the fourth and final part of the book (chap. 9), O’Callaghan briefly discusses what
Aquinas’s views have to contribute to contemporary discussions influenced by
linguistically-turned philosophers such as Putnam and McDowell. According to
O’Callaghan, what Aquinas offers us is an account of language not typically recognized
by philosophers such as Putnam—namely, an account that connects meaning with the
mind, but not with mental representations or mental “symbols”. Aquinas’s theory
doesn’t render language and knowledge internal, private, or “overly-individualistic”,
but is rather more like McDowell’s in its attempt to “eliminate the dualism of the
internal and external in our philosophical reflection upon knowledge” (279). Indeed,
according to O’Callaghan, Aquinas is more successful at this than is McDowell, since
for Aquinas, language and knowledge do not constitute a sui-generis form of life
“untethered from the characteristically animal modes of human life, or at best with
nothing more than a ’foothold’ in them” (285). On the Thomistic picture these aspects
of human nature are really just “a more perfect form of natural existence” (297). It is
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this picture of the continuity of language and knowledge with more basic forms of
human life that O’Callaghan sees as the most significant contribution emerging from
the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition.
O’Callaghan’s book is well worth reading. His project is both ambitious and interesting
and the way in which he develops it highlights that, while Aquinas may be one of the
more well-studied figures among medieval philosophers, we still have much to learn
from (and about) his work. O’Callaghan situates Aquinas’ theory of mind and language
vis-à-vis contemporary dialectical debates in a way that is useful and, in doing so,
succeeds in showing that Aquinas’s discussion of mind and language is more
sophisticated, and has more in common with contemporary discussions than one
might expect. When it comes to the explaining of the details of Aquinas’ theory of
mind and language, however, I think it must be said that O’Callaghan’s discussion is
much less satisfying. This fact, I shall suggest, may owe partly to the overall
dialectical strategy that O’Callaghan pursues, and partly to the audience for whom
he’s writing.
As should be clear from the foregoing overview, O’Callaghan’s project has a largely
negative aim. Although he does make an effort to characterize Aquinas’s positive
views about mind and language, as well as to indicate their potential for advancing
certain contemporary debates, his main goal is to establish what views Aquinas does
not hold. Thus, he devotes the lion’s share of the book to showing that Aquinas is not
committed to three theses associated with mental representationalism, and therefore
that, ultimately, Aquinas’ account does not fit within the Aristotelian—or mental
representationalist—tradition.
With regard to Aquinas’s rejection of the first two representationalist theses,

O’Callaghan’s arguments are, for the most part, compelling. The case he makes for
Aquinas’s rejection of the “Internalist Thesis” is, however, less convincing. Recall that
O’Callaghan’s case rests on attributing to Aquinas two claims: (1) concepts and things
conceived by them are formally identical and (2) what concepts we possess depends
on our causal interactions with the world. But it’s not clear that Aquinas’s commitment
to these two claims is, by itself, sufficient to establish his rejection of the “Internalist
Thesis”. Although the formal identity of concepts and their objects establishes, in
some sense, an “intrinsic” or “necessary” relation between them, this isn’t, as
O’Callaghan acknowledges, sufficient to show that Aquinas rejects internalism. But
adding the second claim doesn’t seem to help. For even if (2) is true, all that follows is
that concepts are causally dependent on their objects, not logically or metaphysically
dependent. But the strong claim is what must be shown to establish that Aquinas is an
externalist about mental content.
Even setting aside any worries about Aquinas’s relation to the three theses, important
questions still remain. For, even if O’Callaghan is right and Aquinas is not committed
to any of these theses, it doesn’t obviously follow that Aquinas isn’t, nevertheless,
committed to some version of mental representationalism. In order to establish that
Aquinas doesn’t hold any form of mental representationalism, much more is
required—in particular, a more careful and a more detailed analysis of Aquinas’s
positive views about mind and language. To the extent that one approaches this book
404
expecting this kind of detailed positive analysis, one can’t help but be a bit
disappointed.
There are at least two reasons for this. First, O’Callaghan does very little to clarify
crucial (and often technical) notions in Aquinas’ theory of mind. In the case of some
technical notions, such as, for example, agent and possible intellect, he leaves them
entirely unexplained, whereas in the case of others, e.g., abstraction, concepts, and
formal identity, his discussion is either vague or merely suggestive. Second, to the
extent that he does attempt to clarify these notions, the strategy he pursues is largely
negative. For example, when O’Callaghan takes up Aquinas’ notion of abstraction, he
begins with the following vague but suggestive description: abstraction is “a progress
from a general and confused act based on sense experience to a more specific and
precise act” (222) and, thus, ultimately a kind of “developmental view of concept use”
(252). Then, all he offers us by way of clarification is an account of how not to
understand this abstraction process: it’s not a process of “moving forms from place to
place”, of “illumination” or of “selectively attending” or of “selectively ignoring”. The
case is much the same when it comes to O’Callaghan’s analysis of concepts. For
Aquinas, he says, concepts are “the informed activity of the intellect as it grasps the
res extra animam” (168). But isn’t this characterization compatible with a number of
more substantive views about the nature of concepts? While O’Callaghan states at
various points what he thinks the substantive account is not (e.g. concepts thus
construed are not “an inner language”, not “representations” or mental “symbols” nor
are they “capacities to use linguistic signs”) he says little more about what it is.
O’Callaghan’s tendency to rely on a kind of via negativa approach or to leave certain
technical notions altogether unexplained is unfortunate. For it not only undermines, at
crucial points, his attempt to communicate in an informative way what Aquinas’s
theory of mind actually is; it also makes the volume as a whole less useful than it
otherwise might have been.
To be fair, it must be said that what I am describing as shortcomings may be a

function of the audience for whom O’Callaghan intends the book. There are several
indications that this text is intended, not as introduction to Aquinas for contemporary
philosophers of language and mind, but rather as an introduction for Thomists (or
people already familiar with Aquinas) to those aspects of discussions in contemporary
philosophy of mind relevant for situating Aquinas’s views with respect to them. There
is, for example, the fact that O’Callaghan spends three chapters introducing and
explaining basic developments in early modern and contemporary discussions in
philosophy of mind and language, while often passing over important (and, for most,
very foreign) aspects of Aquinas’s metaphysics, psychology, and semantics. All of this
makes sense if O’Callaghan is assuming an audience well acquainted with Aquinas but
less familiar with contemporary philosophy. For such an audience a full presentation of
the details of Aquinas’ view may not be necessary; for such an audience it may be
enough simply to rule out various alternative readings in order for O’Callaghan to
locate his own interpretation.
Insofar as no text can be suited for every audience, O’Callaghan’s approach is, of
course, perfectly acceptable. Nonetheless, I suspect that those still struggling to
understand Aquinas’s thought will be disappointed that O’Callaghan hasn’t done more
to open it up for us—especially since, given his conversancy with the contemporary
405
literature, he is in such a good position to do so. Even so, this book will be useful for
anyone wanting either an introduction to some important issues in contemporary
philosophy of mind and language (e.g. the summary of Fodor’s views in chap. 4 is
quite good) or some broad direction in thinking about how Aquinas’s thought relates
to them.1
Endnotes
1. I’m grateful to Jeff Brower for helpful comments and feedback on an earlier draft of
this review.
2003.08.07
J. M. Bernstein (ed.)
Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics
Bernstein, J. M. (ed.), Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge

University Press, 2003, 356pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN: 0521001110.
Reviewed by Richard Eldridge , Swarthmore College
This volume collects English translations of various texts loosely on aesthetic theory
by seven classical (Enlightenment) and Romantic German authors: Hamann, Lessing,
Moritz, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. It replaces a number of
earlier collections from Cambridge that are now, sadly, all out of print: The Origins of
Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to
Hegel, ed. David Simpson (1988); German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant,
Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, ed. David Simpson (1984); German Aesthetic
and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler
(1984), and German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann,
Herder, Schiller and Goethe, ed. H. B. Nisbet (1986), as well as German Romantic
Criticism: Novalis, Schlegel Schleiermacher and others, ed. A. Leslie Willson
(Continuum, 1982). In the absence of these other volumes, the texts of these authors
are not teachable in English, and they are not likely to be widely known to
philosophers. Hence Bernstein’s collection is especially timely and useful.
Its timeliness and usefulness are not, however, simply a matter of historical coverage.
As Bernstein makes clear in a substantial, 26-page introduction, the theoretical
writings on art and culture of Schiller, Schlegel, and, especially Hölderlin have recently
attracted a great deal of philosophical interest of the highest order, largely developing
out of the work of Dieter Henrich on Hölderlin’s early philosophical writings and on the
Tübingen and early Jena circles of relationship, conversation, and influence.
Bernstein’s introduction both usefully surveys this recent work and contributes to its
development, well beyond simply introducing the texts that follow. In this respect, this
volume is prepared more for philosophers and more as a contribution to systematic
thinking about art, philosophy, the subject, and culture than were its predecessors,
406
which appear rather as simpler historical compendia. Though the Simpson Origins
collection would be more useful (were it not out of print) as a sourcebook in
containing 14 authors (in 449 pages) the philosophical thematization that Bernstein
accomplishes is a central strength of this volume.
Bernstein carries out this thematization under five headings: 1) the crisis of reason in
modernity in relation to the disenchantment of nature; 2) critical attention to the
specificities of artistic achievement that are possible in different media of art; 3) the
effort after Kant to grasp how freedom might be embodied and achieved within
sensible nature, through artistic production and cultivation; 4) a counterposed tragic
conception of such embodiment and achievement as possible only in part, in transitory
moments of balance; and 5) the effacement of sensible nature and the abandonment
of the effort at tragic balance, in favor of self-authorizing subject-activity in ironic,
witty, self-critical art.
The first heading announces the main theme of the entire collection. With the advent
of modernity and the disenchantment of nature, the human subject is threatened with
“losing its substantiality, its worldliness” (p. x). That is, without any language or
reasons that are understood to be embodied in a comprehensive system of nature and
culture, but coming instead to face only ’lifeless’ materiality, the subject is faced with
the possibility, it seems, of making only criterionless, arbitrary choices. No good
reason other than want or whim presents itself in favor of any way of life, and this
makes it difficult to believe in the worth of who and what one chooses to be, at least
for those who feel a need for such belief. The solution that is proposed, in different
ways, by each of the authors here collected is a turn to “aesthetic reason” or “reason
aestheticized” (p. ix). The making of a work of art, which is taken to involve the
discovery of what the organization of the work itself demands of the artist, is taken to
be either a model for or the very substance of the discovery of commanding ends
within human, cultural life. As the author, presumably Hölderlin, of the “Oldest
Programme for a System of German Idealism” puts it, “The philosopher must possess
just as much aesthetic power as the poet. . . . The philosophy of the spirit is an
aesthetic philosophy” (p. 186; cited p. ix).
Each of the remaining headings is then identified principally with a particular way of
carrying out the project of an aesthetic philosophy or of the aestheticization of moral-
cultural reason as that project is envisioned by a particular writer. In distinguishing
sharply between the subject-matters and manners of presentation that are proper,
respectively, to poetry and to painting, Lessing in “Laocoön” discovers norms that are
internal to the medium-specific work of the creative artist. As Bernstein puts it, for
Lessing “medium is syntax; . . . it constrains the semantic contents that are possible”
(p. xii). Poetry, for Lessing, has greater range or more subject matters open to it than
does painting, just as modern life affords significantly more and more plastic ways of
being than did Ancient Greek life. Compared with painting, “poetry is the more
comprehensive art, . . . [and] beauties are at her command which painting can never
attain” (p. 60). Yet in order to achieve its proper end, poetry should achieve in its own
way something like the sensuous-imaginative presence to the viewer of a striking
painting. It must be as absorbing for its reader as the beautiful painting is for its
beholder, or, as Lessing puts it, “the poet should always paint” (p. 87). Lessing’s
articulation of this medium-specific aim for poetry and his critical prescriptions for
407
achieving it effectively introduce a model for the artistic construction of a specific life
in modernity, with its own commanding immanent ends, though Lessing himself does
not develop this point.
Instead, the task of describing how a human life can and should involve determination
or shaping “from within” (p. xxii) and yet also within the realm of sensuous
appearance or empirical life (not in an isolated noumenal world apart) was taken up
by Friedrich Schiller in his aesthetic theorizing, in response to Kant’s moral philosophy
and Critique of Judgment. As Schiller puts it in the “Kallias Letters” (1793), included
here rather than the more widely known Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of
Man, “the analogy of an appearance with the form of pure will or freedom is beauty. .
. . Beauty is nothing less than freedom in appearance” (p. 152). To say this is to say
nothing less than that free human life within nature and culture is possible if and only
if it achieves that kind of internal organization, determination from within, or harmony
of parts that is characteristic of both natural and artistic beauty. In a beautiful natural
object, we find, as it were, “the person of the thing” (p. 163); we have a sense of “the
free consent of the thing to its technique” (p. 165) and of “a rule which is at once
given and obeyed by the thing” (p. 167), and this is a model for the free consent of an
individual to the worth of a social repertoire or way of life.
Like Schiller, Hölderlin too undertakes to envision how (Kantian) freedom might be
achieved within nature and culture, in and through the free artistic production of
beautiful works, relationships, and manners of life. Henrich has usefully described
what he calls “Hölderlin’s ’speculative pro and con’ [as] an attempt at a ’unification
philosophy.’“1 Here the emphasis should fall on Hölderlin’s continuing effort to think
aesthetically about how to blend independent selfhood and free creativity with loving
absorption in beautiful nature and human relationships. As Hölderlin argues in the
fragment “Judgment and Being” (1795), here reprinted as “Being Judgment
Possibility,” we are, as finite, discursive, self-conscious subjects cast out of oneness
with the whole of being to which we nevertheless long to return, yet without
sacrificing our independence. As a result, the best that we can do is to achieve a
continuous harmonious modulation between moods of self-assertion and attachment,
without end. Our lives are then essentially tragic, and, as Bernstein puts it, “tragedy is
the narrative that makes manifest our separation from an origin to which we remain
bound” (p. xxv).
Friedrich Schlegel in contrast seeks to enact a kind of imperfect yet always energetic
freedom in continuous, ironic, witty, self-revising activity. In Athenaeum Fragment
#116—perhaps the most famous and most comprehensively summary of his
fragments—Schlegel claims that “the romantic kind of poetry . . . alone is infinite, just
as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet
can tolerate no law above itself” (pp. 249-50). Schlegel’s emphasis on willful,
iconoclastic, ironic and always self-revising self-activity as the vehicle of selfhood---a
kind of commitment to eternal restlessness---is the opposite of Hölderlin’s longing for
unity with Being. As Bernstein aptly remarks, “one might consider the programs of
Hölderlin and Jena romanticism [Schlegel and Novalis] as forming opposing sides of
the fragile Schillerian synthesis” (p. xxiii), according to which free selfhood could
wholly appear in beautiful nature and art, at least in principle.
408
The central theoretical texts of Schiller, Hölderlin, and Schlegel on aesthetic reason
and the production of art as media of free selfhood in the world are of considerably
more than antiquarian interest, at least for anyone who retains a sense of the burdens
and possibilities of self-consciousness and conscience. As Bernstein summarizes the
argument of the collection, “if we watch carefully, the path that runs from Lessing to
[Hölderlin to] Jena romanticism looks uncannily like the path that runs from artistic
modernism to the postmodern art scene of the present” (p. viii). This summary
remark means to suggest, I take it, that there remain as yet not fully canvassed
possibilities of aesthetic reason and of self-cultivation that are worked out by
Hölderlin, who falls in the middle of the spectrum, between Schillerian, modernist self-
formation in and through the wholly self-enclosed modernist work of art and
Schlegelian, post-modernist, emptily iconoclastic drift. That this collection presents
this possibility in its historical context, in comparison and contrast with major
competitors and eloquently and aptly introduced, makes it well worth current
philosophical attention on the part of anyone concerned with the plights and
possibilities of the human subject in culture.
It is, therefore, somewhat puzzling that the core materials of the collection---Lessing’s
“Laocoön,” Schiller’s Kallias Letters, Hölderlin’s System Program and “Judgment and
Being” fragments, and Schlegel’s “Critical Fragments,” “Athenaeum Fragments,”
“Ideas,” and “On Incomprehensibility” are surrounded here by distinctly minor pieces
that do not really help to advance the important core themes of the collection. (It is
noteworthy that the introductory essay focuses only on Lessing, Schiller, Hölderlin,
and Schlegel.)
J. G. Hamann’s “Aesthetica in nuce” (1762), which opens the collection, usefully

sounds the themes of the loss of the divine-ethical word in nature and of the
importance of nonetheless awakening from present slumbers through responsiveness
to the poetic word. But it does so in a text that it so hermetic as to be all but
unreadable. (Its subtitle is “A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose.”) Karl Philipp Moritz’s
“On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful” (1788) participates in the shift from a Neo-
classical to a Romantic sense of the self in urging that appropriate imitation of another
person involves “striving after and competing” as opposed to “aping” (p. 132). But it
urges this thought within the framework of a survey of the characterological concepts
of the useful, the good, the noble, and the beautiful that is—as characterology—more
in keeping with French and Neo-classical models than with the more German,
Romantic, and arts-oriented discourse of Bildung. In addition to the major theoretical
fragments already mentioned, we have from Hölderlin a “Letter to Hegel, 26 January
1796,” “The Significance of Tragedy” (1802), and “Remarks on Oedipus” (1803). It is
puzzling why these are preferred to Hölderlin’s major poetological essays, especially
“On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit” (1800), and to his major fragments of
philosophical anthropology, especially “On Religion” and the ’Skizze einer Metaphysik’
“Letter to his Brother, 2 June 1796.” (In contrast, the inclusion of Schiller’s “Kallias
Letters” rather than the Letters on Aesthetic Education is an inspired choice, since the
Kallias letters are both less troubled by inconsistency--art as instrument of moral
education vs. art as an end in itself--and more closely focused on formal devices for
achieving unity in poetry than is the more widely known set.)
409
Novalis is represented by five pieces, “Miscellaneous Remarks” (1797), “Monologue,”

“Dialogues” (1798), “On Goethe” (1798), and “Studies in the Visual Arts” (1799),
when only the first, plus perhaps some of his “Fichte-Studien”, would do. Novalis has
an important historical role in the development of Jena romanticism, and he generally
shares Schlegel’s iconoclasm.2 As an aphorist, however, he is far from Schlegel’s
equal. Where in Schlegel’s fragments we find a constellation (in Adorno’s sense) of
closely related ideas—genius, wit, irony, newness, the fragment, Kant, philosophy—
developing from fragment to fragment, we find in Novalis’s fragments much more
gnomic and unconnected remarks on the chemical, God, dreaming, and the mystical.
The critical writings on Goethe of both Novalis and Schlegel are on the whole more
distant from their main theoretical stances on the subject. Schlegel’s “On Goethe’s
Meister” (1798) in particular is little more than a plot summary (pp. 269-73), followed
by closer accounts of the structures of individual sections, books, and volumes,
together with a few comments on the characters (pp. 276-86).
These extra writings—Hamann, Moritz, and the more minor writings of Hölderlin,
Schlegel, and Novalis—do not do any harm, and it is perhaps valuable to have them
on hand as points of comparison. But they do not help to advance the important and
true claim that the major texts here are of current philosophical significance, and the
underrepresentation of Hölderlin’s poetological and anthropological writings is a real
loss. It would have been good to have on hand also Schiller’s “On Naïve and
Sentimental Poetry,” with its more tragic, Hölderlinian sense of human limitation and
its unmatched typology of genres of poetic literature (tragedy, comedy, idyll, and
elegy) and their distinctive values.
Nonetheless, this volume is now indispensable for anyone working in English on post-
Kantian conceptions of the subject, art, and culture. There is no other English-
language source available from which to teach these writers as a group. The editor’s
introduction is one of the very best summaries of the significance of these writers that
is available. It is as good as or better than the very good introductions to Hölderlin by
Thomas Pfau and to Schlegel by Rodolphe Gasché, and it is wider than these other
two in scope. The case for the importance of German post-Kantian thought about the
subject that is begun by the introduction and then completed by the major essays
themselves is unassailable. One can hope that the invitation this volume offers to
explore the varieties and significances of exercises of “aesthetic reason” will be taken
up by philosophers and literary theorists-critics alike; it should be.
Endnotes
1. Dieter Henrich, “Hölderlin in Jena,’ trans. Taylor Carman, in Henrich, The Course of
Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), p. 112. Emphasis added.
2. See Charles Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to

German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp. 141-60.
410
2003.08.08
Albert Casullo
A Priori Justification
Casullo, Albert, A Priori Justification, Oxford University Press, 2003, 272pp, $55.00
(hbk), ISBN 0195115058.
Reviewed by Panayot Butchvarov, University of Iowa
Professor Casullo’s goal in this noteworthy book is to provide “a systematic treatment

of the primary epistemological issues associated with the a priori that is sensitive to
recent developments in the field of epistemology.” This he does admirably. The recent
developments to which he thinks sensitivity is needed are the ascendancy of
naturalism, both philosophical and scientific, and the decline of Cartesianism and
foundationalism. His treatment is not only systematic but almost exhaustive. Virtually
every option is discussed patiently and dispassionately, with detailed attention to the
existing literature, from Plato and Kant to Quine and BonJour. His accounts of the
major issues regarding the nature, existence, and sources of a priori knowledge and
justification are detailed, judicious, and penetrating. Casullo argues that to resolve
them we must appeal to empirical evidence.
Analytic epistemology has focused on a posteriori, empirical knowledge, perhaps

because of its early ties to British empiricism, and even its general accounts of
knowledge seek conformity mainly with alleged examples of empirical knowledge,
e.g., what make of car someone owns or whether what one sees is a barn. It has
tended to ignore priori knowledge, BonJour’s In Defense of Pure Reason being an
important exception. Yet traditional epistemology considered a priori knowledge,
especially mathematics, to be the paradigm. It is much less vulnerable to the skeptical
attacks that were the raison d’être of epistemology. Descartes’ fear of Divine
deception about 2+3=5 was regarded, even by him, as extravagant, and the core of
Hume’s “skepticism with regard to reason” was an unexceptionable argument for the
dependence of reasoning on memory.
The arrival of Casullo’s book is thus a welcome addition to the contemporary

literature. I expect it to be the central work in the epistemology of the a priori for
years to come. Its title is “a priori justification,” not “a priori knowledge,” for the good
reason that there may be false beliefs that are justified a priori (mathematics is rife
with examples). Casullo’s use of the deontic term “justified” can be questioned as
inapplicable to beliefs, since actions are justified or unjustified and beliefs are not
actions, but this does not affect the substance of what he says. He just as easily could
have spoken of “reasons” or, better, “evidence” for a belief, rather than of its
“justification.” And the application of what he says to a priori knowledge, the concern
of traditional epistemology, which made a sharp distinction between knowledge and
opinion, is seamless, since Casullo takes for granted that knowledge is some sort of
justified true belief.
411
One of the many virtues of the book is the extraordinary wealth of distinctions made
in it. I cannot do justice to them in a review, but here is an outline of those that are
pivotal. On the most general level, we must distinguish the questions (1) what is priori
justification, (2) is there a priori justification, (3) if there is, what are its sources, and
(4) how do we establish that something is such a source, that there are such sources.
Both traditional and contemporary epistemologists often try to answer one of these
questions by answering another.
Casullo’s answer to the first is that a priori justification is just nonexperiential

justification. This fits what “a priori knowledge” has usually meant and how the phrase
is commonly explained to novices. When we say that logic and mathematics are
apriori, we are likely to be answering the second question, unless our concern is solely
with the philosophy of logic or of mathematics. When we say that a priori knowledge
is knowledge grounded in reason (“truths of reason”), we are offering an answer,
however vague, to the third question. And if we defend this answer by appealing to
the alleged necessity, analyticity, or certainty of a priori beliefs, we may think we are
answering the fourth but probably attempting to answer all four questions. We also
are indulging in numerous assumptions, each of which requires separate and detailed
defense: that no a posteriori beliefs are necessary, that no a priori beliefs are
contingent, that only analytic beliefs are necessary, that only a priori beliefs are
certain, and so on. Much of the book consists in detailed discussions of such
assumptions, traced with erudition and good judgment to their sources, traditional or
contemporary.
Although Casullo says that a priori justification is just nonexperiential justification, he

proceeds immediately to ask, as one must but few do, What is meant by the term
“experience”? Not even radical empiricists offer a useful answer, though they are
committed to the thesis that all knowledge is experiential, i.e., that there is no a priori
knowledge. Intuition of the Platonic Forms can also count as experience in the broad
sense of the term. How narrowly should it be understood then to be useful? Casullo
plausibly suggests that it is “a putative natural kind term whose reference is fixed by
local paradigms,” namely, “the cognitive processes associated with the five senses”
(p. 158). But he also argues that whether these paradigms have significant underlying
properties that are shared with unquestionably experiential but nonsensory sources of
knowledge such as memory and introspection must be left to empirical investigation
to discover, not to philosophers’ intuitions or conceptual analysis. He draws an
analogy in this respect with the much discussed case of the term “water,” the
reference of which is hardly to be decided by appealing to “what we mean.”
It follows that the philosophically crucial question whether there is nonexperiential,

i.e., a priori, justification or knowledge is also to be left to empirical investigation.
Such investigation might focus, for example, on the actual practices in allegedly a
priori disciplines such as mathematics. It would take seriously the history of
mathematics and the psychology of mathematicians in order to determine what they
take to be their sources of justification and to what extent there is variation among
them in this respect. Such investigations are manageable and to some extent have
already been attempted. One could reasonably expect help also from neuroscience, I
might add, but this remains a hope about the future.
412
Casullo argues persuasively that Kant’s views about the relationships between the a
priori and the necessary, and between the a priori and the analytic, which set the
guiding themes in the epistemology of the a priori for more than two centuries, cast
little light on the prior and more fundamental questions “What is a priori knowledge?”
and “Is there a priori knowledge?” It follows that not much light on them is also cast
by Kripke’s examples purporting to show that there is a priori knowledge of contingent
propositions as well as a posteriori knowledge of necessary propositions. The same is
true of Frege’s claim that all arithmetic truths are derivable from logical laws and
definitions. It leaves us with the question about the nature of our knowledge of logic.
The positivist view that all priori truths are analytic also leaves us in the dark, for the
same reason, if what is meant is that they are reducible to truths of logic; if
something else is meant, it remains notoriously unclear. Nor does Quine’s celebrated
argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction address, by itself, the two
fundamental questions about the a priori, though Quine does so in other ways. Of
course, Casullo does not question the independent importance of Kant’s, Frege’s,
Kripke’s, the positivists’, or Quine’s contributions. His aim is to set order in the medley
of issues that have preoccupied epistemologists of the a priori. He accomplishes this
with clarity and thoroughness.
Casullo’s denial that questions about the a priori can be resolved by relying on
introspection or conceptual analysis, i.e., by what less charitably might be called arm-
chair philosophy, sets him apart from most traditional and contemporary
epistemologists, both those (“the apriorists”) who say that there is and those (“the
radical empiricists”) who say that there is not a priori justification. As I noted earlier,
this is so in respect to the seemingly conceptual question “What is a priori
justification?” If experience is a natural kind, its scope and nature require the sort of
investigation that is standard in the investigation of other natural kinds. Only empirical
evidence, not introspective opinion or conceptual analysis, can establish whether there
is a legitimate experiential/nonexperiential distinction. And then we would need
empirical evidence to tell us whether there are nonexperiential sources of justification.
Therefore, if beliefs count as justified in virtue of the processes leading to them, then
whether some beliefs issue from reliable processes that do not involve experience,
and what exactly is the nature of those processes, also could be decided only on the
basis of empirical evidence, not speculation.
Thus Casullo’s approach is not merely that of naturalism. He insists that we must
actually rely on empirical findings, whether of biology, psychology, or the history of
mathematics, for answers to the philosophical questions he raises. Surely, he is right.
Epistemology is about human, not angelic or divine, knowledge and belief. The idea
that philosophers may seek special, philosophical knowledge of facts about them
would be like the idea that they may seek special, philosophical knowledge of
cardiovascular or urogenital facts about humans. Even if we had no doubts about
introspection, would it allow me to suppose that what I find to be true of my cognitive
states is also true of the states of others? And if I did not suppose that it is, what
contribution would I be making to philosophy, which surely aims at being more than a
private diary? The usual way out, of course, is to say that philosophers investigate
only the concepts of cognitive states, not the facts about them, that they are engaged
in “conceptual,” not “factual” inquiry, not even an introspective one.
413
Despite his insistence on empirical investigation, Casullo himself seems to adopt this
way out, at least in style and terminology. He usefully distinguishes between scientific
naturalism, Quine’s view that epistemology be replaced by scientific inquiries, and
philosophical naturalism, which “requires that the analysans of a concept include only
naturalistically respectable concepts” (p. 126). By insisting on empirical evidence he
seems closer to scientific naturalism. But by describing himself as “analyzing the
concept of a priori justification,” often relying on thought-experiments and “intuitions”
of whether “we would say” that a certain belief is justified in a certain imaginary
situation, he would seem to be at most a philosophical naturalist. Chemistry was
concerned with water itself, its molecular composition, not with the concept of water
or what we would or would not say in various imaginary situations. The same is true
of the other disciplines engaged in empirical investigation. But what may be more
important is that if concepts are, or at least are tied to, uses of words – Casullo is not
likely to say they are private inhabitants of consciousness – then it is doubtful that
there is special, philosophical knowledge even of concepts. There is linguistics, as well
as serious, scholarly lexicography. And if concepts are structures, states, or functions
of the brain, there is neurology.
I mentioned earlier that Casullo’s demand for empirical evidence is amply justified by
the fact that the cognitive states epistemology investigates are human, states of a
certain kind of animals. He is well aware, however, that much of epistemology
intentionally ignores this fact. He brands it as Cartesian and foundationalist. I have
agreed that attempting, as Cartesian philosophers do, to answer the questions he
raises by introspection is misguided. But there are questions, properly describable as
Cartesian and foundationalist, to which empirical evidence is irrelevant (unless we
mean the data of introspection). Descartes began his meditations by questioning the
sources of all evidence, empirical and nonempirical. Kant could not have appealed to
neurological evidence about the innate structure of the brain, much as he would have
been interested in it, because he was concerned with the conditions of the possibility
of all knowledge, including that sought by neurology. It would be jejune to think of
Descartes and Kant as misguided. But also it would be a mistake to think of their
approach as competing with Casullo’s. The questions they asked may seem the same,
but in fact are dramatically different. They can be asked only from the first-person
perspective.
For example, Casullo expresses legitimate doubts about establishing a priori truth
through traditional appeals to unthinkability or inconceivability. But if faced with a
disastrous result when balancing my checkbook, I would not even consider that 3+2
might equal 10, rather than a measly 5, though I would benefit greatly if it did. For I
would be immediately faced with the utter unthinkability of this being so, e.g., of
three fingers of my left hand together with two fingers of my right hand being equal in
number to all the fingers of my two normal hands. If a mathematician told me
otherwise, I would not timidly acquiesce, as I might on other matters, I would assume
I misunderstood what I heard. A similar point applies to a posteriori knowledge. If I
complain that I am in pain but my doctor assures me there is “nothing wrong” with
me, I would not cease to believe I am in pain, even if I do not question the doctor’s
findings. These are examples of what is right in Cartesian foundationalism.
414
What is wrong in it, but perhaps insufficiently appreciated by Casullo, is twofold. First,
to be of use in a cognitive discipline, rather than just a private diary, such allegedly
foundational knowledge must receive expression in judgments that employ concepts
in accord with their established use and thus are subject to appraisal overstepping the
bounds of any foundational knowledge. Second, no genuine cognitive disciplines can
develop on the basis of the alleged foundations by means of inferences that pass the
test of unthinkabilty of falsity (as in the mathematical example above) or just of
mistake (as in the example of pain). That this is so is made evident by the skeptic,
who usually allows for the foundational knowledge but denies that it entails the rest of
what we claim to know. As Hume pointed out, even in mathematical reasoning we
must rely on memory. Moreover, both mathematics and all empirical disciplines are
social institutions or practices, in which each investigator must rely on others. The
truth-conduciveness of such reliance fails the test of unthinkability of falsehood or
mistake, as well as any other Cartesian test, such as clarity and distinctness of
“ideas.”
2003.08.09
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Lectures on Philosophical Ethics
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, edited by Robert B.

Louden, translated by Louise Adey Huish, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 296pp,
$21.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521007674.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert , DePaul University
Robert Louden, the editor of the English translation of F.D.E. Schleiermacher’s

Lectures on Philosophical Ethics from 1812/13 and 1816/17, points out that although
Schleiermacher is well known in the English speaking world for his contributions to
theology and hermeneutics, his contributions to ethics remain “a well kept secret”. In
contrast, German scholars emphasize the pivotal role that Schleiermacher’s ethics
plays in all of his other work. Louise Adey Huish’s excellent translation of
Schleiermacher’s mature lectures on ethics will go a long way towards making his
moral theory less of a secret in the Anglophone world. Hence this volume is a most
welcome contribution to the growing number of English translations of German texts
from the period between Kant and Hegel.
This first ever English translation of Schleiermacher’s Vorlesungen über Ethik, forms
part of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy Series, a series which has
also presented translations of Schleiermacher’s work on hermeneutics and criticism
(edited by Andrew Bowie) and On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (edited
by Richard Crouter). The translation is preceded by an introduction which presents a
historical overview of Schleiermacher’s ethics. The reader is also provided with a
useful chronology of events from the year of Schleiermacher’s birth in 1768 to his
death in 1834 and with an annotated list of suggestions for further reading (both
415
English and German titles are provided) on Schleiermacher’s ethical theory. The
translation itself is based on two sets of lectures, both delivered at the University of
Berlin. The lectures delivered in 1812/13 are the first version of what was slightly
reworked and refined in the final version (Letzte Bearbeitung) of 1816/17. Moreover,
certain points in both versions of the lectures are expanded upon by annotations
which Schleiermacher later added (in 1824, 1827, and 1832, when he lectured on
ethics again). These notes are also included in Huish’s translation and often go a long
way toward clarifying central points from the text. The Lectures were not published in
Schleiermacher’s lifetime; in fact, the German version of the Lectures was not
published in complete form until the twentieth century.
In his introduction to Schleiermacher’s text, Louden begins with an overview of

Schleiermacher’s pre-1812 writings on ethics. Louden includes a brief discussion of
Schleiermacher’s relation to the early German Romantic Movement, referencing some
of the texts Schleiermacher wrote during his Berlin years from 1797 to1802 and the
important role that figures such as Henriette Herz and Friedrich Schlegel played in
Schleiermacher’s philosophical and personal development.
Louden’s self-described “tour” of Schleiermacher’s ethics highlights the influence that

Kant’s ethics of duty with its universal leanings had on Schleiermacher’s thought,
while also presenting Schleiermacher’s attention to the role of particulars in ethics,
that is, Schleiermacher’s focus on individuals and their feelings. Louden describes
Schleiermacher as a thinker attempting to “interweave the Kantian philosophy he was
raised on with the new Romanticism which he himself helped to create” (ix).
Schleiermacher’s “pluralistic ethical program” is traced by Louden to ancient sources
(Plato and Aristotle) and also to modern sources, including Spinoza, Kant, and the
early German Romantics.
Given Schleiermacher’s strong connection to the early German Romantic movement,

the loose way in which Louden characterizes Schleiermacher as an early German
Romantic is highly problematic. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with referring to the
“romantic Schleiermacher” (xix): it is indeed historically correct to speak in terms of a
romantic Schleiermacher, because he was after all a founding member of the early
German Romantic Movement that was centered in Berlin during the years 1797-1802.
Yet, Louden gives only the scarcest details concerning what the philosophical
ramifications of early German Romanticism were for the development of
Schleiermacher’s ethical thought, and the details he gives feed into the all too
prevalent caricature of the Romantic movement as guided by giddy, love-struck poets.
For example, in his discussion of the role of feeling and fantasy in Schleiermacher’s
ethics, Louden tells us that, these “dual themes of feeling and fantasy will resound
deeply in early German Romanticism, a movement in which […] Schleiermacher
played a key role” (xv). What the “romantic Schleiermacher” offers “in place of the
stern ethics of duty” (xix) Louden assimilates to a “60s love-in” (xix). Without more
supporting detail for the claim, Louden leaves the reader with a rather distorted image
of Romanticism and a misleading notion of the philosophical positions to which the
“romantic Schleiermacher” was committed. And while Louden is correct in stating that,
“Schleiermacher seeks to balance Kantian concerns with universality, fairness, and
impartiality with the Romantics’ stress on individuality, tradition, and local
416
community” (xxvii), he does not provide the support necessary to make the claim a
compelling one. Moreover, the emphasis that Schleiermacher places on the process of
becoming and his views of the intrinsically incomplete nature of ethical knowledge,
some of the most characteristically “romantic” features of the Lectures, are not even
mentioned by Louden, who rests comfortably with the view of Romanticism as a
movement based on feeling and fantasy.
Despite some imprecision regarding the “romantic Schleiermacher”, Louden’s

introduction does offer a reliable and useful sketch of the principle tendencies of
Schleiermacher’s ethics: namely, reason’s organizing and symbolizing activities in the
historical process of moral self-realization, and attention to both the universal and
individual dimensions of ethics.
Louden and the translator, Huish, have done a great service in presenting
Schleiermacher’s ethics, “warts and all” to the English reading public. As Louden
points out, these lectures “are the closest we will ever get to a full picture of
Schleiermacher’s later ethical thought” (xxv). Many of the “warts” are the result of
Schleiermacher’s lecture style: he preferred to lecture freely rather than reading from
prepared notes, so he only wrote down the headings of key themes that he wanted to
cover in his lecture. The manuscripts we have reflect this style, one which would
certainly have provided the student audience in Berlin with lively, engaging talks, but
which leaves us today with only the skeletal remains of Schleiermacher’s thought. To
flesh out some of the cryptic claims made in the manuscript, a wider knowledge of
certain tendencies of the philosophical thought of the early German Romantics is
necessary.
Schleiermacher begins the Lectures with the claim that, “[t]he communication of a
single distinct science cannot have any proper starting-point” (p. 3). This skepticism
regarding the starting point of any science shapes many of Schleiermacher’s other
claims regarding the fundamentally incomplete and provisional nature of all sciences.
Schleiermacher expresses concern about a “false sense of certainty” which gives rise
to “the least appropriate respect for other points of view” (§36, p. 6). The definition of
ethics that Schleiermacher offers at the beginning of the Lectures reflects his general
view that we should not seek final words in our scientific investigations: “We might
provisionally define ethics, therefore, as the life of reason, the necessary antithesis of
which is acting upon nature” (§13, p. 4). Throughout both versions of the Lectures,
Schleiermacher maintains this commitment to the provisional nature of all knowledge
claims. He claims that “all knowledge can only be both complete and perfect if it can
be taken as a whole” (§6, p. 137), and then in a note goes on to explicitly say that
such a view enables us to “give up science but nevertheless to strive for the refining
of opinions and the eradication of error” and “to regard science in the highest sense as
what is internally complete but at the same time to recognize that in reality science
and the depiction of the highest knowledge, can only ever be a reflection, caught up in
approximation” (pp. 137-8). Probability is more important than certainty, because in
the absence of “any proper starting-point”, the most we can hope for is ever more
probable results.
Many of the fragments published in Das Athenäum, a journal edited by Friedrich and
August Wilhelm Schlegel between 1798 and 1800, reflect the same skeptical attitude
417
concerning “proper starting-points” of any scientific investigation and the possibility of

certain results. Schleiermacher not only contributed to the Schlegel brothers’ journal,
but for a period was Friedrich Schlegel’s roommate in Berlin. So, influences of the one
upon the other should come as no great surprise, plenty of “symphilosophy” occurred
between them, and evidence of their philosophical friendship is found in
Schleiermacher’s Lectures.
Along with the romantic skepticism concerning the completeness of any branch of
scientific inquiry which flavors the opening remarks of the Lectures, traces of the
“romantic Schleiermacher” can also be found in the abundant references to ethics as a
“living process of becoming” (§75, p. 25, see also: §66, p. 9; §73, p. 10; §1, p. 26; p.
123, note 26; §190, p. 51; §55, p. 67; §12, p 124). In Athenäum Fragment Nr. 116,
which can be read as a kind of manifesto of the early German Romantic movement,
Friedrich Schlegel defines romantic poetry as the kind of poetry that is “still in the
state of becoming, that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming
and never perfected”. This emphasis on becoming is central to the philosophical
thought of the early German Romantics: it is tied to their view of the inherent
incompleteness of not only poetry, but of philosophy and of knowledge itself. To track
the “romantic Schleiermacher”, it is not enough to look at his references to feeling and
fantasy, one must investigate the skepticism which frames his discussion of ethics in
the Lectures.
After the introductory remarks, in which the “romantic Schleiermacher” discusses

ethics as a process of becoming (die Ethik im Werden betrachtet), he begins his
detailed treatment of the highest good. Throughout the lectures, Schleiermacher uses
the same principal oppositions to shape his discussion of the highest good and the
ensuing discussion of the doctrines of virtue and of duty. Schleiermacher presents an
opposition between the cognitive and formative/signifying activities of reason, on the
one hand, and the opposition between the individual and the universal, on the other.
These oppositions highlight Schleiermacher’s interest in exploring the individual and
universal elements of moral formation, which he sees as part of the process of the
unification of nature with reason. For Schleiermacher, “[a]ll ethical knowledge is the
expression of reason becoming nature, a process which has always already begun but
is never complete” (Nr. 81, p. 155).1 The formative and cognizing functions of reason
are two distinct ways in which we approximate a unity with nature: “Just as the
formative function represents more the act whereby reason seizes nature and enters
it, so to speak, so the cognitive function represents more the act whereby reason
exists in nature and manifests itself there” (§110, p. 40). In the final version of the
lectures, given in 1816/17, instead of speaking in terms of the opposition between the
formative (bildende) and the cognitive (ekennende) function of reason,
Schleiermacher speaks of an opposition between the formative and the signifying
(bezeichnende) activity of reason.
While some of the details of his argument are slightly altered and refined in the final
version of the Lectures, throughout both versions one thing remains steady:
Schleiermacher’s discussion of ethics never strays far from the concrete social
structures which moor our actions and our agency. For Schleiermacher, ethics is social
and his treatment of ethics is as much about the construction of social reality as it is
about ethics, for he sees the two as intimately related. Indeed, for him, the
418
philosopher’s task in ethics has as much to do with outlining the virtues as it does with
presenting “the various formative levels in the ethical process” (§239, p. 96). As a
result, in the Lectures we find discussions of subjects ranging from agriculture to
property, division of labor, money, language, customs, and the state. Schleiermacher
explores the development of ethics from within the growth of the personality (he even
devotes some time to discussing how the stages of our lives affect our moral
personalities). Schleiermacher’s Lectures are at once a theory of ethics and a theory
of culture. History, art, language, and tradition each form integral parts of his work on
ethics.
A critical feature of an ethical community is what Schleiermacher calls “free

sociability” (freie Geselligkeit). This is the community of communication in the
individual’s relation to other individuals. Because of the individual-to-individual nature
of the relationship characterizing free sociability, this relation stands in sharp contrast
to the relationship of the individual to the totality that is approximated in nationality,
the church, and the family. Free sociability is manifested in hospitality and friendship,
and these form the basis of more inclusive forms of community: the community of
states and churches “proceeds from free sociability” (§255, p. 98). According to
Schleiermacher’s account of ethics, ever broadening, ever growing sociability
(Geselligkeit) is the mark of the moral person: “In general, the inclination of every
great moral person is to enter into community with the past and the future; such an
inclination can admittedly only be realized through works of (science and?) art, but
nevertheless proceeds just as often from free sociability and the state as from the
scholarly association of the church” (§259, p. 99).
Schleiermacher’s treatment of the doctrine of virtue and the doctrine of duties is

directly related to his discussion of the highest good, because the highest good
requires virtues (Nr. 8, p. 101) and the “highest good is the totality of all actions in
accordance with duty” (§13, p. 124). Virtue, he tells us, is that which determines
whether one is worthy of happiness, but it is not sufficient to generate happiness (Nr.
10, p. 101). Schleiermacher pays due attention to both the individual aspects of virtue
and the community aspects of virtue in the path towards the highest good. No
individual can possess the highest good, it can only be produced by virtue in everyone
(Nr. 9, p. 101). Schleiermacher discusses virtue as disposition, with love (disposition
in depiction) and wisdom (disposition in cognition) central here. He distinguishes
virtue as disposition (Gesinnung) from virtue as skill (Fertigkeit), claiming that:
“Virtue understood as the pure ideal content of action is disposition. Virtue understood
as reason set into temporal form is skill” (Nr. 17, p. 102). Skill is what gives
disposition its force, without skill, disposition would be “merely an idea” (p. 102).
Prudence (Besonnenheit) is cognition set into temporal form (Nr. 20, p. 103) and
steadfastness (Beharrlichkeit) is depiction set into temporal form (Nr. 20, p. 103).
Steadfastness and prudence are the basic virtues as skills from which all other skills
develop. Schleiermacher then discusses the doctrine of duties, covering the duty of
right (Rechtspflicht) and the duty of profession (Berufspflicht): the discussion of duty
is expanded in the final version of the Lectures to include duty of conscience and duty
of love.
There is an extensive treatment of love in the Lectures; love is after all one of the two
primary virtues that Schleiermacher analyzes in his discussion of virtue as disposition.
419
An extensive note added by Schleiermacher to his lecture notes in 1827 adds

significant detail to his treatment of love as a virtue. He distinguishes self-love from
love for God (which, in Spinozistic fashion, he equates with love for nature) and the
love associated with justice, tying all of this to his focus on common life and
communities. Yet, this attention to love is hardly what makes Schleiermacher a
romantic. His ties to early German Romanticism did commit Schleiermacher to a
general concern with community and with social justice, which helps to explain his
frequent references to equality between the sexes, even in marriage (§23, p. 63 and
p. 111, note 2). Certainly, the Romantics do take feelings seriously, breaking with the
tradition of positing a tension between reason and feeling. Their concern with feelings
is not really much at all like a “60s love-in”, but is rather a serious philosophical
concern.
Anyone interested in learning more of the skepticism that characterizes early German
Romanticism will benefit from a careful study of the Lectures. Beyond the value of the
volume for the history of ideas, these lectures are a fine example of Schleiermacher’s
original thought, representing an ambitious effort to analyze the highest good as it
develops within history, culture, and society in both individuals and communities.
Endnotes
1. Throughout the final version of the Lectures and in parts of the first version, there
are no section symbols; the headings are simply numbered.
2003.08.11
Lenny Moss
What Genes Can't Do
Moss, Lenny, What Genes Can't Do, MIT Press, 2003, 241pp, $34.95 (hbk), ISBN
026213411X.
Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan , Oregon State University
Lenny Moss’s What Genes Can’t Do is an important contribution to the on-going

project of moving the organism back to the center stage of biology, both conceptually
and as the primary locus for empirical research. The book is a true example of work in
the history and philosophy of biology, moving with ease between historical analyses,
contemporary philosophical debates, and recent biological research. Briefly, Moss
argues that the language of the genome as the repository of ’information’ and as the
’controller’ of organismal development emerges from a historical conflation of two
independently legitimate but jointly incoherent conceptions of “the gene.” This
confusion, Moss argues, has had important implications for both basic and applied
biological research: it has had, for example, unfortunate (and long standing)
consequences for our understanding of cancer.
420
What Genes Can’t Do is at its best when Moss applies his keen understanding of
cellular biology to the problem of understanding development and evolution from a
perspective free from the metaphor of the gene as central controller, and indeed, free
from the perspective that development must be under any sort of centralized control.
This is not, of course, an original project. Many other biologists and philosophers have
argued for such a re-articulation before, especially those researchers who identify with
“Developmental Systems Theory.” But while Moss is firmly part of the DST project, his
arguments seem to emerge from a different tradition than those of most of DST
proponents. Unlike most of the usual arguments against the primacy of the gene,
Moss’s arguments are steeped in history and the messy details of cellular biology.
This approach is, at first, somewhat off-putting; one searches in vain for familiar
arguments and references. For example, it seems unthinkable that a book about the
failures of thinking in terms of centralized genetic control should, for example, never
cite Lewontin, and that a history of the emergence of (various) gene concept(s)
should never address e.g. Dobzhansky’s work. After the shock wears off, however,
much of Moss’s work comes across as a refreshing change. Especially in Chapters 3
and 4 (“A Critique of Pure (Genetic) Information” and “Dialectics of Disorder:
Normalization and Pathology as Process”), Moss’s arguments are as clear and
compelling as any that have come before, and yet are unfamiliar enough to force one
to rethink the old debates from the perspective he stakes out.
Moss suggests, with good justification, that work in both contemporary biology and
contemporary philosophy of biology has been focused too much on genetics and not
enough on the complex (and hence messy) intracellular environment. This misplaced
focus, Moss suggests, has meant that most philosophers of biology, and indeed even
many practicing biologists, are ignorant of even the basics of the internal structure of
cells. Part of his goal in Chapter 3 is to remedy this ignorance, and the chapter does
provide an excellent primer on ’wet’ biology. I suspect most readers will find
unfamiliar his particular presentation of, for example, SNARES, blebs, and the system
of “pancake”-shaped plasma membranes. Moss’s account of the details of the
intracellular environment makes for interesting reading, and for most people will serve
as a reminder of just how little one knows (even of what little is known) about the
internal working of cells. More importantly, Moss shows that even a basic
understanding of the internal organization of the cell precludes thinking of DNA as a
master-molecule, ’controlling’ cellular development and organization. The internal
cellular structure is not ’controlled’ or ’coded’ by DNA; the replication of the internal
cellular structure is the result of straightforwardly (if massively complex) physical
processes, and there is no place where the ’information’ that the cellular structure
’represents’ is ’stored.’ While this was of course the main point of Oyama’s
groundbreaking The Ontogeny of Information (1985/2000), Moss lays out the growing
body of evidence in favor of this position carefully, and the examples he chooses to
develop are excellent.
But even more significantly, Moss provides evidence that modifications to these
complex structures are heritable through non-genetic pathways, and indeed may be
implicated in speciation events (pp 96ff). Research focused on the evolutionary
significance of “epigenetic” mechanisms of inheritance is becoming increasingly
common. However, as there has not yet been a substantive review of the emerging
421
body of work in this field, it remains, for the most part, unfamiliar to people outside
the particular fields. Further, work on variations that are heritable but do not primarily
involve genetic variation is still somewhat outside the ’mainstream’ of biological
research and perhaps for that reason is not taken up with the same vigor as that
found in straightforwardly molecular studies. Recent work in Drosophila on heritable
variations in chromatin states and the phenotypic effects that can be exposed by
reduced heat shock protein activity has received far less attention than the expression
of genetic variation through reduced Hsp activity (see Sollars et al 2003, Pigliucci
2003). It is to Moss’s credit that he confronts head-on the claim that genes are
uniquely important because they are the only source of heritable phenotypic variation,
and shows the claim to be wrong on straightforwardly empirical grounds. (Though
here a more detailed analysis of the empirical work, and a more thorough review of
previous work on this subject, would have been welcome.)
The practical implications of non-genetic pathways of inheritance and the lack of any
centralized control become obvious when Moss turns his attention to cancer research
(Chapter 4). Moss presents the evidence that is generally taken to imply that cancer is
a genetic disease – a disease that springs from some flaw internal to the cell where
the cancer starts – and reveals that in fact the current evidence points in no such
direction. Even if there are genetic changes that are associated with ’cancerous’ cells,
Moss argues that, in light of current evidence, many genetic changes will be better
characterized as effects of the disruption of intercellular organization, not as causes of
it (pp. 180). Moss reviews research showing that many of the field disruptions that
may precede cancer result in the cells undergoing adaptive responses to intercellular
environmental stresses. Cancer, in other words, may well not be the result of errors at
the intracellular level spreading to the body, but rather the result of the failure of
intercellular organization influencing individual cells (see esp. pp. 166ff). Through
these examples from cancer research, Moss argues that new research should focus on
the details of inter- and intracellular organization (an organization for which he argues
we should use the metaphor of biological “ad-hoc committees,” pp. 188), rather than
on the metaphor of a centralized genetic program – a shift in focus that he suggests
would give us a more accurate view of the ways in which cancers develop.
These are the strengths of What Genes Can’t Do, and anyone interested in these
subjects would do well to read it. There are, though, aspects of the book that are less
compelling, or at least compelling to a much smaller group of readers than the
material surveyed above. Chapter 1, “Genesis of the Gene,” is the longest chapter of
the book, and, unless one shares Moss’s fascination with the history of the gene
concept, one is likely to find it slow-going. Moss actually needs to establish very little
in this chapter in order to set the stage for the arguments in the rest of the book. As
long as he can show that the metaphors of DNA as “information,” “blueprints,”
“instructions,” “controllers,” etc., imply a set of empirical claims that are not, and
never were, particularly well-supported by research, Moss has given us all the
introductory claims needed to underwrite the arguments in the book. But he does not
stop here, and continues with an extended and, given the main focus of the book,
overly complex discussion of the conceptual confusions that led to the influence these
particular metaphors.
422
Moss suggests that genetic research has been shaped by the conflation of two very
specific gene-concepts, which he terms “Gene-P” and “Gene-D”. The “Gene-P” concept
emerges (roughly) out of Mendel’s elements, and “genes” in this sense are simply
those things associated with statistically significant differences in phenotypic
outcomes, whatever they may be and however they may work. In this sense, knowing
what version of a “Gene-P” an organism has gives one some information about what
the likely phenotypic outcome will be; knowing, for example, what combination of
alleles associated with pea-color a pea-plant has permits one to predict what color the
plant’s peas will be (ceteris paribus). The “Gene D” concept, on the other hand, refers
to particular DNA nucleotide sequences that are used in organismal development.
Here, the particular sequence is one of a number of resources that are necessary for
development; while differences in the availability or type of this resource can ’make a
difference’ developmentally, so too can differences in many other available resources.
Here, it makes no sense to speak of the gene as carrying “information” about
phenotypic organismal features. Moss suggests that the discovery that DNA was
intimately involved with the formation of the myriad proteins involved in organismal
development (and cellular function more generally) permitted the conflation of the two
concepts; “genes” became both nucleotide sequences and predictors of phenotypic
differences, though there is no one entity to which both concepts refer.
Despite the thoroughness of the first chapter, however, Moss’s account of the history
of these concepts, and of the generation of the confusion, is not wholly convincing. I
agree that there is massive confusion in the literature between, e.g., ’genes’ as
something like markers associated with particular differences in phenotypes in
particular environments and ’genes’ as DNA sequences involved in development more
generally (see, e.g., Kaplan & Pigliucci, 2000). And I’m sympathetic to the “Gene-
P”/”Gene-D” distinction as one important element of the various gene-concept
distinctions one might make. But I remain unconvinced that the “Gene-P” concept can
be so neatly separated from the “Gene-D” concept historically. For example, I tend to
read Morgan’s (and other early Drosophilists’) claim to the effect that “the future of
genetics [lies] in its connections with development and evolution” (from Kohler 1994,
pp. 177) as implying that, despite the technical limitations of the day, those early
researchers hoped that the ’genes’ they were discovering would at least provide
inroads to work in developmental and evolutionary biology. And later, the work with
the period gene in Drosophila (Benzer, Hall, etc.) seems to me to have been wrapped
up from its very early days in searches for biological meaning (and evolutionary
significance) – not just for a gene-phenotype relationship that happened to hold in a
particular population of fruit-flies in a particular laboratory environment (see Weiner
1999). If this is right, then ’gene for’ talk has been, since it’s earliest days, wrapped
up in the functional and hence evolutionary significance of the genes in question.
Done well, it is possible that this kind of ’gene for’ talk is neither strictly “Gene-P” nor
“Gene-D” and yet avoids at least most of the pitfalls of conflation that Moss points
towards (see Kaplan and Pigliucci 2000).
There are, then, elements of the ’gene’ concept that Moss’s account misses, and
historical turns that Moss doesn’t address. Of course, as I have said, this isn’t a
problem for Moss’s more general project in the balance of his book; indeed, it wouldn’t
be a problem for the book at all if Moss hadn’t given his historical account the
significance attending a lengthy chapter on the subject.
423
While the historical picture Moss presents in the first chapter seems to be too specific
and detailed, the analysis in the second chapter, focusing on the rhetorical force of the
metaphors surrounding contemporary genetics, seems simply out of place. To be sure,
Moss’s examination of Schrödinger’s argument for the necessity of (at least something
like) DNA to act as repository of information to guide development is well-presented.
Moss argues that Schrödinger’s reasons for thinking that biological stability needed to
be grounded in an information-carrying ’crystal’ were, while not exactly absurd, in
fact, mistaken. There does not, in fact, have to be any one source for continued order,
and, as it turns out, biological systems ’resist’ entropy at many different levels and in
many different ways. However, this very specific case is discussed without any of the
nuanced historical context that would be of interest to, say, historians of biology, and
for readers simply interested in alternatives to the ’standard’ view of the gene as
information, the discussion does little or no substantive work.
As I noted earlier, most of Chapter 3 is an exploration of the ways in which aspects of

biological order are replicated and maintained, and here Moss begins to hit his stride.
The details of these processes clearly point away from the metaphor of ’information’ –
there is no place where, for example, ’information’ about which intracellular
membranes go where is ’stored’. Again, the biological details are fascinating and, I
think, utterly convincing. But in addition, Moss appeals, unnecessarily, I think, to work
by ’chaos’ theorists on the creation and maintenance of stable complex cycles in non-
linear systems. Here his use of Kauffman’s work seems rather thin. In all fairness,
Moss never claims that the approach Kauffman recommends is sound, nor that the
results Kauffman (and others) have obtained are anything more than suggestive.
Indeed, Moss criticizes Kauffman’s assumptions as unrealistic, and Kauffman’s vision
of biology as too ’dry’ and information-oriented (see pp 102-106). As with the
discussion of Schrödinger, the point of going into some detail on the work of Kauffman
(and other ’chaos’ theorists) is rather mysterious. There isn’t anything wrong with
Moss’s analysis, but again, it seems out of place in an otherwise fairly technical and
non-speculative presentation.
With respect to audience then, while the first chapter may not appeal to people for
whom the History and Philosophy of Science means mostly philosophy, I have no
doubt that historians of biology will find it worthy of careful attention; indeed, I
suspect that historians will find the historical discussions that come up throughout
What Genes Can’t Do to be of special interest. Philosophers of biology, and most
practicing biologists, should pay particular attention to the biological details and
philosophical analysis offered in Chapters 3 and 4. Moss’s analysis in these chapters
points towards new directions for both empirical research and philosophical
exploration, and shows that the continued resistance to these new directions is
increasingly unmotivated.
References
Kaplan, J.M. and M. Pigliuicci (2001) “Genes ’For’ Phenotypes: A modern history view”
Biology and Philosophy 16(2): 189-213.
Kohler, R.E. (1994) Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life.
Chicago. Chicago University Press.
424
Oyama, S. (1985/2000) The Ontogeny of Information (revised edition). Durham, N.C.

Duke University Press.
Pigliucci, M. (2003) “Epigenetics is back!” Cell Cycle 2(1): 33-35.
Sollars, V. et al (2003) “Evidence for an epigenetic mechanism by which Hsp90 acts as

a capacitor for morphological evolution” Nature Genetics 33(January): 70-74.
Weiner, J (1999) Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins
of Behavior. New York. Knopf.
425
2003.08.12
Nicholas Rescher
Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice
Rescher, Nicholas, Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice, Transaction

Publishers, 2002, 147pp, $34.95 (hbk), ISBN 0765801108.
Reviewed by Brad Hooker , University of Reading
This short book does not pretend to survey theories about fairness; rather, the book
makes a very direct attempt to articulate the truth about what fairness really is.
According to Rescher, extant and varying social practices determine what claims
people have, and fairness “requires allocations to be made proportionally to the
strength of the claims at issue” (p. 12). Rescher’s theory is like Craig L. Carr’s in
according social practices a central role. It is also like John Broome’s in focusing on
the proportional satisfaction of claims. Along the way, the book discusses procedural
impartiality, the relationship between fairness and preferences, the relationship
between fairness and bargaining power, what fairness requires when different people
have valid claims to be given a good which cannot be divided, and how the benefits of
teamwork can be fairly apportioned.
Rescher argues that procedural impartiality is a crucial aspect of fairness (pp. 21-23).
There is a familiar distinction between procedural and substantive impartiality.
According to this distinction, procedural impartiality consists in the consistent and
unbiased application of rules and distinctions. Substantive impartiality goes further. It
requires that the rules and distinctions being applied are themselves impartially
justified. However, what Rescher means by procedural impartiality is the equal
application of rules for which there is a valid rationale (p. 23). So what he means by
procedural impartiality builds at least some substantive fairness into procedural
impartiality.
The book rightly focuses on substantive fairness. Consider a rule requiring me to try
secretly to harm every tenth person I meet. I might consistently follow this rule no
matter who the victims will be. Thus, I’m applying my rule impartially. But my rule is
itself substantively unfair, because it makes morally irrelevant distinctions.
Which distinctions between people are morally irrelevant and in that way arbitrary?
Rescher maintains that the answer will depend on what social practices, conventions,
institutions, etc. are around. Consider a society in which people write wills to
determine who gets their wealth. Now suppose Uncle John’s will leaves Cousin Robert
$1000 and Cousin Ronald $1000 (p. 10). Sadly, Uncle John’s net estate is worth only
$1500. Suppose there is nothing in the will to indicate that either cousin’s claim is
secondary or residual. And suppose neither cousin has any other relevant claims on
the money. Then clearly fairness requires that each get 75% of his claim on the
estate.
426
Some people would say that it can be unfair that Uncle John’s estate goes to Robert
and Ronald even if these are Uncle John’s nearest relatives. Presumably the animating
thought behind such a complaint is that Robert and Ronald might not deserve that
$750 each. It might be thought that what any person deserves is a function of what
that person has done (or tried to do). It might also be thought that fairness depends
mainly if not entirely upon desert. If those thoughts are correct, then if Robert and
Ronald have not done anything special, then how can they deserve the money any
more than indefinitely many other people do? And if they don’t deserve the money
any more than indefinitely many other people do, how can fairness allow Uncle John’s
money to go to Robert and Ronald?
But Rescher says we should resist tying fairness to desert. He points out that someone
might freely agree to pay you more for some service than you deserve (p. 2). In this
case, Rescher supposes, the person doing the paying is not unfair in paying more than
deserved. But, consistently with his basic theory of fairness, Rescher could have left a
large role for desert. His basic theory is that fairness is the proportional satisfaction of
claims deriving from positive law, existing conventions, actual agreements, etc. He
could have added that what someone deserves will depend upon such laws,
conventions, agreements, etc.
However, there is a fairly obvious objection to Rescher’s contention that claims derive
from positive law, social conventions, existing customs, actual agreements, etc. This
objection is that some positive laws, social conventions, and customs have had no
purpose other than to give advantages to certain groups or to deny benefits to other
groups. Think of the laws and customs that have discriminated against non-whites and
women.
Given his theory of fairness, Rescher cannot and does not object to such
discriminatory laws and customs on the grounds of fairness. He is emphatic that
“claims determine fairness and not the other way around” (p. 6). He nevertheless sees
that there must be some test that existing social practices must pass in order to
generate valid claims. His proposal is that “rational validation of a claim” depends not
only on its being grounded in an existing social practice but also on there being “good
reason to think that the practice at issue is one that redounds, on balance, to the
advantage of the group as a whole” (p. 8).
Suppose “the advantage of the group as a whole” is read as referring to some

particular group (some proper subset of individuals). If it is read this way, then
Rescher’s test is still too permissive. Suppose the people of Imperium aim to take
over the world. Suppose some of their social practices distribute claims in such a way
as to maximize the probability of success in their imperialistic aim. For example, these
social practices award riches to Imperium’s most bloodthirsty warriors and to
inventors of its best weapons, riches obtained by taxation on Imperium’s citizens.
Suppose Imperium does take over the world and then delights in rewarding itself with
most of the power and riches in the world. Imperium thrives; the rest of the world
suffers. Now I can make the point of this example. Imperium’s practices of rewarding
its most bloodthirsty warriors and the inventors of its best weapons illustrate that
there can be social practices that redound, on balance, to the advantage of a group
and yet do not generate valid moral claims.
427
To fix this problem, we have to say that the social practice must redound, on balance,
not just to the advantage of one group but to the advantage of everyone (taken
collectively). Of course some social practices rightly focus on the needs or interests of
only certain people. Such focus is fine, as long as there is a background justification
for allowing the practice, in terms of the well-being of everyone. Herein we find a
connection between fairness and impartiality. Only a social practice that is impartially
justified, in the sense that the justification takes into account everyone’s well-being,
can generate valid moral claims.
Rescher himself goes in precisely this direction. He observes that what fairness calls
for is consistency in following rules that “rest on an adequate rationale of social-
benefit considerations” (p. 21). And he writes, “[F]airness . . . consists in conforming
distributive practices to impersonal rules of procedure that are justified on the basis of
efficacy in serving the legitimate purposes of the human community” (p. 23).
“Fairness in division itself becomes a process that reflects the aims and purposes that
are at issue in the context within which that division is made” (p. 120). And the aim of
ethics is “to foster principles of interaction that induce people to act for the general
welfare and the common good” (p. 121).
But what if the social practice itself prescribes that the individual with the strongest
claim wins everything, as opposed to merely a greater share in proportion to the
claim’s relative superiority? In fact, Rescher points out that there is a whole class of
such cases. These are cases where different individuals have competing claims to
some pre-owned thing (ch. 6).
Suppose some property is found and two people come forward to claim it. One points
out that he can identify the property. The other possesses a bill of sale with her name
on it as the purchaser. As Rescher rightly says, the legal and social practice is
“predominantist”, i.e., to give all the good to the one with the strongest claim. In such
cases, fairness does not require division in proportion to the strength of the claims,
but instead a ’winner-take-all’ approach.
Rescher makes two interesting points about the predominantist approach to pre-
ownership cases. This approach seems to be justified in rule-consequentialist terms.
Imagine how insecure would be your ownership of, e.g., your bicycle if other people
could obtain rights to shares in it simply by coming forward with some reasons for
believing that the bicycle is theirs. Even though you had the key that unlocks the lock
on it, even though you had a bill of sale for it, other people might claim that they own
it, with their evidence being that their friends testify to this. As Rescher points out, if
proportionalism rather than predominantism were the practice with respect to pre-
owned property, then we would divert our resources away from improving what we
have into insuring our continued possession of it (p. 98). Because of such “incentive
effects”, the expected-value of having a public policy of deciding pre-ownership cases
by proportionalism is lower than the expected-value of having a public policy of
deciding them by predominantism.
Rescher’s other interesting point about these pre-ownership cases is that they are
actually evidential, rather than moral (p. 92). In pre-ownership cases, obviously
someone already owns something. And the question is whether the strength of the
428
evidence for thinking A owns it is stronger than the evidence for thinking B owns it.
Presumably, the fact that someone owns something is (at least largely) what Nozick
called a side-constraint, a reason that settles the issue of whether to give it to that
person. Fairness surely requires compliance with whatever side-constraints there are.
It is open to Rescher, however, to say that side-constraints are determined by those
positive laws and existing social practices that on the whole promote the aggregate
good.
Rescher emphasizes that fairness is determined ultimately by justified social practices,

not by the parties’ preferences or bargaining power (pp. 29-32). What matters from
the point of view of fairness is not how much Cousin Robert or Cousin Ronald wants
Uncle John’s money, nor how much each would envy the other’s inheritance. Rescher’s
main argument for keeping fairness separate from preference satisfaction and
subjective feelings is that people’s preferences and feelings can be variable, unstable,
and irrational (pp. 31-32). Although Rescher’s argument here is quite plausible, it is
very thinly sketched. He says even less in support of his rejection of bargaining power
as a determinate of fairness. But some of the sting is taken out of that rejection by his
admission that, after a distribution is fairly made, “if the parties choose to renegotiate
it in light of power considerations, then that’s their business.” (p. 29) Similarly, if,
because of different preferences, the parties choose to exchange with one another
what has been fairly distributed to them, fairness cannot object (p. 31).
Although the book sometimes refers to its theory of fairness as a kind of pragmatism,
the theory would be more revealingly described as a sort of rule-consequentialism.
Fairness is a matter of satisfying claims that derive from those social practices that on
the whole promote the aggregate good. Claims are to be satisfied in proportion to
their strength, but that strength is determined by the social practice that is itself
justified in broadly rule-consequentialist terms.
To be sure, as Rescher stresses, satisfying legitimate claims does not always

maximize general welfare: “Fairness aims at equity, at equitable treatment . . . . It is
an instrumentality of justice and equity, not of welfare and utility, save insofar as the
pursuit of equity at large conduces to the general welfare” (p. 14; see also pp. 94–5).
So the rationale for thinking in terms of claims and their satisfaction has to be rule-
consequentialist, not act-consequentialist. I think Rescher effectively concedes this
when he writes:
What we have here is not act-pragmatism (’Take that course of action which is
optimally efficient and effective . . .’). Instead, its pragmatic thrust functions at the
policy level because in the contingency of affairs individual outcomes are inherently
less predictable than general tendencies. Observe that the situation is structurally
much the same here as that of the act-utilitarianism vs. rule-utilitarianism conflict in
moral theory.
Unfortunately, that acknowledgement does not appear until the very last endnote in
the book (p. 123n2).
429
2003.09.01
Philip Kitcher
In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology
Kitcher, Philip, In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, Oxford

Reviewed by Samir Okasha , University of York
In Mendel’s Mirror brings together seventeen of Kitcher’s most important essays on

the philosophy of biology written over a period of nearly two decades. Some of the
essays are classics, known to virtually every student of the subject. Others,
particularly the more recent ones where Kitcher discusses topics such as genetic
determinism, the evolution of culture and the implications of human genomics, are
less well-known. What is most striking about the book is its uniformly high quality;
although the volume runs to nearly four hundred pages, there are no space fillers here
– each essay is substantive, penetrating and authoritative. Although the collection
ranges widely – Kitcher has written about virtually every topic in mainstream
philosophy of biology, and many non-mainstream ones too – many of the essays are
thematically linked. In a number of places Kitcher returns to a subject he first wrote
about in the 1980s and offers us updates of how he sees the issues twenty years
down the line.
The collection opens with ‘1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences’, (1984),
Kitcher’s masterful examination of the relation between classical and molecular
genetics. That essay rejected the idea that classical or Mendelian genetics can be or
has been reduced to molecular genetics, an idea widely accepted by many geneticists
at the time. Kitcher argued that the key concepts of classical genetics, such as ‘gene’
and ‘allele’, cannot be defined in the language of molecular biology, and thus that the
explanatory principles of classical genetics are in an important sense autonomous of,
rather than reducible to, molecular biology. Since this essay was written nearly 20
years ago, it is interesting to see how Kitcher’s argument looks in light of recent
advances in molecular biology. In ‘The Hegemony of Molecular Biology’ (1999), we
find Kitcher standing by and extending his anti-reductionism, for broadly his original
reasons. Since not all interesting biological regularities can be captured in molecular
terms, it follows that “macrolevel work in development and physiology” cannot be
replaced by molecular studies.
Kitcher’s scepticism about the possibility of molecular biology’s usurping traditional

‘whole organism’ biology is surely well-placed. However in places one feels that he
may be attacking a strawman, to some extent at least. The thesis that “molecular
biology is all the biology we need”, which Kitcher counters so effectively, is one which
even the most enthusiastic molecular biologist would be unlikely to endorse, at least
publicly. That having been said, defenders of the Human Genome Project have been
wont to suggest that DNA sequence data is the key to understanding all aspects of
430
organismic form; Kitcher is among the many philosophers of biology to have pointed
out the implausibility of this idea. Interestingly, though, he is less suspicious of human
genomics than some authors, accusing Richard Lewontin of having ‘overstated’ the
case against the HGP by claiming it to be devoid of all scientific value. Here as
elsewhere we find Kitcher advocating a sensible, middle course between two opposing
extremes.
Thanks primarily to the pioneering work of David Hull in the 1970s and 80s, questions
about biological classification – the assigning of organisms to species and higher taxa
– have loomed large in philosophy of biology. Together with Michael Ghiselin, Hull
argued that the notorious species problem had proved so intractable for a
metaphysical reason: biologists had failed to recognise that species are individuals,
with births and deaths, rather than kinds. Hull’s ‘individuality thesis’ met with
widespread approval among philosophers and biologists alike. In ‘Species’ (1984),
Kitcher tried to counter this orthodoxy, insisting that it is simply a matter of
convention whether one chooses to regard species as individuals or kinds. In that
paper, Kitcher defended a ‘pluralistic’ approach to the species problem, arguing that
there is more than one legitimate way of assigning organisms into species; which way
is appropriate depends on the interests of the biologist. In ‘Some Puzzles about
Species’ (1989) Kitcher returns to the species problem, further defending his view that
the Hull/Ghiselin individuality thesis is not the panacea it is widely thought to be, and
addressing a range of further conceptual issues about how evolving lineages should be
chopped up into discrete species. Both papers on species are important and still
relevant, but neither is easy reading. Though Kitcher is admirably well-versed in the
relevant biology, his readiness to deploy the full range of tools of analytic philosophy
in the pursuit of conceptual clarity is likely to alienate many biologists, impressive
though the paper is from a philosophical viewpoint. (This is a complaint that could be
made against a number of the essays.)
Kitcher’s 1985 book Vaulting Ambition was a trenchant attack on the then-fashionable
discipline of human sociobiology, pioneered by E.O. Wilson. Though Kitcher did not
reject out of hand the idea of applying Darwinian theory to human behaviour, he
argued that Wilson’s work fell far short of strict scientific standards, and was beset by
shoddy argumentation, anecdotal evidence, and conceptual confusion. Human
sociobiology as practised by Wilson was ‘pop science’, he argued. Sociobiology has
reformed itself considerably since Wilson’s early formulations, become more
sophisticated, and now markets itself under the label ‘evolutionary psychology’. In
‘Pop Sociobiology Reborn: The Evolutionary Psychology of Sex and Violence’ (2002),
Kitcher returns to the fray, attacking theorists such as David Buss, Randy Thornhill,
and Craig Palmer, who argue respectively that various aspect of human mating
preferences (Buss) and the disposition of men to rape women (Thornhill and Palmer)
are Darwinian adaptations, innately hard-wired in the brain, and explicable in terms of
the fitness increases they would have bestowed on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Kitcher finds little of merit in these ideas, arguing that Buss, Thornhill and Palmer are
by and large repeating the methodological sins of traditional sociobiology: inventing
speculative Darwinian stories to explain allegedly universal features of human
behaviour/psychology whose existence is anyway moot, failing to gather sufficient
empirical evidence, and not considering alternative hypotheses.
431
Kitcher’s critique of evolutionary psychology is compelling though perhaps slightly

harsh. Evolutionary psychologists typically distinguish their project from traditional
sociobiology by saying that while sociobiologists tried to explain specific human
behaviours in Darwinian terms, their focus is on the proximate psychological
mechanisms that cause behaviour, not the behaviour directly. Few would deny that
this constitutes a genuine advance, in principle at least, for it allows recognition of the
obvious point that most interesting human behaviours are mediated by complex
psychological factors, even if they have an underlying genetic component. Indeed
Kitcher makes this very point himself, in ‘Developmental Decomposition and The
Future of Human Behavioural Ecology’, (1990), insisting that a Darwinian approach to
behaviour must involve “some conception of the ways in which forms of behaviour are
bound together by proximate mechanisms and developmental processes” (p. 313).
However in his critique of Buss, Thornhill and Palmer, Kitcher insists that their focus
on the selective value of human psychological traits is hopelessly incomplete, because
until we are told “how the traits posited will issue in behaviour, we can’t make any
judgment about their selective impact” (p.342). Evolutionary psychologists could
reasonably protest that they are being forced into an impossible situation. If they
focus on behaviour directly, they are accused of ignoring the fact that behaviour is the
outcome of psychological mechanisms; if they focus on those mechanisms
themselves, they are accused of failing to specify a close enough link between the
mechanisms and the behaviours they issue in. One is left wondering how any
application of Darwinian theory to human behaviour could satisfy Kitcher’s standards
of methodological hygiene.
A number of the more recent essays in the volume, including ‘Race, Ethnicity, Biology
and Culture’ (1999) and ‘Utopian Eugenics and Social Inequality’ (2000) reflect
Kitcher’s growing interest in the social and ethical implications of modern biology. But
best of the most recent pieces, for my money, is ‘Battling the Undead: How (and How
Not) to Resist Genetic Determinism (2000)’, originally published in a volume
honouring the work of Richard Lewontin. Lewontin has been a tireless critic of genetic
determinism in its variant guises, and of associated ideas about the heritability of
many human behavioural traits. Kitcher detects an interesting shift in Lewontin’s
position over the years. According to Kitcher, Lewontin’s original contribution
consisted in explaining why the methods used by behavioural scientists to show that a
trait is ‘genetic’ rather than ‘environmental’ in fact showed nothing of the sort.
(Lewontin’s famous 1974 paper ‘The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes’
is the locus classicus here.) But more recently Lewontin has favoured a more radical
line, similar to that of developmental systems theorists such as Susan Oyama, which
rejects the consensus view that all traits result from the interaction of genes and
environment. In place of this interactionist consensus, Lewontin and Oyama argue
that the causal influences on a trait cannot be divided into two types, ‘genetic’ and
‘environmental’, because this is an excessively ‘dualist’ (Oyama) or insufficiently
‘dialectical’ (Lewontin) way to think about causation.
Kitcher argues that Lewontin’s original critique of genetic determinism was closer to
the mark than the more recent radical view. To my mind Kitcher is right, though
advocates of developmental systems theory will doubtless disagree. But whatever
one’s view on this controversial matter, Kitcher’s careful attempt to show why the
rejection of the interactionist consensus is unnecessary is impressive, and lays down a
432
challenge that Lewontin, Oyama and others must surely respond to. To all those
readers of Lewontin who, like the current reviewer, do not fully accept the relevance
of the Marxist and ‘dialectical’ twists which Lewontin tries to give to his biological and
philosophical insights, Kitcher’s critique makes comforting reading.
The final essay in the volume, ‘Born-again Creationism’ (2002), finds Kitcher revisiting
an old battleground. His 1982 book Abusing Science, written at the height of the
controversy over ‘creation science’, presented an authoritative, comprehensive, and
philosophically rigorous account of just what was wrong with standard creationist
arguments. This was no mean feat, since although biologists all agreed that
creationism is badly flawed, few had succeeded in saying exactly why, and many of
their critiques relied on a woefully simplistic, often Popperian, philosophy of science.
In ‘Born-Again Creationism’ (2002), Kitcher directs his fire at two leading ‘neo-
Creationist’ authors, Michael Behe and Philip Johnson, both who have tried to
resuscitate the argument for design in a modern format, and whose arguments, on
the surface at least, appear considerably more sophisticated than those of the early
‘creation scientists’. Unlike Kitcher’s critique of evolutionary psychology, there is little
to disagree with in his assault on neo-Creationism. It is to Kitcher’s credit that he still
has the time and patience to expend energy exposing the likes of Behe and Johnson.
In sum, In Mendel’s Mirror performs the valuable service of collecting together some
of the finest essays in philosophy of biology written in the last two decades, and gives
a fascinating insight into Kitcher’s intellectual development over that period.
2003.09.02
Andrea Iacona
Propositions
Iacona, Andrea, Propositions, Name (Genoa, Italy), 2002, 138pp, 15.50 Euros (pbk),
ISBN 888729867X.
Reviewed by Christopher Gauker , University of Cincinnati
Propositions, by Andrea Iacona, is a very good book on the existence of propositions.

It was published, in English, by the Italian publisher Name (that’s right, the name is
“Name”) (www.name.it). That’s a shame, because it might mean that few readers
outside of Italy will ever encounter this interesting and useful little book. I am hoping
to give the book a wider exposure through this review.
Iacona (pronounced “Ya’ kona”) has basically two objectives in this book. The first is
to reveal the fallacies by which others have tried to establish the existence of mind-
independent propositions. The second is to offer his own deflationary account of the
existence of propositions. The book is useful not only for its arguments and ideas but
as also as a guide to the relevant literature (from the early 20th century up to the
present).
433
In the first chapter, Iacona takes up several arguments for propositions that in one
way or another appeal to our ordinary ways of speaking. We say that two sentences
mean the same or that one sentence has two meanings and identify these meanings
with propositions. We distinguish between the sentence uttered and the assertion
made and explain the latter in terms of the proposition expressed. Most importantly,
we characterize people’s beliefs and other attitudes using “that”-clauses that we might
suppose refer to propositions. In this chapter, Iacona simply shows that we cannot
derive from these observations any of a number of assumptions that are often made
about propositions. In particular, we cannot conclude that propositions are language-
independent, or mind-independent, or the bearers of truth, or that they have internal
structure.
In the second chapter, Iacona criticizes a more metaphysical argument for

propositions. The starting point for this argument is the premise that the truth of
propositions is mind-independent. From this it is inferred that propositions themselves
exist mind-independently. The basic mistake in this argument is the assumption that if
a truth bearer is true in a world then the truth bearer exists in that world. The
argument takes more subtle forms in the writings of Stephen Schiffer and George
Bealer, but each of them, Iacona shows, misapplies one or another principle of logic.
Iacona does not explicitly say that he wishes to advance a deflationary theory of
propositions, but that does seem to be his intention (and he does embrace the term
“minimalism”, p. 68). Chapter 3 initiates this program with a deflationary account of
the relation of expressing that is commonly supposed to hold between sentences and
propositions. Iacona’s proposal in this regard rests on the idea that two sentences can
stand in a relation of “interpretation” to one another. In terms of this relation of
interpretation, an account of expression can take the form of the following schema:
For every context c, the sentence s, as uttered in c, expresses the proposition p if and
only if “p” is an interpretation of s as uttered in c. Notice that this does not qualify as
an analysis of expression, since it is only a schema, not an actual sentence, and, due
to the fact that the letter “p” occurs both in and out of quotes, it cannot readily be
turned into a sentence just by binding the variables with quantifiers. Iacona does not
stress this himself and so does not take up the question of exactly how a mere
schema can qualify as “an account of what it is for a sentence to express a
proposition” (p. 66).
As for the interpretation relation between sentences, Iacona acknowledges that there
is not just one way to take this. Suppose that “He is tall” is spoken in some context in
which “he” refers to John. Shall we say that “He is tall” is an interpretation of the
sentence “He is tall” in the context in which “he” refers to John, so that, according to
the schema, we may infer that “He is tall” in that context expresses the proposition
that he is tall? Or shall we reserve the privilege of interpreting a sentence for
something more like eternal sentences, such as “John Z. Ypsilanti is taller than most
people alive in 2003”, in which case we should say only that “He is tall” in that context
expresses the proposition that John Z. Ypsilanti is taller than most people alive in
2003? According to Iacona, we can understand interpretation in either way and so can
countenance different kinds of propositions, such as indexical propositions as well as
absolute propositions (p. 71).
434
But do propositions exist? Iacona’s answer, in the next chapter, begins with the
observation that propositions might be “introduced” into our ontology via the following
definitional equivalence: The proposition expressed by a = the proposition expressed
by b if and only if a stands in the relation of inter-interpretability to b. The question
this raises is whether the truth of the identity on the left-hand side reduces to the
truth of the sentence about inter-interpretability on the right-hand side so that,
despite appearances, the left-hand side does not really imply that there are
propositions. The position that Iacona adopts on this question is that we can stand by
the equivalence of the left-hand side and right-hand side without first deciding
whether propositions exist and then can take that equivalence as grounds for
asserting the existence of propositions.
In the final chapter, Iacona examines some of the more “theoretical” uses for the
concept of proposition and more or less dismisses as not serious some of the
questions I am going to press him on presently. But in the course of this Iacona does
make at least one important observation. This is that the issue between deflationists
and correspondence theorists about truth cannot be very well framed in terms of the
truth of propositions. According to traditional notions of propositions, propositions
have their truth values essentially. So there really can be no question of propositions
being true or false according to whether or not they correspond to reality. If we want
to think of propositions as the primary bearers of truth, then the issue becomes
whether we should give a deflationary or a “robust” theory of the expression of
propositions by sentences.
There are a couple of important motives for positing propositions to which Iacona
gives too little attention. These motives do not motivate the assumption that
propositions are mind-independent, which is Iacona’s primary target, but they do
provide a reason for privileging a certain mode of individuating propositions, and they
raise a doubt about Iacona’s strategy of introducing propositions via a relation of
inter-interpretability. The motives I am thinking of stem from a common conception of
linguistic communication and from a nearly universal conception of logical validity.
According to a long tradition--still very much alive in philosophy, linguistics and

cognitive science--linguistic communication is a matter of a speaker’s using words to
reveal to hearers the propositional content of an underlying thought. Supposedly, a
speaker chooses his or her words in the expectation that on the basis of the words
spoken hearers will be able to recognize that the speaker has in mind a thought with a
certain propositional content. On the basis of their understanding of the language,
hearers are supposed to be able to recognize that the speaker’s words express a
certain proposition in the context in which they are spoken, and hearers may then
typically infer that the content of the underlying thought in the speaker is that same
proposition. Communication is successful if in this way the hearer is led to attribute to
the speaker the attitude toward a proposition that the speaker intended the hearer to
attribute to him or her.
If we are to explicate linguistic communication in this way, then it is important that we

understand propositions in one particular way rather than any other. Propositions
cannot be the sort of indexical propositions that Iacona mentions. A proposition
cannot be what any two utterances of “I am sick” have in common regardless of who
435
is speaking. If person A says, “I am sick”, then person B will understand what person
A is saying only if B recognizes that the proposition A has in mind is a proposition that
B would express by saying, referring to A, “He is sick”. B will not understand A if B
attributes to A a proposition of the kind that is expressed both by A’s utterance of “I
am sick” and B’s own utterance of “I am sick”. Multiplying such examples, we find that
the propositions that we appeal to in this theory of linguistic communication have to
be the sort of propositions that have their truth values absolutely.
In two ways this conclusion stands in conflict with Iacona’s picture. First, it
complicates what we have to say about expression. Sentences may express
propositions, but also propositions must somehow be borne in mind, perhaps by being
“expressed” by mental representations. Second, while this conception of
communication does not just deny that there are such things as indexical propositions,
it does give a certain theoretical privilege to absolute propositions, which have their
truth values essentially. So if we think of propositions as introduced into our ontology
via the relation of inter-interpretability between sentences, we have to say what is
special about the relation of inter-interpretability that introduces such absolute
propositions.
Contemplation of relations of inter-interpretability leads to the second motive for

propositions that Iacona basically ignores. This is that the concept of a proposition
plays a special role in formal semantics and, in particular, in the definition of logical
validity. It is commonly said that an argument is logically valid if and only if for every
possible world w, if the premises are all true in w, then the conclusion is true in w as
well. If we want to allow that the truth of a sentence is relative to a context of
utterance as well as to a world, we can say that an argument is valid if and only if for
every world w and every context c, if the premises are all true in c in w, then so is the
conclusion. We obtain what is merely a notational variant on this definition if we
assign to each sentence-context pair the set of possible worlds such that the sentence
in that context is true in the worlds in that set and then say that an argument is valid
if and only if for each context the intersection of the sets assigned to the premises in
that context is a subset of the set assigned to the conclusion in that context. If we
then dub these sets of worlds “propositions” and say that the proposition assigned to
a sentence in a context is the proposition it “expresses” in that context, then we can
say that an argument is valid if and only if for each context the intersection of the
propositions expressed by the premises in that context is included in the proposition
expressed by the conclusion in that context. In this way mere notational variation
takes us from a common conception of logical validity to a conception of sentences as
expressing propositions in contexts. Such propositions will be absolute propositions
whose truth values depend only on whether the actual world is a member and whose
truth values do not vary with context.
The fact that we have this motive for introducing absolute propositions raises the
prospect that Iacona is guilty of a major begging of the question. He can acknowledge
that absolute propositions are one kind of proposition that we can introduce via one
kind of inter-interpretability relation. But what is this inter-interpretability relation?
The only kind of inter-interpretability that he actually talks about is inter-
interpretability on the basis of functional role (p. 115). But that kind of inter-
interpretability is not what is wanted for purposes of introducing absolute
436
propositions. “I am sick” may play the same functional role in me as it plays in you,
and yet “I am sick” expresses a different absolute proposition when it is said by me
than “I am sick” expresses when it is said by you. When we go to explicate the
relation of inter-interpretability by which absolute propositions are introduced, we
might find ourselves positing absolute propositions in much the same way we found
ourselves doing so in defining logical validity. The kind of inter-interpretability to
which we must appeal in introducing the propositions in terms of which we define
logical validity will apparently be just the kind of logical equivalence that we will define
in terms of that same kind of proposition.
In conclusion, one can say that Iacona has done an excellent job of isolating the issue
concerning the nature and existence of propositions. One could almost just grant that
he has decisively undercut the arguments for mind-independent propositions, except
that until we have a fully successful alternative account of our talk of propositions we
will want to leave our options open. But whether we can really accept Iacona’s
deflationary account of propositions depends on whether we can have a non-question-
begging account of the interpretation relation by which we introduce absolute
propositions. For that, we will need an alternative conception of semantics, one that
does lead us to posit absolute propositions simply by altering our notation.
2003.09.03
Jose Bermudez
Art and Morality
Bermudez, Jose and Gardner, Sebastian (eds.), Art and Morality, Routledge, 2003,
320pp, $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415192528.
Reviewed by Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
The fourteen essays gathered in this volume by José Bermúdez and Sebastian
Gardner were originally conceived as a tribute to the Cambridge philosopher, Michael
Tanner. Two of the essays are by Tanner, including the only previously published
piece (his essay “Sentimentality”). All of the chapters discuss relations between
artworks and morality, broadly conceived, either in ways specifically in harmony with
Tanner’s suggestion that there is considerable overlap between aesthetic and moral
concepts (Bermúdez makes the same point about decadence that Tanner makes about
sentimentality), or by suggesting, again with Tanner, that artworks can contribute to
moral understanding by offering richly detailed accounts of particular perspectives on
issues that are central to morality.
The book opens with an introduction which explains the rationale of the volume,
groups the essays, and briefly characterizes the argument of each chapter. The essays
are divided by the editors into two parts. Those in the first part explore the themes
above in relatively general terms, and in a manner usually consistent with recent work
in analytic aesthetics, with some reference to particular artworks (chiefly literary) and
437
some discussion of figures in the history of philosophy. The essays in the second part
come in two varieties. Two concern themselves in a more detailed way with certain art
media. John Armstrong offers a strong argument in favor of his claim that pictures can
deepen moral understanding through the use of specifically artistic means, and Roger
Scruton analyzes Richard Wagner’s Ring in order to demonstrate that Wagner’s music
conveys a particular moral vision. The only artworks reproduced in the book are found
in these two chapters, which include excerpts from Wagner, and reprints of two
paintings, one by Poussin and one by Sassetta. The remaining five chapters engage in
extensive analysis of philosophical works by Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Since
the essays in both parts of the book are influenced by Tanner, it is perhaps not
surprising that references to Wagner, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are found quite
frequently throughout the volume, particularly in the second part, but this does make
for a rather idiosyncratic selection from the history of philosophy. One potential
strength of the volume, its ability to cross the divide between analytic and continental
work in philosophy, is somewhat diminished by the narrow range of continental
philosophers drawn upon.
Many of the essays in the first part offer valuable contributions to contemporary
debates within analytic aesthetics. For instance, essays by Matthew Kieran and
Christopher Hamilton engage with work by Noel Carroll and Berys Gaut, among
others, who explore the ways in which artworks express perspectives on morality, and
who question whether some moral merits of artworks should be considered artistic
merits. Kieran offers a spirited defense of immoralism, or the view that moral defects
can contribute to the artistic value of a work, in part because he holds that
“imaginatively experiencing morally defective cognitive-affective responses and
attitudes in ways that are morally problematic can deepen one’s understanding and
appreciation” (72). Hamilton argues that some involved in the abovementioned debate
are too quick to equate the moral relevance of certain features of an artwork with a
particular valency, good or bad. He also reminds us that when we are discussing the
moral character of artworks, we should not exaggerate the extent to which those who
respond to them have fixed moral views, or suppose that increased understanding will
necessarily lead to moral betterment. He writes: “Even where a work of art does effect
a clarification in our moral thinking, I can see no good reason why this must be one
which is friendly to morality. It could make one more hostile to morality” (39). This
point seems pertinent to Kieran’s argument, and this was one of several places where
I wish the individual chapters had made reference to one another (several do cite
Tanner’s writings, including his essay reprinted here, but none engage to any extent
with the chapters not written by Tanner). Mary Mothersill’s arguments about why one
may refuse imaginative engagement with particular artworks is another essay in the
volume which makes an important contribution to a contemporary debate. Proceeding
chiefly by critical engagement with the works of Tanner and Kendall Walton on the
topic, she makes use of Richard Moran’s distinction between hypothetical and
dramatic imagination to explore why one might be unwilling to enter into dramatic
imagination along the lines encouraged by a work of art. However, I did think her
essay promised slightly more than it delivered in terms of a focus on reasons for
refusing to do so which relate to the moral character of the work, even when that
work is not sermonizing.
438
Essays in the second part, in addition to the two by Armstrong and Scruton discussed
above, explore such topics as whether Kant’s account of the ideal of beauty
undermines the sharp distinction he makes in some places between beauty and
morality (Anthony Savile’s essay), the ethical significance of tragedy (essays by both
Alex Neill and Sebastian Gardner), and the connection between art and philosophy in
Nietzsche (Christopher Janaway’s chapter). Some of these essays are closer to
straightforward textual interpretation than others (Neill’s is perhaps the closest), but
all situate their analysis of the texts they study with reference to the larger themes of
the book. The essays do not make reference to one another, but they are read quite
usefully in conjunction with one another, including Lyas’ essay which continues the
focus on Nietzsche and Wagner that runs through many of the essays in the latter half
of the book.
Overall my chief criticism of the book is that the essays in both of its parts pay far
more attention to exploring how artworks function than they do to exploring the
meaning of morality. Most operate with a rather open-ended conception of morality
which more or less coincides with all important questions about how we should live.
Many of the essays devote at most a paragraph to explaining what they meant by
morality or ethics (the two terms are typically used interchangeably). Armstrong’s
essay, which devotes two pages to the issue, and Tanner’s opening essay, pay more
attention to the topic than all but two of the other essays in the volume. The two
exceptions to the tendency to shortchange discussion of the nature of morality are
both found in the second group of essays: Sebastian Gardner’s essay (not
coincidentally, at 41 pages, more than twice as long as most of the other chapters)
and Colin Lyas’ chapter (which concludes the book). Gardner explores connections
between tragedy and morality, in an argument that defends the claim that tragedy
may be philosophically significant by undermining the moral point of view. Lyas
argues, on the basis chiefly of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Wagner’s art, that we
should contrast a government of law with a government of love. He connects the
former with morality, interprets it as obsessed with punishment, and favors the latter,
arguing that artworks can help us either to criticize or to overcome the false appeal of
morality. Therefore the two essays which explore the nature of morality are the two
which find it wanting. If the majority of the essays (which are by and large more
favorably disposed towards morality) had operated with a narrower, more clearly
defined conception of morality, this would have sharpened the connection they sought
to make between art and morality. Aaron Ridley’s essay on the ethical nature of art
criticism, for instance, argues that the job of the art critic is ethically significant at
least in part because the critic must strive for accuracy, but this does nothing to
distinguish art criticism from any other knowledge-seeking enterprise. While other
aspects of Ridley’s arguments do engage more specifically with features he attributes
to art criticism (for instance he claims a good art critic must be or become clear about
the nature of his or her values), more attention to the specific nature of ethical values
(as opposed to values overall) would have made the connection between art criticism
and ethics clearer. Even though most of the contributors to the volume are in
agreement with Tanner’s point that some concepts (including sentimentality,
decadence, and style) have both ethical and aesthetic significance, this need not and
should not commit them to the view that the ethical is coincident with the realm of
value, for this would make connections between the ethical and the aesthetic banal in
that the latter would be one species of the former.
439
Overall, while there may not be many who would be equally interested in all of the
essays in the volume, the various chapters both cumulatively and individually make a
strong case for the value of understanding many artworks as expressing views of life
which can lead those who respond to them to clarify, question, reject, or renew a
commitment to various values which are enacted in dimensions of life which have
nothing at all obvious to do with art or aesthetics. The editors have done an excellent
job of collecting essays by a number of leading scholars in aesthetics on this important
topic.
2003.09.04
Richard Swinburne
The Resurrection of God Incarnate
Swinburne, Richard, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Oxford University Press,

2003, 232pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199257469.
Reviewed by Richard Otte , University of California, Santa Cruz
In The Resurrection of God Incarnate Swinburne argues that the available evidence
makes it overwhelmingly likely that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead.
More specifically, he argues that given our evidence, the probability that Jesus was
God incarnate who rose from the dead is very high, somewhere around .97.
Swinburne’s argument is based on an application of Bayes’ theorem, and most of the
book is support for the probability values he uses in that theorem. What differentiates
this book from other books by New Testament scholars is the emphasis that
Swinburne places upon our evidence about what Jesus taught and the type of life he
led; it is only in the last third of the book that we get the sort of evidence one would
normally find in a book on the resurrection. In Swinburne’s Bayesian framework,
evidence about how Jesus lived is very relevant to whether we should believe he rose
from the dead, and Swinburne claims it is “deep irrationality” when New Testament
scholars ignore this evidence in their discussions (p. 3).
In the first part of the book Swinburne discusses what sort of evidence we would
expect to find if Jesus was God incarnate, and in the second and third parts of the
book Swinburne argues that this is the evidence we do in fact find. It is in the final
third part of the book that Swinburne focuses on the specific evidence for the
resurrection. Most of the book isn’t strictly philosophical in character, and instead is an
argument that we have evidence that would be likely if God became incarnate and
rose from the dead. In this review I will not focus on the specific historical evidence
that Swinburne presents, but instead will focus on the epistemic framework that he
uses and how the historical evidence he presents fits into this framework.
Swinburne begins his argument in chapter 2 by giving three main reasons to expect
God to become incarnate:
440
1. to provide a means of atonement

2. to identify with our suffering
3. to show us how to live and encourage us to do so
From this Swinburne concludes that the probability that God will become incarnate, if
he exists, is 1/2: “Again, so as not to exaggerate my case, let me suggest that these
reasons make it as probable as not that, if there is a God, he will become incarnate . .
. .” (p. 50). These reasons are not given merely to incline the reader to Swinburne’s
conclusion, but also play a crucial role in his argument; they determine both the prior
probability that God will become incarnate as well as what we would expect if God
does become incarnate, both of which are important in Swinburne’s use of Bayes’
theorem.
However, I found it difficult to see why these reasons make it as likely as not that God
would become incarnate if he exists. Swinburne himself discusses a couple of plausible
alternatives to becoming incarnate as the best act for God to do, and readers may
think of several more. He endorses a form of the principle of indifference applied to
God’s actions, and thus one would expect Swinburne to conclude that the probability
of God becoming incarnate (given that he exists) is about 1/n, where n is the number
of equally best acts that God could do (p. 34). Given this, it is difficult to see why
Swinburne concludes the probability of God becoming incarnate, if he exists, is 1/2
instead of 1/3, and many readers will assign an even lower probability.
In chapter 3, “The Marks of an Incarnate God,” Swinburne discusses what properties

we would expect God incarnate to have. He gives five “prior requirements” for
someone to be God incarnate:
live a perfect life teach great moral truths show us that he believes himself to be God
incarnate teach that he provides an atonement for our sins found a church to
propagate his teaching and works
But Swinburne notes that it is quite possible that a prophet satisfy these five prior
requirements and still not be God incarnate, and thus Swinburne expects God to give
us some further evidence that a prophet who satisfies the five prior requirements is
actually God incarnate. This required additional evidence, what Swinburne calls the
posterior requirement, is a “super-miracle” which clearly violates the laws of nature
(p. 62).
In the rest of the book Swinburne argues that the historical evidence supports the
claim that Jesus and only Jesus satisfies both the prior and posterior requirements of
being God incarnate; the evidence is that Jesus lived the type of life we’d expect God
incarnate to live, and the evidence also supports his being resurrected after death (a
super-miracle). In part II of the book Swinburne argues that the evidence we have is
not too improbable given that Jesus was God incarnate, and in part III of the book
Swinburne argues that the evidence we have about the resurrection is the sort of
evidence we’d expect if Jesus really did rise from the dead. So in parts II and III
Swinburne has argued that the probability of the evidence we have, given that Jesus
did those things, is not too low.
441
The basis of Swinburne’s argument is an application of Bayes’ theorem to the

probability of Jesus’s being God incarnate given the evidence we have. Swinburne
considers the evidence of natural theology (k) to be our background knowledge, and
the evidence to be that Jesus and only Jesus satisfies the prior and posterior
requirements for being God incarnate (f).1 Swinburne discusses two main
interpretations of the Council of Chalcedon’s 451 A.D. affirmation that God became
incarnate in Jesus. According to the “unified incarnation”, Jesus was fully aware of his
divine thoughts and nature while on earth, whereas the “divided incarnation” holds
that Jesus did not have full access to his divine powers, and thus was partially
ignorant of his divine acts and thoughts. Since Swinburne believes the reasons to
expect God to become incarnate lead us to expect a divided incarnation, he is
interested in how likely it is that God became incarnate in a divided incarnation (c).
More formally, Swinburne is interested in the following instance of Bayes’ theorem:
P(c/f&k) = P(f/c&k)P(c/k) ÷ [P(f/c&k)P(c/k) + P(f/~c&k)P(~c/k)]
This makes it clear that it is important to look at the probability of the evidence we
have if God became incarnate, the probability of this evidence given that God did not
become incarnate, and the prior probability that God will become incarnate.
Swinburne’s argument depends on the evidence we have being much more likely if
God became incarnate than if God did not become incarnate. For this reason the
specific values that Swinburne assigns to P(f/~c&k) and P(f/c&k) are not as important
to his argument as it is that P(f/~c&k) is much less than P(f/c&k).
With regard to P(f/c&k), Swinburne says “Let me not exaggerate my case and suggest
(despite my strong feeling that this value should be higher) that we give it a fairly low
value and put it provisionally at 1/10 ....” (p. 212). In evaluating P(f/c&k) Swinburne
relies heavily on his discussion of what we would expect if God were to become
incarnate (his prior and posterior requirements). But many will not be convinced by
Swinburne’s claims of what to expect if God were to become incarnate. Why should
we be so confident that God incarnate would teach that he was God incarnate, that he
provided atonement for sins, and would rise from the dead? Based only on the
evidence of natural theology, many will not find this probable at all, and will assign a
lower probability to P(f/c&k).
Although Swinburne discusses P(f/c&k) at length in this book, one weakness is that he
does not discuss in depth the value of P(f/~c&k). Swinburne does claim that it is
“immensely unlikely” that we would have the evidence we have if God did not become
incarnate: “It would have been deceptive of God to bring about this combination of
evidence . . . unless he had become incarnate in this prophet; and so God would not
have brought this about. So let’s say that P(f/~c&k) = 1/1000” (p. 213). It is clear
that Swinburne’s argument is based on an appeal to God not deceiving us, which will
be unconvincing to many philosophers. Certainly God allows evidence for positions
inconsistent with Christianity, and this casts doubt upon the claim that God would not
allow this evidence unless Jesus was God incarnate. And Swinburne gives no detailed
argument that it is very unlikely we’d get this evidence if God did not exist; Swinburne
simply claims that it is very unlikely that we’d get the evidence we have unless God
planned it (p. 213). Given the importance of P(f/~c&k) to his argument, one would
have expected a stronger defense of the claim that this is about 1/1000.
442
As for the prior probability of God becoming incarnate in a divided incarnation, P(c/k),
many will think this much less likely than the 1/4 that Swinburne assigns to it.2 In
reasoning about probability, adding more information to a hypothesis generally makes
the hypothesis less likely to be true. It is a principle of probability that if A implies B,
then P(A) is less than or equal to P(B). One apparent problem with Swinburne’s
reasoning throughout this book is that he often appears to add information to a
hypothesis by making the hypothesis more precise or detailed, without recognizing
that this makes the hypothesis less probable. Swinburne began by arguing that the
probability that God (assuming he exists) would become incarnate was 1/2, and he
then argued that the reasons we have to expect God to become incarnate also lead us
to expect a divided incarnation, which is only one of the main interpretations of what
the Council of Chalcedon affirmed (p. 51-53). But given that both the divided and
unified interpretations of Chalcedon are possible and have non-negligible probability,
the probability of God becoming incarnate in a divided incarnation is less than the
probability of God becoming incarnate (assuming the probability of God becoming
incarnate with a unified incarnation is greater than 0). This makes it surprising that
Swinburne assigns a probability of 1/2 to God (assuming he exists) becoming
incarnate with a divided incarnation (p. 211). Given that God exists, either the
probability of God becoming incarnate is greater than 1/2, the probability of a unified
incarnation is 0, or the probability of a divided incarnation is less than 1/2. For this
reason many will assign c a lower probability, or a range that represents ignorance.
Many others will simply not be convinced by the reasons that Swinburne gives as to
why God would become incarnate, and some may not even believe it is logically
possible for God to become incarnate in a divided incarnation.
While reading Swinburne’s arguments, I often found myself thinking it was rational to
withhold judgment on many of the probabilities he was discussing. Throughout the
book Swinburne announces what he concludes from certain evidence or reasoning, but
many philosophers will not be as certain of his judgments. Withholding judgment
could be represented probabilistically in various ways, but the result is that it is
rationally permissible to believe that the probability of the resurrection is much lower
than Swinburne does.3
Swinburne claims his probabilities are to be viewed as epistemic or logical

probabilities. According to Swinburne, it is a logical truth, necessarily true or
necessarily false, that some evidence makes a certain proposition likely to some
degree. Although it is controversial whether an adequate account of epistemic or
logical probability can be developed, there must be some clear connection between
rational belief and any account of epistemic or logical probability in order for the
concept to be of any use. One common view is that if the epistemic or logical
probability of some proposition, given all of the available relevant evidence, is r, then
we should believe that proposition to degree r. Another way of putting this is that
once we have taken account of all of the relevant evidence, rational degrees of belief
should equal the objective probabilities; it is not rationally permissible for our degrees
of belief to differ from the epistemic or logical probabilities. This principle is quite
natural, and if one were to deny this principle it would be difficult to see how logical
probabilities could be relevant to what it is rational to believe. This is important
because throughout this book it was difficult to see why it would be irrational for
someone to disagree with Swinburne on the probabilities he assigns, and to have
443
different degrees of rational belief. Many philosophers may think it rational to withhold
judgment on some of the probabilities Swinburne discusses, which allows as rational
more degrees of belief than Swinburne does.
The Resurrection of God Incarnate is clearly written and Swinburne very clearly lays
out the structure of his argument, something that many authors should emulate. In
using a Bayesian framework to discuss evidence that is normally not thought relevant
to the incarnation and resurrection, Swinburne has given an argument that those
working in this area will need to take account of. However, this book will not satisfy
those looking for a more philosophical work or one containing more rigorous
conclusive arguments about what it is rational to believe. Swinburne’s discussion of a
wider range of evidence and Bayes’ theorem does not solve these problems, but
instead focuses the debate on the values of other probabilities. Since Swinburne is not
successful in defending the values he assigns to various probability statements he
used in Bayes’ theorem, I do not think he is successful in showing that, given our
evidence, necessarily it is very likely that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the
dead; rationality appears to tolerate a wider range of belief than Swinburne
acknowledges. But even if Swinburne is not successful in showing that it is
overwhelmingly likely that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead, he has
made a good case that it is rationally permissible to hold beliefs that, by Bayes’
theorem, result in this being very probable. Thus although Swinburne may not have
shown that it is rationally obligatory to believe in the incarnation and resurrection, he
does give us reason to believe that one can rationally hold beliefs that imply their high
probability. Another way of putting this would be to say that Swinburne’s argument is
unsuccessful if dealing with logical probabilities, but we can instead interpret it as
describing Swinburne’s own subjective probabilities or degrees of belief. If probability,
like logic, places constraints on rational belief, Swinburne’s argument can be seen as
supporting that it is epistemically permissible to believe in the resurrection of God
incarnate.
Endnotes
1. The actual evidence Swinburne considers is:
f1: There is evidence (of certain strength) that prior requirements for being God
incarnate is satisfied in some (unnamed) prophet. (See part 2)
f2: There is evidence (of certain strength) that the posterior requirements are
satisfied by the same prophet. (See part 3)
f3: There is evidence (of certain strength) that neither set of requirements is satisfied
by any other prophet (to any reasonable degree). (See chapter 3)
2. This is equal to 1/4 because the probability that God will become incarnate given
that he exists is 1/2, and the probability that God exists is 1/2.
3. One common way to represent withholding judgment is with an interval , and to

interpret this as saying that I don’t reject any probability value within that interval.
444
2003.09.05
Joel Feinberg
Problems at the Root of Law
Feinberg, Joel, Problems at the Root of Law, Oxford University Press, 2002, 232pp,
$45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195155262.
Reviewed by Russ Shafer-Landau, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This is perhaps the last published work we will have from Joel Feinberg. It represents
a fitting capstone to a very illustrious philosophical career.
Feinberg is undoubtedly one of the preeminent social and legal philosophers of the
twentieth century. His work is justly praised for an enviable variety of virtues, all of
which are on display in this collection of essays. He writes wonderfully well, in a lucid
fashion, with a minimum of jargon. He is one of those philosophers whose aim is to
utilize and preserve, so far as possible, the distinctions latent in moral common sense.
He tackles central problems, as well as many of the more “applied” issues (here,
entrapment, punishment for failed attempts, and funding for the arts) that capture the
public’s fancy. The range of sources he relies on is remarkable–history, fiction, poetry,
current news magazines and legal opinions, in addition to the usual professional
philosophical suspects. These are all introduced with a light touch, dropped in at just
the right spot to seal a point or helpfully illustrate a problem or view under scrutiny.
Two other features of all of Feinberg’s work are amply illustrated here. The first is his
love of classification. In the longest essay in the book (“Evil”), at just under 70 pages,
we are introduced to the titular theme by way of a series of distinctions among the
varieties of evil. One can almost sense Feinberg’s mounting joy at parsing this
domain, despite the ultimate intractability (for Feinberg) of some of the philosophical
conundrums it raises. Feinberg’s attention to subtle distinctions and taxonomical
niceties is directly related, I believe, to the second of the perennial features on display
in the present book–the rejection of top-down theorizing, and its replacement by a
very nuanced deployment of mid-level, prima facie principles. Feinberg is more
content here than in earlier works to identify problems that he does not or cannot
decisively solve. Some of these are ones that he makes good headway on, without
rendering a final verdict (e.g., who the victor may be in debates between natural law
theorists and legal positivists–see Chapter 1). Others he judges insoluble for one
reason or another (e.g., what, precisely, the difference amounts to between those
who are irremediably evil and those who are nonculpably mentally ill–see Chapters 6
and 7). Still others are ones that can be solved in some ways but not others–in
particular, we may know which principles are relevant in rendering particular
decisions, without being able to avoid reliance on practical judgment that resists
algorithmic codification.
445
As a lovely illustration of this last idea, consider the following passage from the book’s
fourth essay, “Criminal Attempts: Equal Punishment for Failed Attempts.” Feinberg is
there concerned to argue that punishment must be predicated on moral
blameworthiness. Can we say, in a general manner, which factors contribute to an
agent’s blameworthiness? We can. But can we say, in like manner, what weight to
assign to each factor, or how to commensurate weights of different factors? We
cannot:
A great number and variety of factors go into the determination, whether we are
talking now of criminal sentencing guides or the moral judgments they partially
incorporate. A sound if blurred insight is that the harm intended is much more
important an indicator of an offender’s desert than the harm actually caused. Far
more useful, however, than the concept of intentionality, are the four “culpability
conditions” first proclaimed in the Model Penal Code--acting purposely, knowingly,
recklessly, or negligently in regard to some harmful result. Then, of course, the
concept of a motive, ruthlessly kept out of the original criminal trial, forces its way
back at the sentencing stage, and contributes its flavor to the emerging
blameworthiness stew. Did the offender act cruelly? spitefully? from mercenary
motives? out of greed? in an emotional explosion provoked by sexual rejection? or by
sexual jealousy? or through political conviction? out of mercy or compassion for
another’s suffering? after forethought and deliberation? out of conscientious conviction
or the determination to do at any cost to oneself what one sincerely believes to be
one’s moral duty? out of sudden violent impulse as mysterious to the actor as to
anyone else? And after all those questions have been answered, and provocation
considered, and other types of mitigation, and diminished responsibility, and the
questions they raise, now at last the more traditional justifications and excuses enter
the arena with their talk of subtle coercion and mistakes, mistakes of fact and
mistakes of law, defenses that undermine and defenses that affirm, defense of self
and defense of others, with duress and necessity, involuntary and voluntary
intoxication, insanity and short of insanity a host of neuroses and psychoses,
compulsions and obsessions, and the great parade of syndromes, and on and on.
There is surprisingly little disagreement about the factors that belong on this list, but
much disagreement about the weight to be given different factors when they conflict.
(101)
Feinberg never attempts to resolve this disagreement in a general fashion; he doesn’t

seek to show that, for instance, motive is invariably more important than intention (or
vice versa). Nor does Feinberg, in this volume (or anywhere else that I know of), seek
to solve such difficult problems by defending or invoking a general moral theory such
as Utilitarianism or Kantianism. Feinberg is a master at working close to the ground,
always attentive to what we really think and the way we actually do go on in
reasoning about difficult moral problems. He is as adept as anyone at identifying the
various salient principles whose import must be considered when arriving at correct
judgment. And he shows us how much can be accomplished with their aid, and
without that of the grand moral theories that have occupied the attention of so many
of his contemporaries.
A nice bonus of the present collection is that about half of its contents have not before
been published. The book consists of seven essays. Portions of two of these have
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already appeared in print, as have two complete essays. (In one case–Feinberg’s
H.L.A. Hart lecture, “In Defense of Moral Rights”– the article also appeared in his
earlier collection, Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton 1992). No mention is made of
the rationale for its inclusion in this collection as well.)
The first essay focuses on natural law theory, and the role of judges who must
interpret immoral laws. Feinberg uses this entry as a vehicle for testing the
malleability of natural law theory, and concludes with an invented dialogue between a
natural law theorist and legal positivist that is pedagogically extremely useful. (It has
been excerpted in the textbook that Feinberg and Jules Coleman edit, Philosophy of
Law 6ed. (Wadsworth 2000).) Feinberg does not take sides in this paper; despite
comments and asides, made elsewhere in his writings, to the effect that legal
positivists have the upper hand, here Feinberg is content to explore the possibilities
on the natural law front. He recognizes the pull of the Austinian/Benthamian
contention that immoral law may yet be valid, but does what he can on behalf of
natural lawyers. As he sees it, the debate between the two camps has very little
practical import as it applies to the moral duties of private citizens and jurors. Only
when it comes to the moral obligations of judges might a choice make some real
difference. In this context, Feinberg helpfully reviews and expands upon some work of
Robert Cover’s (in his oft-cited book, Justice Accused (Yale 1975)). Feinberg seems to
like the suggestion that he places in the mouth of his fictitious natural lawyer–that (i)
if there are any moral principles that must form a part of human law, then they are
few in number and, in content, highly abstract maxims of justice; and (ii) these are to
be used to countermand the results of ordinary judicial interpretation only in cases in
which such interpretation would lead to “flagrant, gross and outrageous injustice and
utterly crazy, pointless unreasonableness” (35). On the theoretically crucial point,
however–on whether the antecedent in (i) is satisfied–Feinberg remains mum.
Chapter 2 represents Feinberg’s defense of moral rights–rights that are conceptually

prior to and independent of conventional rights of any kind. He reviews efforts by
Bentham, Frey and Sumner that aim either to eliminate moral rights, or to reduce
them to some species of conventional right. Along the way Feinberg argues for an
important point made in earlier writings, namely, that rights are, in many cases,
normatively and explanatorily prior to duties–that what often explains and grounds
the fact that agents are duty-bound in some way is the fact that another agent has a
right against them. These are the two central theses that Feinberg seeks to defend in
this essay, and, to my mind, he is completely successful in his efforts.
After having tackled the relatively abstract issues to do with natural law and moral
rights, Feinberg devotes the next three essays to more concrete moral and legal
problems. The first of these, discussed in Chapter 3, is criminal entrapment. One of
the central theoretical problems about entrapment cases is that an agent is there
caused to voluntarily undertake some action for which he is judged morally culpable.
Feinberg has already shown that such a thing is possible–in his fine piece written over
three decades ago, “Causing Voluntary Actions.” One’s culpability is partly a function
of the strength of one’s dispositions to resist the illicit temptation, and Feinberg
introduces us to two tests of strength (63-5), which are both embedded in common
sense and also, unfortunately, capable of working against one another. After that he
weighs in on the topic of moral luck, and develops a theme that will be carried over to
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the next essay in the collection (on punishment for failed attempts). Being the object
of a criminal entrapment scheme launched by government officials is in some very
real sense a matter of bad luck–if one succumbs to temptation, that is. And, given the
tenacity with which some government agents have pursued their quarry, it would take
a principled person of unusual integrity to resist. If we follow Nagel’s account of the
matter, then this would be a case of “situational luck,” of the sort that leads to the
stains on the moral records of concentration camp guards and entrapment victims
who, were they born in quieter times, would have escaped (anything like the same
degree of) deserved moral censure.
Feinberg thus undertakes to assess Nagel’s case for moral luck, and finds it wanting.
The basic problem, as Feinberg sees it, stems from Nagel’s focus on an
unrepresentative kind of moral verdict–one in which an agent is judged blameable for
some result. Feinberg does not deny that moral luck can enter in such cases, and
properly affect the moral record of the person who suffers from it. But in the criminal
law, punishment is to be predicated on blameworthiness. And blameworthiness is a
function of belief, desire, motive, intention, and conduct–all things that are
substantially within our control. If these factors are identical across cases, then the
agents in such cases cannot differ much, if at all, in regards to blameworthiness.
What entrapment does is to determine the relative strength of a person’s disposition

to commit crime. Is this the sort of knowledge that governments ought to set traps to
obtain? That depends–on whether the dispositions that are being mined are those of a
private or public figure. “If police have the power randomly to intervene in people’s
lives just to determine whether they have wrongful predispositions, then we are all
subject to a great danger from those who are supposed to be our protectors” (75). As
Feinberg rightly notes, things can be even worse if such entrapment schemes are not
random–as when they target members of opposition political parties. With caution,
Feinberg allows that it may be more palatable to put responsible governmental
officials to the test–they, after all, have sworn to uphold the law, have special
responsibilities to be trustworthy, and, given their positions, are already highly prone
to being tested for their honesty. “It is plausible to tell them that being subject to a
special kind of scrutiny is a reasonable price to pay for their power” (76).
The next chapter focuses on criminal attempts. Feinberg’s central thesis is that the
distinction between “successful” and failed attempted crimes should make no
difference at all in the punishment one receives. Here he takes on the penal status
quo–as defended by several fine philosophers and in Seven Bad Arguments–and
maintains the point, made in the previous essay, that punishability should be
predicated entirely on blameworthiness. The results of one’s faulty conduct are not
within one’s control, and so should not affect one’s punishability. Those who insist on
disparate sentencing for attempts and successes are confusing (among other things)
the purposes of tort and criminal law. Tort law is aimed at redressing actual harm, and
so must take results into account in determining how to treat offenders. Criminal law
has a different aim (on the whole, that of reducing harmful conduct, which aim is best
secured by punishing offenders of laws even if such offenders fail in a given case to do
any actual harm). Feinberg’s main positive proposal here is to eliminate the causal
element in the specification of criminal offenses. An ideal criminal code would
substitute the offense of wrongful homicidal behavior (chargeable in degrees) for our
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present distinction between murder and attempted murder. A like arrangement would
be made for other offenses.
The thematic unity of chapters 3 and 4 is punctuated by the fifth essay, on public
funding for the arts. I found myself applauding not only the substantive message
Feinberg sought to defend (the “not-with-my-tax-money” crowd is mistaken), but the
way in which he introduced quite fundamental issues in value theory as a way of
adjudicating the disputes in this area. Feinberg concedes that not every taxpayer is
going to benefit, even indirectly, from such publicly funded projects as opera and
ballet companies. This leads him to the question of whether something can be
valuable even if it benefits no one. His answer is yes, and he gets to it by means of a
very nice discussion of intrinsic and inherent value (108-120). He appreciates that the
case he offers is only the beginning, and not the end, of proper discussion of these
issues. In a nutshell, his claim is that certain kinds of artistic activity are worthy of
being valued for what they are (quite apart from any benefits they yield). This is what
it is to be intrinsically valuable, for Feinberg, and it would be “odd to admit that
something is objectively worthy of being valued (esteemed, treasured, cherished) and
then deny that the possession of such property is any kind of reason–or a reason of
significant weight–for requiring people to protect or support it” (121).
The concluding essays are both on the nature of evil. A very short chapter 7, that only
begins the historical investigation into the contemporary fusing of our moral and
mental illness concepts, serves as a postscript to the longest essay in the collection.
Feinberg approaches the topic of evil by focusing on a question that has long vexed
him–what is the relation between moral culpability and mental illness? The short
answer is that the relation, as we might have expected, is extremely complex. In fact,
at the end of the day, Feinberg abandons hope that we can identify any coherent and
sharp line that divides the two spheres. Moral and “psychiatric” concepts have
developed in tandem over the years, and their intermingling has left us in a bad way.
Teasing out the implications of our notions of evil and mental illness, Feinberg is
confounded by paradox and contradiction. For instance, he traces lines of equally
plausible arguments that take us to the conclusion, first, that mental illness mitigates
otherwise blameable conduct, and then, second, that it aggravates such an appraisal.
This discussion occurs in the context of a characteristically insightful series of
investigations regarding various kinds of evil. Given space limitations here, I can’t
possibly do justice to the scope of Feinberg’s explorations. I shall instead simply
encourage any readers interested in the topic of evil (and aren’t we all?), and that of
the relation between moral appraisability and mental health, to attend to the
important work that Feinberg offers us in this essay.
For those familiar with Feinberg’s work, this latest collection is bound to invite
comparisons with the three earlier collections of essays that he has published: Doing
and Deserving (Princeton 1970); Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton
1980); and Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton 1992). In my estimation the book
under review does not quite measure up to the initial collection. But then, in my view,
Doing and Deserving represents the best thing that Feinberg ever wrote. The novelty
of its arguments, the tight focus on questions of agency and responsibility, and the
charge of a youngish philosopher who knows the ground that he’s breaking–all this
done in writing that is about as lovely as contemporary English philosophical writing
449
gets; it would be hard to match or surpass such an effort. The present collection
doesn’t quite manage either feat, but it bears all of the markers of the Feinberg style,
and is well worth the read for those interested in the questions it raises.
2003.09.06
Kristin Shrader-Frechette
Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy
Shrader-Frechette, Kristin, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming

Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2002, 288pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195152034.
Reviewed by Katie McShane, North Carolina State University
Consider the following:
60% of African-Americans in the U.S. live in areas endangered by hazardous waste

landfills [12].
7,000-11,000 U.S. workers die annually from workplace injuries [135].
62,000-86,000 U.S. workers die prematurely from diseases such as cancer induced by
workplace conditions [135].
29% of pesticides exported by the U.S. to other countries are so dangerous that they
cannot legally be used in the U.S. [164].
49,000 people die annually of pesticide poisoning, most of them in the developing
world [164].
Certainly these are appalling and deplorable states of affairs. But are they instances of
injustice? Those in the Environmental Justice Movement have long been arguing that
they are – that these situations aren’t just the result of individuals’ bad luck or poor
choices, but rather of an unjust distribution of environmental benefits and burdens.
Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s latest book is an attempt to defend these claims of

injustice philosophically. The book is a collection of nine semi-autonomous essays,
parts of which have appeared in other published works of hers going back to 1985.
Each chapter takes us through at least one case study exemplifying a particular type
of environmental injustice and then details the ethical principles in virtue of which it
counts as injustice. The book concludes with a discussion of the obligations that
ordinary citizens have toward fighting environmental injustice and suggestions for how
this might best be done.
The overarching ethical principle, which Shrader-Frechette defends in the second

chapter and refers to throughout the book, is what she calls the Principle of Prima
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Facie Political Equality (PPFPE). Unfortunately, we never get a clear statement of the
principle itself, and this omission poses a challenge to readers. However, we do get a
discussion of the principle’s two “components”: distributive justice and participative
justice. The distributive component concerns the “morally proper apportionment of
benefits and burdens” [24]. It “presumes that equality is defensible and that only
different or unequal treatment requires justification” [27]. The “equality” in question is
political equality, to be understood as “equality of treatment under the law” [25].
“Equality of treatment” is treatment “proportional to the strength of one’s claims to
it,” which may vary according to one’s merit, compensation due to one, one’s special
needs, or society’s general interest in providing incentives for certain kinds of actions
[26]. Political equality “often requires economic equality, at least in the sense of equal
economic opportunity” [25]. The participative component of the PPFPE involves
“institutional and procedural norms that guarantee all people equal opportunity for
consideration in decision-making” [28]. It requires that “stakeholder and expert
deliberation [be] given equal weight” and “guarantee[s] citizens and environmental
stakeholders . . . the same rights to consent, due process, and compensation that
medical patients have” [28-29].
Although Shrader-Frechette doesn’t always clearly distinguish these two components

from each other (e.g., compensation is mentioned in the initial description of both
components, though it is discussed only as a type of distributive injustice thereafter)
or explicate them in as much detail as professional philosophers might like (e.g., there
is no discussion of what “equal opportunity for consideration” or giving parties’
deliberations “equal weight” would amount to), this turns out not to be very important
in the discussion of particular cases. In the cases she considers, most violations of the
PPFPE fall into two categories: failure to obtain informed consent from those put at
risk and/or harmed by environmental policies (participative injustice) and failure to
compensate these parties adequately for the increased risk/harm they endure
(distributive injustice).
Drawing on principles found in medical ethics, Shrader-Frechette argues that it is

unethical to expose people to environmental hazards without first obtaining their free
and informed consent. Her understanding of what it is for consent to be free and
informed is a fairly standard one: consenters must have all relevant information
concerning the risks/harms; they must be capable of understanding that information
and bringing it to bear on their decision-making; they must not be coerced; and they
must be competent to make autonomous decisions [77]. With these requirements in
place, she goes on to show us case after case where they are not met.
In the case of a proposed uranium enrichment plant to be built in rural Louisiana, for
example, she finds that the site selection process withheld important information from
residents (about the selection criteria the company was using, about the nature of the
facility, about the risks posed by the facility, and about alternatives to the facility),
that the information residents were given about the risks posed by the facility wasn’t
accurate, that the site selection process didn’t include residents from communities
most likely to be affected by the facility, and that the area was one of “severely
depressed socioeconomic conditions” and low levels of education [77-81]. She argues
that because local residents lacked both important pieces of information and the
education necessary to interpret the information they did have, because some were
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excluded from the process altogether, and because those who were included had to
deliberate under conditions of economic need so severe as to be considered coercive,
they can’t be said to have given free and informed consent.
We find similar stories throughout the book. In Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear
facilities, workers weren’t told of their radiation exposure levels, and safety violations
in their workplaces were covered up by plant managers [157-161]. The Mescalero
Apache, asked to allow a nuclear waste storage facility on their land, were subject to
coercion by severe economic need and threats made against those who opposed
accepting the waste [126-128]. The nuclear waste storage facility to be built at Yucca
Mountain in Nevada was not consented to by those who would be put at risk by it.
Members of future generations cannot consent (since they do not exist), and current
residents of Nevada are vehemently opposed to the project [105-110].
The other type of environmental injustice cited frequently by Shrader-Frechette is the

failure to compensate those put at risk or harmed by environmental hazards. For
example, in a Texas community with toxic waste seeping up through cracks in the
sidewalk, the government initially rejected a proposed buyout of the victims’ houses
[7]. In DOE nuclear facilities, workers have not received wage increases proportional
to increased estimates of their risk (and so the Compensating Wage Differential
defense of increased worker risk in this case fails) [149, 157]. And in the case of
Yucca Mountain, any victims of radiation exposure are only entitled to partial
compensation as a matter of law [111-112].
Shrader-Frechette is at her best when analyzing the methods used to distort or

conceal important information. As she has elsewhere (see, e.g., her Risk Analysis and
Scientific Method), she shows the many ways in which data can be manipulated to
give the appearance of supporting certain conclusions. Here we see these techniques
used to mask racial disparities in proximity to environmental hazards and even to
conceal the existence of the hazards themselves [15, 25]. She also shows how
environmental impact assessments can minimize the apparent costs of
environmentally risky endeavors by failing to consider certain kinds of costs in their
analysis (e.g., omitting, in assessing offshore drilling projects, the costs from oil spills
borne by coastal communities [40]), or by discounting future costs (e.g., representing
the costs of future deaths and cleanup from nuclear waste leaks as zero, thus making
nuclear energy look cheap [86]).
Professional philosophers may find this book frustrating to read at times. Some of the
formulations are a bit more casual than one would like. For example, Shrader-
Frechette defines the Environmental Justice Movement as “the attempt to equalize the
burdens of pollution, noxious development, and resource depletion” [6]. But mere
equalization can’t be the aim, since that could be achieved by raising pollution levels
to make everyone suffer as much as those who currently suffer most, a result that
would not please Environmental Justice advocates. She also claims that “[t]he most
basic assumption underlying all land-use planning is that land, as a natural resource,
ought to serve equality rather than inequality, justice rather than injustice” [50].
Though many of us wish it were, this just isn’t true – land-use planning is still largely
driven by the value of economic productivity, a fact to which many of the cases in her
book attest. We are also told that “[p]eople often fail to engage in [Environmental
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Justice] advocacy because they wrongly believe they ought to remain neutral. They
frequently believe that whatever scholarship or action is not wholly neutral also is not
objective and therefore is biased or subjective in a reprehensible way” [194]. Taken at
face-value, this is quite an implausible claim. Ordinary people don’t, for example,
refuse to vote or sign petitions because they believe that one should strive for
neutrality on political matters. There are plausible claims in the neighborhood of what
she says here: there may be some people (e.g., political scientists, EPA officials,
judges, etc.) who think that neutrality on issues of environmental justice is required of
them for professional reasons, and people in general might worry about taking sides
on these matters because they don’t trust advocates on either side to give them
unbiased (and thus, they might think, accurate) information. But neither of these is
the claim we actually find Shrader-Frechette making. In one sense, all of these
problems are minor – a matter of changing a word here or there – and other parts of
the book make it clear that she doesn’t believe what she seems to be asserting in
these places. But on page after page, passages such as these give readers ample
opportunity to exercise their interpretive skills, and this can make for slow going.
It should also be noted that, as helpful an analysis as this book provides, it does not in
the end deliver everything it promises in the first chapter. Chapter One tries to situate
the book within the larger field of environmental ethics. Here Shrader-Frechette
presents herself as offering an alternative to biocentric and ecocentric views:
“Contrary to environmental fascists and misanthropic biocentrists, this book argues
that protection for people and the planet go hand in hand” [5]. Unfortunately, the
book makes no such argument. The charges of misanthropy made against
biocentric/ecocentric views come from the way that they handle conflicts between the
interests of people and the interests of other things (plants, nonhuman animals,
ecosystems, etc.). Views on which the more vital interests of people tend to lose out,
e.g., those that say it’s ok to kill people to save ecosystems, are open to charges of
misanthropy. There are a number of ways that a theorist might try to avoid this
problem: by denying that other living things have interests, by denying that their
interests ever do conflict with ours, or by claiming that people’s interests – or at least
their vital interests – always take precedence in cases of conflict. The environmental
ethics literature is filled with attempts to run all of these lines of argument. But
Shrader-Frechette’s book has nothing at all to say about conflicts between the
interests of people and other living things. In the absence of that, one can’t really see
this book as an argument for an alternative view about how to handle such conflicts.
But surely this is an asset. The debates about biocentrism and ecocentrism are well-
worn at this point. Issues of environmental justice, on the other hand, have been the
subject of remarkably little philosophical discussion. This is especially surprising since
problems of environmental justice raise so many interesting philosophical questions:
What sorts of environmental conditions, if any, do people have rights to? Against
whom can these rights be claimed (polluters, the government, those who reap
benefits from the hazards imposed on others, etc.)? Should people be compensated
for risks imposed on them or only for actual harms? What understanding of racism is
implicit in the concept of environmental racism and what response to it is called for?
To what extent should we be willing to make sacrifices in human health for the sake of
financial prosperity or sacrifices in political/economic equality for the sake of economic
development? To what extent do consumers in developed countries bear responsibility
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for hazardous working conditions in the developing world? Shrader-Frechette’s book

begins to address these questions, and for this reason it is a valuable contribution to
the literature, regardless of whether it has anything to do with biocentrism or
ecocentrism.
Overall, this book is an example of precisely the type of practical ethics one hopes to
see more of. The author takes seriously the need to give arguments and consider
objections, but she also takes a very detailed approach to the cases she considers.
Clearly a lot of research went into this book. (Partly for that reason, a bibliography
would have been quite helpful.) The cases here aren’t just illustrations of more
general philosophical points – they’re interesting in their own right. Very few
philosophers, even those of us who do practical ethics, take the time to work through
the details of cases in the way that Shrader-Frechette does in this book. It is a must-
read for anyone interested in environmental justice and accessible enough that it
would make a valuable addition to any undergraduate environmental ethics syllabus.
2003.09.07
Arnold Davidson
The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of

Concepts
Davidson, Arnold, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the

Formation of Concepts, Harvard University Press, 2002, 272pp, $42.00 (hbk), ISBN
0674004590.
Reviewed by Linda Martin Alcoff , Syracuse University
Although Michel Foucault’s philosophical writings from beginning to end focused on

deeply epistemological questions about knowledge and science, his ideas remain
almost entirely absent from epistemological debates in the English-speaking world. No
doubt this is due to his style, not a linguistic style but what Ian Hacking calls style of
reasoning, by which he means to invoke the kinds of differences that occur between
aesthetic styles and relate these to differences in scientific inquiry. In short, Foucault’s
work on knowledge is not easily translatable into the more familiar problematizations
of epistemology. The best attempts thus far at such philosophical translations of
Foucault have been in Ian Hacking’s and Gary Gutting’s work, though Hacking can be
frustratingly elusive on the core topics of justification, truth and reference and
Gutting’s interpretations do not reach the stage at which Foucault developed his
notion of power/knowledge, one of his most well-known, interesting, and difficult
concepts.
In the last several years, Arnold Davidson has been filling this gap by developing an
interpretive account and application of Foucault’s work on knowledge and science (as
well as of Canguilhem and Bachelard’s), and these essays, together with some new
ones, are now usefully collected in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical
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Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. To be sure, this collection reaches

beyond Foucault--Davidson’s own original analyses are also evident here--and his
interpretation of Foucault as an epistemologist of sorts is itself original and
provocative, and will no doubt raise the ire of those who would place Foucault in more
of a postmodernist camp. But Davidson’s demonstration of the utility of Foucault for a
host of ongoing debates in psychology, psychoanalysis, historiography as well as
epistemology is persuasive and amply developed in several fascinating examples.
Historical epistemology, as Davidson develops it, is not simply doing a history of

epistemology, though there is some of that, but primarily an epistemological analysis
of the history of knowledges, not just with an eye toward assessing truth but more so
with assessing how some things, and not others, become candidates for truth-value.
Analytic epistemologists generally portray this kind of project as outside the domain of
epistemology proper, unless one is offering a judgement about the epistemic viability,
in today’s terms, of prior modes of knowing. If epistemology is defined as the pursuit
of justification and truth, history holds no intrinsic interest. What is most valuable in
this book is Davidson’s insistence that a concern with the history of concepts and with
the variable ways in which statements are made candidates for truth-value should not
be seen as extra-epistemic issues, or as mere sociology or ideology-critique. The
pursuit of truth will be enhanced if we come to a better understanding of how the
domains of knowledge emerge, are delimited, and constrained by the peculiar ways in
which concepts are formed in different historical moments.
For example, Davidson shows in a fascinating chapter on sex (with pictures) that,
before the last hundred and fifty years, anatomy was exhaustive of sexuality. That is,
one could not fathom the idea, so commonplace today, of a person being anatomically
one sex and psychologically another. The very concept of the homosexual requires
this distinction, which is why we should not import current ideas of homosexuality to
the past. This claim was made by Foucault, but Davidson makes an even stronger
case for it through his studies of the representations of Christ’s sex (not, he argues,
his sexuality, a category that did not exist), and through his detailed studies of the
development of psychiatric reasoning. One way to explain the latter development, and
one which could be misleadingly taken from Foucault himself, is that psychiatry
appropriated for itself a domain of judgement and diagnosis previously accorded to
the morality of the church. Instead, psychiatry emerged from the possibility of
conceptualizing a sexual subjectivity and “mental individuality,” to quote Krafft-Ebing
(63), that constituted types of persons above and beyond their physical morphology.
Whether the question of truth is related to such historical studies depends on how
they illuminate the question of reference. Is the distinction between anatomy and
sexuality a contemporary illusion, or a fact about human experience that was recently
discovered? One of the laudable features of Davidson’s work is that he shows how we
must complicate such questions, but that such complications are not ways to avoid
questions about the referentiality of science’s claims. The complication is that the
concepts can affect and even produce experiences, in this case, experiences of
sexuality, which then have an effect on our practices, perceptions, and the
perceptions that others have of us, all of which create the “feedback loop” peculiar to
the human sciences that Hacking calls “dynamic nominalism.” The referentiality of
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medical or psychiatric terms is thus historically delimited; hence the importance of

history.
Foucault was no idealist, nor did he effectively reduce the production of scientific
concepts and categories to the operations of social interest. For this reason, Davidson
says, against Hacking on this point, “I find the label ’social construction’ utterly
inappropriate . . .”(xiii). This is apparently because Davidson fears that the idea of
social construction conveys the relativist definition of truth as ideology, and leads
people to believe that the work of historical epistemologists such as his own and
Foucault’s requires rejecting the traditional attempt to uncover what was really
happening in the past, or rejecting any objectivist account of how the best practices of
science validate their claims. It would be interesting to hear what he has to say about
Hacking’s recently published The Social Construction of What?, which artfully unpacks
the variable possible meanings of the idea of social construction and demonstrates
that they do not all entail wholesale repudiations of realism in any form. Davidson
does not explain or pursue the debates over social construction, other than to align it
with a view that would eschew epistemology altogether.
Like Rorty, Putnam and other contemporary pragmatists, Davidson dismisses the
“absolutist/relativist distinction” outright, but not for the reasons they give.
Pragmatists generally point to the unintelligibility of the distinction, and repudiate any
need to address charges of relativism since this would require a philosophical
elaboration of truth and reference that is entirely unnecessary and results from a kind
of category mistake. Davidson’s approach here should be much more persuasive, or at
least more interesting, to those who find the pragmatist ridicule for concerns with
ontology as overly glib.
In several essays, but especially in the essay that addresses the idea of evidence as
developed by Carlo Ginzburg, Davidson argues that the more relevant distinction than
absolutism/relativism is that between conditions of validity and conditions of
possibility. Conditions of validity involve those bread-and-butter issues about which
epistemologists and methodologists of the social sciences are most familiar, issues
involving evidence, proof, the criteria of justification, and truth. Conditions of
possibility, by contrast, are concerned with a different level of the knowledge-
generating process, the level at which statements become formalizable as candidates
for truth. Thus, it is not that those who are concerned with the conditions of
possibility, such as Foucault, are discrediting the concern with conditions of validity, as
the charge of relativism would imply, but that they are focused on a different arena.
Davidson’s approach also works to discredit the sharp distinction between sociological
and epistemological approaches to knowledge, despite the fact that he mainly
distances himself from the former. Foucault distinguished between three kinds of
approaches to the study of knowledge: intradiscursive, which is the domain of
epistemology as traditionally understood, interdiscursive, which is the domain of the
archeological method Foucault himself developed, and extradiscursive, which is the
domain of genealogy or the relations of knowledge and power, and thus what might
be traditionally understood as the domain of the sociology of knowledge. But here
Davidson introduces Wittgenstein’s linguistic and pragmatist based ontology as a way
to rethink the relations between these distinct approaches, to bring them closer than
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Foucault himself was able to articulate. Foucault’s idea that discourses construct the
objects of which they speak is essentially parallel, if not identical, to Wittgenstein’s
argument that ontology is supervenient on a grammar. Thus, it is not that all
questions of ontology or of reference are unintelligible, but that they operate within
contingent historical constructs which should be understood not as words standing
alone as much as practices of which words are a part. With more than a touch of
irritation, Davidson complains that “One might have thought that Anglo-American
philosophers would have learned from Wittgenstein that concepts cannot be divorced
from the practices of their employment” (181).
This is all that Foucault means when he speaks of “the games of truth,” Davidson is
suggesting, and not the radical idealism or epistemological nihilism of which he is so
often accused. But this also means, again contra Rorty, that there are in fact quite a
few critical questions yet to be explored in regard to reference, and neither the
intradiscursive nor the extradiscursive approaches will be sufficient to explain any
given ontology. A concept like “perversion,” for example, cannot be assessed in terms
of its ability to capture some aspect of the world without making use of each of these
approaches, and, further, exploring the relations between the extra-, intra-, and inter-
discursive domains in their concurrent use of such a concept. Most importantly,
Davidson makes a strong case that the traditional approaches to questions of
knowledge still in use today, and which share with positivism the idea that justification
can be assessed in an acontextual manner, work to deter attempts to explain or
explore the production of those experiences and forms of subjectivity to which so
much of the social sciences seek to refer. He insists that such explorations must still
be guided by the normative requirements of evidence and the aim toward truth, and
thus what he argues we need overall, it seems to me, is not a replacement of
epistemology but a more complex and detailed account of proof, evidence, and truth.
Davidson’s work thus raises our ability to conceptualize new ways to do epistemology
and to understand the benefits of the new historical and social studies of science for
those of us with more of an epistemological interest than a strictly historical one. He
does not bring all of these questions to closure, however. It remains unclear exactly
how his relativizing of concepts to their context avoids the anti-realism that he claims
to avoid. One also wonders whether the sharp distinctions he draws between the
understanding of concepts in different periods, e.g. “sex”, should be understood as
incommensurable, to bring up Kuhn’s old nightmare. Why he ignores the excellent
work in historical epistemology by Mary and Jim Tiles is another question. Finally, I
found myself resisting the easy libertarian assumptions he seems to be making
without much reflection and that justify his admonishment to reject all moral or
pathological approaches to the formation of problematics around sex and sexuality.
The call for a complete “laissez aller” is just as much implicated in current discourses
of perversion (and dare I say, ideology) as is the medicalizing of pleasure, and thus
just as much in need of an extradiscursive, and not merely intra-or interdiscursive,
analysis.
2003.09.08
Christopher Gauker
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Words Without Meaning
Gauker, Christopher, Words Without Meaning, MIT Press, 2002, 312pp, $25.00 (pbk),
ISBN 0262571625.
Reviewed by Brian Weatherson , Brown University
In philosophy it’s hard to find a view that hasn’t had an ism associated with it, but
there are some. Some theories are too obscure or too fantastic to be named. And
occasionally a theory is too deeply entrenched to even be conceptualised as a theory.
For example, many of us hold without thinking about it the theory that “the central
function of language is to enable a speaker to reveal his or her thoughts to a hearer,”
(3) that in the case of declarative utterances the thoughts in question are beliefs
whose content is some proposition or other, and that hearers figure out what the
content of that belief is by virtue of an inference that turns on their beliefs about the
meanings of the words we use. These claims might seem too trivial to even be called
a theory. They have seemed too trivial to draw an ism. Christopher Gauker calls them
’the received view’, and the purpose of his book Words without Meaning (all page
references to this book) is to argue against this received view and propose an
alternative theory in its place. In Gauker’s theory the primary function of language is
social coordination. If language ever functions as a conduit to the mind, this is a
secondary effect.
It is useful to have an ism for everything, so let’s call ’the received view’ Lockism,
since Locke believed something similar. Of course, Locke probably didn’t have any
detailed opinions about where the semantics/pragmatics distinction lies or what the
role and importance of Horn scales might be or how to build a compositional
semantics for quantification, or indeed about many of the issues on which various
contemporary Lockists have their most distinctive views, but there’s an intellectual
legacy worth noting. Still, if Locke was a Lockist without having views on these
matters, this starts to suggest how broad, and how divided, the Lockist church may
be. Lockists need not agree on the semantic analyses of indicative conditionals or
attitude reports. They need not even agree on whether there are such things as
conventional implicatures or deep structures. An argument against Lockism will have
to either focus on the few rather platitudinous points where Lockists agree, or try to
respond to all the ways Lockists might develop their position. Gauker takes both
options throughout his book. The central theses of the Lockist position that are
attacked concern the nature and contents of beliefs, the nature of logical implication
and the status of truth. Gauker’s attacks on Lockist theories of quantifier-domain
restriction and of presupposition rely more heavily on attacking all the variants of
Lockism.
But the arguments against Lockism are not necessarily the most important parts of
the book. Alongside the criticisms of Lockism, Gauker develops in great detail his own
positive theory about the nature and role of linguistic communication. Gauker
suggests “the primary function of assertions . . . is to shape the manner in which
interlocutors attempt to achieve their goals” (52). Conversations do not take place in
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a vacuum. Conversants frequently talk because they want something. The world does
not always make it easy for us to get what we want, but sometimes at least other
people can tell us which ways work best.
It becomes crucial to Gauker’s theory here that certain actions are or are not in accord
with certain sets of sentences. Given this idea the primary norm of conversation
becomes: Say things such that others who act in accord with what you say, and with
what else has been said, will achieve their goals. The concept of actions according
with (sets of) sentences seems intuitive at first. If my goal is to download the new
Matrix movie, then going to stealthatmovie.com is in accord with {’The new Matrix
movie is available at stealthatmovie.com.’} while going to moviebootlegger.com, or
anywhere else, is not. (These are, by the way, fake site names.) Given this idea of
actions according with sets of sentences, we can then define the context, or set of
relevant sentences, as the smallest set such that “all courses of action in accordance
with it relative to the goal of the conversation are good ways of achieving the goal”
(56). We can then restate the primary norm as: Say things that are in the context.
Those sentences will be useful to say, and their negations will be useful to deny. This
idea of useful assertibility becomes crucial to Gauker’s theory, often playing much the
role that a Lockist has truth play. For example, validity gets defined in terms of
assertibility preservation in all contexts.
Clearly the concept of actions according with contexts given goals is quite crucial, but
there’s less explication of it than we might hope. I have some idea what it might mean
to say that my going to stealthatmovie.com accords with the proposition that the new
Matrix movie is available at stealthatmovie.com, and I have some idea which facts in
the world may make this true. But I don’t have as clear an idea about what it means
to say this action accords with any sentence. Lockists think that actions accord with
sentences because sentences express propositions and some actions accord with
propositions. But this isn’t Gauker’s account, and it isn’t clear what is. At one stage
Gauker notes that the distinction between actions that accord with a context and
those that do not will be primitive relative to the ’fundamental norms of discourse’,
which are the primary focus of Words without Meaning. That sounds right, and I hope
it’s a sign that we’ll see more details about the concept of accord in future work.
This issue though is important because there are a few reasons to worry about how
the concept of accord will be explicated. First, whatever problems face Lockist theories
of meaning, including some of the problems Gauker raises, may recur here. Second,
some theories of accord will introduce entities that are functionally just like meanings,
so if meaning is a functional concept, as seems plausible, those theories will not end
up being theories of words without meaning. Third, as Gauker notes, there are serious
epistemological questions about how we could ever learn which actions accord with
which contexts relative to which goals. Those who are impressed by Fodor’s
arguments for the systematicity of human linguistic competence will probably think
these questions raise insuperable difficulties for anything like Gauker’s program. On
the other hand, those that are impressed by Gauker’s program will probably find these
Fodorian claims overstated.
Words without Meaning concludes with three chapters setting out a rather distinctive
view of belief. Gauker argues that a complete account of the role of belief ascriptions
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should be sufficient for a theory of belief. This is not because of a general policy that
explaining the talk about something is sufficient to explain the thing in general. Such a
policy is not entirely antithetical to Gauker’s overall picture, but it would be hard to
defend in all cases. Rather, Gauker argues, we have little access to the nature of
beliefs and desires except through investigation of their attribution. Many philosophers
will baulk here, because they think we can understand the nature of beliefs and
desires through their role in folk psychology. Since folk psychology is a crucial part of
how we predict the actions of other people, and of how we explain their actions, there
is an important aspect of the nature of beliefs and desires that a mere account of their
ascriptions will not capture. These philosophers will not agree with Gauker that an
“account of the attribution of beliefs and desires is already an account of [their]
nature” (271-2).
Gauker’s response to these philosophers is to question the explanatory and predictive

capacity of folk psychology. He argues first that the explanatory, and especially the
predictive, power of folk psychology is much over-rated. And more importantly, he
argues that when there do appear to be good folk-psychological explanations or
predictions, there are equally good explanations that do not appeal to beliefs and
desires. The argument for this involves running through several cases that are
intended to be paradigms of cases where folk-psychological explanations are
successful and showing that there are rival explanations that do without folk-
psychological language that are equally effective.
This does not mean that we adopt an error theory of belief- or desire-ascriptions.
Gauker thinks these have a use, so they are properly assertible. Their role, in general,
is to let us speak on behalf of other people. “The primary function of attributions of
belief and desire is to extend the range of participation in conversation” (226). When I
say that Harry believes that tech stocks are good investments, I say on Harry’s behalf
that tech stocks are good investments. Unfortunately, we never get a complete
positive characterisation of when it is permissible to say something on Harry’s behalf.
We are told that such assertions, like all assertions, must be relevant to the
conversation, but beyond that not a lot. We are told that it can’t just be permissible to
say this just in case Harry would be disposed to say it, were he here. Harry might
have a habit of keeping his investment ideas to himself, but still believe that tech
stocks are good investments. And we’re told that this can be permissible to say even if
Harry has never made an ’inner assertion’ that tech stocks are good investments. But
this doesn’t amount to a positive characterisation. Further, it’s not clear how to extend
this account to all attitude reports, especially reports of desire-like attitudes. One
could truly say Brian wants to play for the Red Sox, but in doing so one is not making
a command, or even a request, on my behalf.
As well as these intriguing positive proposals, there are several arguments against
Lockism. Chapter 2, on mental representation, is an attack on the Lockist position that
there are beliefs with propositional content. Gauker first notes that any attempt to
provide an atomistic theory of mental content seems to run into insuperable
counterexamples. The main focus is Fodor’s asymmetric dependence theory, but a few
other atomist theories are raised and dismissed. Gauker suggests that holistic theories
are a little more promising, but when we look at the details we see that these all fall
to a version of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. Gauker’s argument here differs
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from Putnam’s in two key respects. First, it concerns primarily mental content, rather
than linguistic content. Second, it has fewer theoretical overheads. Gauker shows that
the argument never really needed any complicated mathematics; the formalism in the
standard semantics for first-order logic is quite sufficient. Despite those two
differences, the argument is fairly familiar, and the moves that could be made in
response are also, by now, fairly familiar. Gauker quickly surveys these moves, and
notes why he thinks none of them work, but the survey will probably be too brief to
convince many who are happy with their preferred reply to Putnam. Those who are
not happy with any of the replies to Putnam, or who would be more impressed by a
version of Putnam’s argument that did not drift into needless technicality, should
enjoy Gauker’s argument.
The middle half of Words without Meaning consists of six case studies designed to
show that Gauker’s approach can solve problems that are intractable for Lockism.
Three of these are described as being in pragmatics, the other three in semantics.
Here Gauker more often has to revert to arguing against each of the different versions
of Lockism in the literature, for there are few points of agreement among Lockists
once we get to the details on how language works. This is particularly clear when we
look at pragmatics. I guess most Lockists agree that there is a pragmatics/semantics
distinction, and most of those who do agree think that there is such a thing as scalar
implicature. Beyond that there are disagreements everywhere. So Gauker is often left
arguing against a string of variants of Lockism, aiming to knock them all out on
independent grounds. Even if he succeeds against all of them, Lockism is a growing
doctrine, and a smart Lockist could often take Gauker’s positive ideas and incorporate
them into Lockism. So it’s not clear we’ll see any knock-down argument against
Lockism here. But there’s rarely a knock-down argument against paradigms. Maybe
an interesting abductive argument will develop over the course of these attacks, and
in any case it is always worthwhile to see Gauker’s positive account. Space prevents a
full discussion of many of the issues raised here, but I’ll provide a quick summary of
the salient issues, and why Gauker thinks he has an advantage over his Lockist rivals.
The first case study concerns domains of discourse, which mostly means domains of
quantification. To use Gauker’s example, imagine Tommy runs into Suzy’s room,
where Suzy is playing with her marbles, and says “All the red ones are mine.” What
determines the domain of Tommy’s quantifier? If it is what Tommy intends, then we
might end up saying that his sentence is, surprisingly, true. For Tommy, it turns out,
intends only to speak of the marbles in his room, which are as it turns out all his. But
if we don’t take it to be what Tommy intends, there will be too much indeterminacy in
the domain of the quantifiers. Gauker suggests it is better to say that the domain is
the class of things that are relevant to the goal of the conversation that Tommy and
Suzy are having.
The second case concerns presupposition. Allegedly, some sentences are such that
they cannot be properly asserted or denied unless some condition, the presupposition,
is met. Sentences containing factive-attitude verbs are sometimes held to fall into this
category. So I cannot affirm or deny . regret that you failed the test unless you failed
the test. There are several Lockist theories of presupposition, but Gauker argues that
none of them can satisfactorily explain how asserting such sentences can inform the
hearer of the truth of the presupposition, in this case that the test was in fact failed.
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Gauker’s theory, which does not have a special category of truth conditions apart from
assertibility conditions, does not have this difficulty. For a similar reason, however,
the Lockist theory that rejects the concept of presupposition also avoids any problem
of informative presupposition.
The third case concerns Gricean implicature. Gauker notes, correctly, that we can well
explain the effects of Gricean implicature without presuming that the hearer even
contemplates what the speaker had in mind in speaking. But this kind of
contemplation is essential to Grice’s official story. Gauker’s alternative suggestion is
that we can explain non-literal communication by assuming the hearer draws
inferences about the context from the assertibility of what is actually said.
The next three case studies are classified as ’Semantics’, so we might hope that here
Lockists will present a more unified target. But two of the studies seem, from a Lockist
perspective, to concern the semantics/pragmatics boundary, so again there will be
several varieties of Lockism that need to be addressed.
The first semantics study concerns quantifiers. Gauker argues that in practice (1) is a
bad argument form, (1a) for instance is invalid, while (2) is a good argument form.
(1) Everything is F. Therefore, a is F.
(1a) Everything is made of wood. Therefore, Socrates is made of wood.
(2) a is F. Therefore, something is F.
Gauker argues in some detail that various Lockist theories of quantifier domain
restriction cannot explain the asymmetry here. On his theory, the asymmetry falls out
quite naturally, since quantification is always over (inter alia) named objects, and
once named an object is relevant. So (1) need not be valid, since a need not have
been named, but (2) must be valid.
The last two case studies are the most interesting, and the most intricate. I can’t do
justice in a small space to the details of Gauker’s theory, but I’ll say a little about the
issues raised. Chapter 8 concerns conditionals. Gauker thinks he has a telling
argument against a central Lockist claim. The primary intuition is that (3) and (4) are
logically equivalent, i.e. each entails the other (at least when p and q are not
themselves conditionals), but they are not equivalent when embedded in longer
sentences. In particular, (5) and (6) need not be equivalent.
(3) Either not p or q
(4) If p then q
(5) Either not p or q, or r
(6) If p then q, or r
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If this is right, then what Gauker calls ’the Equivalence Principle’, that substitution of
logically equivalent constituents preserves truth-conditional content, is false. Gauker
suggests this is a serious problem for Lockism. There are, however, a few Lockist
theories in which Equivalence fails. For example, in classical supervaluationism, p or
not p is a logical truth, and p is equivalent to p is true, but p is true or not p is not a
logical truth. So some Lockists have learned to live without Equivalence. More
importantly, the data that suggest that (3) and (4) are logically equivalent aren’t
unequivocal. Some Lockists have provided arguments as to why (3) and (4) will
usually have the same assertion conditions even though they have different truth
conditions. (Gauker notes Robert Stalnaker’s 1975 paper ’Indicative Conditionals’,
which argues for this line.) If those arguments can be made to succeed, then we can
keep Equivalence by denying that (3) really entails (4).
More interesting than the possible Lockist replies is Gauker’s own theory. He
manages, quite impressively I think, to provide a recursive definition of truth
conditions for the connectives without keeping Equivalence. The rough idea is that If p
then q is true iff p strictly implies q relative to the context. Strict implication theories
usually block the inference from (5) to (6), as Gauker’s does, but they also normally
block the inference from (3) to (4). In Gauker’s theory, however, because entailment
is defined in terms of assertibility-preservation, and disjunctions can only be asserted
if one or other disjunct is assertible in every possibility left open by the context, the
inference from (3) to (4) is valid. Roughly, any contextually salient possibility either
contains not p or q, so all the possibilities that contain p contain q, in which case If p
then q is assertible. This theory still has some counter-intuitive features, since the
paradoxes of material implication are still with us, but it’s a fascinating addition to the
literature on conditionals.
The final case study concerns truth, and in particular the semantic paradoxes. Gauker
argues that extant Lockist responses to the paradoxes are not capable of handling
metalinguistic versions of the paradox. In particular, Lockist theories struggle with
sentences like (7).
(7) (7) does not express a true sentence in this context.
Gauker’s argument that his theory here does better than the Lockist has two parts.
First, he has a detailed demonstration that it is impossible to infer a contradiction
directly from (7) in his theory. Second, he argues that a Lockist explanation of what’s
going on with (7) has to posit that uttering, or writing, ’this context’ changes the
context. This might be true, indeed Gauker endorses a similar claim in his response to
the paradoxes. But on most Lockist accounts of what contexts are, we could replace
the demonstrative with some other phrase that more directly picks out the context.
For example if a context is just an ordered n-tuple, we could just replace ’this context’
with a description of the n-tuple that is, actually, the context. Here it does look as if
Gauker’s theory has more resources than the traditional Lockism. It remains to be
seen whether Gauker’s theory is completely free from the paradoxes - it’s quite a bit
harder to come up with a consistent theory of truth than it is to block the liar paradox
- but again Gauker provides an interesting alternative to existing approaches, and one
that experts in the area should pay close attention.
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Overall, what should we make of Words without Meaning? I think the book has three
major aims, and it succeeds in two of them. The first aim is to extend Gauker’s
preferred theory of linguistic communication to show how it handles presupposition,
quantification, conditionals, attitude reports and truth ascriptions. In this it succeeds
quite well, especially in showing how the project holds together technically. The
second aim is to raise a host of problems for the Lockist theory, problems that are
deserving of serious consideration and response. And again, there is no doubt it
succeeds. Even if one thinks that all the problems Gauker raises can be solved, having
them set forth so sharply certainly advances the debate. The third aim, the big one, is
to convince Lockists that their research program is moribund, and Gauker’s
contextualist alternative is the way of the future. That aim, in short, is for a revolution
in semantics. (And in any fields that presuppose Lockist semantics. Many of our best
syntactic theories have to be revised if Gauker is correct.) Here I think the book is less
successful, if only because the aim is so high. It’s not clear how any short book, and
the MIT series Words without Meaning is in is clearly a series for short books, could
trigger such a revolution. Lockism may have its weaknesses, and Gauker shines a
spotlight on a few, but it’s been a relatively productive program the last fifty years, so
overthrowing it will not be easy. Such a revolution would need a longer book, or
books, answering among other questions the metaphysical and epistemological
questions we noted above about Gauker’s concept of actions according with
sentences. (To be fair, some of these questions are addressed in Gauker’s earlier book
Thinking Out Loud (Princeton, 1994).) Gauker’s work always leaves the impression
that he has worked through the relevant material in much more detail than is
apparent from a superficial reading of the text, so such books and papers may well be
in the pipeline. If one is already on Gauker’s side in these disputes, one should
heartily welcome the wealth of detail Words without Meaning adds to his program. If
one is more conservative, more orthodox, one should perhaps be worried about the
anomalies rising, but not panicked. At least, not panicked yet.
2003.09.09
Herman Rapaport
Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work
Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work, Routledge, 2003, 158pp,
$19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415942691.
Reviewed by Catherine Mills , Australian National University
In this book, Herman Rapaport considers Jacques Derrida’s work published in about
the past 15 years in relation to cultural studies and more specifically, the work of
Trinh Minh-Ha, Gayatri Spivak and Martin Heidegger. In four essays, Rapaport
traverses topics such as post-colonialism, monolingualism, trauma and memory,
community and society to develop an extremely active interpretation of Derrida that
emphasizes the theme of the ’outside’ or other of deconstruction. Given the scope and
range of the topics covered, the work promises an illuminating and encompassing - if
464
not exhaustive - interpretation of Derrida’s recent work, and particularly the ethical
turn of it. Yet, Rapaport begins the book by stating that he ’makes no attempt to be
all-encompassing or definitive’ (vii). Because of this then, there is a sense in which
this book is inherently dissatisfying, since it does not give what it promises in the title
or its scope of discussion.
The key to reading this book appears in the first chapter. Though ostensibly
developing a juxtaposition of deconstruction with the critical methodology of Trinh
Min-Ha, this chapter also sets up Rapaport’s own method of exegesis. He argues that
Trinh’s Woman, Native, Other epitomizes an ’antagonistic’ strategy of revealing the
presence of the other that prevents self-identification or self-presence. Turning this on
Derridean deconstruction, Rapaport suggests that Trinh’s method ’channels
deconstruction to a destiny [to which] it has not otherwise been disposed to go’,
where ’deconstruction comes about as something else or something other than
deconstruction’ (9). In particular, the encounter of Trinh’s critical method with
deconstruction suggests a future or destiny for deconstruction as a new metaphysics
’at the margins’ of deconstruction. Against Derrida’s early deconstructive critique of
metaphysics as logocentric, Rapaport suggests that metaphysics might well re-appear
as the ’heteronymous, multicultural and pluralized effect of deconstruction that has
the effect of antagonistically putting deconstruction under erasure’ (9). As such,
metaphysics re-appears as the other of deconstruction, but only insofar as it is an
effect of deconstruction. In other words, metaphysics returns ’on the hither side of
deconstruction’ in the form of a metaphysics always already deconstructed.
As interesting as this thesis might be in itself, it also rests on a more general

methodological point. The encounter of Derrida’s various formulations of the strategy
of deconstruction with Trinh’s method yields a strategy of critical exegesis that rejects
representational critique in favor of an anti-mimetic questioning of the ’disposition’ of
one’s subject matter. Such a strategy does not seek to give an accurate
representation of its object of analysis, but asks instead what it is to speak of or about
something. Moreover, this strategy is antagonistic insofar as it reveals the ways in
which the text or object of analysis is prevented from becoming one with itself,
because of the overdetermined or surplus differences that haunt it. It thus reveals
something other than the purported object itself. While he does not state it explicitly,
this is effectively the method that Rapaport pursues in his exegesis of the later work
of Derrida. Despite what the title augurs then, this book does not, strictly speaking,
represent Derrida’s later work in order to develop a critique, immanent or otherwise,
of it. Instead, to paraphrase Rapaport, ’supposedly about Derrida’s later work, this
book is clearly about something else’ (13).
Since Rapaport does not pursue a single line of argumentation throughout the book, it
is difficult at times to see precisely what this something else is, a problem not helped
by the fact that while Rapaport claims to consider the relation of deconstruction and
cultural studies, there is little in the text that would count as cultural studies in a
narrow, disciplinary sense. There is instead, a heavier focus on literary theory, and to
this extent, one wonders just how far Rapaport’s focus has shifted from the studies of
deconstruction and literature available already. Yet, while Rapaport does not state this
explicitly, there is a sense in which the something else that this book is about can be
understood broadly as deconstruction’s other, or that which appears on the ’hither
465
side’ of deconstruction, to cite a phrase repeated throughout the essays. More

specifically, one might read at least some of the essays as being concerned with the
return or recovery of metaphysics on the ’hither side’ of deconstruction, a
heteronymous, multicultural and pluralized metaphysics that emerges in the wake of
or alongside Derrida’s early critique of logocentrism.
The possible emergence of such a form of metaphysics is best developed in the final
essay of the book, in which Rapaport considers the theory of the subject, or the lack
thereof, in Derrida’s later work through consideration of his relation to existentialism.
Rapaport shows that strictly speaking there is not a theory of the subject in Derrida’s
work, but rather, ’bits and pieces… fragments or shards’ (136) of a theory in which the
subject itself is ’shattered’ and fragmentary. Drawing on Derrida’s essay on Artaud,
’To Unsense the Subjectile’, and his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, ’Eating Well’,
Rapaport argues that Derrida offers a way of thinking the subject as a ’subjectility’
that does not subscribe to or unwittingly re-inscribe a metaphysics of presence.
Rapaport suggests that as such, subjectility can be understood as the ’outer limits’ of
Derrida’s thought on the subject without subjectivity, without essence or quiddity. In
developing this point, Rapaport links the question of the subject with a recovery of
existentialism – or at least of certain Heideggerian problematics – perceived in
Derrida’s comments to Nancy, to claim that the subjectile is ’this who that is “called”
in the absence of its being given’ (127). In this, the ’who’ stands in for the subject
shattered in its fragmentary theorization. Hence, while the subject cannot be simply
liquidated, it might be displaced or recast by the subjectile that comes to stand in its
place. This is not to say that the subject is effaced by the subjectile, but rather that
the subject re-appears or returns as a multiple, fragmented form of itself.
However, while this method provides for novel interpretations of Derrida’s work at
times, it also has its limitations, which become evident in the middle essays of the
book in which Rapaport is more directly concerned with Derrida’s work during the
1990s. What is somewhat curious about these central chapters to note initially is that
while they discuss the work of the 1990s, focus lies largely on two smaller essayistic
publications from Derrida, namely, Archive Fever and Monolingualism of the Other, a
choice that Rapaport justifies on the basis that these texts represent ’some of the
strongest work of this period’ (viii). Apart from the contestability of this strategic
claim, this choice of texts is doubly problematic given that major texts such as
Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship receive scant attention even when the
arguments being made would seem to demand a more rigorous attention to precisely
these texts. This is particularly evident in the argument that the ethical turn of
Derrida’s work rests on and re-works the sociological distinction between
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or community and society.
In the most substantial essay of the collection, ’Monolingualism and Literature’,

Rapaport considers Derrida’s thought on the gift, passion, testimony and
exceptionality to argue that ’the monolingualism of the other . . . is a law unto itself, a
law of exception, that is, of the circle or cult that won’t avail itself to skeptical
inspection and callous audit’ (73). In doing so, he harnesses Derrida’s considerations
of literature to the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, to bring out the
way in which this distinction underlies Derrida’s later work and indeed, makes it
comprehensible (50). Rapaport argues that Derrida is deeply concerned with the
466
existence of small societies or groups in which face-to-face relations characteristic of

Gemeinschaft take place. While conceding that Derrida does not actually invoke these
terms, he claims that Derrida is nevertheless constructing a ’negative theology’ of
Gemeinschaft, but in such a way that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft exist
simultaneously, rather than the latter superseding the former as sociologists and other
theorists of modernity have argued. In other words, Derrida takes a synchronic
perspective on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft rather than the more common
diachronic view. Further, Rapaport claims that the essence of Gemeinschaft is
expressed in literature, thus establishing a direct connection between the literary, the
political and the sociological. He also suggests that this connection is central to
understanding the ethical turn in Derrida’s work during the 1990s, such that Derrida’s
ethical turn is theoretically inseparable from his sociology and theory of literature.
While one might expect that Politics of Friendship, in which Derrida examines the
paradoxical formulation that ’O my friends, there is no friend’ to trace the horizon of a
politics of amity rather than enmity and in doing so, reformulate the relation of ethics
and politics, might yield strong support for these claims, Rapaport makes surprisingly
little reference to this text. What he does say of it is limited to half a paragraph, in
which he claims that Derrida ’counterpoints the small community that is formed by
friendship . . . with the larger social question posed by the political philosopher Carl
Schmitt of friends and enemies in the social sphere of the nation and its political
apparatuses’ (51). Apart from the superficiality of this description of Politics of
Friendship, the implication that emerges throughout the essay is that Gemeinschaft is
at base analogous to or perhaps more accurately the arena of ethics, whereas politics
correlates with the impersonal relations of Gesellschaft. But this is a problematic
association, which seems to ignore Derrida’s construal of the conditional interrelation
and hiatus between ethical responsibility and the political decision. Ultimately, what is
required here is further examination of the structure of the decision in Derrida’s work,
as well as the themes of messianicity and historicity. To be fair, this absence of
reference is not necessarily a problem in itself; but, in this context, it both leaves
Rapaport’s argument open to critique and reveals the downside of his interpretive
focus on the antagonistic differences of deconstruction.
As illuminating as the exegetical strategy that Rapaport pursues might be at times, it

also has the effect that the arguments that he is attempting to establish are
sometimes unnecessarily elusive and the implications of them are often unelaborated.
This is because this strategy for ’reading the recent work’ tends to push Rapaport’s
critical focus away from some of Derrida’s key texts that one might expect to be
covered in a book that claims to be a ’necessary companion’ for students of his work.
In this sense then, while Rapaport develops often insightful and original
interpretations of the texts taken up, the book is not, strictly speaking, about
Derrida’s ’later work’, but is more about what might be found on the ’hither side’ of
deconstruction. At times, the problems this generates are further enhanced by the
fact that the claims made are sometimes insufficiently elaborated or the detailed
textual evidence that would support the claims is not provided. Thus, while Rapaport
deftly draws together a number of strands and themes within this short collection of
essays, the detail and conceptual architecture required to fill out the arguments is
simply not there. Instead, Rapaport approaches his arguments in broad brush-strokes,
which allow him to cover much ground, but in a way that often leaves one wondering
467
why it is that Derrida’s later work should be understood in this particular way. Hence,
even accepting that Rapaport is not aiming to provide a comprehensive account of the
later Derrida, one is nevertheless left with the sense that this is ’one of those missed
opportunities for discussion that cries out for elaboration’ (27).
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2003.09.10
M.R. Bennett, P.M.S. Hacker
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
Bennett, M.R. and Hacker, P.M.S., Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2003,

Blackwell Publishing, 480pp, $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 140510838X.
Reviewed by Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University, Camden and New

Brunswick
Neuroscience is the study of the physiological mechanisms that give rise to a manifold
of human capacities, including perception, memory, vision and the emotions. To
achieve the goals of scientific understanding, neuroscientists must of necessity
advance claims and hypotheses which are subjected to scientific experiment. In
addition to experimental techniques, neuroscientists need a conceptual framework
within which to make sense of the results of their empirical work. In short, a
necessary complement to empirical research is a coherent conception of the
phenomena under investigation, that is, human psychological capacities.
Bennett - a distinguished neuroscientist - and Hacker - the preeminent scholar of

Wittgenstein's thought - have teamed up to produce a withering attack on the
conception of the mental that lies at the heart of contemporary neuroscience.
Although neuroscientists are committed materialists, and adamantly insist on this
aspect of their anti-Cartesianism, they have, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely
jettisoned the dual substance doctrine of Cartesianism, but retained its faulty
structure with respect to the relation of mind and behavior.
The book is divided into four parts followed by two appendices. Part I (“Philosophical
Problems in Neuroscience: Their Historical and Conceptual Roots”) is, among other
things, a survey of the historical and conceptual roots of the biological basis for
sensory, volitional and intellectual capacities. Aristotle's work on the psuchê
established the paradigm for sophisticated speculation on the relationship of the
mental to the physical. The psuchê - the idea that every living organism has a “form”
– characterized the soul not as an entity separate from the body but more akin to an
array of powers or capacities exhibited by living things. In time, Aristotle's early
biological conjectures were modified by subsequent scientific research (e.g. Galen on
nerves and brain) but his philosophical views continued as the basis for theoretical
discussion until the arrival of Descartes.
What interests Bennett and Hacker about the Cartesian replacement of Aristotelian
thought is the extent to which contemporary neuroscientists have failed to go far
enough in their rejection of Cartesianism, thereby threatening the integrity of their
scientific endeavors. In brief, these are the key elements of Descartes's legacy:
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(1) Descartes reconceived the soul “not as the principle of life, but as the principle of
thought or consciousness” (p. 26), a thesis which led to the idea that the mind was
separate from the body in all respects. This formulation inevitably “casts a long
shadow over neuroscientific reflection . . . .(p. 26);
(2) Descartes further complicated his position by insisting that while distinct, mind
and body are united. The central problematic to emerge for both Cartesianism and its
inheritors is how to explain the connection between mind and body;
(3) The only thesis of Descartes that withstood critical objection was his claim that
“explanation at the neurophysiological level will be in terms of efficient causation”
(p.27). In this respect, Bennett and Hacker remind us that “Descartes contributed
substantially to advances in neurophysiology and visual theory” (p.27).
Once the Cartesian paradigm took hold, it fell to neuroscientists to work out its
implications at the experimental level. For two generations (from Sherrington to his
protégés) modern brain scientists remained fundamentally Cartesian (i.e. they
adhered to the Cartesian explanatory framework of the relation of mind to body). The
third and current generation of neuroscientists repudiated Cartesian dualism,
replacing the mind with the brain as the explanatory locus of human psychological and
emotional capacities. But, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely replacing the mind with
the brain falls short of a repudiation of the structure of the Cartesian explanatory
system.
In Chapter 3 of Part I - “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience” - Bennett and

Hacker set out a critical framework that is the pivot of the book. They argue that for
some neuroscientists, the brain does all manner of things: it believes (Crick);
interprets (Edelman); knows (Blakemore); poses questions to itself (Young); makes
decisions (Damasio); contains symbols (Gregory) and represents information (Marr).
Implicit in these assertions is a philosophical mistake, insofar as it unreasonably
inflates the conception of the 'brain' by assigning to it powers and activities that are
normally reserved for sentient beings. It is the degree to which these assertions
depart from the norms of linguistic practice that sends up a red flag. The reason for
objection is this: it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between
a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical
part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to
concluding that the part just is the whole. These claims are not false; rather, they are
devoid of sense.
Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes sense to say “it
has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.”
(Philosophical Investigations, § 281). The question whether brains think “is a
philosophical question, not a scientific one” (p. 71). To attribute such capacities to
brains is to commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as “the mereological fallacy”,
that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes that are properties of
the whole being. Moreover, merely replacing the mind by the brain leaves intact the
misguided Cartesian conception of the relationship between the mind and behavior,
merely replacing the ethereal by grey glutinous matter. The structure of the Cartesian
explanatory system remains intact, and this leads to Bennett and Hacker's conclusion
470
that contemporary cognitive neuroscientists are not nearly anti-Cartesian enough.

Much more of the Cartesian conceptual scheme needs to be rejected.
But how serious is the mereological fallacy? Why can we not regard talk of the brain
“believing” or “interpreting” as a mere façon de parler or harmless metaphorical talk?
It is not difficult to take Bennett and Hacker's objections seriously when one reads
neuroscientists (e.g., Semir Zeki) arguing that knowledge acquisition is a “primordial
function of the brain” such that it falls to neuroscience “to solve the problems of
epistemology . . . .” (p. 75). Similarly, J.Z. Young speaks of knowledge and
information encoded in the brain “just as knowledge can be recorded in books or
computers” (J.Z. Young, Programs of the Brain (OUP, 1978), p. 192). Finally, Milner,
Squire and Kandel all speak of “declarative memory” which, they maintain, is “stored
in the brain” (Brenda Milner, Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, “Cognitive
neuroscience and the study of memory,” Neuron, 20 (1998), p. 450). Neuroscientific
research that proceeds from conceptually flawed premises is likely to yield incoherent
empirical questions and answers that escape illumination of any kind. In this regard
Bennett and Hacker make the case that, done well, philosophy matters deeply for the
proper conduct of neuroscience.
The mereological fallacy is but one dimension of the shadow cast by Cartesianism over
the landscape of contemporary neuroscience. In Part II (“Human Faculties and
Contemporary Neuroscience”) the authors detail the reach of Cartesianism and
empiricism in the areas of sensation and perception, the cognitive powers, the
cogitative powers, emotions, volition and voluntary movement. Just as Locke argued
that perception is explained as the causation of ideas in the mind, some contemporary
neuroscientists explain perception as the result of visual or auditory images in the
brain. These neuroscientists work to discover the neural substratum in the brain that
enables persons to exercise powers of sight, emotion and volition. Bennett and Hacker
advance no objection to these scientific undertakings. The object of their critique is
the explanatory framework within which these theorists extrapolate from scientific
results to theories of the mental.
Philosophers of mind are themselves prone to similar conceptual errors. Consider John
Searle on pain and the role of the brain:
Common sense tells us that our pains are located in physical space within our bodies,
that for example, a pain in the foot is literally inside the area of the foot. But we now
know that is false. The brain forms a body image and pains, like all bodily sensations,
are part of the body image. The pain-in-the-foot is literally in the physical space of the
brain. (Searle, J., The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992: p. 63.)
Bennett and Hacker object on grounds of logical grammar: one does not have pains
“in the brain.” Pains (other than headaches) are not “in the head.” If there is a locus
of pain it is a distributed feature of the whole experience, the brain being only one
physical part of it. For the experiencing subject, of course, “His pain is located where
he sincerely suggests it is” (p.123) (phantom pains being in need of special
explanation). This is not to deny that in the absence of a proper functioning brain, one
would feel no pains. But that does not license the claim that pains “are felt either in or
471
by the brain” (p.122). What hurts when one breaks one's leg is typically one's leg, not
one's head.
Part III (“Consciousness and Contemporary Neuroscience: An Analysis”) considers the

leading work on consciousness as well as neuroscientific efforts to explain the
“mystery” of consciousness. McGinn, Dennett, Searle, Chalmers and Nagel are just a
few of the many philosophers whose arguments Bennett and Hacker scrutinize with
care. Neuroscientists such as Blakemore, Crick, Damasio, Edelman, as well as
psychologists such as Baars and Weiskrantz, are given equal treatment, especially
their attempts to make the case that the brain is a conscious organ. Absent the brain,
of course, there is no consciousness, but ascribing consciousness as such solely to the
brain is philosophically suspect.
When it comes to consciousness, no topic will invite more discord than that of qualia.
When Nagel asks “What is it like to be a bat?,” Bennett and Hacker answer that the
question proceeds from a philosophical confusion. Qualia – the idea that mental states
have qualitative characteristics – is but another example of philosophers bewitched by
a philosophical pseudoproblem.
These are some of the ideas that Bennett and Hacker are eager to refute:
There is a specific way it feels to hear, smell or “to have mental states” (Block);.
Every conscious state has a certain qualitative feel (Searle);
Each differentiable conscious experience presents a different quale (Edelman and

Tononi) (p. 274).
Suppose, we ask a person who has had his sight or hearing restored “How does it feel
to see (or hear)?” They are likely to answer “Why, it's wonderful.” What we are asking
after is the person's attitude toward his recovery of a faculty, now restored. But what
if we ask a person possessed of normal faculties “What is it like to see a chair or a
table?” Bennett and Hacker aver that the person would have no idea what we were
talking about. Seeing tables and chairs, postboxes and lampposts are all different
experiences. But “[t]he experiences differ only in so far as their objects differ” (p.
274).
Some neuroscientists have themselves fallen victim to the logical fallacies of

philosophers of consciousness. Damasio, for example, explains vision as the
production of mental images in the brain. Bennett and Hacker object that this
explanatory model makes no sense, since it raises objections of another kind; the
hypothesis that mental images are real features instantiated in the brain would not
seem subject to empirical verification and, even if it were, it would fail to illuminate
vision as we know it. Of course, there is brain activity associated with vision. But it is
unhelpful and of little value to say that “we” perceive the image of the apple produced
in our brain. The question Bennett and Hacker ask, “How is it that we see it?” (p. 305)
cannot receive philosophical illumination by the question “Where 'in' the brain is the
image?” The reason is that that question ignores the all-important one: “Who, or
what, is doing the seeing?” The error is in thinking that seeing an object is itself
472
somehow reducible to a quale behind vision. But it is not. And the object of normal
vision is not an image of any kind either. Neuroscientists may find inductive
correlations between seeing certain items (e.g. lines, corners, curves) and brain
activity. But finding such correlations is not the same as reducing one to the other. It
is the reduction that leads to a muddle.
Part IV (“On Method”) has two key features. First is a sustained argument against the
reductionist impulse of contemporary neuroscience. Second is an explicit articulation
and defense of the philosophical method that informs both the critique of reductionism
and the perspective of the book as a whole. For philosophers, this second aspect will
be the most interesting and surely controversial.
Francis Crick is one neuroscientist who wants to reduce the mental to the physical. His
“astonishing hypothesis” that we are “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly
of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (Francis Crick, The Astonishing
Hypothesis, p. 3 (1995)) is a good example of the sort of explanatory account of
human action that Bennett and Hacker reject as metaphysical nonsense.
In the course of reducing the mental to the physical, the normative dimensions of
social life are lost. Consider this example. Suppose I place my signature on a
document. The act of affixing my signature is accompanied by neural firings in my
brain. The neural firings do not “explain” what I have done. In signing my name, I
might be signing a check, giving an autograph, witnessing a will or signing a death
certificate. In each case the neural firing may well be the same. And yet, the meaning
of what I have done in affixing my signature is completely different in each case.
These differences are “circumstance dependent,” not merely the product of my neural
firings. Neural firings accompany the act of signing but only the circumstances of my
signing, including the intention to do so, are the significant factors in explaining what I
have done.
Bennett and Hacker conclude their book with two appendices, devoted to a careful
study of the work of Daniel Dennett and John Searle, respectively. Dennett adopts the
posture of Quine, specifically the thought that philosophical problems can be solved
through a combination of scientific inquiry and empirical evidence (p. 414). Dennett's
attempt to explain intentionality as an interpretive strategy is grounded in what he
refers to as the “Heterophenomenological Method.” Bennett and Hacker argue that the
method is a non-starter because it is incoherent (p. 428). Similarly with Dennett's
attempt to compare our thinking to computer programs.
In the case of Searle, Bennett and Hacker find much with which they agree. Cartesian
dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, eliminative materialism and functionalism are
all rejected, and rightly so. Searle advocates “biological naturalism,” the view that
consciousness is a biological phenomenon, a proper subject of the biological sciences
(p. 444). Bennett and Hacker serve up no objection here. It is when Searle claims that
“mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are
themselves features of the brain” (Searle, Rediscovery, p. 1) that Bennett and Hacker
demur. Searle's claim commits the mereological fallacy discussed earlier. Brains are
no more conscious than they are capable of taking a walk or holding a conversation.
473
True, no animal could do either of these things without a properly functioning brain.
But it is the person, not the brain, that engages in these activities.
A central feature of philosophy is the clarification of our forms of representation – the

ways in which we make statements about the world. In articulating and employing this
approach to the philosophical foundations of neuroscience, Bennett and Hacker bring
to light defective forms of representation widely employed by some contemporary
neuroscientists as well as some philosophers of mind. One of the many strengths of
their book lies in its persuasive argument for the inherent distinctiveness of science
and philosophy. Another is its clear-headed account of the necessity of philosophy to
the proper conduct of science. Sweeping, argumentative and brilliant, this book will
provoke widespread discussion among philosophers and neuroscientists alike.
2003.09.11
Peter A.Redpath (ed.)
A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson
Redpath, Peter A. (ed.), A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson,

Rodopi, 2003, 263pp, $62.00 (pbk), ISBN 904200875X.
Reviewed by Denis Bradley , Georgetown University
This memorial volume, the first in a projected series honoring the person and the
scholarship, and promoting the philosophical doctrines of the late and great Étienne
Gilson (b. 6/3/1884 in Paris; d. 9/19/1978 in Auxerre) is a miscellany of eleven
articles, with seven pages of charming photographs, written by his former students,
disciples, and admirers. This first volume is dedicated to another onetime Gilson
student, subsequently a colleague at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in
Toronto, the Rev. Armand A. Maurer, C.S.B., in appreciation of “his masterful
application of the Gilsonian method.” The eleven articles raise appropriately Gilsonian
themes: (1) “The Enlightening Gloss: Gilson and the History of Philosophy” (Jorge J. E.
Gracia); (2) “The Practical Nature of Philosophy” (Richard Geraghty); (3) “Philosophy's
Non-Systematic Nature” (Peter A. Redpath); (4) “The Beauty of Wisdom” (Robert A.
Delfino); (5) “Étienne Gilson and the San Francisco Conference” (Desmond J.
FitzGerald); (6) “Maritain's Reply to Gilson's Rejection of Critical Realism” (Raymond
Dennehy); (7) “On the Nature of Being and Division of the Speculative Sciences”
(Joseph J. Califano); (8) “Gilson and Maritain: Battle Over the Beautiful” (Francesca
Murphy); (9) “Gilson and Gouhier: Approaches to Malebranche” (Richard J. Fafara);
(10) “Poinsot, Pierce, and Pegis: Knowing as a Way of Being” (James Maroosis); (11)
“Possessed of Both a Reason and a Revelation” (James V. Schall).
Given the terms of the book's dedication, the first question to ask is: What is the
“Gilsonian method”? Robert Delfino's article summarizes Maurer's 1983 book, About
Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation. But this book is perhaps not the best instance of
Maurer applying the “Gilsonian method” of historical scholarship; in it, Maurer
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attempts a metaphysical synthesis and Thomistic prolongation rather than the

uncovering and interpretation of the historical sources of Aquinas's scattered remarks
about beauty: beauty is a transcendental property of being, differing from being only
in notion; it is a pleasing intellectual vision of the claritas, consonantia, integritas
“radiating” from a thing's form (cf. ST, I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1). In The Arts of the Beautiful,
Gilson, using a neologism incorporating the Greek term kalos (beauty), called this kind
of metaphysics of transcendental beauty a “calology,” which he then carefully
distinguished both from “aesthetics,” the theory of how artistic beauty is perceived,
and the “philosophy of art,” “the theory of how works of art are made.” The
distinctions were controversial. Gilson and Maritain, although presumably they agreed
about the metaphysical elements of Aquinas's “calology,” had lengthy, disputatious,
and rather personally embittered exchanges, so Francesca Murphy recounts, about the
possibility and manner of distinguishing the other two philosophical theories about art.
Jorge Gracia, who himself has written astutely about the variant philosophical uses of
the history of philosophy, irenically labels Gilson's historical method “the enlightening
gloss.” According to Gracia, Gilson's primary purpose was to understand the text of an
historical author by understanding the “controversies, issues and views common when
it was produced” (p. 2). Typically, Gilson glosses his focal texts by (1) using a battery
of philosophical concepts—that are not always sufficiently explained, so Gracia
judges—to interpret them; (2) having his own explicit philosophical criterion by which
to evaluate them; (3) simplifying or reducing textual and conceptual complexities to
the main philosophical issue raised in the focal text(s). In short, Gilson's enlightening
gloss is “an explanatory paraphrase” of the sort that so-called contemporary “analytic
Thomists,” who are fond of minute logical reconstructions of Aquinas's arguments,
largely eschew. Gracia contends, correctly, that Gilson narrated the history of
philosophy as one long praeparatio for and one long declinatio from Aquinas: in
particular, from Aquinas's “existentialism”—linguistically marked by the Latin infinitive
of the verb “to be”—the metaphysics of esse. Gilson famously opined that Aquinas,
inspired by what the saint himself called (SCG, I, c. 22; Pera, 2: 33a, n. 211) “the
sublime truth” that God revealed to Moses, recorded in Exodus, 3.13 (“Ego sum qui
sum,” in the Latin translation familiar to Aquinas), came to a historically unique
understanding of the divine name that, Gilson held, was the keystone of Thomistic
metaphysics: the divine essence is identical with ipsum esse subsistens, and that the
finite actus essendi which participates the divine esse is the foundational actuality of
all created natures.
Gracia does not mention, however, that Gilson's narrative alleging the revealed source
and the historical uniqueness of the Thomistic metaphysical insight has been plausibly
challenged by Hadot and other scholars, who trace the Thomistic ipsum esse
subsistens doctrine through the medieval neo-Platonist tradition—mediated to Aquinas
by Pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, and Proclus—back to an anonymous commentary
(probably by Porphyry) on Plato's Parmenides. For the anonymous commentator, the
first principle is not, in typical neo-Platonist fashion, “beyond being” but is pure
activity (auto to enérgein) whose nature is designated by the infinitive auto to eînai.
Hadot's alternative account raises many questions, which have been put in the form of
a direct challenge by Wayne Hankey, about the soundness of Gilson's historical views.
If Hadot and Hankey are correct, Gilson was wrong about the historical uniqueness
and biblical source of Aquinas's esse metaphysics.
475
So too, questions about how historical method should be used and what it reveals in
philosophy—Is the history of philosophy focused on the chains of essentially or
necessarily connected ideas or on contingent and self-contained, radically personalized
insights?—underlie the rather spun-out but worthwhile article that Richard Fafara
devotes to the relationship between Gilson and his doctoral student Henri Gouhier
(1898-1994). Gouhier's student thesis (La pensée religieuse de Descartes), the
product of a seminar with Gilson, was published and awarded a prize by the Academie
française in 1924. In his thesis, Gouhier rejected any temporally fixed or abstractly
global portrait of Descartes's thought; instead, he presented Cartesian philosophy
biographically as a succession of recastings which reinvented for diverse audiences
Descartes's earliest themes. Gilson, while remaining unconvinced by some of
Gouhier's particular claims (especially Descartes's alleged affinities with Thomism
rather than, as scholarly convention held, the Augustinianism of the seventeenth
century French Oratory), nonetheless, praised his student's method as Aristotelian as
well as properly historical: Gouhier's interpretative focus, biographical rather than
systematic, moves from Descartes's concrete actions to cautious speculations about
Descartes's (for Gilson irretrievably) hidden motives. Though Gouhier became a life-
long friend and eminent colleague, the erstwhile student never agreed with his former
maître about the nature and end of historical method. Their disagreements
conspicuously surfaced in their respective interpretations of Malebranche.
For Gilson, Malebranche was not just, in some vague sense, a “religious philosopher”
but an Augustinian, who, like his thirteenth century predecessors (especially
Bonaventure), regarded Aristotle as pagan and Aristotelian scholasticism as an
idolatry that concedes far too much ontological density to the creature. Moreover,
Gilson maintained that it was the Aristotelian notion of nature as sufficient unto itself
that allowed Aquinas to distinguish with unequaled precision “the respective domains
of the supernatural and the natural, and of theology and philosophy” (p. 114).
Malebranche's occasionalism, with its attendant denial of the reality and efficacy of
secondary causes, is the antithesis of St. Thomas's created world which is robustly
and intrinsically causal. Malebranche's occasionalism indicates that a philosophy's
Christian inspiration is no guarantee of its being a sound philosophy. In Gilson's
synthetic view of the history of philosophy, bad ideas, which like all ideas capture
intelligible universals, connect in a constellation of essential relations and have their
own impersonal consequences that devolve independently of their original context and
their author's intentions. In his two doctoral theses, brilliantly defended in 1926
before an admiring audience of eminent academics, Gouhier took account of Gilson's
notion of Christian philosophy and the Augustinianism of Malebranche; he located the
center of Malebranche's philosophy in our union with a God whose power and glory
must be exalted in preference to the putative autonomy of the creature. Yet, Gouhier
sustained a phenomenological, rather than a conceptual or systematizing, approach
that tries to remain internal to the thought which it describes: accordingly,
Malebranche's philosophical vision arises from and articulates a world of Christian
experience to be lived and understood only from within itself. Thus Gouhier's historical
method permits the historian, who would remain really in contact with Malebranche's
own world, no access to an external reference point from which to criticize it.
Evidently, this is not how Gilson practiced “the” historical method. Forty years later, in
a letter to Gouhier (9 June 1966), Gilson refers disapprovingly to Gouhier's “radical
historical contingentism”, which ignores the metaphysical necessities inherent in
philosophical thinking. History, as narrative, does bear on the individual and the
476
contingent particular but philosophy, as science, bears on the universal and the
essential. The philosophical historian can link the thoughts of philosophers, if they
derive from a common principle, and thereby reveal the inevitability of those
conceptual chains. With remarkable éclat, Gilson himself did just that in The Unity of
Philosophical Experience.
As one might expect from disciples moving still in the ambit of their master, almost
every article in this book rehearses rather than criticizes or deconstructs Gilson's
historical and philosophical views. It is not surprising, then, that (Dennehy excepted)
Maritain remains for most of them, as he was for Gilson, the great alternative
Thomist. So, Richard Geraghty does again what he did in his published doctoral
thesis; he takes issue with Maritain's notion of moral philosophy (influenced by John
of St. Thomas) as “a speculatively practical science” needing to be supplemented by a
“practically practical science” (p. 15). Geraghty convincingly argues that Aquinas's
distinction of the speculative and practical sciences is disjunctive; it eliminates the
middle ground on which Maritain seeks to position ethics. The goal of ethics as a
practical science is determining, choosing, and effecting the right deed to be done.
Aristotelian ethics in making that practical determination draws on but does not get
bogged down in metaphysics; rather, it takes as its own proper starting point (NE, I,
4, 1095b16-22) “the well-habituated person as the highest standard of his culture” (p.
16). Such a man will already know that honor is better than pleasure, and virtue
better than honor. He needs only to be instructed through the theoretical
demonstrations of the moral philosopher that the intellectual virtue of contemplation
is the highest component of happiness. More controversial and less convincing are
Geraghty's brief remarks (pp. 26-27) on how Aquinas the “moral theologian” differs
from Aquinas the “moral philosopher”—which can only mean Aquinas the
commentator on Aristotle's ethics. In that capacity, Aquinas quietly attempts to shore
up Aristotle's well-habituated man by insinuating into his exegesis some hint of the
medieval Christian doctrine of synderesis, the innate knowledge of universal principles
of practical reason that license quasi-immediate inferences to the inviolable moral
precepts of the Decalogue. [Cf. III Sent., d. 33, q. 2,a. 4, sol. 4 (Moos, 3: 1066, n.
242); SLE, II, 4, 1105b5, 101-6; V, 12, 1134b19, 49-57; VI, 11, 1144b1, 30-33.]
Since Aquinas grounds these self-evident “natural law” principles “onto-theologically”
(in the human mind they participate the divine law in God's mind), it is highly doubtful
that Aquinas held that “two irreducible ways exist to consider human actions”—”from
the viewpoint of faith in the word of God and the viewpoint of the reason of the good
and experienced person” (p. 26; italics my emphasis).
As one might also suspect, there are several potent doses of anti-modernisme
administered in this inaugural volume. James Schall warns that neither theology nor
philosophy can declare “its own absolute autonomy” (p. 178). The warning is hitched
to current events: “Current worldwide political turmoil” (p. 179), especially as it arises
from conflicts between secular and Islamic cultures, exposes (Leo Strauss
notwithstanding) the impossibility of “two [unrelated] truths,” that is, it exposes the
need to harmonize without eliminating either reason or revelation. Gilson sought to
harmonize them using the reasoning of Aquinas. Aquinas showed that philosophy
cannot be identified even with “The Philosopher,” Aristotle, and that faith is not
contrary to sound philosophy, thereby freeing reason and protecting revelation: in
other words, Aquinas showed that Aristotle's arguments leading to conclusions contra
477
articulos fidei are non-demonstrative and that there are cogent rational proofs for the
praembula fidei. Thus reason, without negating itself, leaves an opening wherein
one—moved by divine grace—may rationally accept transcendent or super-rational
revealed truths. In no way, then, does Gilson propose, contrary to what Murphy
erroneously states, that we can only begin with “the act of blind faith in the invisible
God” (p. 103). It is the modern rejection of Aristotle, which was undertaken as the
necessary propaedeutic for modern science, that has led to a philosophical reason
severely diminished by “relativism and skepticism” (p. 180) and a correlative religious
fideism. For his part, Gilson attempted to reinvigorate modern philosophical reason
“by restoring revelation to its proper content and role” (p. 182). The restorative
revelation in question is—and Schall unhesitatingly affirms that it can only be—
Christian: for Schall, the West's struggle with an ideological Islam appealing to the
arbitrary (that is, non-rational) will of Allah, is, first of all, a struggle within Islam
about whether its own economic and political marginalization must be attributed to
untrue religious beliefs and faulty intellectual foundations.
The editor of this volume, Peter Redpath, is convinced, and doubtless not he alone
among its authors, that Gilson cleared the historical and doctrinal path, by exposing
modern philosophy as an epistemological detour leading to an idealist cul-de-sac, back
to the enduring truths of Thomistic “realism.” Redpath celebrates the significance of
Maurer's essay, “The Unity of a Science: St. Thomas and the Nominalists,” which was
written for the septicentennial celebration of St. Thomas's death. In this essay, Maurer
traces Descartes's dream of a systematic science of clear and distinct ideas (so
important for modern conceptions of science) to its historical antecedents in the late
medieval nominalists, notably William of Ockham, who rejected Aquinas's doctrine
that a science is unified in reference to its abstracted formal object. Similarly, Joseph
Califano singles out for praise Maurer's lucid English translation and helpful annotation
of Aquinas's Commentary on the de Trinitate of Boethius: the fifth and sixth question
of this commentary explicitly treat the division of the three theoretical sciences
(physics, mathematics, and metaphysics) by detailing the three kinds of abstraction
from matter that the intellect can effect. The nominalists, after eliminating universal
intelligible natures (and thus abstracted formal objects), had to find a new ground for
the unity of a science. Leibniz, commenting on the seventeenth century nominalist,
the philosopher Mario Nizolius, praises the medieval nominalists as “most in harmony
with the spirit of modern philosophy” (quoted Redpath, p. 31). For this very reason,
however, Redpath would be forced to brand, eagerly it seems, modern philosophy as
well as its late medieval antecedent “a sophistry” (p. 34).
The way back to pre-modern epistemic certitudes, however, may not be so straight as
Redpath hopes, even for convinced Thomists: Raymond Dennehy, rehearses—
syncretizing their positions rather than clearly resolving—the exact issue between
Maritain and Gilson. How should an “authentic” Thomistic realism be grounded:
immediately or critically? Everything depends on how the bugbear, “critique of
knowledge,” is defined. The issue inflamed neo-Thomists for almost a hundred years.
Dennehy, a Maritainian partisan despite his conciliatory intent, continues to think that
Thomistic realism, standing before the bottomless “epistemological trench” of modern
scepticism, somehow requires and permits both an immediate and a critical
grounding, thereby apparently—or coming very close to—conceding the need and the
possibility of exactly what Gilson, ever the vigilant anti-Cartesian, never ceased to
478
deny: a reflexive, second order, inferentially constructed bridge to the extra-mental

world of naturally knowable things. This is not to deny that Thomists need a cognitive
theory (explaining how we know the extra-mental world); it is to say that it should not
be conflated with critique (essaying to demonstrate the conclusion that we do know
the world). While perhaps not conflating them, Maritain—with Dennehy in tow—seems
to think that the former is somehow a suitable and necessary stand-in for the latter.
(For a vastly more developed and sustainable version of the latter position, which
really does sublate the now rather faded neo-Thomist controversy, one can
recommend total immersion in Lonergan.)
In any case, Gilson surely would never have agreed—however intense Maritain's
Bergsonian inspired anxieties—that his brand of “dogmatic” realism entailed or was
implicated in a dangerous “relying on intuition cut free from rationality” (p. 78):
analytically, ens is the first concept that falls under the intellect's act of simple
apprehension, but it is the judgment that extra-mental “Being is and non-being is not”
that is the first cognitive certitude or principle of knowledge. The critical illusion,
Gilson repeated incessantly, is to imagine that one can attain some greater epistemic
certitude than what is actually available at the very beginning. Immediate cognitive
contact with the extra-mental world is either a self-evident first principle or, as the
history of modern philosophy proved to Gilson at least, a radically shaky, impossible
to preserve, and, finally, utterly unreachable conclusion. To the very end, Gilson
scorned Maritain's whole epistemological anxieties. In 1919, Maritain signed the
apodeictic manifesto of the politically right-wing and aesthetically conservative so-
called “parti de l'intelligence.” Fifty-five years later, one year after Maritain's death,
Gilson wrote acerbically to Armand Maurer that Maritain's youthful “revival of realism,”
once so attracted to but then so intemperately denigratory of Bergson's alleged
irrationalism, was not, in fact, “the party of being.” It is hard to imagine a greater
Gilsonian “put-down.” Francesca Murphy proposes, though I am disinclined to accept
it, that it is through his own notion of “a vital, fluid, and energetic act of existence
[that] Gilson incorporated the Bergsonian intuition into his metaphysics” (p. 99). On
the contrary, Gilson always insisted that we attain the actus essendi only through
judgment.
The book—I mean to say with benignity—is an in-house laudation of Gilson: genial,
almost wistful in recalling the magnificent scholar, superb teacher, and deeply
Christian man. Who could deny—and why would one want to?—that Gilson was an
“intellectual giant” who “dwarfed and intimidated many of his contemporaries” (xvii).
No mere intellectual giant though: Gilson, in his own life and in the polis, was capable
of applying luminous theory to opaque practice; in 1945, he served as a member of
the French delegation to the conference writing the charter for the United Nations.
Desmond Fitzgerald recalls the droll incident of Gilson speaking Russian to Molotov
and his fellow Soviets—slyly, and to their chagrin, only at the very end of the
Conference. This profound humanist, then, was a giant in many senses.
Nonetheless, Gilson's intellectual contemporaries are not our contemporaries; ours are
no longer so intimidated by the deceased giant. In a published lecture (the twenty-
first in “The Étienne Gilson Series), given 3 March 2000 at the Pontifical Institute of
Medieval Studies, Marcia Colish provides some details about the “newer maps” of
scholasticism that are being drawn, and that decenter Aquinas, who occupied the high
479
point of the “old story-line” of the neo-Thomists, including Gilson. But lest we too
quickly assimilate Gilson to other “neo-Thomists,” we might remind Colish that Gilson
began his career not as a medievalist but studying Descartes, whose sources he
traced back to the Middle Ages. Gilson backed into the Middle Ages and he always
read the mediaevals with his eye on his contemporaries as well as the moderns—some
have said with an eye too fixed on Heidegger's dubious history of the forgetfulness of
being. As I mentioned, Wayne Hankey, drawing on recent French scholarship, has
written a series of provocative articles about the neo-Platonist sources of Aquinas's
existential metaphysics that purport to show that “Gilson's Thomism is past, being
sustainable neither historically nor philosophically” (“Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern
cold and postmodern hot,” in Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community
[London/New York: Routledge, 1998], 139–84; quotation p. 147). Well, I am still
confident that Gilson's astonishing historical scholarship, like those of the
unsurpassably erudite nineteenth-century German classicists, will remain for a very
long time a touchstone for all latter-day medievalists. But it is not, of course, the ne
plus ultra. Hankey's provocative judgments do call for some considered response from
Gilsonians, who tend to spend too much time rehearsing the jejune neo-Thomist
debates of the last century. Doubtless Gilson, if he were still with us, would respond to
Hadot and Hankey and to many others: his continuous engagement with
contemporary intellectual life is what made him more than just a “historian.”
As for Gilson's own philosophical views, they will have as much vitality and pertinence
as the Gilsonians who espouse them. Anton Pegis, another one of Gilson's illustrious
students and colleagues, continually urged his fellow Thomists not merely to repeat
but to use Aquinas's principles in their own, personally constructed dialogue with
contemporary philosophers. Nothing less should be asked of present-day and future
Gilsonians, if there be such. To his credit, James Maroosis, in the present volume,
makes valiant if somewhat convoluted efforts to find Pierce, Jean Poinsot (John of St.
Thomas), and Anton Pegis concurring on the structure of cognitive intentionality: on
Maroosis's reading, all affirm that knowledge is the presence of the mind-independent
other but known as other solely within the knower—a paradoxical relationship of sign
to signified that is trans-subjective or external world-dependent but which allows the
world to be interiorly manifested and objectified only within the knower.
Nonetheless, a certain pained desire for le beau temps perdu suffuses the present
book. Dare one attribute—yet one more time— this nostalgia to the vicissitudes of
Catholic intellectual and cultural life since the Second Vatican Council? No matter:
non-Gilsonian “externs,” who as students had intellectually powerful but not quite
world-making maîtres and who as academics wear differently calibrated spectacles
when looking at and evaluating modern philosophical projects, will doubtless feel less
nostalgic and, likely, less convinced that the way forward is the way backward. Yet, it
would be a mistake, whether one wants to go backwards or forwards, to ignore Gilson.
Undoubtedly, he would have rejected so simple-minded a dichotomy and given
historically and philosophically overriding reasons to do so. If for that reason alone,
one can happily welcome this inaugural issue of the promised Gilson series.
2003.09.12
J.L. Bermudez (eds.), Alan Millar (eds.)
480
Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality
Bermudez, J.L. and Millar, Alan (eds.), Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of
Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2002, 286pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199256837.
Reviewed by Todd Stewart , Illinois State University
Reason and Nature is a collection of essays, either recently published elsewhere or

brand new, concerning both epistemic and practical rationality. The essays span the
fields of epistemology, meta-ethics, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science.
One of the stated goals of the volume is to bring together a variety of perspectives
and approaches to rationality. In keeping with this goal, the volume is loosely
organized into two sections. The papers appearing in the first group focus on more
purely philosophical approaches to rationality and in particular the status of norms of
rationality and the shape these norms take. In contrast, the articles in the second
group tend to take an evolutionary psychological or cognitive scientific perspective on
the question of what place rationality has in psychological and causal explanations.
This division is a bit misleading insofar as some papers in the second group, e.g.,
Levi’s, concern far more than whether or not rationality is a useful explanatory
concept, but it does help to provide some limited structure. Another general theme,
although one taken up only sporadically by the entries in the collection, is whether
rationality can be naturalized. A little fewer than half of the papers are critical
evaluations of other papers in the volume, and so there is often a proposal-then-
response feel to the volume. This is not unwelcome, though, since the essays are
uniformly quite interesting. Since the papers as a whole do not share any single
theme, in this review I will briefly outline most of the papers and provide some critical
remarks.
The first substantive entries are an exchange between Paul Boghossian (“How are
Objective Epistemic Reasons Possible”) and Crispin Wright (“On Basic Logical
Knowledge”) about the treat of epistemic relativism and the justification of objective
norms of epistemic rationality. Boghossian argues that there is a real problem about
the justification of objective, universally binding norms of rationality. The justification
of a norm, thinks Boghossian, comes about through the justification of a belief that
the norm is objective. The problem is to explain how such a belief could be justified,
and justified in a way that means the agent is epistemically responsible when
employing the rule. Appeals to pure intuition are unhelpful and mysterious and so do
not make clear how a belief in the objectivity of a norm is justified. There is as of yet
no good account of why such beliefs might be default-reasonable, and attempts at an
inferential justification of the belief inevitably become rule-circular (e.g., need to rely
on the rule in question in order to justify the belief about the goodness of the rule), at
least when fundamental logical rules like modus ponens are concerned (20-28). Since
none of these options seem particularly appealing, epistemic relativism or
noncognitivism (non-factualism) are serious possibilities (28-34).
Boghossian attempts to defend the objectivity of norms of logic by arguing that some
inferential dispositions constitute and fix the meanings of key logical terms (e.g., the
481
conditional) and that an agent is not irresponsible to have and act upon such
dispositions prior to and independent of an explicit justification of the belief that the
rules are objective. Some rule-circular arguments, thinks Boghossian, can produce
justified beliefs in their conclusions, but only when the inference involved is a
meaning-constituting inference (35-40). Wright attacks the connection between
meaning-constitution and responsibility, pointing out that just because an inferential
disposition is part of the meaning of a concept, it does not follow that an agent is
responsible in inferring in this way (62). Most obviously, the agent may fail to
appreciate the meaning-constituting nature of the inference. Wright thus opens up the
possibility that perhaps some sort of simple externalism about the justification of
fundamental rules of inference which eschews the notion of responsibility in favor of
warrant, perhaps through pure intuition, is a possibility that should be taken seriously
after all.
Both papers are quite good but I think they could benefit by placing some of the
issues into a wider epistemological context. In particular, there is a growing literature
on epistemic circularity, and rule-circularity of the form discussed is arguably simply
another form of epistemic circularity.1 Other instances of epistemic circularity include
arguments for the reliability of sense perception that are inductive inferences from
premises that have their origin in perception and inductive arguments for the
reliability of induction. As with rules of deductive reasoning, it is not obvious how to
make room for, e.g., responsible sensory belief. Pure intuitions about the reliability of
sense perception seem more hopeless than in the logical case; it is not entirely clear
why sensory beliefs would be default-reasonable; and an epistemically circular
argument for the reliability of sense perception seems unconvincing. This begins to
suggest that we should find some other response to epistemic circularity generally,
perhaps either by allowing that some epistemically circular arguments do result in
justified beliefs (but not simply in the meaning-constituting case as Boghossian would
have it) or that no justification is required.2 Viewed in this light, the putative problem
for norms of reason is not all that peculiar and looks to be an instance of a more
general epistemic problem. If this is correct, it seems that what we require is a
general solution to the problem, not one that exploits idiosyncratic features of logic
(e.g., that some inferential dispositions are meaning constituting).
John Broome argues in “Practical Reasoning” that there is an important difference

between reasons and normative requirements. If a person intends to do something,
then this imposes a rational requirement to take necessary or the best means to fulfill
that intention (92-7). But, if, e.g., the intention itself is unreasonable, then one can be
normatively required to do something without its being that case that one has a
reason to do it. Broome thinks that both practical and epistemic normative
requirements are fixed by the contents of the propositions involved and in this sense
have the same logic (89). Instrumental rationality is thus a matter of meeting rational
requirements which may or may not translate into reasons. Alan Millar’s “Reasons for
Action and Instrumental Rationality” explores similar themes.
In “The Rational Analysis of Human Cognition,” Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford explore
the relationship between formal principles of reasoning and the sort of rationality that
human beings exhibit most of the time (135-47). They propose a method of rational
analysis that attempts to explain why human beings are so successful in their
482
everyday lives (147-53). Their idea is that the fact that human beings are rational in
their everyday lives is best explained by the fact that human beings act in accord with
the outputs of formal principles even if they do not reason according to these
principles. Many actions seem rational and well suited to the environment because
people employ fast, frugal, and reliable mechanisms of decision making and planning
that often accord with the outputs of formal principles. Formal principles are supposed
to explain the everyday rationality of human beings. The authors apply rational
analysis to argue that human performance on the Wason selection task is actually
rational and plausible when we understand the task in terms of inductive inferences
and real world pressures for information gain (153-60).
E.J. Lowe’s “The Rational and the Real” offers criticisms of Chater and Oaksford,
arguing that they run together two distinct notions when performing rational analysis,
namely rationalization and causal explanation. The fact that in everyday life we often
act in ways that might be rationalized by appeal to formal principles does not causally
explain why those actions take place or why a cognitive/behavioral system came to be
a certain way (180). This criticism is fairly convincing against the view as presented
by Chater and Oaksford. Lowe is careful not to overstate his argument, and in the end
rests with the assertion that there are all sorts of plausible explanations of the
existence of various modules in terms of adaptiveness that make no mention of
optimality or formal principles.
Chater and Oaksford might try to shift to explaining not just the fact that people
exhibit a good deal of everyday rationality but the fact that people are quite often
successful in achieving their goals. One possible explanation of this is that
evolutionary pressures for adaptation tend to produce fast and frugal modules that
usually produce results that can be justified/rationalized by formal principles. The
existence of these modules might be causally explained if we make the assumption
that formal rationality has a connection to some sorts of success in the world. It could
then be argued that evolution favored these modules because they are successful, but
they are successful because they mimic the operation of more reliable but less
computationally tractable formal principles. Lowe’s final point will still be in effect; this
would be one of several available explanations of the existence and performance of
certain modules, but it seems that this explanation could sometimes be the best one.
It does make sense that sometimes evolution produces or favors an adaptation
because that thing is closer to optimal (here, an output of a computationally unlimited
reasoner employing the correct formal rules) than other competing adaptations if we
assume that an optimal decision is one most likely to lead to success.
David Over argues against the view that human rationality consists entirely of
domain-specific modules (the massive modularity hypothesis) in his “The Rationality
of Evolutionary Psychology.” First, such modules need to be integrated together
somehow to allow for complex planning, and the relation between modules and final
decisions is difficult to understand if the massive modularity hypothesis is true (201).
Second, it is at least plausible that some sort of sorting needs to be done before a
module is engaged; a cognitive/behavioral system needs to determine, for example,
which domain-specific module to activate, and this smacks of some sort of centralized
processing of some sort. Domain-general reasoning also plays the vital role of filling in
gaps between domain-specific modules and allows for flexible responses to unusual
483
occurrences in the environment. He explores and rejects some putative empirical data
for the massive modularity hypothesis, e.g., people perform differently on problems
that are thought to share the same logical structure (192-201).
Isaac Levi’s ambitious “Commitment and Change in View” attempts to make room for
epistemic responsibility while arguing that rationality has no place in causal
explanations. Levi sharply distinguishes rational commitment and the implementation
of changes in commitment. He thinks that while we can directly control rational
commitment, our behaviors lag behind because it is sometimes difficult to implement
these changes in our actions (211; 224). Rational commitment, then, is not the same
thing as a belief, functionally construed. A commitment to a rational requirement is
putatively part of the shared background of all inquirers, and includes things like
logical closure and coherence among commitments. One unsatisfying part of Levi’s
account is that he fails to make clear why we do have control over rational
commitment; the most he offers is the claim that if an agent thinks in terms of
normative commitments, then this implies the agent has control (222). However, just
because rational commitment is not a causal notion, this does not entail that we can
control our rational commitments, and an agent’s viewing himself as capable of
normative commitments does not rule out an error-theory. As for the role of
rationality in explanation, Levi thinks that human beings are so far from meeting the
ideals of rational commitment that explanations in terms of rational commitment
cannot serve as a good way of explaining human behavior. To the extent that
rationality is involved in explanations, Levi argues it is a place-holder for a better
naturalistic explanation, much like dormative virtues (216-223).
Allan Gibbard proposes an interesting quasi-naturalistic view of rationality in his

“Normative Explainings: Invoking Rationality to Explain Happenings.” The idea is that
while all properties are naturalistic, including those that instantiate rationality, it does
not follow that the concept of rationality is naturalistic (264; 272). According to
Gibbard, rationality is not a causal/explanatory concept, although it is realized by
purely natural properties. Rather, judgments of rationality are essentially about how
one ought to reason in specific conditions. To call someone irrational is to assert that
you do not think that they should reason in the way which they in fact reasoned (if I
were in their position, let me not reason that way) (270). This might explain
something causal, for example, why a person tends to fail to achieve her goals, but it
contains an essential normative component which is not causal. Disagreements about
rationality between conceptually competent persons are supposed to persist even
given agreement about the natural facts, and this Gibbard takes to support the view
that reason is not entirely a descriptive naturalistic concept (276-9). Instead,
rationality is a concept that has its place in making plans about the future and in
coordinating social planning (274). Gibbard concludes that rationality is a non-natural
concept the application of which supervenes on purely naturalistic properties (for a
given individual), but a concept which should be banished from science (279).
Explanations of a person’s failure, for example, are better couched in terms of the
naturalistic properties which the non-natural concept of rationality picks out.
In need of some clarification is what, exactly, it takes for a concept to count as non-
natural, and what this is meant to show about the concept. Supposing Gibbard is
correct that explanations in terms of rationality are not purely causal, it is not
484
immediately obvious why this shows that the concept of rationality is itself non-
natural. If all non-natural means in this context is that a concept is not purely
descriptive of the natural world (perhaps because its content is not simply the
naturalistic property which it represents), then Gibbard’s conclusion would follow.
Why, though, is a concept non-natural just because it fails to be descriptive? As
Gibbard makes clear with his own proposals, concepts can have roles other than mere
description. The mere fact that a concept has a primary role other than causal
explanation does not seem to show that it is non-natural in any more robust sense
than that it, trivially, is not simply purely descriptive of natural properties. What is
needed is an argument for the view, then, that we should understand naturalistic
concepts as being causal/explanatory or purely descriptive. Still, Gibbard’s paper
advances an interesting alternative understanding of the relationship of rationality and
nature.
Reason and Nature is a very nice collection of papers which succeeds in bringing
together a variety of perspectives about reasoning. All of them are well written and
worth study, and Bermúdez and Millar select very appropriate papers. Because the
entries cover a host of different topics, not all of the papers are likely to be of interest
to a single reader. Still, it is a volume well worth reading by those interested in
philosophical or cognitive scientific approaches to reasoning.
Endnotes
1. See, e.g., William Alston, (1986) “Epistemic Circularity,” reprinted in Epistemic

Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Markus Lammenranta,
(1996) “Reliabilism and Circularity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LVI,
for some treatments of epistemic circularity.
2. For an interesting alternative, see John Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary
Theories of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). They
argue that many sensory beliefs are default-reasonable because part of the meaning-
constituting conceptual norms of physical-object concepts permit the formation of
perceptual beliefs when in certain sensory states. Notice that this would be, in a
sense, to diminish the distinctiveness of the problem Boghossian constructs for logical
norms and to extend his proposed solution to perception as well.
2003.09.13
Adam Morton
The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics
Morton, Adam, The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics,

Routledge, 2003, 225pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415272432.
Reviewed by Constantine Sandis , University of Reading
485
There is no denying that in everyday life human beings attribute beliefs, desires,
thoughts, and emotions to one another. In this sense we are, all of us, folk
psychologists. More importantly, though we might often be mistaken in our particular
attributions, we are doubtlessly generally right to attribute such things both to others
and to ourselves. This book is an attempt to map out the relation between this truism
(eliminativism is largely ignored save from a one-line attack on p32) and the further
fact that we often successfully predict how people are going to act by explaining why
they will do so. Morton's central claim is that 'sometimes and in some ways we
understand because we can cooperate rather than the other way around' (p2). That is
to say it is partly because we can engage in cooperative activity that we can predict,
explain, and understand action.
The book is divided into two parts. The first and largest part of the book presents us
with his arguments for this main claim with Morton guiding us through questions
relating to co-operation motivation, belief ascription, causal explanation, and
simulation. The second half does not present us with any further arguments for
Morton's view; instead it offers us four 'explorations' into moral psychology which we
might wish to pursue - if we find ourselves sympathetic to the central claim of Part I -
and tells us why these possibilities (concerned with attribution bias, introspection and
expression, evaluation, and moral progress) are worthy of serious consideration. So in
effect what we have is a monograph supplemented by the author's proposals for
further research. I begin with former.
According to the traditional folk-psychological picture, we first infer what people are
thinking and feeling from their behaviour and only then, having understood one
another, do we (indeed can we) begin to engage in shared activities. Morton argues
against this view by emphasising the 'beneficial circularities between our capacities to
attribute states of mind and our capacities to engage in shared activities' (p148).
What he means by this is that 'our understanding of mind and action is, in part,
shaped by its need to mediate shared activity, just as the shared activities we
undertake are shaped by the need to rely on our capacities to gather and
conceptualize information about one another' (p149). The argument comes mainly by
example and overall it is persuasive.
As one might expect, many of the examples are modified versions of classic game-
theory puzzles while others are cooperation problems of a much broader sort. Morton
labels this latter category 'microethics', where this stands for 'the collection of ways of
thinking we have in everyday life for finding our way through frequently occurring
situations in which the stakes are low but there are potential conflicts of interest
between individuals' (p2). He guides us through possible ways in which we might
reason in such situations, acknowledging that, although solutions to cooperation
problems are frequently derived from psychological attributions, we just as frequently
derive our information about someone's thoughts and intentions by reasoning about
the solution to the problem in question.
The idea then is that we reach a judgement about what we ought to do first, and only
then form an expectation of what the other person will intend/desire to do etc. To give
486
one of his examples: someone is helping you move a table through a narrow doorway.
Will he turn the table to the left or to the right? There might well be some advantage
to one of these ways but the truly important thing is that both of you turn it the same
way when the decisive moment comes. He is acting as if he will turn to the right, so
you move your hands accordingly. In this way you make it understood that this is the
agreed course. You then predict that he will stick to it, partly because it is what he
should do (pp14-15).
Of course one might object that the only way you could have made the prediction was
by inferring from his behaviour something about the other agent's psychology, namely
that he intended to move right (where his intention is best understood as a belief-
desire pair). Morton doesn't deny this. The point, rather, is that had you then moved
as if you were going for a left turn, he would probably not have moved right. So his
action is shaped by yours as much as yours is by his, and what you both have on
common is a conception of what one should do in cases such as this. What we have
here, therefore, is a case of beneficial circularity as described above. Moreover - and
this is the important point - in microethical cases when each of you tries to ascertain
what the other will do, you typically don't try to figure out what their interests (viz.
beliefs and desires) are before you figure out what the correct joint course of action
would be. You might then infer from this that he will do whatever will promote this,
but again prediction here will not solely depend on knowing what the other person's
interests were. Rather, by letting him know what you intended to do, you gained 'a
predictive hold' over his behaviour. In this sense, we can influence the actions of
others by letting others know what our own interests are. This isn't only true of joint
actions but also of any situation where what the one person does depends on the
actions of those around him and what they do (in turn) depends on how they believe
he is going to react (Morton's favourite examples include driving, playing tennis and
robbing banks). It is therefore important for us (if we are to get what we want) that
we make ourselves understood.
Morton summarises this thought in his claim that folk psychology exists because ethics
exists: it is because we find ourselves in ethical situations that we make ourselves
intelligible (hence the book's subtitle). Of course 'ethics' is to be understood here in a
rather loose sense as something like 'the enterprise of helping one another to the best
lives' (pvii). An ethical situation then is one 'in which it makes a difference to each
agent what each other agent does' (p148). Likewise Morton defines 'folk-psychology'
loosely as 'whatever beliefs, skills or other cognitive processes human beings use in
everyday life to predict and understand actions' (p206 cf. pvii), explicating that by this
he means nothing more than our 'everyday understanding of one another' (p2).
Given these definitions the claim that folk psychology exists because ethics exists
seems to be both true and interesting. Unfortunately Morton's own position loses
much of its appeal once we realise that despite his attempts to use the term 'folk-
psychology' in a non-loaded sense, his actual understanding of it betrays deep
theoretical commitment. For according to Morton to say that a person believes
something is to attribute them with a mental state (pvii) and to give a person's reason
for acting is to cite the action's main cause (pp10-11). Not only do these
commitments make it impossible for those who don't share them to reach the same
conclusions as Morton (or at any rate to interpret his conclusions in the same way) but
487
at times they also prevent some of his own arguments from getting through. Even
more unfortunately they restrict some of his most exciting ideas to parameters in
which they cannot do the work they are most naturally suited to. In this respect
Morton's book is like a zoo of beautiful wild animals that are caged and improperly
fed. This environment is particularly unsuitable for the kinds of explorations he invites
us to join in the second half of the book.
So, for example, in the second 'exploration' he confesses to being 'very uncertain
what Wittgenstein is trying to persuade us about the states we express: can they
coincide with causes of our actions' (p161), when it is clear that Wittgenstein did not
think that we express states or that actions are caused at all (let alone by any states
that we express!). As a consequence of this Morton fails to develop the kind of
expressivism that would best suit his own views. A similar difficulty arises when in the
same exploration he tries to give an account of introspection.
An altogether different example of theory constraining originality can be found in

'Exploration IV: Moral Progress', where Morton attempts to convince us that
justification and explanation can never be completely distinct since good reasons for
action could explain why someone actually performed an action (p190). This seems
the right way to go given the role of microethical judgements in situations such as the
one the table-movers find themselves in in the example above. Here Morton's folk-
psychological commitments prevent him from turning this into an interesting claim
about action explanation since at best these reasons will somehow have to find
themselves affecting the agent's action by being one of its many causal determinants
(p11), a job which good reasons are ontologically ill-suited for as it is, even before we
introduce the folk-psychological conception of motivation which Morton relies upon in
the first half of the book. This is unfortunate because, were it not for his (theoretical)
folk-psychologism, not only would these explorations be more rewarding but they may
indeed have been solid enough to incorporate into the monograph itself.
This is not to say that Part I is not infected with theory either. In Chapter 4 (on
explanatory contrast) we witness a powerful idea: 'that we get better explanations if
we focus on ends rather than motives' (p81) being deprived of its bite because it turns
out that what makes one explanation 'deeper' than another is its 'causal depth' (pp85-
6). But what was most interesting about Morton's central claim is the intuitively
appealing idea that when we engage in shared activities our predicting what the other
person will do is not the result of an empirical investigation into the potential causes
of his behaviour. In fact the examples were pushing towards the idea that the aim
alluded to in teleological reasons is not a cause (in the form of an intention) but an
(intended) effect of our doing something.
It would be a mistake however to let a few folk-psychological tenets keep one from
what is an otherwise tantalising read. Morton's book presents us with a much-needed
break from traditional accounts of understanding, and yet it comes without the price
of our having to abandon our vernacular psychology. This is no small achievement,
especially given the outstanding clarity of the argument throughout. It is therefore a
great shame that the author expresses himself in terms whose theoretical implications
prevent him from giving his own views the breathing space they need.
488
2003.09.14
Lynn Holt
Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules
Holt, Lynn, Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules, Ashgate Publishing

Company, 2002, 120pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0754606643.
Reviewed by Guy Axtell , University of Nevada, Reno
In Apprehension, Lynn Holt argues for “a conception of reason in which reason is

primarily apprehensive, secondarily discursive and calculative” (3). Holt finds his
inspiration in Aristotle, wherein “the authority of the virtuous, the authority of the
expert, is the hallmark of an Aristotelian account of reason” (95). This approach
underscores the priority of person over principle and of understanding over rule, in all
areas of expert practice. But in constructing a virtue epistemology for the modern
philosophical era, Holt also explicitly takes leave of Aristotle in numerous respects,
arguing that practical reasoning and practical wisdom are primary over theory, and
showing how the “intellectual” virtues and those of “character” are more holistically
related than Aristotle himself allowed. While sweeping in scope, Apprehension is well-
grounded in historical case study; the author's call for a return to the resources of
classical philosophy is supported by his historical account of how twentieth-century
analytic philosophy came to inherit the ills that befell modernism through its wholesale
rejection of Aristotelianism (4).
Holt deserves applause for a book which combines a well-articulated line of argument
with an engaging and varied expository style. His style is reserved and succinct,
without needless recurrence. Because of this the author accomplishes a great deal
more than many authors would in a short text of 120 pages. This book will appeal to
epistemologists and metaphysicians, and to those with strong interdisciplinary
interests, as Holt blends his neo-Aristotelianism with a range of previous research
interests in rationality theory, scientific discovery, and social psychology.
What may be most distinctive about the author's understanding of the value of virtue
epistemology for contemporary philosophers is that he locates epistemological
interests in a very different conceptual space from that of analytic philosophy; indeed
the critique of analytic philosophy that he offers is sharp-edged, pointing towards an
alternative in which many traditional problems of epistemologists are either
transformed or rendered irrelevant:
. . . conceiving reason as essentially apprehensive both requires different conceptual

resources than those from which contemporary analytic philosophy draws, and entails
very different accounts of the rationality of science and concepts like objectivity and
truth. (112-113)
489
Partly for this reason the author spends his time developing themes such as “the
epistemic role of apprehension,” and “the rationality of scientific discovery and
experiment” by directly relating them to a neo-Aristotelian background, without
drawing substantially on the work of other self-described contemporary virtue
epistemologists.
Apprehension is chosen as a focal term in part because, “unlike 'intuition' or 'nous',

[it] is not bound to any one philosophical tradition” (3). In the broader sense of the
term utilized in the above passage, Holt believes it to be the sole intellectual virtue.
But he allows it to be differentiated and identifies the more expressly apprehensive
virtues as wisdom, practical wisdom, perception, imagination, and understanding.
These he distinguishes both from innate faculties and dispositions and from non-
apprehensive elements of expertise such as calculative reasoning and technical skills.
Here as elsewhere, the author is admirably straightforward whenever he takes leave
of Aristotle's own account. All of the intellectual virtues are apprehensive for Aristotle,
Holt holds, yet by placing apprehensive character most explicitly under understanding
(nous) and practical wisdom (phronesis), his discussions have had “the unfortunate
effect of making understanding and practical wisdom seem very different from science
(episteme) and craft (techne)” (15). To correct this, Holt emphasizes that science
(episteme) is an achievement for Aristotle, and itself a virtue attributed to individuals;
he also tries to show that for Aristotle's account to be successful, nous must be a
virtue. This is partly illustrated by discussion of the similarities and differences
between Copernicus and the Ptolemaics. Copernicus' system was in some respects a
technical failure, yet the primary achievements which separates Copernicus from
Ptolemy regard his understanding of the principles and presuppositions of his field,
and his use of imagination: “What separates Copernicus from other Ptolemaic
astronomers is his apprehension both of the current state of high astronomy and how
that same astronomy might be transformed and reformed if certain less than
fundamental elements were abandoned” (86).
But part of what Holt argues can be countered and corrected by the resources of his
aretaic approach is the narrow conception of reason that entered with the mechanistic
new science of the 17th century. “When method supplanted virtue in the early modern
philosophical imagination, it did so in combination with a strong movement against
Scholasticism, when Aristotelianism was perceived to have been corrupted” (3). Here
the author's defense of the priority of virtues over rules and apprehension over
inferential reason is buttressed by his reading of the early-modern fascination with
and appeal to “method”:
Thinkers in other ways as diverse as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes both wished to
extend this conception to the new sciences, conceiving the application of reason in
science as a scientific method: a set of rules of inference which, if followed exactly,
will lead to truth. This conception was enormously popular at the dawn of the (so-
called) scientific revolution, and as a guiding heuristic in the intervening centuries via
such rubrics as 'The Scientific Method', a notion which nicely captures the scientism
and Methodism which have dominated philosophical thought about reason and
rationality in the last four centuries. (2)
490
The older ideal of intellectual virtue and the epistemic authority that it confers did not
survive the seventeenth century except as a minority position. It was eschewed with
the reaction against title, position, and privileged authority, generally. A new
understanding of reason as calculative and machine-like was emerging with both
rationalist and empiricist versions; this new mechanical philosophy envisioned
impersonal standards of rationality and indeed insisted—famously in Descartes—that
reason is equally-divided. The socio-political appeal of a more 'democratic' conception
of reason is in some ways obvious, but the author insists that it obscures the essential
correctness of the Aristotelian insight that “character matters in inquiry” and that
experts do not need rules for practice except as shorthand or as a means of
transmitting techniques to novices. In the reaction against Scholasticism,
the authority of persons was meant to be supplanted with impersonal authority:

scripture supplants the Pope, laws supplant the King, method supplants the
Philosopher. When Kant suggested that people should reason for themselves, he did
not mean that they should reason idiosyncratically: they should rather reason
according to universal laws binding for all. This only reinforces the point that
Methodism was all the rage: it was consonant, indeed it was the intellectual
counterpart, of political and religious reform. The rule of law—in legal codes, in
scripture, in scientific methods—was thus a hallmark of the period. (95)
Holt's historical thesis of the neglect of the virtues and personal authority in favor of
impersonal rules of method leads him not just to be critical of the leveling idea of
“democracy of the intellect,” but to seek an altogether different account of the
rationality of science, and of “objectivity” more generally.
This sort of mechanistic inquiry simply leaves no room for the characteristic frailties of
human reasoning. Method secures objectivity as detachment, for it equally detaches
novices from their inferiority and experts from their superior ability. (103)
Holt's interest is accordingly not in normal psychology but in that of the expert in any
particular field of inquiry, whether scientific or otherwise. He argues against the
separation of emotion and rationality and for a conception of objectivity that “entails,
contra its standard presentation, a condition of character” (104). This is the difference
between a model in which disinterestedness and impartiality is sufficient for
objectivity, and one in which objectivity requires a kind of proper attunement to one's
context of inquiry, supported by positive virtues of understanding, honesty,
perseverance, etc.
In Holt's thought objectivity is closely connected with the authority of expertise,

because, while the virtues are in us potentially, there are wide differences in character
and competence; the intellectual virtues come to be actualized in us only through
proper development, which generally requires education and training. This perspective
is represented as an attempt to make good philosophical sense of Aristotle's claim
that there is no more ultimate criterion for truth and objectivity than the achievement
of the individual who possesses virtue. Such an achievement is a rare thing, but
“means that a genuine virtue epistemology ought properly to be regarded as a
virtuoso epistemology: an account of who is best able to judge truth from falsity in
virtue of his or her possession of wisdom” (73).
491
With respect to scientific rationality and matters of discovery, then, there is a “priority
of understanding over rule” (96); proposed rule sets are not predictive of how the
experts will handle new cases; experts really rely on their experience, their trained
intuitive judgment. It is only after the fact that the authority of the expert becomes
precedent, and can be codified as a rule. “Apprehension is the element of intellectual
expertise which, while it defies reduction to rules, is itself the source of rules of reason
properly circumscribed” (42). So with an apprehensive account of reason, the problem
of conceiving how scientific discovery could be rational is not the problem of supplying
a logic or methodology; it is rather a question of tracing discovery to the appropriate
apprehensive act and virtues. On such an account no invidious distinction is drawn
between discovery and justification, since “To make a discovery is to be justified,
precisely because the discovery flows from virtuous activity” (88).
In assessing Holt's wide-ranging study, this reader finds himself drawn to his
(MacIntyrean) understanding of rationality as embedded in practice (8), to the priority
he assigns to practical over theoretical reasoning, and to his rather holistic conception
of the virtues. Holt concedes the failure of “intuition” as typically conceived by its
supporters, and nicely traverses the contemporary field in attempting to differentiate
apprehensive virtue from intuition. Although apprehension defined as “seeing things
'as'“ or just seeing how things hang together (39) must surely face some of the same
objections that intuition commonly does, I would prefer to focus on some different
concerns with his text.
One is the way in which Holt wants to differentiate himself from others doing research
within virtue epistemology. He does so by painting them with the same brush he
paints analytic philosophy generally. In this he seems to neglect that not all of those
who engage what Michael Williams calls the “analytic problem,” or the question, “What
is knowledge?” are necessarily 'analytic epistemologists'. Moreover, where he does
offer a specific critique, it is that “said epistemology thus fails to conceive virtue
correctly, assimilating it either to a skill which anyone could learn or a reliable
mechanism anyone could possess” (3). Holt instead views virtue as “an achievement
available only to a few with the right combination of potential, education, experience
and hard work” (3). But in siding with an account of virtue as acquired, and against
reliabilist or “dispositional” accounts of virtue, Holt is already taking positions that
associate him with some figures in the field (Zagzebski, for instance) and distance him
from others (like Sosa), though he does not seem self-aware about this.
Some of those who fall to criticism in this regard do not favor Methodism, the key ill
Holt associates with analytic philosophy. A Particularism akin to his own stance is
favored by some, and is not wholly second-fiddle in 20th century Anglo-American
epistemology. But few particularist accounts are as immoderate as Holt's, which
reinforces the idea that the elite person of virtue is the ultimate judge of truth and
objectivity. This leads me to query whether the author's account may be most
troubled exactly where it is most distinctive. Apprehension clearly raises issues of
seminal importance in an age of expertise like our own. But the concern that I have
about 'elitism' in his approach is hoisted by perception of vagueness and lack of
content in the notion of apprehension as he uses it.
492
Holt worries that “if virtues were faculties, every 'normal' person would possess them,
just like every 'normal' person has eyes. But as we have noted, the virtuous person
sets norms for Aristotle, and it would be a mistake to transfer that norm setting
function to the 'normal,' i.e. ordinary person” (14). I do not find that this satisfactorily
justifies Holt's proposed shift in epistemology away from “normal” psychology onto
that of the “expert.” The shift here seems tantamount to a strong anti-naturalism, in
that it places the norm-setting function in the particular judgments of the individual of
genius, thereby insulating it from social-scientific scrutiny.
I am not suggesting, as many have, that all normativity be rested on evolution—that

dispositions all be appraised by the extent to which they are adaptive in the sense of
aiding long-term survivability. But neither should the importance of normal psychology
and the operations of the genetically-endowed faculties be neglected in favor of the
norm setting function of the expert, since this raises insuperable difficulties of
identification, both as to who the expert is, and as to the specific content of his
apprehensions. The concern here is that the author hasn't done anything to assuage
the “conservative” consequences of Aristotle's elitism. While his examples of virtue—
Copernicus, for instance—are well-taken, these are men whose merit is recognized
and attributed only retrospectively; in a more synchronic context, it remains easy to
see how granting a norm-setting function to the expert is largely to associate such
norms not with such paradigm-breaking figures, but rather with orthodoxy, or with
those institutions that decide who the experts are.
A similar caution is noted by sociologists of science who worry about traditional

epistemology as founded upon an unacknowledged self-privileging, and a 'principle of
asymmetry,' in which the truth of a scientist's true beliefs are explained simply by
their “good” supporting reasons, while mistaken belief (and only mistaken belief) calls
for sociological analysis. Such an explanatory asymmetry, as Barbara Herrnstein
Smith points out, “is a general feature of defenses of orthodoxy: political, aesthetic,
and scientific as well as philosophical.”1 What Holt accepts as a seminal point of
Aristotle's thought, that “failures of inquiry may regularly be explained by the absence
of some element of character” (105) invites just this kind of response: that it entails a
self-privileging asymmetry in explanation and does so in terms of internal traits which
he makes out to be quite opaque to scientific analysis and falsification.
Ultimately, then, while I benefited greatly from this book and think that others will as
well, I sense that Lynn Holt's worthy project of constructing a virtue epistemology for
contemporary times might have been better served had he started somewhat further
back, separating himself at the outset from just these aspects of Aristotle's elitism
that lead it so evidently into tension with contemporary philosophic naturalism.
Endnotes
1. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance, Harvard University Press (1998),
p. 83. To be fair, Holt takes no explicit stance on the naturalism/non-naturalism
debate; he also separates himself from certain Aristotelian assumption because of
what I take to be a genuine concern with naturalism. For instance, he points out how
taking episteme and nous as virtues lessens the appearance of infallibilism in
Aristotle's account of science. Similarly he insists on the primacy of practice and the
493
practice-embeddedness of rationality. So my point is that the same concerns that

motivate these aspects of Holt's thought should have also led him to challenge the
explanatory asymmetry implicit in Aristotle's approach. I do not see a resolution to the
tension between the practice embeddedness of reason, and the vision of the
autonomous virtuous agent that we find in this text. For an overview of the debate
about naturalism focusing on the role of intuition in analytic philosophy, see Gary
Gutting, “Rethinking Intuition: A Historical and Metaphilosophical Introduction,” in
Michael R. DePaul and William Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition. Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, pubs., 1998: 3-13.
2003.09.15
Bernard Williams
Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy
Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton

University Press, 2002, 336pp. $27.95 (hbk), ISBN 0691102767
Reviewed by Clancy W. Martin, University of Missouri, Kansas City
The work of Bernard Williams (1929-2003) will be argued and written about by
philosophers for many years to come. He was widely viewed as one of the most (if not
the most) important British philosophers of his generation, and his many noteworthy
books, including such well-known works as Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck
(1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Shame and Necessity (1993),
have deeply influenced contemporary debates about the nature of moral knowledge.
We will miss him.
In Truth and Truthfulness, his last published book, Williams has left us with a powerful
argument for the importance of the notion of truth to our attempts to think and talk
about the world. Williams is not attempting to provide a theory of truth, he rather
hopes to give us “the value of truth” (6). Williams believes that the notion of truth he
will be working with reflects “everyone’s concept of truth” (271). So, rather than
concentrating on truth as such, his account focuses on what he identifies as the
“virtues” of truthfulness, Accuracy and Sincerity. Williams similarly insists that he is
not giving us a history of the concept of truth, which is, he believes, “everywhere and
always the same” (61). Instead, he will tell a story or “fictional genealogy” that
explains our need for truth and truthfulness. Having done so, he proceeds to detail
some of the important ethical consequences of that need, in several historical
genealogies of the concepts of truth and truthfulness, and related ideas such as
authenticity and self-deception.
The book is roughly divided into two parts. The first half, chapters 1 through 6,
revolve around a State-of-Nature story Williams tells (in chapter 3) to illustrate and
defend the importance of truth for successful human interaction. The second half,
chapters 7 through 10, offers several fascinating accounts of changes in the notions of
494
truth and truthfulness, including discussions of such figures as Herodotus and

Thucydides, Rousseau and Diderot, and Habermas and Foucault.
Williams begins by identifying “The Problem”: he thinks there is a contemporary

“tension between the pursuit of truthfulness and the doubt that there is (really) any
truth to be found” (2). This problem has been compounded (if not created) by the
“deniers” of truth, who skeptically argue that the truth is unavailable to us, or
pragmatically argue that we can do all we need to do without a full-blooded notion of
“Truth with a capital T.” Williams thinks we can’t do without Truth, and accordingly
asks: “Can the notions of truth and truthfulness be intellectually stabilized, in such a
way that what we understand about truth and our chances of arriving at it can be
made to fit with our need for truthfulness?” (3).
His argument—which depends on his development of a State of Nature story or

“fictional genealogy”—is simple: (a) we can’t get along without trust (human
flourishing creates a “need for cooperation” [38]), (b) but trust requires truthfulness,
and (c) truthfulness presupposes that there are (at least some) truths. The story
Williams tells of a primitive society persuades his reader of the not terribly
controversial (a), and both the State of Nature story and the book as a whole do a
masterful job of defending (b). But (c) is trickier, and here I don’t think Williams
succeeds in making his case.
Everyone will admit, Williams thinks, that there are some “plain truths.” In his State of
Nature, “a small society of human beings sharing a common language, with no
elaborate technology and no form of writing” (41), such truths are of the “Watch out!
Here comes a bear” variety. Williams identifies two “virtues” of truthfulness that will
emerge in such a society: “accuracy” and “sincerity.” Accuracy is the virtue of
carefully investigating and deliberating over the evidence for and against a belief
before assenting to it; sincerity is the virtue of genuinely expressing to others what
one in fact believes. And, in the state of nature Williams imagines, the accurate and
sincere reporting of truths between persons certainly seems to be necessary to the
development of trust between persons, and facilitates human flourishing.
Truthfulness, as Williams rightly argues, is instrumentally valuable.
But does it follow from the instrumental value of truthfulness that there are some
“truths” of the sort Williams is after? Although he does not tell us what his own notion
of truth is, he seems to have in mind some version of a correspondence theory of
truth. When we are sincere and accurate, we arrive at truths about the way the world
really is. But a State-of-Nature pragmatist might respond to Williams: suppose every
time I call out “Watch out! Here comes a bear” what truly approaches is a nasty
enemy combatant cunningly disguised in a bear-suit. It is easy enough to imagine
experiences suffered by our State-of-Nature pragmatist that reliably substantiated
such a mistaken belief. The statement, though false, is sincere, so far as the
pragmatist can tell it is accurate (and here prudence is a legitimate constraint, for us
and for Williams), and on Williams’ standards it is thus truthful. It serves the purposes
of trust and human flourishing. It is a justified, working pragmatic belief, and yet
Williams (and most of the rest of us) would count it as false. Williams’ virtues of
truthfulness can provide increasingly good justifications for a belief, but unless “truth”
in Williams’ sense is simply the best possible justification or justifications for a belief,
495
it doesn’t look as though these virtues will provide the “truth”. Williams does not
address the sorts of objections that a pragmatist or some other “denier” of truth might
raise to his idea that truthfulness presupposes a concept of truth, and it is a shame
that he doesn’t.
Williams also claims that truthfulness is intrinsically valuable, and though many of us
will be inclined to agree with him, it is hard to see how his State-of-Nature story can
provide truthfulness with more than instrumental value. Truthfulness in Williams’
primitive society serves the purely functional role of promoting human flourishing—
and Williams’ account is interesting in part because he shows that, for purely natural
reasons, truthfulness is likely to emerge as a human virtue. But, as Colin McGinn
pointed out in his excellent review of Williams’ book (see below), the fact that a virtue
promotes certain goods clearly does not make that virtue good in itself. The functional
story Williams tells shows us that truthfulness is useful, but it does not show that it is
any more than useful.
One reason we might worry about an account of truthfulness that makes it

instrumentally valuable (and no doubt one reason Williams would like to provide an
account of its intrinsic value) is that one can easily imagine an account of deception
that makes its practice similarly instrumentally valuable. Plato’s gennaion pseudos in
the Republic is justified specifically in terms of its instrumental benefits, and later
thinkers such as Machiavelli, Grotius, and in our own day Arthur Sylvester (“The
Government Has the Right to Lie,” Saturday Evening Post, November 18, 1967) have
similarly insisted that deception is justified and even necessary to produce certain
goods of human flourishing. And most of us will agree that at least some deceptive
practices—such as the lie of a physician to a dying child—can be justified
instrumentally.
Williams is aware of this difficulty, which brings me to chapter 5, “Sincerity: Lying and
Other Styles of Deceit,” my favorite chapter in the book. Here Williams makes many
valuable contributions to current philosophical thinking about deception. In a
particularly interesting discussion of ways people tell lies, Williams uses Grice’s idea of
“conversational implicatures” to expand the range of what counts as deception. One
reason we value sincerity, he argues, is that “in relying on what someone said, one
inevitably relies on more than what he said” (100). Consequently we cannot limit our
discussions of deception to merely straightforward verbal lies (such as Sissela Bok
attempts to do, in her groundbreaking study Lying [1989]). For Williams lies are
pernicious for at least two reasons: (1) the liar betrays the trust of the dupe; and (2)
the liar exerts power over the dupe, manipulating his or her beliefs and thus
(potentially) his or her choices. Here Williams appeals to the (in the literature on
lying, by now familiar) Kantian notion that we should treat others not “merely as a
means” but also always as ends. However, Williams adds a condition of “reciprocity”
(121), arguing that, contra Kant, there are some persons who do not deserve the
truth.
Williams’ claim in chapter 7 that “Thucydides invented historical time” (162) struck me
as less interesting, and is unfortunately argued without much evidence. If we
understand the claim in a very loose and general way—that Thucydides is the first
historian who looks like he uses modern methods—Williams’ idea is not very
496
interesting, because it is only a step away from scholarly cliché. Since David Hume
remarked that “The first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of
real history,” the notion that Thucydides is the first genuinely trustworthy ancient
historian has been generally accepted (even Kant agreed with Hume, here). And yet
the view, cliché or no, does not seem to be correct.
Williams argues that Thucydides, as a historian, does four things that Herodotus did
not do before him: (1) concerns himself with Accuracy, and thus seeks to establish
facts about the past; (2) reports history with Sincerity, thus disregarding the appeal
(or lack of it) to his audience; (3) invents the notion of “objective” historical time (as
opposed to “mythical” time), by concerning himself with the precise ordering of
events; and (4) uses the notion of objective historical time in the development of
historical explanation.
Now, against Herodotus, we might grant Williams (2): Herodotus is clearly concerned
with the effect his History has on his audience of Greeks (although one wonders if
Thucydides was not similarly concerned). But (1), (3) and (4) are all accomplished in
Herodotus’ work: (1) by the time of his account of the Persian wars Herodotus has his
dating down fairly accurately; (3) he is specifically concerned with the ordering of
events and has the Greek notion of the Olympiad for establishing that order; and (4)
he is clearly concerned with historical explanation—he tells his history just to explain
how the Greeks, a loose collection of squabbling tribes, could have possibly defeated
the greatest army on Earth. Williams thinks that Thucydides is the first to “link time,
truth, and causal explanation” (154), but these elements seem already to be
thoughtfully linked in Herodotus. Of course, the “who did it first” question is not a
particularly interesting one; but Williams puts a stress on it because he believes that
Thucydides introduces a new, “objective” way of understanding history. Williams’
Thucydides is supposed to provide an example of how “Truth” appears in historical
accounts, out of a concern for Sincerity and Accuracy. If the example succeeded, it
would provide a nice instance of “true genealogy” bearing out Williams’ “fictional
genealogy.” But it does not succeed in distinguishing between Thucydides and
Herodotus, and in so failing it casts doubt on the thesis that the notion of “objective”
time emerges with any particular thinker (rather than, say, as part of a much larger
cultural process).
Much better is his account, in chapter 8, of the differences between Rousseau and
Diderot on the questions of self-knowledge and “what it takes to be a truthful person”
(173). Williams persuasively argues that, for Rousseau, to be a truthful person one
need only be completely sincere, and self-knowledge lay in the frank revelation of
one’s deep dark secrets (thus his Confessions). This, Williams thinks, gives us a
distorted view of the self, by assuming a transparency of consciousness that simply
does not exist. The better account of selfhood is given by Rousseau’s contemporary
and sometime friend Diderot, who (like Nietzsche and Freud after him) describes
coming to know oneself as a difficult, lifelong project of self-creation and stabilization.
The self as it is given to us “is awash with many images, many excitements, merging
fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another” (195), and the attempt to sort
through and manage that refractory collection is the struggle for authenticity. Williams
goes on to give his own (unfortunately, brief) account of authenticity, both before
oneself and with one’s community, in terms of “beliefs . . . which [an agent] is
497
committed to holding true in the context of his deliberation” (196). Here he

provocatively argues that the many different forms of “wishful thinking” are not (as is
often thought) impediments to the creation of an authentic self, but essential to the
process of “individual deliberation” that alone allows such a self to develop.
There is much more here: a fascinating discussion of Habermas, Foucault, and the
importance of truth in politics (chapter 9), an excellent, and fundamentally
sympathetic, critique of Hayden White’s analysis of historiography (chapter 10), and a
wonderful endnote unraveling the complications of the notoriously knotty ancient
Greek word for truth, Aletheia. I recommend the book to other philosophers with
genuine enthusiasm: as with Williams’ previous books, the breadth of learning is so
large, and the generosity, wit and incisiveness of the intelligence so compelling, that
any reader will leave the book with a feeling of intellectual refreshment. Naturally, I
have focused on those aspects of the book that particularly caught my own interest;
others will find much that I have missed.
This book has been widely reviewed and praised. I recommend the interested reader
of this review to two other reviews of particular note: Richard Rorty’s “To the Sunlit
Uplands” (London Review of Books, Vol. 24 No.21, October 31, 2002) and Colin
McGinn’s “Isn’t it the Truth?” (The New York Review of Books, Vol. L, No. 6, April 10,
2003). Rorty’s review focuses on Williams’ attacks on pragmatism and the “deniers” of
truth (including, of course, himself); McGinn’s review is particularly helpful on the role
of truth (as opposed to truthfulness) in Williams’ book. Both reviews were valuable
sources for the present review.
2003.09.16
John Locke, Victor Nuovo (ed)
ohn Locke: Writings on Religion
Locke, John, John Locke: Writings on Religion, edited by Victor Nuovo, Oxford
Reviewed by Thomas Lennon , University of Western Ontario
Religion and theology are two spheres that converge for Locke, and together they
provide a frame for most of his writings. Such is the premise for this collection. “The
writings collected [here] should make clear that Locke’s interest in religion and
theology was neither peripheral nor pursued for the sake of appearance . . . . religious
concern was one of the main determinants of his intellectual pursuits” (lvii). Religion
for Locke is the practice of revering God, and theology the discipline of informing,
justifying and explaining that practice. The essential expression of Locke’s views in
these two domains is gathered here.
498
The collection is intended to be, and undoubtedly will be, of use to philosophers,
theologians and intellectual historians. Some will read the texts seriatim; many will
use the work as a source book for consultation on specific topics only. (An example of
such use is given at the end below—the topic of Locke’s alleged Socinianism.) It is
especially important, therefore, that the index be good, which it seems to be.
Moreover, the interest of the book is not restricted to religion and theology, but
extends to general, metaphysical questions. For example, in “Adversaria 94,” a
notebook from a short period in 1694 in which Locke speculates on, among several
other topics, the possibility of material animality and spirituality. The date of this
speculation places it not long after his addition to the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding of his views on personal identity, and it goes well beyond the famous
text (IV.iii.6), found in the first edition (1690), which queries “whether Omnipotency
has not given to some Systems of matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and
think.”
There are twenty-one texts, grouped under seven headings: 1) Theology, its sources
and the pragmatics of assent, 2) Morality and religion, 3) ’Adversaria theologica 94,’
4) Inspiration, revelation, scripture, and faith, 5) The nature and authority of the
church, 6) The reasonableness of Christianity, and 7) Fall and redemption. Each group
is arranged chronologically. Thus, the reader is able to find the themes of interest,
and to follow the development of them in Locke’s thought. The texts themselves are
notebook entries, selections from other works, both published and well-known, and
unpublished and unknown. An appendix contains the relevant passages from the
Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A single list of the sources for each of the
texts would have been useful; as the book stands, the information is there, but, on a
principle not obvious to me, spread throughout.
There is a useful, eighteen-page set of endnotes that provides translations of Latin

and Greek passages, context, bibliography, explanatory texts from Locke and other
authors, etc. The critical apparatus is appropriate. The only mistake that I have found
is that, in the title of Bayle’s work of 1682, “que les comètes” should replace “qui les
comits,” which makes no sense (xxviii, n.33; also in the bibliography).
There is also a wonderful, forty-two page introduction that is in many respects a

model of its kind. Clearly and elegantly, it argues the case for the centrality of religion
and theology to Locke’s thought, and introduces each of the seven sections in turn,
with helpful discussion in footnotes of the relevant bibliography of both primary and
secondary sources. Throughout, Locke is depicted as representing an enlightened and
universalistic version of Christianity, as opposed to the dogmatism of Rome and
Geneva. The honorific epithets heaped upon this “Christian humanism” might beg the
question of orthodoxy against Catholicism and Calvinism, each of which would view
Locke’s rationalistic latitudinarianism as having given up the ghost. Still, there is an
irresistible civility and decency that carries over from Locke into the introduction that
will charm readers of every persuasion. Nor is its charm the introduction’s only virtue;
it is patently very competent in every respect.
What was Locke’s religious and theological framework? The biographical fact of the
matter is that he was a communicating member of the Church of England, who had
the Psalms read to him on his deathbed. What Anglicanism meant to him, however, or
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what is to be found in, or entailed by, his writings, whether intended or not, are all
questions of a different order. With an attitude typical of Boyle and others of the time,
Locke sought his theology in both nature and scripture (natural and supernatural
revelation). As Locke saw it, this rapprochement of reason and faith was already
achieved by Christ himself, who overcame the distinction between the ancient priests’
role of propitiation and the ancient philosophers’ role of promulgating morality. Thus
was Locke’s way opened to viewing Christianity as a religion of morality based on
Scripture, itself open to easy, rational interpretation. It interprets itself, according to
Locke, without need of an infallible interpreter such as the Church of Rome—which
seems to me a rather naïve view. For the subsequent history of his sort of attitude
reveals a drift into either creedless deism or fundamentalist enthusiasm, both of which
Locke foreswore.
The best example, it seems to me, of the problem here is Locke’s understanding of
the nature and role of Christ. He repeatedly refers to Christ as “our Savior,” but one
wonders about the kind of salvation involved. From what does Christ save us?
Certainly not from an imputed original sin, a concept that Locke rejects on the ground
that Adam’s descendents could not be punished by a just God for a sin they did not
commit. Instead, it is an epistemological matter. Although morality is a matter of the
agreement and disagreement of ideas, and thus is as certain as mathematics, there
are many impediments to our knowledge of it. These are overcome by Scripture. To
be sure, faith justifies, and faith is based in Scripture, but the propositional content of
Christianity reduces essentially to the single claim that Jesus is the messiah, belief in
which, plus the moral life entailed by that belief, is sufficient for eternal (happy) life.
Now, all of this smacks of what in the period was castigated as “Socinianism.” Was
Locke a Socinian?
Here is what the editor takes to be the views of the source of the doctrine, Fausto
Sozzini: he “denied the doctrines of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality
of the soul, and the satisfaction of Christ” (p.271). Now, Nuovo takes the charge of
Socinianism against Locke to be false: “there is no evidence that [Locke] ever
intended to propagate Socinianism” (li-lii). Certainly, Locke never intended to
propagate Socinianism as such, for in his time the term was invariably deployed as a
term of abuse. So it would have been paradoxical or perverse of him to do so.
Nonetheless, all four of the denials that Nuovo attributes to Sozzini are arguably true
of Locke as well. The fourth is discussed above; with no imputed original sin, there is
nothing to be satisfied. Instead, the change wrought by Christ is the immortality of
the just, with the wicked ultimately perishing in nihilo, which is to say that, if the soul
of some is as a matter of fact immortal, the soul itself is not essentially immortal. The
first denial hangs on the second. If Christ is not divine, then the triune God is
relinquished. Although Locke never explicitly denied the divinity of Christ, the
evidence he assembled in the “Adversaria 94” clearly favored the denial, such that
given his own proto-Bayesian view of belief, he could hardly have avoided the denial.
All of this was immediately detected just from Locke’s published work. John Edwards
made the charge explicit in 1695. Nor was he the only one with such worries; among
others, Leibniz felt that Locke “inclined to the Socinians.” (For more see Nicholas
Jolley, Leibniz and Locke: A study of the New Essays in Human Understanding,
500
Clarendon Press, 1984, ch.2.) What was Locke’s response? Consider the following
passage from his Vindication [sic] of the Reasonableness of Christianity:
I expound, [Edwards] says, John 14.9 &c. after the Antitrinitarian Mode: And I make
Christ and Adam to be Sons of God, in the same sense, and by their Birth, as the
Racovians [i.e. Socinians] generally do. I know not but it may be true, that the
Antitrinitarians and Racovians understand those places as I do: But ’tis more than I
know that they do so. I took not those Texts from those Writers, but from the
Scripture it self, giving Light to its own meaning, by one place compared with another:
What in this way appears to me its true meaning, I shall not decline, because I am
told, that it is so understood by the Racovians, whom I never yet read. (Writings on
Religion, p. 219)
Add to this weak statement the fact that Locke certainly had already read a great deal
of Socinian literature and was familiar with Socinian doctrine, and his vindication
becomes highly problematic.
The question of Locke’s alleged Socinianism raises many further questions, to begin
with: what does the view mean? and what does it matter? (as a view, and whether
Locke held it). Those who want more on the topic should have a look at the papers by
Nuovo, by Udo Theil, and by John Marshall in M.A. Stewart, English Philosophy in the
Age of Locke, Clarendon Press, 2000.
2003.09.17
Richard T. De George
The Ethics of Information Technology and Business
De George, Richard T., The Ethics of Information Technology and Business, Blackwell
Publishing, 2003, 289pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0631214259.
Reviewed by Norman Mooradian, unknown
The Ethics of Information Technology and Business is an examination of a wide range

of ethical questions that arise from the use of information technology in business and
the business of information technology itself. Among the many issues discussed,
privacy has a central place. Two chapters are devoted to the topic (chapter two:
Marketing, Privacy, and the Protection of Personal Information; and chapter three:
Employees and Communication Privacy). Privacy comes up repeatedly in other
chapters of the book as well, such as chapter five, Ethical Issues in Information
Technology and E-Business, where Web tracking and data mining are discussed, and
chapter six, Ethical Issues on the Internet, in which the issues of anonymity and
security are raised.
Another central issue is that of intellectual property, in particular, digital assets such
as software programs. Chapter four: New, Intellectual, and Other Property focuses
501
exclusively on this issue, though again, as in the case of privacy, it comes up in other
chapters as well. The last chapter is a broader reflection on the impact of information
technology on society (chapter seven: Information Technology and Society: Business,
the Digital Divide, and the Changing Nature of Work.
While privacy and intellectual property are central issues that are worked out in detail
in the earlier chapters of the book and applied to different cases in later chapters,
there are a number of other topics as well, too numerous to list. They include taxation
of e-commerce, assigning domain names, the changing nature of work, liability for
system failures, and censorship, just to name a few.
Four themes pervade the book and provide the closest thing to an overarching
structure to its many arguments. They are the Myth of Amoral Computing And
Information Technology (MACIT), the Lure of the Technological Imperative (TI), the
Danger of the Hidden Substructure, and the Acceptance of Technological Inertia.
MACIT is described in various ways throughout the book. In the preface it is described
as a tendency to ignore the ethical dimensions of computing. However, for the most
part it is treated as a propensity to mistakenly believe or reason that one cannot
assign moral responsibility to agents’ for failures of various sorts where computer
technologies play a causal role. The reasoning implicit in this mistake is that
computers are amoral entities and as such cannot be responsible for the harm they
cause. Human agents may be involved in the causal nexus of the harm, but since they
are not the direct or central cause, they are not responsible or if so to a minimal
degree.
TI is described in various places in various ways. Putting a few of the descriptions

together, we might say it is a tendency to develop an information technology because
it is possible to do so and meets some objective, irregardless of its ethical
consequences (pages 175, 194, 260 et al.). Since the book is an extended argument
against TI and MACIT, TI must also be manifested as a form of belief as well. On a
descriptive interpretation it says that for any given technology, it will be developed if
there is a reason to do so, regardless of its ethical consequences. The prescriptive
interpretation is that for any technology, it should be developed if it is possible to do
so.
The other themes, i.e., the hidden substructure and technological inertia complement
the first two themes and receive much less attention. When they are mentioned it is
usually in support of the other two themes. The hidden substructure topic helps
explain MACIT, because much of the causal nexus is unknown to most people.
Technological inertia is the flip side to TI, that is, accepting the status quo once it has
been established. Also, De George is not always careful to distinguish the themes.
MACIT and TI seem to blend together from time to time (page 7). This may be
because belief that a technology is inevitable might lead to belief that its developers
are not morally responsible for its development.
In the first chapter, Ethics and the Information Revolution, De George describes his
approach to the ethical questions he will discuss. He locates the issues within a
common and universal framework of ethical norms. Murder, stealing and other such
502
acts are generally inconsistent with societal norms across societies despite their
cultural differences. Within a society, norms exist for many practices that bear certain
similarities to new and emerging practices made possible by information technologies.
This suggests a two-step method. First, when evaluating a new practice such as
monitoring e-mail, one can use analogical reasoning from similar practices and norms;
for example, opening and reading private correspondence. If the dissimilarities are
significant or if societies differ in the compared practices, one can move to the second
step, which is to appeal to “pertinent considerations of a variety of kinds” (page 26).
De George does not attempt to characterize these considerations, but it is fair to say
from the way he argues that they can be described as consequentialist or deontic and
that they must cohere with the general framework of fundamental ethical norms.
De George then draws a distinction between an empirical approach and an analytical

or conceptual approach. The empirical approach is reactive, waiting for harms to be
done before a response is formulated. The conceptual approach is proactive. It
consists of identifying the logical presuppositions of a practice, institution or system,
identifying its structure and the possible ethical weak points of that structure, and
considering ways in which values might be built into those structures that would
eliminate or mitigate its weak points. This conceptual approach is the one he
endorses.
De George does not say how these two methods are meant to fit together, although I
think it can be inferred that the place of the kind of conceptual analysis he describes
lies in the second step, which moves beyond analogy and takes into account a wide
range of “pertinent considerations.” If this is the case, then De George’s method can
be summarized as a two-step process that first attempts to apply existing norms to
new practices via analogical arguments and then, if that fails, attempts an analysis of
the practice or system along the lines described above.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is in chapter one, where De George
applies his method of analysis to the general system of IT taken as the basis for the
information society. Here he argues that core values of an information-centric society
are truthfulness, accuracy, information sharing, and trust. While important in other
types of society (agricultural, industrial), these values take on greater role in an
information economy, in contrast to punctuality, for example, which is critical in an
assembly-line industrial economy. Appeal to these values plays a role in a number of
arguments throughout the book.
De George’s discussion of privacy in chapter two also illustrates his method. He

distinguishes between four kinds of privacy: Space privacy, body/mental privacy,
personal information privacy, communication privacy, personal privacy and
cyberspace privacy. Space privacy has to do with control of one’s space against
intrusion or observation by others. Body/mental privacy concerns one’s ability to
control access to ones thoughts and body. Personal information privacy concerns
control over information about oneself. Personal privacy has to do with one’s ability to
reveal or not to reveal certain aspects of oneself to certain people. Finally, cyber
privacy is similar to some of the others such as space privacy and body privacy and
might be thought of as the virtual equivalent of these.
503
After making these distinctions, De George addresses the problem of tracking people
in public. Surveillance technologies are often employed in public places to reduce
crime or traffic congestion. An argument can be made that there is nothing wrong
with such surveillance. One can observe someone in public and can take a picture, and
one can even video someone. If one were to use computer technology to coordinate
video images in order to track people’s movements, this would just be an extension of
permitted activities. De George identifies the fallacy in such reasoning by describing
the argument as claiming that public + public = public.
The argument fails, De George claims, because private and public are not necessarily
opposed concepts. One expects a certain amount of anonymity in public, and it is
precisely this anonymity that is undermined by aggressive tracking. While De George
does not explicitly use the distinctions above, it is clear that they play an explanatory
role. The public-public argument assumes that all privacy rights are waived when one
enters a public area. Hence it presupposes the frictionless extension of greater and
greater observation. It seems plausible because we may be thinking of space privacy,
which is certainly waived when we enter most public places. However, body/mental
privacy, personal information privacy, communication privacy and personal privacy
are not necessarily given up by leaving one’s private spaces. Also, De George’s
treatment of privacy shows that it is a degree concept. He does not use this
description, but his argumentation in a number of places implies it. If privacy can be
held in different degrees, it can be valued in different degrees, and hence can be
violated in different degrees. The public-public argument fails because it uses the
same justificatory coin to buy more and more of one’s privacy without offering further
reasons proportionate to the loss the individual suffers.
De George’s treatment of intellectual property provides another example of his

methodology. He challenges the appropriateness of copyright to software programs by
showing that the analogy between computer programs, on the one hand, and literary
and artistic works, on the other, is not strong enough to support the full extension of
copyright protection (mainly its duration) to programs. Computers are more like lists
of instructions than literary expressions. Defenders of copyright protection argue the
value of the particular expression within a program, but, De George argues, people do
not buy programs for their literary value. They normally buy object code, not source
code, and hence cannot read the programs. Moreover, I think anyone familiar with
programming would agree that one could change the names of all objects in their
source code without diminishing the program’s value as an intellectual work or
product.
De George also argues against patent protection on the grounds that software
innovations are so rapid that that the twenty-year duration of patent protection should
be unnecessary. Also, deciding what aspect of the program can be patented is a
problem. Is it the look and feel of the interface, the architecture of the program, or
the specific instructions of any and every subroutine? De George calls for a form of
protection especially crafted for software instead of stretching protections designed for
different sorts of intellectual property. He does not tell us what shape such protection
should take, but his analysis shows that the grounds for such protection should be
reasonable compensation for those who work to develop and market software
products and fairness to them for investing time, money and effort in such
504
development. What we need to do, therefore, is look at the special circumstances of

software development to determine what is needed to afford such protection.
Like producers of books, developers are threatened by the unauthorized copying of

their software, especially since it is so easy to do. But De George is right in thinking
that protection against such copying should not span decades. Software changes
quickly and versions older than a few years are usually obsolete. Reverse engineering
is also a threat, especially in the form of decompiling code and adopting it into a
competing product for sale. However, it should be sufficient to ban particular forms of
reverse engineering without using the strong protection afforded by patents, which
prevents anyone but the first recognized inventor of the innovation from using it
without a license. If someone writes a similar program with similar functions to an
existing program, but does not steal code from a competitor, it seems unreasonable to
deprive him or her of the benefit of his or her work. De George is correct in thinking
that this would stifle competition. Also, it is hard to see how society would be
benefited. Software developers do not face the same kinds of cost barriers that
producers of pharmaceuticals or manufacturers of computer hardware do, so they do
not need the incentive of barring competition to recoup massive investments. They
just need to have reasonable assurance that no one can compete with them by
stealing their code instead of developing their own.
De George puts a lot of weight on MACIT and TI as characterizations of kinds of errors

in thinking that can be corrected through argumentation. However, it is not clear that
each is a single kind of error or that it occurs on a single level. In fact, it is not clear
that they always describe errors in thinking. For example, in the case of TI, it is not
always clear where an error is committed when considering the beliefs of agents. In
the practical context, TI is less like a kind of error than a decision-theoretic dilemma
in which individually rational choices lead to an “irrational” outcome. Individual
developers of a technology are often in the position of seeing an opportunity to create
something with clear benefits that also carries with it a hard to define risk of being
considered unethical at a later time. There may be no clear norms in place against the
technology, the implementation they envision may be unproblematic in itself, and
coordination with other groups or individuals for the sake of clarifying the issues may
not be feasible. The only answer is for society to establish clear norms in advance.
Hence, if there is an error here, it may be in found in the reflective belief that this
cannot be done, not in the context-dependent, individual decision making.
Here the connection between De George’s argument against TI and his methodology is
evident. If TI, as a general claim about technological development, is false, then moral
norms can be established in advance of the emergence and deployment of information
technologies. For moral norms to be identified, the sort of conceptual analysis De
George describes will have to succeed in identifying problems and providing answers.
It is probably a bit optimistic to think that this can be done without relying on the
reactive, empirical approach of assessing the extent of moral damage done.
Nonetheless, De George provides a good example of how to do such conceptual work
in the service of identifying and clarifying such issues.
505
This book is certainly a contribution to the field. It is well placed as part of a series on
the foundations of business ethics and should prove essential reading to scholars in
computer and information ethics, as well as related fields.
2003.10.01
Robert Figueroa, Sandra Harding (eds.)
Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophy of Science and Technology
Figueroa, Robert and Harding, Sandra (eds.), Science and Other Cultures: Issues in
Philosophy of Science and Technology, Routledge, 2003, 265pp, $27.95 (pbk), ISBN
0415939925.
Reviewed by Peter J. Taylor , University of Massachusetts, Boston
This collection of essays leaves me at once jealous, refreshed, and wanting more.
Jealous because the collection represents the work of scholars who have moved
against the mainstream in their field—philosophy of science—yet had an opportunity
to do so with funding and endorsement. The essays represent one product from a
National Science Foundation grant to the American Philosophical Association in 2000-1
for a series of summer research projects and conference presentations on diversity
issues in the philosophy of science.
Refreshed by the topics addressed by these philosophers, which are diverse and
grounded in fascinating, real-world cases. Let me review the range: controversy over
the use of placebos in a clinical trial of low-cost prevention of mother-to-baby HIV
transmission in poor countries; the inquiry of Blanche in Barbara Neely’s murder
mystery as an illustration of the epistemological importance of standpoint; the
significance of multicultural and postcolonial science studies; the conquest-era Nahuatl
ideal of inquiry as one of humans maintaining balance as they walk on the “slippery
surface” of the earth; comparison of the socio-cultural nexus around use of transgenic
seeds versus agro-ecological methods; official versus local views about monitoring of
medical after-effects of Marshall Islanders’ exposure to H-bomb tests; appropriate
legal frameworks for preventing discrimination based on genetic information;
application of MacIntyre’s idea of “flourishing” in thinking about people with mental
disabilities; the blurred boundary between cosmetic surgery and restoration of
functioning; socioeconomic and ethnic biases in standard tests for mental flexibility;
geographical considerations as prior to any biological claims about race; circularity in
explanation of the exceptionality of homosexual behavior in animals; and Japan and
Japanese scholars providing alternative, non-Western models of modernization and
globalization as they interact with specific national contexts.
Wanting more books of such variety, which will contribute to a culture of science
criticism as vigorous as we already expect for art, literature, movies, architecture—
preferably even more vigorous. After all, science is a dominant institution in Western
societies and in their interactions with other cultures. Surely it ought to be strong
506
enough to accommodate a diversity of commentary and angles on the process and

products of science.
Yet there was another sense in which the book left me wanting more. I wanted the
wonderful material in the essays to yield more philosophical resources to help in
engaging with sciences. My interpretation is that these (and other) philosophers of
science need to explore the diverse practical considerations that arise when scientists
and other social agents attempt to modify specific instances of knowledge making. Let
me use one essay to illustrate this interpretation and then comment briefly on some
other essays in this light.
Robert Crease’s essay, “Fallout,” centers on medical research conducted for forty
years by the Brookhaven National Laboratory to assess the health of Marshall
Islanders after their exposure to radiation from the 1954 hydrogen bomb test in the
Bikini atoll. During the 1960s the annual check-ups by the researchers expanded to
include some (unauthorized) provision of health care, but the brief visits did not
attempt to bridge the language or cultural gap or bring benefits back to the Islanders.
During the 1970s a conjunction of factors engendered resistance to the research.
Thyroid abnormalities emerged; Japanese antinuclear activists made contact with local
politicians, Peace Corps volunteers encouraged the Islanders to demand better
medical treatment, and the idea gained currency that the original exposure and
subsequent lack of medical care was deliberate with Marshall Islanders as scientific
guinea pigs. By 1996 an official declaration of the Marshallese parliament declared
that “diabetes and cataracts” were “irrefutably presumed to be the result of the
Nuclear Testing Program” (cited on p. 121). No credibility was given to research that
refuted that connection and attributed the diabetes to the increasing dependence on
canned foods that has followed the relocations of the Islanders since the tests. Crease
laments the skepticism about the medical research: “social activism in [a] volatile
situation”. . . means that science “ceas[es] to inform practical action” (p. 122). To
avoid this, Western researchers, he implies, need to be especially careful “in
interactions with socially vulnerable populations and colonial environments” (p. 122).
I agree with Crease’s call for cultural sensitivity, but want to argue that more mileage
for philosophy of science can be gained from this case. Lest there be any confusion, I
accept the idea that knowledge claims have varying degrees of fidelity to the
situations they purport to explain. Suppose, however, we focus on what makes the
knowledge claims significant to those that develop them. From this angle, the
attitudes to science from both sides depend on a social context. The Marshallese come
to believe that they are being used for medical research without their benefit, and the
Brookhaven scientists believed that the results of regular monitoring provide useful
insight into the health effects of radiation. The Marshallese belief became significant
for them when they began to assert a political voice and develop a movement
narrative to respond to the power of the American State. The Brookhaven researchers,
funded by that State, took the significance of increased scientific knowledge for
granted—along the lines of the long-standing, enlightenment narrative they could
believe that discovering more about observable phenomena is worthwhile in itself. In
practice, however, this does not always turn out to be the case. For example, in the
United States Goldberger’s investigations during the 1910s linked the disease pellagra
to deficiencies in diet. Nothing was made of Goldberger’s correct findings and they did
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not play a part in the eradication of the disease. Pellagra disappeared in the United
States when the diets of the poor improved during the New Deal and mobilization for
World War II. Indeed, until the Federal government assumed such a role in job
creation and income support, it was difficult for most people to envisage what
significance could be given to Goldberger’s findings (Chase 1977).
An important question is opened up once we acknowledge that the significance of

knowledge depends on the social context in which it is produced: What would it take
in practice to change the knowledge of either side? Consider the admirable work done
by an ecologist, Jan Naidu, who, Crease tells us, was hired in 1978 to monitor the
environment and dietary exposure of the Marshallese. Naidu lived with the
Marshallese, learned their language, hosted nightly conversations, earned their
respect, and gradually developed ways of explaining the relevant science. If this had
continued, the views of both sides about what knowledge was significant could well
have developed into a position of mutual appreciation. But after one year the funds for
Naidu’s work were redirected into a program that produced colorful brochures. What
would it have taken in practice for the Marshallese to influence funding decisions that
occur far away from the Islands? It is unusual but not unknown for marginal people to
bridge such gaps, to make the distant part of their scope and get involved in shaping
the direction of scientific research. But reconstruction of science from the margins is
never a simple matter; there is always a complex confluence of processes and
conjunction of circumstances involved (e.g., Arditti 1999, 69ff).
It might seem more straightforward for the Brookhaven researchers to have secured
the continuation of Naidu’s work. Yet they were involved in establishing general
results about radiation biology; they had built careers, skills, collaborations, access to
publishing outlets, and so on that supported this emphasis. It would not have been a
simple matter for them to shift their priorities to assist the Marshallese make local
knowledge (Harvey 1995). Individual will, morality, political commitment, or ideology
may help motivate scientists to attempt to change knowledge that has social
significance, but in my experience—first as an agricultural and environmental
scientist, then in analyzing and interpreting the dynamics of science—there are always
diverse practical considerations that have to be addressed (Taylor 1995).
Crease ends by appealing to readers’ desire to “do justice to the memory of the
exposed victims” and concluding that we need to ensure that scientifically produced
knowledge is not prevented from informing social action. If we take this as a starting
point, the challenge would be to identify multiple points at which scientists could in
practice engage differently to try to modify the knowledge produced and its
significance. Whether any specific modifications are achievable depends on the
position and resources of the specific scientists as they enter into negotiations with
other relevant social agents. Shedding light on this may seem to be a project for
sociology of science, but the interaction of multiple, diverse conditions also raises
difficult issues about causality and explanation that invite more attention from
philosophers (see appendices of Taylor 1995).
Politics of science is also implied by the idea of teasing out multiple points of
engagement, for it suggests that many different agents are jointly and partially
responsible for making change. The authors in this collection foster a different view of
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democratizing science, one that relies on oppositions or differences among cultures.

Lacey’s essay, for example, highlights the divide between agriculture employing
genetically modified varieties and traditional agro-ecological strategies. Challenging
the hegemonic “socio-cultural nexus” that gives a value to transgenic seeds is a
matter of “solidarity with poor people whose movements are struggling to recover and
enhance their personal and communal agency” (p. 102). Lacey’s dichotomy, however,
leaves no place conceptually or politically for other alternatives, such as plant-
breeding research that uses conventional (pre-genetic engineering) methods to
generate new varieties suitable for specific regional or local environmental conditions.
From personal experience in such agricultural research, I learned that securing
support involves negotiations among scientists and other social agents that are more
complicated than what can be captured by notions of hegemony and solidarity.
There are rhetorical and expository advantages in philosophers using readily

demarcated oppositions, which this collection’s authors tend to do when they
juxtapose dominant science with knowledge claims of the colonized, subaltern,
marginal, or insurgent. The result is a valuable countercurrent to mainstream
philosophy of science, but I think that deeper challenges would flow from building
analyses that address the wider arenas of practice in which scientific ideas become
significant. In this vein, Maffie’s account of the Nahuatl’s ideal of inquiry might have
considered not only the ideal, but their actual practice—after all, most Western
scientists advocate the scientific method, but this provides little insight into what
questions get asked and what answers get taken up. Hood’s account of “activist
science” might have played down the ethical dilemmas of using placebos in clinical
trials and instead focused on how to develop the multitude of non-clinical
interventions needed to stem HIV transmission and address its ramifications on
livelihoods and human relationships. Wylie might have been less satisfied with the
murder-mystery analogy she used to illustrate the importance of standpoint—in real
life, there is not necessarily a “who done it?” to arrive at by the end. Moreover,
oppression can occlude people’s intelligence; it does not always—the success of the
fictional Blanche notwithstanding--guarantee insight unavailable from other
standpoints. And so on.
Of course, it is too easy to make suggestions about what authors might have written.
Let me affirm my earlier assessment that Science and Other Cultures enriches an
emerging culture of science criticism. At the same time, the book leaves me
wondering what it would take in practice for questions about engaging with science to
find a firmer place in either mainstream or alternative cultures of philosophy of
science.
References
Arditti, R. (1999). Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plazo de Mayo and the
Disappeared Children of Argentina. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Chase, A. (1977). “False Correlations = Real Deaths,” pp. 201-225 in The Legacy of
Malthus. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
509
Harvey, D. (1995). “Militant particularism and global ambition: The conceptual politics
of place, space, and environment in the work of Raymond Williams.” Social Text 42:
69-98.
Taylor, P. J. (1995). “Building on construction: An exploration of heterogeneous

constructionism, using an analogy from psychology and a sketch from socio-economic
modeling.” Perspectives on Science 3(1): 66-98.
510
2003.10.02
Gregory McCulloch
The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism
McCulloch, Gregory, The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism,

Routledge, 2003, 176pp, $25.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415266238.
Reviewed by Anne Jaap Jacobson , University of Houston
Some philosophy books and articles concentrate on the arguments for or against a
certain position, while others place their initial emphasis more on the conditions of
adequacy on any theory in the relevant area. The Life of the Mind: An Essay on
Phenomenological Externalism takes the latter approach. While it is markedly engaged
with traditional arguments in Anglophone philosophy of mind, it also works with
overall guiding principles for a theory of mind. The result is a valuable book, one to be
read with profit both by professors and students.
The Life of the Mind presents a reconceptualization of the place of the mind in the
world. In a far-reaching way it challenges the binary oppositions that many recent
continental thinkers have found in Anglophone philosophy, such as that between mind
and world. The project is surprisingly articulated in the context of a literature that
seemingly enacts a disembodied philosophy. Recent preoccupation with merely
possible worlds, as in the Twin Earth literature on which McCulloch draws extensively,
hardly seems to lead to an increased sense of one’s embodiedness.
The structure of the book is misleadingly simple. Hence, readers unfamiliar with
McCulloch’s work should take Tim Crane’s valuable introduction seriously; it serves as
an excellent guide to the rest of the book. As Crane tells us, a possible epigraph for
the book is the demand articulated by John McDowell that the ’life of the mind should
not be made unrecognizable’ when one theorizes about content. Restoring to us a
recognizable life of the mind is a central task of the book. For McCulloch
recognizability of the right sort requires three very general theses (p. 1):
• phenomenology, the idea that it is like something to have a mind;

• externalism, the idea that ’the mind ain’t in the head’;
• the epistemological Real Distinction, the idea that knowledge of minds as such
is different in kind from that delivered by the physical science.
The impact of the book comes as all three are put together. However, the specific
claims on behalf of each and their interrelations in the theory make all the difference.
Thus, for example, McCulloch argues for extending the usual understanding (at least
in Anglophone philosophy) of “phenomenological” to include non-sensory, intentional
states and activities such as thinking. Nor is this simply a technical point; in
conjunction with his other claims, it will enable him to present a picture of our
intentionality as phenomenologically available to others in our actions.
511
In addition, the externalism is no mere externalism. It becomes “behavior-embracing

mentalism,” a view that holds that activities of the body are the primary bearers of
content (p. 12). With it the author is in the company of other recent authors such as
Hubert Dreyfus, Susan Hurley, Alva Noe, Shaun Gallagher and Sean Kelly, all of whom
are working to construct alternatives to a scientific Cartesianism.
McCulloch’s behavior-embracing mentalism is based on both Putnamian and

Wittgensteinian considerations. There have been some complaints in the literature
about his attempts to wed the two very different philosophers. To put it in terms
employed above, Twin Earth conclusions about content and essence seem to fall very
short of the picture of embeddedness that McCulloch wants. He is unrepentant,
though he addresses critically the central alternatives to the Wittgensteinian
conclusions he draws from Twin Earth cases.
McCulloch also argues for an epistemological Real Distinction. The ’epistemological’ is

in contrast to a Cartesian ontological real distinction between mind and body. The
ontological distinction is in some ways McCulloch’s stalking horse; it provides the
underpinnings of many of the erroneous ways of thinking that the book seeks to
defeat. He maintains that the two real distinctions are fully separable; one can have
either without the other.
According to the epistemological real distinction, in Collingwood’s version,

understanding another as a thinker requires re-enactment of his or her thoughts. “ …
[T]hinking, conceiving, doubting and so on can occur as conscious (and shareable)
phenomena” (p. 101). In knowing what others think we do get their thoughts into our
minds; an account of the neurons’ activity is not even a good candidate for a
substitute.
The three principle ingredients of McCulloch’s philosophy of mind – phenomenology,

externalism and the epistemological Real Distinction - are put fairly quickly into place
in what McCulloch deems a more constructive first part of the book. The picture that
one gets is clearly that of a self-in-the-world, one for which the usual bifurcations of
mind and world, self and other, and sensory and cognitive either disappear or are
reconceived into a much mitigated form. This is valuable philosophy.
Though some recent philosophers, notably Paul Churchland, are criticized in the first
half of the book, the second half of the book is, according to the author, more
destructive. It offers critiques of various opposing pictures. Some of the usual
suspects appear. Quine’s behaviorism is rejected; Davidson’s views are modified. Twin
Earth is revisited; Fodor and McGinn’s views are subjected to acute scrutiny. More
particularly, a bipartism, which underpins much that is said these days about the
computational theory of mind (with its peripheral inputs and outputs), is tellingly
contrasted with a tripartism that is characterized as originating with Frege. One
cannot, it is claimed, understand thinking in terms merely of mental representation
and causal relations; there is something “in between” which is sought in the Fregean
conception of intentionality. McCulloch distinguishes importantly between behavior-as-
phenomenologically-available (i.e., behavior-as-interpreted) and behavior as bodily
movements. Our actions are phenomenologically available to others and our
512
intentionality is manifest. Tripartism allows us to accommodate such features of our

lives.
The book is not perfect. In McDowell style, it takes scepticism as the principle
motivating factor in the development of Cartesianism. Today many, and quite likely
most, historians of the period disagree. The skeptical stance of the First Meditation,
with the accompanying detachment of the mind from the body, is not the principle
motivation for the Cartesian picture of the mind, as Margaret Wilson, among others,
has effectively argued. In his Synopsis to the Meditations, Descartes tells us that the
First Meditation is to help detach the mind from the senses, but his motivation for
wanting to do that is independent of the skeptical method he employs. He is rather, as
his reference to the senses indicates, concerned with understanding the place of mind
in a world newly revealed to be bereft of many of the traditional sensory qualities.
Unlike many of the recent authors resisting Cartesianism (and cited above), McCulloch
does not strongly take account of recent empirical research. This is a book in analytic
philosophy, as that has been understood over the last half century. At times the
remoteness from the empirical is jarring. For example, he tells us, “… [I]f you could
undergo a medical operation to equip you with sonar, then you would notice that the
world seems different on account of a new sensitivity to certain properties, and you
would acquire the corresponding concepts in the process” (p. 34). Given the lack of
success some people have with cochlear implants, this claim looks just wrong. There
is elaborate processing that goes on between sensory input and concepts, and,
equally, success can depend on ways in which one grows and develops. McCulloch’s
work presents foundational reasons for taking the body seriously, and it might itself
have been enriched by taking the empirical more seriously, controversial though that
thought is among Wittgensteinians.
Finally, the argumentation too often accepts conclusions too easily. For example, the
important Real Distinction is based partly on observations that in a particular case
“there is no reason to suppose that learning the physical breakdown of these humans
will give us their concepts . . . “. Sympathetic as one may be to the conclusion, the
premises seem infected by a parochial appeal to what we now can recognize as
reasons.
The flaws are small, however, compared to the foundational nature of the inquiry. The
physicalist isolationism of the brain-in-the-vat scenario is thoroughly put to rest.
Though itself not much engaged with recent empirical research, the book can provide
a framework for understanding both important contributions of, and important
restrictions on, the conclusions to be drawn from, such research. As the blurbs say,
the book is distinctive and original, ambitious and bold. It is clear that those who
knew Gregory McCulloch will miss him greatly. I would expect that those who did not
meet him before his early death will, like me, wish they had had the chance.
2003.10.03
Wayne A. Davis
Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Cambridge
513
Davis, Wayne A., Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Cambridge, 2002, 654pp,
$90.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521555132.
Reviewed by A.P. Martinich , University of Texas, Austin
Davis’s project in this book is to give an ’expression theory of meaning,’ according to

which “words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas,
and that meaning consists in their expression” (1). For Davis, a convention is “a
regularity that is socially useful, self-perpetuating, and arbitrary” (206). He is inspired
by David Lewis’s analysis except that Davis argues that conventions do not include an
equilibrium condition and do not require mutual knowledge (225-8). The meaning of a
word is determined by an idea, which is an object, but it is “unnecessary and
inaccurate to refer to ideas . . . as meanings.” The “word ’red’ in English … does not
mean the idea of red” (130). Meanings are no objects; they are properties of words
(130-4, 556-7). Thus, Frege’s theory of Sinne is mistaken because it makes meanings
objects. Davis holds an ideational but not a referential theory of meaning.
Since ideas are parts of thoughts, one naturally expects, and Davis provides, a
“theory of thought” (1). Thoughts are robustly existent and not amenable to reduction
to behavior or physical states. Thoughts are “structured events, a particular kind of
mental representation,” of which ideas are parts (6, 59). Declarative thoughts are
propositions, that is, thoughts expressed by declarative sentences (344-5). There are
also interrogative thoughts, expressed by interrogative sentences, and presumably
imperative thoughts expressed by imperative sentences. This linguistic-thought
correlation is not one-one, however, because there are thoughts that exist in no
language and synonymous sentences express the same one thought.
Davis accepts the existence of thoughts on the basis of introspection and their
predictive value (5). He declares himself part of the semantic tradition of Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke. This raises an obvious problem. The views of
Hobbes and Locke, at least, are susceptible to arguments against the existence of
private languages. The argument applies to theories like that of Locke, for whom the
meaning of a word is an idea that is known only by the speaker. This has the
immediate consequence that no one could ever know what anyone else meant. Also,
Locke’s theory requires a comparison between the speaker’s ideas and the hearer’s
ideas; but a comparison can be carried out only if one has access to both objects.
Davis gives what I think is a perfunctory and unacceptable answer to the private
language argument (571-2). However, Davis’s view is not immediately as subject to
this refutation because his ideas are not Lockean ideas but concepts, objects that
need not be uniquely possessed. Concepts are event-types, not tokens. Nonetheless,
his theory is in trouble because he seems to hold that people have no cognitive
possession of these concepts. What each person possesses is the occurrence of a
token of a concept. Concepts have properties in virtue of these individual events (see
also 533). So it is not clear how anyone could know that they have the same concept
as someone else. Davis thinks that this is known in virtue of “what we observe” about
the behavior of people. But then this raises the question of whether the concepts
514
themselves do any work. Although Davis devotes two hundred pages to saying what
ideas are, he realizes that someone might still not be clear about what ideas consist of
(518). To the question, “what can we say about the intrinsic nature of the basic or
atomic ideas?,” Davis answers, “At present, nothing definite” (518; cf. 421). This is
worrisome to many, but not to Davis. Thoughts certainly exist, because, as
mentioned, they are introspectible, and they are explanatory. Whether Davis is
ultimately right, he gives a powerful defense of them against such criticisms as that
the use of thoughts leads to a regress or circularity (586-98). His defense against
Quine’s arguments is not, I think, successful. He seems to think that it is the idea of
synonymy (sameness-of-meaning) itself and not the questionableness of the idea of
meaning that drives Quine’s skepticism.
Davis’s theory is Gricean, or, as he prefers, “neo-Gricean.” The key problem with
Grice’s theory, Davis claims, is “its emphasis on audience-directed intentions” (7). He
says that “Grice and his closest followers wrongly assumed . . . that meaning is the
attempt to communicate” (7; see also 63, 67). It is not easy to decide whether Davis
is right about this or not. I think he would be right if he restricted his claim in this
way: Grice wrongly assumed that all speaker meaning is the attempt to communicate.
Davis is right that some sayings are expressions of thoughts, not beliefs, and not
attempts to induce beliefs or actions. However, I think that the basic cases of utterer’s
meaning are parts of attempts to communicate, instances of communication that do
not rely on convention or rule-governed utterances. I think the cases of talking to
babies and animals and other noncommunicative instances of meaning something are
etiolated cases and should not be handled by the central part of a theory of meaning.
In contrast, Davis thinks these cases are on all fours with the basic cases and wants
the same analysis to handle them. What a theorist does may be more a matter of
decision than good practice. It depends on when and where a philosopher likes or
prefers to start pushing, stretching, and cutting the linguistic phenomena.
Sometimes this leads to apparently startling claims. For example, he says that a
person “may communicate something to A without even trying to” (89); but with more
explanation, it becomes hardly startling at all. He distinguishes communicating with
(which does require trying) from communicating to (which does not). Something
important underlies this procedure. Davis takes cases and uses of words that other
philosophers would consider derivative or figurative, respectively, as on all fours with
paradigmatic cases. For example, Searle holds that (paradigmatic) promising requires
(1) that the addressee wants the speaker to do what the speaker promises to do and
(2) that promises must be about a future action. Davis, I suspect, would deny (1) and
(2) on the grounds that one might say, “I promise to ruin you” and “I promise that he
was there.” This methodological difference results in substantially different analyses of
important concepts such as communicating, meaning, and saying.
Like most philosophers, Davis studies the philosophy of language because he is at

least as interested in the nature of thought and other mental phenomena. Although
“thought” and “idea” are mentioned only in the titles of the latter two of the four parts
of his book, discussions of thoughts and idea pervade the first two parts: (1) Semantic
Acts and Intentions, (2) Languages and Semantics Acts, (3) Thoughts and Ideas, and
(4) Ideational Theories of Meaning.
515
Davis seems to me to make some unfortunate choices in his technical terminology.

For example, he defines “S expresses the belief that p” as “S either means [says] or
implies that p,” even though it seems that what is implied is implicit and hence not
expressed (cf. 59). His use of quotation marks is also unfortunate. He uses them both
to mention words and sentences, to indicate the meanings of words and sentences
(not to mention as corner quotes), thoughts and the contents of thoughts. This has
the consequence that his sentence,
(A) The meaning of “bachelor” is “unmarried adult male”
is ambiguous between
The meaning of “bachelor” is (the same as the meaning of the phrase) “unmarried
adult male.”
and
The meaning of “bachelor” is unmarried adult male.
And one encounters sentences like, “One expression meaning ’the idea “water”’ is
obviously ’the idea “water”’“ (559). Davis in effect uses quotation marks in the same
way that Russell did in “On Denoting” and that led to some of the confusions of his
notorious Grey’s Elegy argument. Davis’s convention is surprising because there were
so many other obvious ones that would have obviated the problem. He could have
used single quotation marks or italics to denote meanings following formulas of the
form, “w means.” This would have followed the convention of many philosophers who
use italics to show that words are denoting thoughts.
Concerning the foundations of meaning, Davis distinguishes three kinds of meaning

that are apparently relevant to semantics:
(1)Boulders mean glacial activity (Evidential Meaning).
(2) “Boulder” means “large rounded stone block.” (Word Meaning)
(3) By “boulder,” S means “kilo of cocaine.” (Speaker Meaning) (19)
Philosophers seem to disagree about “means” in (1). Some, like Davis, think that
boulders merely give one good reason to think that there was glacial activity in the
area. Others, like Grice and I, think that some kind of necessitation holds between the
subject and direct object. If (1) is true, then it must be the case that there was glacial
activity in the location of the boulders; but evidence does not induce necessity. If
boulders were brought to the site by a truck dumping waste, then (1) is false even
though the boulders remain the evidence that justified the assertion of (1) and the
statement, “The boulders are the evidence for glacial activity” is true (cf. 45). A
different example may make this clearer. Suppose the police catch Jones holding a
bloody knife and standing over Smith’s bleeding body. The evidence remains evidence
even if Jones is innocent of the stabbing and acquitted. Evidence points to a state of
affairs but does not guarantee that it is a fact. Contrarily, “Those spots mean measles”
516
is false if it turns out that the spotted person does not have measles. Davis is wrong
to say that Grice’s “natural meaning” is evidential meaning. For Grice, if “means” has
the sense of natural meaning, then “x means that p” entails that p.
Concerning (3), Davis does not distinguish between speakers and utterers. For Grice,
speaker-meaning depends in part on word meaning, which depends on utterers’
meaning. What a speaker says depends on the meaning of his words, to which the
speaker defers; but what an utterer means does not necessarily depend on the
meanings of words since utterer’s meaning does not require the existence of language
(cf. 38-9, 231). Davis’s use of “speaker meaning” also causes a possible confusion. He
holds that word meaning depends on speaker meaning, and speaker meaning is “more
fundamental” than word meaning (21). However, he also holds that “word meaning
does not depend on speaker meaning” (268), and “Speaker meaning and word
meaning are logically independent” (168). What he means is that word meaning does
not depend on “any particular speaker’s intentions [meaning], but rather on
conventional usage and the rules of language, which are determined by the intentions
of prior speakers of the language (25, 44). But he could have made this clearer with
some changes in terminology. A clearer terminology would also have obviated some
mistakes, I think: for example, his criticism of Searle’s famous example of the
American soldier with little knowledge of German (54).
Crucial to Davis’s theory is the difference between expressing a thought without

committing oneself to its truth, as when one supposes something for a proof or
contributes to a brainstorming session, and expressing a belief. It is the difference
between thinking a thought or proposition and believing it. He indicates the difference
as follows:
(4) By (the expression) e, S meant “p.” (Cogitative Speaker Meaning)
(5) By (saying or doing) e, S meant that p. (Cognitive Speaker Meaning)
(Again, I don’t think Davis’s use of quotation marks is suggestive.) This distinction is
important, but occasionally he tries to have it do too much. For example, he thinks
that fiction characteristically uses only cogitative meaning (27, 82, 190). But that is
not right because either authors or narrators often express cognitive speaker meaning
(“I swear the story I will tell you is true in all of its particulars”).
Although one of the two key concepts in his book is that of thought, I think Davis does
not explain it as clearly as he might have. For example, analogous to beliefs, two
aspects of thought need to be distinguished: there is the propositional attitude and
the content of the propositional attitude. He might have reserved the word “thinking”
(and “believing”) for the propositional attitude, and “thought” (and “belief”) for the
content. But he uses “thought” for both. I also think it is wrong or at least odd to hold
that propositions are event-types. That snow is white is a proposition, but it is not an
event, because events involve changes. Perhaps Davis thinks that propositions are
event-types because he thinks of their tokens as the events of thinking of a
proposition; but this would involve a confusion of the content of the thought with the
process of thinking it.
517
Since metaphysics is once again in full bloom, most readers will not be disconcerted to
distinguish thoughts from the contents of thoughts, not to mention the objects of
thoughts. To me it is Scotistic; and I’m not convinced that language or cognition
requires such an elaborate metaphysical bureaucracy, as Davis develops. Some of the
concepts seem to do no work: “the content of the thought that the sky is blue is that
the sky is blue” (478).
In a book as long as Davis’s, it would have been easy for the reader to forget what
has gone before or to be unable to dip into just those parts of the book that are of
particular interest, if Davis had not been so careful at various points to give the reader
clear, summaries of what he had already discussed.
Davis’s command of the scholarly literature is impressive. Not only is his bibliography
almost 40 pages of small type, he often gives a brief history of the scholarly work on a
topic by listing chronologically at appropriate places in the exposition the major
treatments of that topic, sometimes one hundred items or so. Although no one can
now read everything that is published on the philosophy of language, Davis’s reading
is prodigious and admirable. His knowledge is also not restricted to the last one
hundred years. He often brings in the views of Aristotle, Ockham, Hobbes, Leibniz,
and others, and not in a heavy-handed or gratuitous way. Also, his topics range so
broadly that they include discussions of Esperanto and American Sign Language as
part of his clarification of such concepts as natural languages, living languages, dead
languages, and even still born languages (267-72).
Davis’s writing is generally clear and each page is chock full of arguments for his view,
most of which seem to me to be right or very close to right. If my review is largely
critical and filled with reservations, it is only because Davis’s book is so rich in
controversial material.
2003.10.04
Samuel Freeman (ed.)
The Cambridge Companion to Rawls
Freeman, Samuel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, Cambridge University

Press, 2003, 585pp, $24.00 (pbk), ISBN: 0521657067.
Reviewed by Wilfried Hinsch , University of the Saarland
The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, will prove a

supportive and reliable companion to all those who turn to moral or political
philosophy and feel the need to study the work of John Rawls more carefully. Freeman
has brought together articles from more than a dozen distinguished contemporary
philosophers dealing with different aspects of Rawls’ work. The late Burton Dreben
contributes a lecture on the significance of Rawls’ idea of a distinctively ’political’
liberalism, and Thomas Nagel gives a well-balanced account of Rawls’ somewhat
518
exceptional place in the tradition of liberalism. Joshua Cohen and Amy Gutman discuss
Rawls’ contribution to democratic theory. Their articles are complemented by Frank
Michelman’s essay on Rawls’ understanding of the ’constitutional essentials’ and the
role of judicial review in liberal democracies. Philippe van Parijs and Norman Daniels
explain the details of social and economic justice and Rawls’ idea of democratic
equality. Thomas Scanlon writes instructively on the original position and public
justification from a reflective equilibrium perspective, and there is another article on
public reason by Charles Larmore. Onora O’Neill explains the differences between
Kantian and Rawlsian constructivism in moral and political theory, and Samuel
Sheffler highlights some structural affinities between Rawls’ theory of justice and
utilitarian theories. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift defend Rawls against the most
prominent communitarian charges but not against all. They “hope to put an end to
those misunderstandings and misattributions that continue to divert intellectual
attention from the real and important issues raised by the communitarian critique”
(Companion 461). And last but certainly not least, Martha Nussbaum gives an
unexpectedly sympathetic account of how much of the prevailing feminist criticism can
be accommodated within the framework of justice as fairness. Freeman himself
contributes not only a long and helpful introduction, summarizing the main lines of
argument in . Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples, but also
an instructive article on the congruence of the right and the good. For good measure,
the volume also contains a highly informative index of the kind we already learned to
appreciate in the books of John Rawls. What is missing, though, are one or two
articles on The Law of Peoples. Freeman has a brief account of the book in his
“Introduction,” but given the philosophical and political relevance of Rawls’
understanding of international justice, this is hardly enough. Rather sooner than later,
this shortcoming should be mended in one of the future editions of the Companion,
which should also give Mard Rawls due credit for the wonderful painting of her
husband shown on the cover.
It is, however, not just the index that makes the Companion a worthy tribute to both
the philosopher and teacher John Rawls. It is above all the quality of the
contributions. Indeed, it is quite impressive to see distinguished philosophers—many
of them have been Rawls’ students at Harvard—restraining their more personal
ambitions and leaving aside their own projects and favorite arguments to give Rawls
center stage and to explain his moral and political philosophy. The contributors almost
never make their points as competing critiques. They write in the spirit of sympathetic
interpreters who carefully avoid easy criticism and eagerly clarify common
misunderstandings. All contributors also take great care to substantiate their
interpretive statements with quotes and ample references. For readers who are
already well acquainted with Rawls’ work, this may occasionally (but not often) seem
somewhat pedestrian, but students and new readers, the primary addressees of the
Companion, will certainly appreciate it. They are given reliable information from first-
rate sources and have the additional benefit of seeing distinguished philosophers
exercise the virtues of hermeneutic modesty and carefulness. The Companion clearly
exemplifies what John Rawls himself thought about the adequate treatment of great
philosophical works. In the words of Barbara Herman, “At the centre of his thought
about this history [of moral philosophy] is the idea that in the great texts of our
tradition we find the efforts of the best minds to come to terms with many of the
hardest questions of how we have to live our lives. Whatever their flaws, superficial
criticism of these texts is always to be resisted (my emphasis).”1
519
Rawls’ work occupies a special place in the liberal tradition of political thought that
goes back to Locke, Kant, and Mill. . Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism did not
only contribute to a general revival of liberal thinking in the last decades. Both works
profoundly changed the ways in which we conceive of liberalism and its tenets today.
As Nagel points out, Rawls developed the philosophical and methodological
foundations of liberalism further than any other philosopher before him, and he
broadened the scope of liberal ambitions in unprecedented ways. The two perhaps
most important innovations of Rawls are (1) the integration of ideas of social and
economic equality into a liberal theory of justice and (2) the exposition of a
distinctively ’political’ liberalism that no longer relies on contested substantive values
of personal autonomy and individual flourishing but on a more general idea of respect
for persons and their ways of life. Both innovations carry Rawlsian liberalism way
beyond its classical forerunners and account in Nagel’s view for much of the
controversy aroused by . Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism.
Political liberalism may be characterized as the attempt to justify principles of political

justice and legitimacy solely on the basis of premises that cannot be reasonably
rejected. It is an exercise of accommodation aimed at finding a shared basis of values
and principles for public political argument and decision making that proves to be
acceptable at least to all reasonable people in a free society irrespective of whether
their more specific views are liberal or non-liberal, religious or nonreligious, the only
constraint being that certain minimal standards of ’reasonableness’ be fulfilled. The
aim is to identify what Rawls has called the ’public reason’ of a liberal and democratic
society.
Many liberals, however, are not yet persuaded by a liberalism that is not only
compatible with a certain range of broadly liberal positions but also with all kinds of
non-liberal views and even, as Nagel has it, with “religious orthodoxy”. Many non-
liberals, on the other hand, seem to shun ’political liberalism’ as simply another
attempt to pursue liberal partisan politics under the camouflage of an allegedly all-
embracing universalism. Still, it seems hard to deny that the very liberal idea of
legitimate government presupposes at least the possibility of reasonable consent on
the side of the governed. And this requirement of reasonable consent has a price, as
Frank Michelman states in his article (Companion 414), namely not to invoke
reasonably contested conceptions of the good (and the right), be they liberal or non-
liberal, in the public justification of norms that apply to all citizens whatever their
particular moral or religious viewpoints and doctrines.
From a more traditional liberal vantage point, Rawls’ second principle of justice
(requiring fair equality of opportunity for all and maximal social and economic
advantages for the least privileged members of society) may appear much closer to
European socialism than to classical liberalism with its more narrowly defined focus on
personal freedom and political equality. Moreover, the kind of redistribution needed in
order to achieve social justice in the Rawlsian sense can be effected only by a much
more developed and powerful state than would seem acceptable to those liberals who,
following Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill, see strong reasons to impose
rather strict limits on the range of legitimate state action. Facing the challenge of
classical liberalism, the strength of the Rawlsian position is, as Nagel points out, that
it does not simply combine ideas of individual liberty, from the liberal tradition, and
520
social equality, from the socialist tradition, in a somewhat novel way. Rather, Rawls
constructed an argument (represented in the model construction of the ’original
position’) by means of which specific requirements of social and economic equality are
derived from exactly the same set of premises (ideas of moral agency and the equality
of persons) from which the equal personal and political liberties of the more confined
classical liberalism derive.
Next to liberalism, the tradition of democratic thought provides a natural background

for an assessment of Rawls’ moral and political philosophy. Cohen and Gutman
maintain in their articles that even though Rawls says little about specific democratic
institutions in . Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, both works contain
significant contributions to democratic theory. . Theory of Justice presents a theory of
justice the principles of which not only prescribe a constitutional democratic regime,
but also yield a set of rather specific normative standards for the appraisal of existing
political institutions and programs. Both Gutman and Cohen emphasize that what
democracy is ultimately about is not majority rule but political equality, which in turn
is based on the more fundamental idea of the citizen as a moral person with the
capacities necessary for an autonomous life and fair social cooperation.
It is the idea of the citizen as a moral person with equal claims to participate in the
political processes of collective decision making that gives rise to the problem of public
justification that Rawls addressed in Political Liberalism and that motivated his
conception of ’public reason.’ According to Rawls, whenever ’constitutional essentials’
or matters of basic justice are at stake, the use of political power needs to be justified
in terms of reasons that are capable of being publicly recognized by citizens who hold
incompatible comprehensive views about the ultimate ends and values of life.
Both Gutman and Cohen have misgivings as to whether Rawls gave sufficient
attention to the fact that reasonable disagreement is ubiquitous and not confined to
the realm of comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines. There is no denying
that reasonable disagreement permeates the domain of the political—witness the
public debates in liberal democracies about the more specific requirements of social
justice and about the appropriate constitutional regulations concerning pornography,
abortion, or same-sex-marriages. But there is no reason, either, to assume that Rawls
intended to deny the obvious when he developed his conception of public reason and
maintained that important constitutional issues be settled on the basis of reasons
acceptable to all citizen whatever their more comprehensive religious or philosophical
views. In Political Liberalism Rawls says: “One difficulty is that public reason often
allows more than one reasonable answer to any particular question . . . public reason
does not ask us to accept the very same principles of justice . . . . We should sincerely
think that our view of the matter is based on political values everyone can reasonably
be expected to endorse . . . . A vote can be held on a fundamental question as on any
other; and if the question is debated by appeal to political values and citizens vote
their sincere opinion, the ideal is sustained” (Companion 241). It is noteworthy, then,
how little inclined Gutman and Cohen seem to be to spell out the consequences of
reasonable disagreement in politics as regards the relationship between democracy
and justice. Cohen’s article simply ends with an enigmatic note and an open question:
“. . . we cannot expect the most reasonable democratic society to be founded on an
agreement about justice. So how might the most reasonable conception of justice
521
[i.e., justice as fairness] be achieved in the most reasonable form of democracy?”

(Companion 131)
Gutman has a handful of proposals for how to deal with reasonable disagreement in
politics: for instance, show respect to those who reasonably oppose your political
opinions, offer civic friendship, be ready to meet halfway. They are all well taken and
refer to important virtues of a democratic citizenry. Still, Gutman’s precepts of civility
clearly miss an important point. It is agreed that reasonable disagreement in politics is
often a disagreement about how to spell out the requirements of political or social
justice in a given case. Now, from a contractualist point of view, reasonable
disagreement about justice means that to the extent that there is disagreement, the
content of justice is indeterminate. If we think of principles of justice as principles that
cannot be reasonably rejected, this is a conclusion we can hardly avoid. It follows
that, whenever we run into a reasonable disagreement, there are no determinate
requirements of justice. Justice ceases to show us the way. Still, we may need a
collectively binding decision. It is a platitude of political thinking that the need of
binding regulations by far exceeds what can be achieved consensually, and this is true
even if we talk about ideal or hypothetical consensus and confine ourselves to the
constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.
Let us say, in ideal theory a reasonable disagreement is a disagreement with regard to

which none of the parties involved is subject to rational or moral criticism. The claims
put forth by the parties are not based on recognizably false or incomplete information,
or on unsound reasoning, and they do not grossly violate agreed upon requirements of
reciprocity and impartiality. In such a situation a further exchange of arguments
would not seem to be of much help if we assume that effective arguments always
involve some kind of rational or moral criticism. Still, a continuation of public
deliberation may be worth the effort. The parties may find a compromise or an
arrangement that, at least for the time being, settles their dispute. But, of course, we
know that it is not always possible to strike a deal or to find a compromise.
Sometimes all arguments have been exchanged, all deals have been made, and all
compromises have been tried, and still there may be no agreement on how to
proceed. In such a situation . non-argumentative collective decision-making procedure
may be the only way to find a collectively binding decision that can be publicly
justified even though it cannot be justified in terms of reasons or arguments that
would find universal approval. In a democracy this would often be a vote in
accordance with majority rule. Indeed, given the principle of political equality and
given the well-known properties of majority rule as a decision-making procedure
(giving equal weight to all votes, neutrality toward all alternatives), majority rule may
be just what we need in order to deal in a fair and publicly justifiable way with
reasonable disagreements in politics. Hence, given the fact of reasonable
disagreements in the political domain, principles of justice—for instance the principles
of justice as fairness—have to be complemented by principles of procedural decision
making capable of resolving disagreements that cannot be resolved by public reason.
What we need in addition to a substantive theory of political justice, then, is a theory
of procedural legitimacy, explaining the appropriate non-argumentative ways of
resolving reasonable disagreements in a society of free and equal citizens.
522
Gutman takes a kind of critical stance toward majority rule and claims, in line with
what Rawls says in . Theory of Justice, that like other decision-making rules
(unanimity, plurality vote) it has a merely instrumental value as a mechanism of
imperfect procedural justice for the achievement of just outcomes as judged by
independent standards. Given the fact of a reasonable pluralism in politics, however,
this cannot be the final word. In cases of reasonable disagreement about questions of
political justice, there simply is no independent standard of what a just outcome
should look like. Therefore, we need a non-argumentative (formal) decision-making
rule to resolve the impasse resulting from this indeterminacy. It is at this point that an
element of pure procedural legitimacy (rather than pure procedural justice) comes in.
As a collective decision-making rule that gives equal weight to all votes and is neutral
toward all alternatives (including the status quo), majority rule may prove to be the
best way to guide us where the principles of justice are silent. Hence if properly
spelled out, Rawls’ idea of a distinctively political liberalism in which the ideas of
liberal legitimacy and reasonable disagreement figure so prominently may be even
more hospitable to democratic thinking than Cohen and Gutman seem willing to
concede.
Endnotes
1. John Rawls’ Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. by Barbara Herman,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. 2000, Herman’s introduction, p. xi.
523
2003.10.05
Claudia Card
The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil
Card, Claudia, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Oxford University Press, 2002,
284pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195145089.
This book is the second major philosophical treatise in recent years that focuses on
problems to which very great evils give rise. The first was Horrendous Evils and the
Goodness of God by Marilyn McCord Adams. According to her definition, horrendous
evils are “evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which)
constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their
inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole” (M.M.Adams, Horrendous
Evils and the Goodness of God, Cornell University Pres, 1999, p. 26). Her examples of
horrendous evils include such things as the rape of a woman and axing off of her
arms, parental incest, and the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas.
Horrendous evils are of special philosophical concern to Adams because of the threat
they pose to the rationality of belief in God’s goodness. Adopting R.M. Chisholm’s
distinction between balancing off and defeating evils, she lays down two conditions on
divine goodness: “At a minimum, God’s goodness to human individuals would require
that God guarantee each a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole by
balancing off serious evils. To value the individual qua person, God would have to go
further to defeat any horrendous evil in which she/he participated by giving it positive
meaning through organic unity with a great enough good within the context of his/her
life” (Adams, p. 31). The formidable task Adams sets for herself is to work out a
logically possible scenario in which God satisfies both of these conditions.
Claudia Card undertakes a contrasting project in secular moral philosophy in the book
under review here. As she tells the reader in its introductory chapter, her interest in
evil is motivated by atrocities that have occurred during her own lifetime. They include
the following events: “the Holocaust; the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg,
and Dresden; the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians during
World War II; the My Lai massacre; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; genocides in
Rwanda, Burundi, and East Timor; the killing fields of Cambodia; the rape/death
camps of the former Yugoslavia; and the threat to life on our planet posed by
environmental poisoning, global warming, and the destruction of rain forests and
other natural habitats” (p. 8). Card takes atrocities to be paradigms of evil “(1)
because they are uncontroversially evil, (2) because they deserve priority of attention
(more than philosophers have given them so far), and (3) because the core features
of evils tend to be writ large in the case of atrocities, making them easier to identify
and appreciate” (p. 9). Constrained by this choice of paradigms, she identifies the
core features of her conception of evil in the following definition: “An evil is harm that
is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2) culpably inflicted (or tolerated,
524
aggravated, or maintained), and that (3) deprives, or seriously risks depriving, others
of the basics that are necessary to make a life possible and tolerable or decent (or to
make a death decent)” (p. 16). In the definition’s third condition, tolerability is to be
understood as a normative concept. For Card, a tolerable life “is at least minimally
worth living for its own sake and from the standpoint of the being whose life it is, not
just as a means to the ends of others” (p.16). Card does not devote much space to
reflection upon the theological problems of evil, though she does at one point claim
that her account of evil “makes sense of what is morally at stake in the theological
problem of evil, but without solving it and without presupposing either theism or
atheism” (p. 13). However, she sometimes fails to adhere strictly to the theological
neutrality advertised in this claim. Thus, for example, she remarks that “natural
events—earthquakes, fires, floods—not brought about by or preventable by moral
agency are not evils” (p.5). But earthquakes, fires, and floods are preventable by the
moral agency of the omnipotent deity of traditional theism, and so this remark does
presuppose atheism. Card asserts: “My theory presupposes no such agency, but can
be adapted for those who do” (p.5). We may grant that she is correct in claiming that
her theory does not presuppose that there is a divine moral agent, which is to say it
does not presuppose theism, and so would need to be adapted for those who do
presuppose the existence of God. The remark I have quoted, however, does
presuppose that there is no divine moral agent, which is to say it does presuppose
atheism. The slip represented by this departure from Card’s advertised theological
neutrality is, in my opinion, only a minor blemish on the book.
Despite large differences between their projects, the views of Adams and Card
converge on two significant points. First, the classes of evils they target for special
philosophical attention overlap to a considerable extent. The destruction of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki by atomic weapons is reckoned by Adams to be a horrendous evil and is
counted by Card as an atrocity. Second, as their respective definitions indicate, they
are interested in the evils in the targeted class at least in part because of the threat
they pose to the overall value of the lives that include them. For Adams, horrendous
evils provide prima facie justification for doubt that the lives of those who are
participants in them can on the whole be great goods to them. And for Card, evils
deprive, or seriously risk depriving, those harmed by them of things needed to make
their lives good enough to be worth living from their point of view. This convergence
suggests that a detailed comparison of Adams and Card on evil would yield some
interesting philosophical fruits. Unfortunately, a book review is no place for such a
comparison. So in the remainder of this review I shall restrict my attention to Card’s
discussion of evil.
After having outlined her account of evil in the book’s introduction, Card devotes three
chapters to defending it against challenges that might be mounted from other
philosophical perspectives. Chapter 2 is a critique of Nietzsche’s denial of evil. Card
considers it unfortunate that “Nietzsche’s approach to evil in his Genealogy of Morality
has been successful, in secular circles, in effecting a general shift away from questions
about evildoing and evil practices to psychological questions about why people have
wanted to use the concept of evil, what hidden agendas they may have, and how they
can thereby manipulate others” (p.23). In order to counteract this shift, she attempts
to separate the insights from the prejudices in Nietzsche’s discussion of evil. She holds
that his important insights include the claims that judgments of evil come chiefly from
525
a victim’s perspective, and that they are often accompanied by a distorting hatred,
and perhaps also the view that such hatred is often rooted in fear of impotence. But
she criticizes “the beliefs (1) that the perspectives of the weak are more distorted and
yield more dishonest judgments than those of the powerful, (2) that powerful
perpetrators are not likely to hate their victims, and (3) that hatred underlies
judgments of evil” (p. 29). It seems to me that Card is on the right track in insisting
that our attitude toward the perspective of victims of evil should be neither
systematically dismissive nor sentimentally credulous.
Chapter 3 argues that the definition of evil Card advocates can successfully steer a
course between the extremes of utilitarianism and stoicism because it takes into
account both the culpability of perpetrators of evil and the harm they do to their
victims. Her main complaint about utilitarianism in its classic Benthamite form is that
it fails “to place independent value on agents and on willing (agency), that is, value
independent of the suffering or harm one’s choices may cause” (p.51). This is, of
course, a well-known objection, but its familiarity does not undermine its power.
Following Martha Nussbaum, Card takes the fundamental idea of stoicism to be “that
good character, good willing, or good agency is the most important value (for extreme
stoics, the only thing that is truly good), along with the corollary that it is a mistake to
place great value on contingencies, on what eludes or exceeds our control (for
extreme stoics, that such things have no true value at all but are ’indifferent’)” (p.
66). She protests against the tendency of stoicism, thus understood, to devalue
suffering and compassionate responses to it as well as its neglect of the possibility of
harms that do damage to the will itself. This objection too is familiar, but none the
worse on that account. I am inclined to quibble with Card over a small point she
brings up in this chapter. She lumps together ascetics and the severely depressed,
conjecturing that they “may subject or expose themselves to such hardships because
they have ceased to care, or think they deserve no better, or perhaps to prove they
can do it” (p.63). No doubt there are ascetics who satisfy this uncharitable
description. But clearly many religious ascetics subject themselves to real hardship
because they judge that doing so puts them on the best path toward very great
spiritual goods. Card’s failure to see this is one of the very few instances of lack of
sympathetic imagination to be found in this book.
In Chapter 4, Card grapples with the account of radical evil set forth in Kant’s Religion
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. As she understands it, Kant’s theory is
basically stoic in its values because “it implies that the sufferings of victims are just
incidental, not part of what makes evil deeds evil” (p.73). She is also dissatisfied with
Kant’s claim that it is, and must remain, inexplicable to us why anyone freely adopts
the evil principle of subordinating the incentive of duty to self-interest as a supreme
maxim of conduct. If there is a mystery here, Card urges, it “should be expressed as
why any of us makes supreme whatever principle we make supreme, whether the
moral law, self-interest, or even something else” (p.78). She then goes on to propose
a solution to Kant’s mystery that invokes Christine Korsgaard’s notions of self-
conceptions and practical identities and the idea of attachment to important persons
and their internalized representations (IPIRs) found in the work of the psychologist
Lorna Smith Benjamin. In Benjamin’s approach to treatment of personality disorders,
the patient is helped to become aware of attachment to one or more IPIRs. And as
Card puts it, “once aware, the patient can choose to endorse the attachment, try to
526
disengage, or negotiate a different relationship with the IPIR” (p.91). It seems to me,
however, that Benjamin’s ideas shift the Kantian mystery to another place without
actually solving it. If the choice between endorsing and trying to disengage from an
IPIR is as fundamental as the choice to adopt a supreme principle of conduct, and if it
is a libertarian free choice for which the patient is accountable, as Kant insists such
fundamental choices are, then it will be inexplicable to us why patients make the
choices they do, whether endorsement, endeavoring to disengage, or renegotiation.
After bringing her account of evil into conversation with some of its philosophical
rivals, Card turns in Chapter 5 to what I take to be the chief practical payoff she
hopes to derive from highlighting evil in her moral theorizing. She proceeds to argue
that “feminists and other political activists working for social justice or liberation
should give priority to addressing evils over the goal of eliminating unjust inequalities”
(p. 96). In the course of her discussion of feminism in this chapter, she makes the
interesting point that American feminists have been divided between those who, in the
majority tradition of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, have given
priority to achieving equal rights and those who, in the minority tradition of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman, give priority to ending oppression. There is
obvious poetic justice in Card’s advocacy for the stance on priority of the minority
tradition, since she is Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison. The most difficult question she tackles in this chapter is
explaining what it means to prioritize evils; it cannot sensibly mean neglecting lesser
injustices until all greater evils have been eliminated. Card’s view is that “prioritizing
evils does mean, at least, making sure that significant attention is devoted to them,
whatever else we do” (p. 106). In the course of spelling out this view, she points to
helpful analogies with giving priority to family over work and with prioritizing research
over teaching, which is an example that is sure to be salient for university professors.
The next two chapters are devoted to case studies of atrocities. Chapter 6 covers war
rape and the related evil of wartime sexual slavery. Card’s discussion emphasizes and
tries to explain the fact that until recently these evils have been relatively invisible.
She argues that several factors contribute to the explanation, including death, shame,
and fear on the part of the victims and the insensitivity produced by distance on the
part of those most responsible for sexual slavery in such instances as the “comfort
women” enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II. Card reports in this
chapter some of her fantasies about penalties for rape, which she envisages being
inflicted primarily in wartime. Her principal fantasy penalty, “motivated by a vision of
something like poetic justice in which the crime bounces back on the perpetrator, was
compulsory transsexual surgery, that is, removal of the penis and testicles and
construction of a vagina, accompanied by whatever treatments may be advisable for
the sake only of bodily health and integrity” (p. 133). A modification of this fantasy
penalty, which she aptly calls “Bobbitizing,” would be “to eliminate construction of the
vagina and stop after removing the penis, producing more of an ’it’ than a
transsexual” (p.134). Card makes it clear, let me hasten to add, that she is opposed
to the legal enactment of such fantasies, but she says she would not support their
realization “because their humane administration would require the participation of
health care professionals” (p.135). I confess to some ambivalence about the role
these fantasies play in Card’s larger argument. On the one hand, it may be necessary
to say something shocking to get some men to appreciate how seriously Card thinks
527
the evil of raping women should be taken. On the other, the cruelty of the fantasized
punishment, which Card herself acknowledges in passing, may result in the sort of
rhetorical overkill that is counterproductive. And, in any event, she is surely right
when she goes on to observe that “the fact that there are also male victims of sexual
abuse in war shows that these fantasies and the currently popular understanding of
war rape suffer from too narrow a view of the nature and motivation of the crime”
(p.135).
Card also resorts to shock tactics in her discussion of the evils of domestic violence in
Chapter 7, which bears the provocative title “Terrorism in the Home.” She tells the
reader that this phrase is meant “to refer to spousal battering and ongoing sexual
abuse of children” (p. 143). The chapter’s main thesis is this: “The relations defined
by marriage and motherhood trap victims of terrorism in the home. They pose serious
obstacles to escape by granting perpetrators enforceable intimate access to victims
and extensive control over the knowledge and access of others” (p.140). And, in the
book’s introduction, Card candidly asserts that the chapter “argues for the abolition of
marriage and motherhood (as institutions), in favor of alternative forms of durable
intimate partnerships and child rearing” (p.25). An alternative to the legal institution
of marriage that Card finds attractive would involve contracts in which “intimate
partners committed for a specified length of time, to be determined and renewable
only by mutual consent” (p.157). She also advocates more distributed forms of child
rearing, drawing for inspiration on the idea of revolutionary parenting proposed by bell
hooks and thoughts about compensated caregiving expressed by Eva Feder Kittay.
I think Card performs a valuable service in focusing attention on the way in which the
institutions of marriage and motherhood raises issues in what she describes as the
ethics of access and in bringing her abolitionist proposals to the table for discussion. I
am willing to grant that current institutions of marriage and motherhood make it
harder to detect and stop spousal and child abuse than might otherwise be the case,
precisely because of the way in which they restrict access to what transpires within
family units. But she does not address the full range of issues that would need to be
confronted before a rational decision to adopt some alternative to currently existing
institutions could be reached. In the case of marriage, some of them involve religion.
For a large fraction of the people of the world, marriage is an institution primarily
governed by religious norms and not by the rules of civil law. Such people will
reasonably insist that the legal institution of marriage should reinforce or, at least, not
seriously undermine the religious institution, and many of them would regard an
attempt to impose on them alternative arrangements that reflect Card’s secular liberal
values as an intolerable infringement on their religious freedom. As the example of
Hindus and Muslims in India shows, permitting different systems of family law for
different religious communities in a pluralistic society respects religious liberty but is
likely to exacerbate political conflict. Card’s discussion simply fails to consider the
political costs or feasibility of moving to alternative legal forms of intimate
partnership. In the case of motherhood, empirical questions about the consequences
of more distributed forms of child rearing demand attention. We do not know what
impact they would have on the lives of people brought up under them. Card does not
assess the evidence from studies, for example, of Israeli kibbutzim. In short, her
argument in this chapter gives us only an opening statement in what would have to be
a complex and difficult debate.
528
Even if we were to prioritize addressing evils, it is unlikely that we would succeed in

eliminating them. Hence moral reflection on how to live with evils is important, and
Card takes up this topic in the next two chapters. Chapter 8 concentrates on the
moral powers of victims, which she identifies as blame and forgiveness. Her treatment
of forgiveness seems to me to be particularly insightful. Card operates with a
conception of ideal interpersonal forgiveness in which “there is a change of heart in
the offended party regarding the offender, which consists of (1) a renunciation of
hostility out of (2) a charitable or compassionate concern for the (perceived) offender;
(3) an acceptance of the offender’s apology and contrition; (4) a remission of
punishment, if any, over which the forgiver has authority or control; and (5) an offer
to renew relationship (to ’start over’) or accept the other as a (possible) friend or
associate” (p.174). She devotes a good deal of effort to reflecting on cases that depart
from the ideal in various ways. When she considers unrepentant offenders, for
example, she concludes that “there comes a time when it is good for victims to let go
of resentment, even if there is no basis for compassion for the offender” (p. 175). I
agree that it is good for victims eventually to endeavor to free themselves from
resenting unrepentant evildoers, when this will help them move beyond being
obsessively preoccupied with injuries they have suffered. When this happens,
however, victims try to rid themselves of resentment wholly for their own sake, not
for the sake of the reconciliation with those who have harmed them, and so I wonder
whether such acts should be counted as cases of forgiveness. As Card points out, a
reason for considering such efforts to be genuine forgiveness, at least when they
succeed, is that they involve a real change of heart and include “renunciation of
something that underlies blaming, namely, the sense of injury and the hostilities that
go with it” (p. 177). But a reason to the contrary is that they need involve no
transaction with, or even communication to, the evildoer.
Chapter 9 is devoted to the moral obligations and burdens of perpetrators; it pays

particular attention to the obligation of gratitude for forgiveness or mercy and the
burden of guilt. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, Card sees value in
feelings of guilt because they can serve to motivate reparative activities. She develops
her defense of guilt by means of an interesting comparison with shame. Some of the
contrasts between them that she views as morally significant are these: “Guilt
includes the idea of owing, whereas shame includes that of dishonor or humiliation. In
expiating guilt, we seek respect and reacceptance. In removing shame, we seek
esteem or admiration” (p. 206). With some differences between guilt and shame thus
delineated, Card goes on to claim that “an advantage of guilt is that when it is not
excessive or obsessive, the confessions, apologies, restitution, and reparations that it
tends to motivate can remove cause for continued resentment” (p. 207). By contrast,
the achievements that remove shame may create grounds for admiration and yet do
nothing to eliminate grounds for resentment or to make reparations for harms done. A
controversial aspect of Card’s treatment of guilt is her endorsement of certain forms of
what is often called “blameless guilt.” An example is survivor guilt, which she defines
as “a form of guilt over involuntary unjust enrichment, that is, involuntarily benefiting
from injustices done to others by others” (p. 202). Card agrees with Herbert Morris
that survivor guilt so defined is a kind of blameless guilt that is not irrational.
Apparently she holds this view because she thinks that survivor guilt can motivate
those who suffer from it to aid the victims of the injustice that produced the benefits
or the victims of similar injustices or to struggle against the kind of injustice involved
in producing the benefits. A white descendent of slave owners who felt guilty on
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account of benefits derived from injustices his ancestors visited upon their black
slaves would satisfy Card’s definition of survivor guilt. And she seems to be committed
to accepting examples of this sort, since she speaks in this context of knowing “at
least one philosopher descended from slave owners who has devoted much of his
career to work on the concept of social justice” (p.203). No doubt it is good that
Card’s acquaintance has worked on the concept of social justice. But if he was
motivated by feelings of guilt over benefiting from the injustices done by his slave-
owning ancestors, then I would say he was irrationally motivated. After all, he is not
blameworthy or guilty in the matter of those injustices and presumably knows this to
be the case, and so it would be irrational for him to feel guilty over them. Those who
think otherwise might do well to reflect that they would almost certainly not exist
unless some of the great evils of human history had taken place. Feeling guilty over
their own existence would thus seem to be not irrational for them if they consider
their existence to be a benefit they enjoy.
The book’s final chapter discusses what Card calls “diabolical evil.” As she indicates,
her conception of diabolical evil differs from Kant’s view that it is wrongdoing for its
own sake and is not possible for humans. She invites us to “regard diabolical evil as
knowingly and culpably seeking others’ moral corruption, putting them into situations
where in order to survive they must, by their own moral choices, risk their own moral
deterioration or moral death” (pp. 211-212). She argues that evil of this sort is aptly
thought of as diabolical because Satan is traditionally depicted as a moral corrupter.
Following Primo Levi, who called areas in Hitler’s death camps where prisoners were
given limited authority over other prisoners “the gray zone,” Card contends that the
deliberate creation of gray zones exemplifies diabolical evil if anything does. She also
suggests that instances of the so-called “Stockholm Syndrome,” notably the case of
Patricia Hearst and her SLA captors, involve the creation of gray zones. Interestingly,
Card at one point entertains the idea that gray zones mark limits to our capacity to
understand and evaluate human affairs in moral terms. She asks: “Are there really
always right and wrong choices in such situations (where voluntariness is not the
issue)? Are there always responsible or excusable choices (where rightness or
wrongness is not the issue)? Is there always such a thing as the agent’s real motive?
Does our moral vocabulary fail to mark distinctions that we should want to make, to
capture the way things really are? Would gray zones cease to be gray, if we had more
fine-tuned concepts? Or are some gray zones ineliminable” (p. 226)? However, as if to
provide an antidote to the moral paralysis that might be induced by such poignant but
skeptical questions, Card goes on to affirm that “people who have lived under the
extreme stress of gray zones have often not abandoned the categories of morality,
nor ceased responding in moral ways emotionally, nor ceased entering relationships of
trust and holding one another responsible” (p. 227). I consider the evils Card views as
diabolical particularly unnerving. It has long seemed to me a comforting feature of the
perspectives on morality offered by Kant and Stoicism that there is deep inside us an
inner citadel, to borrow a phrase from the title of Pierre Hadot’s commentary on
Marcus Aurelius, to which we can retreat in order to preserve the core of our moral
personalities from the assaults of evil. Reflection on diabolical evil in Card’s sense
makes it painfully clear that the comfort to be derived from the thought of such an
inner citadel being invulnerable from corruption may to a large extent be built on
illusion.
530
In this review, I have discussed the main themes of Card’s book at considerable
length, and mentioned some of my own reactions to her views, in order to convey to
readers an idea of how rich and stimulating the book is. What I cannot communicate
in a review is a sense of the nuances of her judgments about a large array of
particular cases of evil. One of the book’s great strengths is the detailed knowledge
she has of the victims of many kinds of evil. This expertise is, of course, the result of
a lot of hard work. As Card notes in her preface, she has at the University of
Wisconsin been involved for quite some time in the interdisciplinary areas of Women’s
Studies, where she has done teaching and research on lesbian issues and
Environmental Studies, and she has recently begun teaching in the area of Jewish
Studies. The book amply confirms the view that these areas of study are valuable
sources of data for moral reflection.
In a blurb on the dust jacket of the book, Susan Wolf is quoted as saying that Card’s
discussion is “genuinely wise.” Ordinarily, I would advise taking the puffery on a
book’s dust jacket with a grain of salt. But, in this case, I think no exaggeration at all
is involved in the claim that the book contains a good deal of wisdom.
In sum, this is an excellent book. I recommend it very highly to any philosopher who
is interested in the topic of evil. Even those who share my reluctance to follow Card in
setting aside theological concerns when we think about evil can learn a lot from
reading it. Doing so may serve to reinforce our sense there is little hope of complete
liberation from evils in Card’s sense until the coming of the Kingdom of God. In the
meantime, however, it appears that God has given humanity the vocation of
struggling against these evils, and Card’s book can help to guide us to where our
efforts are most urgently needed.
2003.10.06
Laurence Paul Hemming
Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice
Hemming, Laurence Paul, Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice,

University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 327pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0268030588.
Reviewed by Jean Grondin , Universite de Montreal
Engaging, refreshingly independent and at times personal, this book is an honest

attempt by a theologian to take up Heidegger’s challenge to theology: how can a
thinker who, despite his own Catholic origins, professes a philosophical atheism and
emphatically reiterates Nietzsche’s word «God is dead» have anything to say to
theologians? While most sympathetic to Heidegger’s thinking and his relevance for the
voice of faith, Hemming’s study remains largely free of any «Heideggerizing» (and
when it does seem to indulge, the author thankfully apologizes!). Its interest is not
biographical either: the nature, evolution and roots of Heidegger’s personal faith (or
personal atheism), if there is one to speak of, are not his topic. The author is only
531
concerned with its theological consequences. His basic thesis is straightforward, but
by no means original: Heidegger’s atheism, the author argues, must be read as a
destruction of the metaphysical God, that is nothing but an idol of subjectivity, and as
an opening up of the place for a more divine God. The last words of the book speak of
a «holy atheism», from which contemporary theology could only benefit. It is thus an
atheism ad majorem Dei gloriam. The «refusal» of a theological voice alluded to in the
subtitle refers mainly to Heidegger’s own reluctance to give more precise contours to
the more «divine» God he is aiming at or hoping for. Whereas one could read this
refusal as a criticism of Heidegger, faulting him, say, for failing to engage more
directly with theology (or the Scriptures themselves) in his quest for a more divine
God, the author more often than not maintains that Heidegger’s silence is, on the
whole, the best way to speak of this unspeakable God. To say what this divine God
would amount to would be to fall back into an objectifying and thus ontological notion
of God. In other words, the refusal is more eloquent than anything that can be said
about God (but what about Revelation?). It is the author’s conviction that Heidegger’s
negative theology can best be described as mystical, in continuity with St. Gregory of
Nissa, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart (282).
This is all very defensible, but it has (often!) been said before. Unfortunately, the
author is quite dismissive of his predecessors, often claiming, with enormous
pretension, that «theological appropriations of Heidegger’s have never opened up
Heidegger’s thought as a question» (21). For anyone familiar with the theological
reception of Heidegger’s work, this claim is outrageous. It is quite inexplicable that the
author does not evoke the work of such well-known theologians as Gerhard Ebeling,
Eberhard Jüngel or J. B. Lotz, to name but a few, nor the landmark study on the
relations between philosophy and theology in the work of Heidegger published by
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert in 1974. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find any
theology after Heidegger that has not been provoked by his critique of the
metaphysical God and his longing for a holier one. The only theologian discussed at
any length is Jean-Luc Marion, but here again, the discussion remains
uncompromising, accusing Marion of a host of misunderstandings: contrary to what
Marion would allege, Heidegger never thought of God as a being (257) and Marion
never escapes a notion of being that remains metaphysical (265). Nevertheless,
Hemming remains far more indebted to Marion than he acknowledges in that the
holier God he is seeking for is not a last ontological principle, and not even a God that
exists (?), but a God of love, that requires self-abandoning (and a sacrificium
intellectus?). The author hints that this must lead to a (renewed?) Christology, but it
remains, understandably, unarticulated in this book. Not a surprising outcome on the
part of a Christian theologian, to say the least, but what support can such a
Christology find in the work of Heidegger?
The interest of the book lies in its reading of Heidegger’s entire opus out of this silent
quest for a non-metaphysical God, taking up, as it were, Gadamer’s indication that
Heidegger remained a «God-seeker» throughout his life. This leads the author to a
useful relativization of the idea of a caesura, allegedly marked by the turn or Kehre,
between two phases in Heidegger’s thinking. «What if there is no later Heidegger?»,
challengingly asks the author (3). This relativization is also not revolutionary. Authors
such as Gadamer and Kisiel have already spoken of a «Kehre before the Kehre». But if
there is a Kehre before the Kehre, what is this turn away from, asks Hemming (75)?
532
He reads the Kehre as a turn away from metaphysics and its objectifying
understanding of God. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this Kehre must
not be understood as a biographical turn on Heidegger’s path. Hence his (again)
dismissive attitude towards the interpretations of Löwith and Richardson, who would
have wrongfully constructed the notion of a biographical Kehre, failing to understand
its true historical import. The author gives the impression that this notion of a
biographical conversion has been created by Löwith and Richardson and reiterated by
every interpreter ever since. The truth of the matter is that it is Heidegger himself
who gave credence to this idea of a biographical turn when he wrote and published his
Letter on Humanism. It was not invented by Löwith. Furthermore, it has also long
been registered in the literature that the Kehre must primarily be understood as a
historical turn «in Being». It would have been more felicitous if the author had focused
on the recently published texts of the GA that shed new light on the Kehre, among
others: the Beiträge, of course, but also the Bremen lectures of 1949 [GA 79], and the
small text entitled Rückweg und Kehre [Return and Turn] published in the Jahresgabe
der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft in the year 2000. There is perhaps more insight to
be gained from these texts, which Heidegger left unpublished (and in part, certainly,
because of their theological undertones), than from a rehash of the alleged
misunderstandings of Löwith and Richardson in the 50s and 60s.
In sum, if the author has every right to read Heidegger’s «pious» atheism as a
«vibrant pedagogy», i.e. as a self-criticism for theologians, it fails to do justice to and
acknowledge the critical and diversified reception it has already enjoyed in the
theology and philosophy of the last century.
2003.10.07
H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross
Moral Writings and The Right and the Good
Prichard, H.A., Moral Writings, edited by Jim MacAdam, Oxford University Press, 2002,
272pp, $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199250197.
Ross, W.D., The Right and the Good, edited by Philip Stratton-Lake, Oxford University
Press, 2002, 220pp, $18.95(pbk), ISBN 0199252653.
Reviewed by Mark Timmons, University of Memphis
The philosophical story of H. A. Prichard (1871-1947) and W. D. Ross (1877-1971) is

the story of intuitionism’s progress from the rather bare bones statement of this
metaethical position that we find in Prichard to the fairly well fleshed out version that
we find in Ross. Prichard and Ross were members of the same circle of Oxford
intuitionists (led by Prichard) that included H. W. B. Joseph, E. F. Carritt, and John
Laird, a circle that perhaps represents the glory days of British intuitionism. Prichard
published remarkably little: only two lectures and two papers in moral philosophy, the
most famous being his widely anthologized paper, ’Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a
533
Mistake?’, published in 1912. However Prichard is reported to have written much that
he never published--writings that were nevertheless circulated among his colleagues
over whom he apparently had substantial philosophical influence. In his short preface
to The Right and the Good, for instance, Ross claims that his ’main obligation’ is to
Prichard who, he says, wrote ’exhaustive comments and criticisms’ on the book in
manuscript form. Intuitionism’s progress was interrupted in the mid-1930s with the
publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic in which Ayer, in opposition to
intuitionism, defended a version of emotivism, signaling noncognitivism’s initial volley
that was followed by wide-spread rejection of intuitionism. (However, intuitionism
continued to find some able supporters such as A. C. Ewing in the 1940s.) But at the
start of the twenty-first century we now see a revival of intuitionism in the work of
Robert Audi,1 Russ Shafer-Landau,2 and in a new collection of essays, Ethical
Intuitionism: Re-evaluations (Oxford, 2002), edited by Philip Stratton-Lake. So the
story of intuitionism’s progress continues and this is what makes these new editions of
Prichard’s moral writings and Ross’s book particularly welcome.
A collection of Prichard’s writings in moral philosophy was edited by Ross and

published posthumously in 1949 under the title Moral Obligation, and in 1968 a new
edition of these writings, Moral Obligation and Duty and Interest, with a preface by J.
O. Urmson, was published--the extended title referring to the addition of Prichard’s
previously unpublished 1928 inaugural lecture as White’s Professor of Philosophy. As
part of their recent ’British Moral Philosophers’ series, Oxford University Press has
published an expanded version of the 1968 collection, now entitled, Moral Writings,
edited by Jim MacAdam, that includes four never before published essays plus two
letters, one of them from Cook Wilson to Prichard in 1904 and the other from Prichard
to Ross in 1932. The new essays include ’Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the
Metaphysics of Morals’, six (edited) chapters of a never completed book, which
MacAdam has entitled ’Manuscript on Morals’, and two short essays, ’What is the Basis
of Moral Obligation?’ and ’A Conflict of Duties’. In addition, this volume includes the
editors’ introductions from the two earlier editions, a new introduction by MacAdam, a
complete list of Prichard’s published work, the editor’s notes on the ’new’ writings, and
a bibliography divided into reviews of Prichard’s books, obituaries, and secondary
literature.
Also in the same series from Oxford is a new edition of Ross’s 1930 The Right and the
Good with an excellent introductory overview of Ross’s views by editor Philip Stratton-
Lake and a bibliography divided into works by Ross, works about Ross, and works on
ethical intuitionism. Stratton-Lake has also added a set of editor’s notes to the text,
many of them usefully referring to changes in Ross’s view that were reflected in his
1939 The Foundations of Ethics.
I will make a few remarks about the new Prichard material and then proceed to
consider, in order, key metaethical views of Prichard and Ross in order to mark what I
see as progress.
In ’What is the Basis of Obligation’ (undated), Prichard’s main aim is to defend the
claim that the question mentioned in the title ’admits of no general answer’, a view he
never gave up and a constant theme in many of his other moral writings. The 1928
essay, ’A Conflict of Duties’ is interesting because in it Prichard modifies his former
534
view about conflicts of duty (about which I will say more below). The most significant
addition is ’Manuscript on Morals’ which, although including discussions that overlap
with some of Prichard’s other moral writings, contains discussions of Sidgwick’s views
and an illuminating account of how intuitionism can plausibly incorporate the idea that
the consequences of actions are morally relevant. Cook Wilson’s 1904 letter is
included because in it he briefly explains his ’instinctive aversion to the very
expression ’theory of knowledge’ (284), which, as MacAdam notes, was influential in
Prichard’s case against moral theory. Prichard, in his 1932 letter to Ross, asks Ross to
forgive him for ’taking a sort of pot shot at something in your book’ (286). But the pot
shot turns out to be a significant worry about the inclusion of beneficence as a basic
prima facie duty, which Prichard thinks also applies to Ross’s notion of a duty sans
phrase. The undated essay on Kant’s moral philosophy reads rather like a set of
lecture notes and serves to make clear how much progress in our understanding of
Kant’s views has been made in the past thirty or so years by sympathetic interpreters.
Let me now turn to metaethical issues.
I’ve been using, and will continue to use, ’intuitionism’ in a common but deliberately
loose sense to cover three metaethical views characteristic of these philosophers: (1)
non-naturalist moral realism, (2) a foundationalist moral epistemology featuring the
notion of self-evidence (’intuitionism’ in a narrow sense), and (3) robust ethical
pluralism—the view that there is an irreducible plurality of fundamental duties, goods,
and virtues. (Moore’s version is not robust in this way.)
We find in Prichard very little elaboration of these doctrines. He never doubts that
terms like ’right’ (by which he meant ’being under an obligation’ or ’having a duty’)
name some property or attribute and, like Moore, he claims that the property of
rightness is ’the kind of attribute [that] is sui generis, i.e., unique, and therefore
incapable of having its nature expressed in terms of the nature of anything else’
(169). Prichard, unlike Moore, does not employ the distinction between natural
properties and nonnatural properties (a distinction with which Moore struggled). Nor
does he use the open-question argument in defending this view (as did Ross), though
he employs what we might call the ’argument from mistaken identity’, a close cousin
of the open-question argument. Prichard claims that the question ’What is moral
obligation?’ (understood as asking about the metaphysical nature of obligatoriness) is
’not a real question’ (115) because, he claims, we can readily see upon inspection of
various attempted definitions of the term ’ought’ that (1) in asking such a question,
we must have an understanding of the term and thus in some sense already know
what it is to be morally bound, and that (2) any proposed analysis or definition of the
term is easily seen to ’covertly resolve moral obligation into something else which is
not moral obligation’ (116). Apparently, this was lost on many moral philosophers
including Spencer, Hutcheson, Kant, Hobbes, Paley, and Joseph who, as Prichard
reads them, attempted the impossible and thereby had a confused understanding of
the nature of morality. According to Prichard, we can use clear thinking to recognize
the fundamental differences between such simple properties as rightness and
goodness on the one hand, and the distinct properties that philosophers have
mistakenly identified them with on the other. Furthermore, we can recognize
important differences in attributions of fundamentally distinct moral properties such as
rightness and goodness. Such a regimen will apparently help us focus on the true sui
generis nature of the moral properties in question. Although Prichard remarks that
535
such properties are necessarily related to certain other non-moral properties—

something has the property of rightness or of goodness ’because’ it possesses other
nonmoral properties—he does not discuss the nature of this necessary relation.
Prichard defended a kind of particularist moral foundationalism, according to which

our knowledge of obligation and of value is grounded in our (non-inferentially)
apprehending particular cases in which these properties are present. These particular
apprehensions are the basis on which we come to grasp the self-evidence of general
moral rules. So, in grasping the fact that some particular action is right, writes
Prichard,
[W]e appreciate the obligation immediately or directly, the appreciation being an

activity of moral thinking. We recognize, for instance, that this performance of a
service to X, who has done a service to the would-be agent, ought to be done by us.
This apprehension is immediate, in precisely the sense in which a mathematical
apprehension is immediate, e.g., the apprehension that this three-sided figure, in
virtue of its being, must have three angles. Both apprehensions are immediate in the
sense that in both insight into the nature of the subject directly leads us to recognize
its possession of the predicate; and it is only stating this fact from the other side to
say that in both cases the fact apprehended is self-evident. (13)
This passage may make it seem as if you either see it (the obligation) or you don’t, a
common complaint about epistemological intuitionism. But as Prichard makes clear,
being in a position to grasp the self-evidence of an obligation may require appreciating
certain facts about one’s circumstances that are ’preliminaries’ in the process of
thinking about ethical issues. Prichard mentions two such preliminaries: getting clear
about the consequences of a proposed course of action (in order to be clear about the
full nature of the action) and getting clear about the nonmoral facts of one’s situation.
Both bits of preliminary thinking are part of a process that Prichard calls ’general’ in
contrast to moral thinking. Prichard says very little about the notion of self-evidence
or about moral apprehension or about how we may legitimately work from
apprehensions of particular self-evident truths in ethics to more general moral rules.
Ross has more to say.
Prichard’s rejection of moral theory (by which he meant monistic attempts to specify
some one underlying feature that ’renders’ or makes an action right) is the big
mistake featured in his famous 1912 paper. Apparently he embraced pluralism about
the right and the good, but we don’t find any attempt on his part to list fundamental
moral obligations, moral virtues, or other intrinsic goods. We do find an interesting
development in Prichard’s view about the problem of conflicts of duties, a problem
that any pluralist has to face. In the undated ’What is the Basis of Moral Obligation?’,
which MacAdam places first among the essays that are otherwise ordered
chronologically, Prichard claims that (1) obligations admit of degree, (2) in cases of
conflicting obligations, the proper question to ask is ’which obligation is greater?’ (3)
but there is no general method for resolving such conflicts, and so (4) when they
occur we must take all the circumstances bearing on the decision into account in
trying to determine which obligation is the greater. This same view is mentioned in a
footnote in his 1912 paper, but in ’A Conflict of Duties’ Prichard denies that there can
be degrees of obligation (duties) that apply to some particular case, because for an
536
action to be an obligation it must be true that all other actions one might perform are
wrong and hence not (at all) obligatory. Instead, Prichard claims that ordinary talk
about a conflict of duties is really about something else.
If we ask ourselves what this something else is, we seem driven to say that . . . what
is called a conflict of duties is really a conflict of claims on us to act in different ways,
arising out of various circumstances of the whole situation in which we are placed.
Further, we find no difficulty whatever in allowing that what we call claims on us may
differ in degree, or that where there are two claims on us so differing, the act which
there is greatest claim on us to do is duty. (79)
This solution differs importantly from Ross’s doctrine of prima facie duties that has
been extremely influential in moral theorizing since the 1930s.3
Whereas much of Prichard’s writing in ethics is polemical and his favored version of
intuitionism tends to be in the background of his writings, in Ross we find a clear
statement, elaboration, and defense of intuitionism. In brief, the advance in the
intuitionist position that we find in Ross compared to Prichard involves the following
ideas. First, regarding ethical pluralism, Ross’s view makes two advances over
Prichard’s. Ross rejects Prichard’s proposal to understand conflicts of duties in terms
of conflicting claims. The notion of a claim, says Ross, expresses part of the idea of an
interpersonal duty from the point of view of the person to whom one has a duty but
not from the agent’s own point of view (something we want to capture), and
furthermore talk of claims in cases of duties to oneself is ’artificial’ (20). Instead, Ross
introduces the notion of a prima facie duty which he sometimes explains in terms of
subjunctive conditionals (19) and sometimes in terms of tendencies (28). Both ways
of understanding this notion are problematic, as a number of philosophers have
argued. Indeed, the notion of prima facie duty might seem like a setback for
intuitionism. But I follow Stratton-Lake in thinking that the idea here can be
understood in terms of reasons. To talk about a prima facie duty is to talk about the
fact that an action, in virtue of having certain properties, gives one a reason (not
necessarily sufficient) to perform or refrain from performing the act (depending on the
feature in question).
Another advance, I think, is Ross’s attempt to partially systematize ethics by initially

setting forth a list of seven basic prima facie duties (fidelity, reparation, gratitude,
non-maleficence, justice, beneficence, and self-improvement) and a list of four basic
intrinsic goods (virtue, pleasure, the apportionment of pleasure to virtue and pain to
vice or, more simply, justice, and knowledge). Given his pluralist theory of intrinsic
good, Ross is able to subsume the prima facie duties of justice, beneficence, and self-
improvement under a prima facie duty to promote the good (24-7), thus reducing the
number of basic prima facie duties to five.
Earlier I mentioned that Prichard was apparently an ethical pluralist, and my qualified
claim was meant to indicate that given his adamant anti-theory stance, it is not so
clear to me that Prichard is committed to pluralism or is best interpreted as a kind of
particularist (the kind that denies that ethics can even be partially systematized)
about the nature of rightness and goodness. In the preface to The Right and the
Good, Ross claims that Prichard agrees with his treatment of rightness, which is some
537
evidence of commitment to pluralism. But if Prichard is best read as a particularist,

then whether one thinks of Ross’s systematic pluralism as genuine progress will
depend on one’s views about plausibility of pluralism compared to particularism.
The second area of progress concerns intuitionist foundationalism about moral

knowledge. Here again, I think the advance is in the greater amount of detail we find
in Ross compared to Prichard. Ross thought that, in the order of discovery, we come
to recognize certain prima facie duties in a particular case (e.g., one sees that in the
case at hand it would be prima facie wrong to break a promise) and then by a process
of ’intuitive induction’ one comes, upon sufficient reflection, to grasp the relevant self-
evident truth (e.g., the general truth that we have a prima facie obligation of fidelity).
Ross also makes clear that although the relative stringency of conflicting prima facie
duties is not self-evident in a particular case (and thus Ross denied the likelihood of
having moral knowledge about particular cases of duty, given typical moral
complexity), he nevertheless held that the prima facie duties of fidelity, reparation,
and nonmaleficence are ’weightier’ than the prima facie duty of beneficence, even
though in certain cases considerations of beneficence might outweigh any (or a
combination) of the others. Finally, Ross also made some advance in thinking about
moral metaphysics. He is clear, unlike Prichard, about basic moral properties being
nonnatural (though this was famously advanced earlier by Moore), but more
importantly he addresses the kind of ’because’ relation linking moral properties to
nonmoral properties in terms of the relation of ’resultance, which Jonathan Dancy has
argued differs importantly from the relation of supervenience’.4
The progress from Prichard to Ross, then, involves some doctrinal changes but
perhaps more significantly it involves providing intuitionism with a certain amount of
substance that is lacking in Prichard.
The elements of Ross’s intuitionism—his realist-nonnaturalist moral metaphysics, his

pluralism about the right and the good, his moral epistemology, and the main
arguments Ross used to defend these views—are explained and commented upon in
Stratton-Lake’s excellent 40 page introduction to Ross’s text. Stratton-Lake’s essay is
especially valuable because, as a sympathetic interpreter of Ross, he explains why
certain standard objections often used to dismiss this or that aspect of intuitionism
(e.g., its metaphysical commitments are ’otherworldly’, its epistemology requires
believing in some mysterious sixth sense, and so on) are simply misguided because
they represent a mere caricature of intuitionism generally and Ross’s view in
particular. In addition to setting the record straight on such matters, Stratton-Lake
also takes the liberty of disagreeing with certain details of Ross’s position. Most
notably, perhaps, is his view that although Ross was correct in thinking that basic
moral properties such as rightness and goodness are nonnatural, Ross was mistaken
in thinking that such properties are simple. According to Stratton-Lake, the moral
property of rightness (oughtness), for instance, involves the idea of certain features of
an action giving us reason to perform the action (xxii). Since the concept of a reason
is a nonnatural concept, and irreducibly so, rightness, on Stratton-Lake’s view, is a
complex nonnatural property. (Scanlon5 seems committed to this kind of view.)
Furthermore, understanding prima facie rightness (obligation) in terms of reasons
allows the intuitionist to make sense of conflicts of duties in a way that avoid
538
Prichard’s misleading talk of ’claims’ and Ross’s own puzzling talk of prima facie
duties.
I think intuitionism has its share of philosophical problems but as mentioned earlier it
has made a comeback, and the new editions of Prichard’s moral writings and of Ross’s
1930 book should help the cause.6
Endnotes
1. See R. Audi, ’Intuitionism, Pluralism, and the Foundations of Ethics’, in W. Sinnott-

Armstrong & M. Timmons (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; and his
forthcoming book, The Good in the Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2. See R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defense, Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2003.
3. Philip Stratton-Lake pointed out to me that in all likelihood Ross had the notion of a
prima facie duty as early as 1927 (see Ross’s ’The Basis of Objective Judgments in
Ethics’, International Journal of Ethics 37, 1927, pp. 113-27), thus perhaps preceding
and even inspiring Prichard’s notion of a claim.
4. See J. Dancy, Moral Reasons, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, ch. 5, and his forthcoming
book, Ethics Without Principles, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. See T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, pp. 1-13.
6. For helpful discussions about Prichard and Ross, I wish to thank my colleagues, Tim
Roche and John Tienson. I also wish to thank Philip Stratton-Lake for his comments on
the penultimate draft of this review.
539
2003.10.08
Onora O'Neill
Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics
O'Neill, Onora, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, Cambridge, 2002, 228pp, $20.00
(pbk), ISBN 0521894530.
Reviewed by Alan Thomas , University of Kent
This interesting and unusual work of philosophy offers a synoptic view of current
practice in bioethics, from the point of view of a person who has made not only
theoretical contributions to the field but also practical contributions. The author has
been heavily involved, for many years, in the public regulatory regime of the United
Kingdom concerning central areas of bioethics and this involvement clearly shapes
some of the issues of this book.
O’Neill’s central concern is the paradox that recent bioethics has seen an increase in
the safeguarding of individual autonomy and yet increasing public mistrust of the
professionals and institutions centrally concerned with bioethical issues. Bioethics is
understood broadly in this book as spanning both medical ethics and environmental
ethics. While O’Neill is sensitive to the relevant differences between the two fields, she
believes that the basic paradox that she identifies is exemplified in both. She is
equally aware that it may have explanations grounded more in sociology than in moral
philosophy, but this essay explores whether, in fact, there are good normative
grounds for a trade-off between the safeguarding of autonomy and a desirably high
level of trust. Has the philosophical emphasis on the importance of individual
autonomy, centrally in medical ethics but in bioethics more widely, offered a
philosophical rationale for a reduction in the extent to which people are prepared to
trust? Are we, collectively, facing a trade-off between these two important values?
O’Neill claims that we need to clarify different conceptions of autonomy and trust such
that we can choose whether or not to realize both values simultaneously or not. There
is certainly a concept of autonomy, as a desirable feature of people identified
reductively as their capacity for independence, that is inimical to relations of trust, in
the sense that such individuals require a self-sufficient space of action which renders
trusting relations with others largely redundant. But that is not an ethically particularly
deep or interesting notion and O’Neill seeks to describe a more satisfactory
conception. In the background here is O’Neill’s revisionary version of Kantianism.
Kant’s immediate successors, particularly Hegel, were inclined to represent his
practical philosophy as an empty formalism lacking social content and as the
progenitor of a conception of the rational agent that is particularly ethically
unattractive. That one-sided view of Kant’s achievement would point to a development
in our ideas about freedom and autonomy which stripped away its evaluative context,
leaving the willful and Luciferian individual criticized by, amongst others, Iris Murdoch.
This work, in spite of its “applied” theme, can be seen as indirectly undermining any
540
such view from the perspective of the Kantianism O’Neill has defended in earlier
works. She argues that the idea of autonomy can hardly be intelligibly stated, let
alone defended, without a context of choice and trust playing an important role in any
such context.
O’Neill begins her analysis with a bracingly sceptical look at the importance given, in
recent medical ethics, to the idea of autonomy. As she points out, the practical focus
of this concern has been to increase the scope and demands of informed consent, with
the philosophical rationale for this practice very much in the background. However, it
is far from clear, O’Neill argues, how much informed consent actually delivers in the
furtherance of an ethical ideal, as opposed to acting as a practical safeguard. People
who are ill, who want treatment that will enable them to recover and who are
choosing from a limited range of possible treatments described to them by those in
charge of their treatment certainly do not seem to be exercising a Millian autonomous
experiment in living. They are, rather, at the sharp end (no pun intended) of a
medical system that increasingly presents itself to its consumers as an industrial
process.
As O’Neill points out, where the ideal of autonomy has played a role is in philosophical
rationale for “reproductive freedom”. Once again, however, faithfulness to the facts of
different cases and sensitivity to different concepts going under the same name leads
her to doubt whether the important concept of negative liberty that protects the
private sphere of the individual, and a far more ethically ambitious notion of
autonomy as akin to free self-expression, really ought to be classed together. She
concedes that the former is an important notion, and protects such taken for granted
(but hard won) freedom as that which people now enjoy when they plan the timing of
having children. But O’Neill finds the latter concept very strained when it is placed at
the service of arguments for a generalized “right to choose”. She points out, very
perceptively, that once the issue is not the timing of childbirth but whether or not a
particular person ought to exist, the introduction of a new person who is significantly
dependent for a considerable period of time on its parents or appropriate surrogates
makes appeals to a generalized ideal of reproductive freedom, modeled on free
expression of one’s identity, ring hollow.
In search of a more philosophically defensible and ethically feasible notion of

autonomy, O’Neill turns to Kant. Developing the arguments of her previous works,
notably Towards Justice and Virtue, O’Neill argues that Kant’s central concept of
autonomy does successfully steer between a dependence on a prior commitment to
rationality as a constitutive value, or a collapse into undirected free choice. For that
reason, Kant’s concept of autonomy can lead to the reasoned defence of certain
central duties, such as a general duty not to coerce and a general duty not to deceive.
In that way she argues that Kant’s approach can lead not simply to a defence of the
limited, negative concept of autonomy as freedom from constraint but to a more
defensible ethical concept of autonomy that is equally dependent on relations of
mutual trust. Given O’Neill’s extensive treatment of these issues elsewhere and the
aims of this particular book, it would be unfair to single out her defence of these
claims as a weakness of this book. But the arguments do pass by rather quickly – at
one point O’Neill describes her description of them as constituting a “freehand sketch”
– and there is little here that will convince those unconvinced by her earlier
541
arguments. I am happy to agree with her that there are some unconvincing reductive
caricatures of Kant’s moral philosophy that need to be undermined, but less clear than
O’Neill as to whether Kant’s actual views are entirely defensible and a completely
satisfactory underpinning for the general duties of non-coercion and non-deception.
Those arguments set the scene for a general discussion of the nature of
trustworthiness and the compatibility of O’Neill’s account of autonomy with a general
account of trust. Following her methodological principle that Kant’s general obligations
will require specification in historically specific institutional and political circumstances,
complemented by the exercise of practical judgement, O’Neill describes a
programmatic account of trustworthiness in biomedical ethics. Basically happy with
the regulatory regime that structures these discussions in the United Kingdom she is,
nonetheless, troubled by the combination of effective public regulation with a collapse
in public trust. In a searching examination of the possible explanations of this state of
affairs, O’Neill questions whether certain trends in public administration intended to
further the cause of trustworthiness, the widespread use of auditing methods and an
“agenda of openness”, have had the opposite effect. Citing the work of Michael Power,
O’Neill endorses his conclusion that an audit culture actively undermines the very
processes of trust that it sought to reinforce. (I suspect that this conclusion will be
endorsed by those academics in the United Kingdom who have been on the receiving
end of this particular trend in public administration applied to institutions of higher
education.) Her criticism of the openness agenda is more indirect: it has, in her view,
increased the trustworthiness of those in public life, but that is not the same as
ensuring that they are in fact more trusted. These “top-down” efforts to enhance
trustworthiness have not, in fact, led to increasing trust on the part of the public. The
opposite has been the case, ironically very often in those areas of biomedical ethics
that are most closely politically regulated (such as animal testing).
What is one to make of such public recalcitrance? O’Neill, a publicly engaged

intellectual herself, responds by putting forward arguments that as it is impossible not
to trust at all, it can be as damaging to suffer from misplaced mistrust as from
misplaced trust. While placing trust in the untrustworthy can be directly damaging,
there are also costs to a corrosive scepticism that trusts no-one, one is tempted to
say, “on principle”. In fact, as O’Neill demonstrates, while the rhetoric surrounding
such a crisis of public trust makes it look as though the educated public of the modern
West have become seasoned experts in the hermeneutics of suspicion, they continue
to trust, but “erratically and with reservations”. O’Neill reinforces this general point by
re-iterating her basic argument: that the implementation of the kind of principled
autonomy she derives from Kant will have to be complemented by attention to a social
context of trust. Taking the example of the use of human tissue in medical research,
she argues that emphasis on informed consent can hardly be sufficient without a more
general contextualisation of these principles alongside the obligation not to deceive
and the need for a context of trusting relations between medical professionals and
those with whom they interact.
O’Neill understands that this remedy may have less application to those environmental
and public health issues that have an impact on social groups rather than on
identifiable individuals: issues, such as genetically modified food, characterized in the
United Kingdom by a great deal of public mistrust would seem to fall outside the scope
542
of O’Neill’s positive proposals. A political analogue of her ethical proposals might hope
that democratic legitimation, or deliberation in the public sphere, may play a role
analogous to that of informed consent in a context of trust at the level of individuals.
But O’Neill is deeply sceptical about both proposals, worried that extant notions of
democratic legitimation may fail to respect basic ethical norms and that broadcast and
print media in the United Kingdom are in such a parlous state that their contribution
to a notional public sphere of deliberation is nugatory. (O’Neill sees no reason, in
drawing these pessimistic conclusions, to draw a distinction between private media
corporations and the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corporation.) Her response,
somewhat ironic, is an extension of public regulation of the media, justified if it
improves the quality of communication. Corporate persons do not, O’Neill argues,
have particularly robust rights of free expression, not when so many of them are in
the business of confusing liberty with license. Their aim, rather, is communication,
which is subject to the general obligations of non-coercion and non-deception and the
more specific responsibility of allowing an audience to assess the truthfulness of
claims put before it.
This is a thoughtful and conspicuously intelligent analysis, both of foundational

philosophical issues about the basis of biomedical ethics, broadly conceived, and of
the difficulties of implementing ethical principles through public legislation in a
complex society characterized by various conspicuous market failures, principally, in
the marketplace of ideas and their fair and accurate reporting by an increasingly
commercialized media. (Increasingly commercialized in the sense that even publicly
funded broadcasters in the United Kingdom have to demonstrate that they are
delivering “value for money” precisely by competing with private commercial
interests.) Three conspicuously optimistic assumptions underpin O’Neill’s essay: that a
liberal public will respond to good arguments, that public administration can advance
the public good, and that the blame for a crisis in public trust should be placed largely
at the door of the media and not of its “consumers”.
This was not an easy book to write, spanning as it does issues in meta-ethics,
normative ethics and practical issues concerned with social and institutional policy.
O’Neill’s standing as a moral and political philosopher and as a contributor to the
public regulatory regime in the United Kingdom have put her in a position to produce
a book of interest to several distinct audiences. The delicate balance between
philosophy and its “applications” is well managed in this work. This book will interest
specialists working in moral and political philosophy who want to see the development
of O’Neill’s version of Kantianism and specialists in the areas of medical and
environmental ethics who want to see its “applications”. Unusually for a work of
philosophy, there is material here of considerable interest to those outside the
academy, ranging from the relevant professional disciplines of medicine and public
administration to the media. All in all this is an engaging and distinguished book that
may, unlike most books of moral philosophy, do some good in the world by advancing
the understanding of pressing and important ethical issues.
2003.10.09
Nicholas Saunders
543
Divine Action and Modern Science
Saunders, Nicholas, Divine Action and Modern Science, Cambridge University Press,
2002, 234pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521524164.
Reviewed by Thomas Tracy , Bates College
The last twenty years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the relation of
religion and science. One particularly difficult tangle of issues has to do with the idea,
deeply rooted in the theistic traditions, that God acts in the world. What is the relation
between theological depictions of the world as the scene of divine action and scientific
descriptions of the world as an intelligible structure of natural law? Can God be
understood to act entirely in and through the regular structures of nature or does a
robust account of divine action also require the affirmation that God acts to redirect
the course of events in the world, bringing about effects that would not have occurred
had God not so acted? If we say the latter, are we committed to the claim that God at
least sometimes performs miracles, in the familiar (if truncated) modern sense of an
event caused by God that “violates” the laws of nature?
Saunders begins by noting the Biblical roots and theological prominence of the idea of
divine action in the world. For the writers of the Hebrew Bible there was no notion of
nature as an autonomous system and God as an external agent; rather the world
around us is an expression of God’s vital activity and purposes. This Biblical talk of
divine action poses problems for modern interpreters, however, as was evident in the
embarrassing predicament of the Biblical Theology movement of the 1950’s, which
proclaimed that God is made known through mighty acts in history, and yet which was
unable to give a satisfactory account of what God has done. The difficulty for modern
theologians centers on the idea of particular, or special, divine action. Special divine
action is often contrasted to God’s general action of creating and sustaining the
universe as a whole. If we say that God’s purposes are realized entirely through the
natural order that God creates, then there need be no conflict with what the sciences
tell us about the law-governed processes constituting that natural order. Special
divine action, however, involves bringing about “genuine physical effects that would
not have occurred had God not chosen to act” (p. 21). This appears to require that
God intervene within the natural order to turn events in a direction they would not
otherwise have gone.
Modern theologians have notoriously grown wary of miracles, understood as divine

acts that contravene the laws of nature. There are many reasons for this: some are
distinctively theological (e.g., concerns about God’s consistency in creation), but
others reflect responses to the methods and findings of the natural sciences, and
especially to modern conceptions of the integrity of natural law. Saunders gives
particular attention to the latter, surveying a number of philosophical analyses of the
concept of a “law of nature,” and focusing especially on “necessitarian” accounts,
which are presupposed in debates about determinism. He borrows from William James
a working definition of determinism according to which it claims (quoting James) that
“those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the
544
other parts shall be” (Saunders, p. 85). It appears that in a deterministic universe
special divine action would have to take the form of a miraculous intervention in the
order of nature. If, however, the structures of nature are indeterministic, it may be
possible for God to bring about particular effects in the world without contravening
natural law precisely because those laws do not in every case fully specify each
succeeding state. This would be a form of non-interventionist special divine action.
There currently are two leading options for developing a position of this kind. Each
relies upon the interpretation of a contemporary scientific theory, quantum mechanics
in one case and chaos theory in the other. A critique of these proposals is the heart of
Saunders’s book, and he opens these chapters with an historical survey of the
theological uses of quantum mechanics. The best known early proponent of this
approach is William Pollard in Chance and Providence (London: Farber and Farber,
1958), but a number of thinkers have explored variants of this idea in the last decade
(see, e.g., the essays collected in Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-
McNelly, John Polkinghorne, eds., Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on
Divine Action [Vatican Observatory Publications and Center for Theology and the
Natural Sciences, 2001]). Saunders argues that this general approach faces a number
of important objections, and he is surely right about this. His critique is marred,
however, by understating the extent to which most of these objections have been
recognized and considered in recent discussions by the authors he cites. He contends,
for example, that these accounts “all claim ’quantum events’ as a locus of SDA
[special divine action] and yet do not explain how this might be the case, or even
what they take to be an ’event’ in quantum mechanics” (p. 129). In fact, most of the
authors he considers make it clear that they are talking about so-called “measurement
events” in which (according to a widely held version of the Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum theory) the wave function describing the probabilistic properties of a
quantum entity (e.g., an electron) collapses non-deterministically to a single value for
the “measured” (i.e., irreversibly registered) property.
Nonetheless, Saunders’s analysis of the issues is perceptive and helpful, not least
because it is informed by a detailed grasp of the relevant science. He points out that
quantum systems evolve deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation, and
that the only point of possible indeterminism is in probabilistic state reduction, as we
just noted. Further, we can conclude that the unpredictability of the outcome of this
event reflects ontological indeterminism, rather than merely epistemic uncertainty,
only if we adopt a particular interpretive approach to quantum theory. This
interpretation takes the probabilistic character of the quantum formalism to reflect a
superposition of properties in the quantum system, and it holds that the collapse of
this superposition has necessary but not sufficient conditions in the history of the
system and its environment. Although views of this kind dominate current discussion,
there are well-developed deterministic alternatives, (for example, the pilot wave
hypothesis developed by David Bohm, and some forms of the “many worlds”
interpretation).
Saunders argues that even if we adopt a version of the “orthodox” indeterministic

interpretation, there is little prospect of successfully developing an account of special
divine action at the quantum level. He identifies four possible ways in which, given
this interpretation of quantum mechanics, God could act upon a quantum system. 1)
545
God might alter the wavefunction between measurements; 2) God might make a
measurement on a system; 3) God might alter the probabilities for realizing particular
outcomes; 4) God might determine the outcome of measurement. Saunders considers
and rejects each of these alternatives, though it is clear that only the fourth is
relevant to the project of conceiving of special divine action in a way that does not
contravene the order of nature. His formulation of this fourth option is curious. “The
final approach to quantum SDA in the ’orthodox’ interpretation of quantum
measurement is the assertion that God simply ’ignores’ the probabilities predicted by
the orthodox measurement theory and controls the outcomes of particular
measurements” (p. 154). A theologian interested in non-interventionist special divine
action will not say that God ignores the probability distributions predicted by quantum
theory. Rather, the thesis would be that God might act in the world by determining
quantum events within the ordinary probability patterns, which do, after all, permit
wide variation in particular outcomes from instance to instance. If some of these
quantum events were located within natural structures that amplify them in such a
way that they have significant consequences on the macroscopic level, then God could
affect the larger course of events without contravening any statistical or deterministic
laws of nature.
Clearly, a proposal of this sort is highly speculative and intimately tied to some of the
most unsettled and unsettling puzzles in the interpretation of quantum theory. The
question about the amplification of quantum events, for example, is crucial; if
indeterministic quantum chance is entirely subsumed within higher level deterministic
regularities, then it will be of no use to the theologian looking for a means of non-
interventionist special divine action. Saunders does not press this point, however.
Rather, he argues that if God were to determine quantum events, then the probability
patterns “either are a deception in that they have no relationship with physical reality
whatsoever, or they are a representation of the chance of God acting in the same way
on a subsequent occasion. Both of these conclusions are unsatisfactory. . .” (p. 155).
The first half of this dilemma is easily dispelled. If God chooses to determine events
that the causal structures of nature leave undetermined, there is no divine deception
involved; quantum systems really do display these stochastic regularities, and the fact
that God establishes them through direct divine action no more undercuts their
standing as physical fact than if they were determined by a (non-local) hidden
variable (as in Bohm’s theory). Saunders argues for the unacceptability of the second
alternative in this dilemma by contending that if we treat quantum-measurement
probabilities as reflecting regularities in divine action, then this commits us to a
“regularitarian,” or neo-Humean, conception of natural laws. This is incompatible with
the idea that a divine act could violate a law of nature, and therefore the very
distinction between interventionist and non-interventionist divine action collapses.
Each of the links in this argument is problematic; it is not clear how the theological
view in question entails a general commitment to a regularitarian conception of
natural law or why such a view would make it impossible to speak of violations of
natural law (understood, following Hume in his essay on miracles, as events that fall
outside well-evidenced patterns of constant conjunction). Nor is it clear why, if the
argument were successful, a theologian concerned with special divine action should be
troubled by this result, since the worry about law-violating interventions would then
disappear. This is not to deny that there are a number of important problems facing
the suggestion that God might act to determine some or all undetermined transitions
at the quantum level; as we have seen, there are uncertainties of interpretation in
546
quantum mechanics, fundamental puzzles associated with measurement and

wavefunction collapse in contemporary varieties of the Copenhagen interpretation,
and open questions about the amplification of quantum events. (There are also, of
course, important theological misgivings that can be raised about this mode of divine
action.) Saunders skillfully analyzes the scientific issues, but his discussion does not
justify the conclusion that “non-interventionist quantum SDA is not theoretically
possible” (p. 172).
A second approach to non-interventionist special divine action appeals to chaos

theory, and is especially associated with the work of John Polkinghorne. Saunders’s
discussion of mathematical chaos theory is technically sophisticated and illuminating.
He gives particular attention to Edward Lorenz’s attempt to model the behavior of the
atmosphere, which led to the discovery that his mathematical model displayed an
extraordinarily sensitive dependence on the precise specification of initial conditions.
Vanishingly small differences in initial conditions result in dramatically different states
of the system on very short time scales. As a result, even though the non-linear
mathematical equations describing the system develop deterministically, its future
behavior is unpredictable for any finite intelligence. We can, however, recognize an
overall pattern in the ensemble of possible paths of development (the “phase space”)
marked out by a chaotic system. In dissipative systems, in which energy is lost over
time, trajectories through the phase space will tend to contract and converge,
generating a pattern known as an attractor. In so-called “strange attractors” the
converging paths fold in on themselves so tightly that there is, at the limit, no energy
difference between them, though they do not cross or join.
Does chaos theory provide a set of concepts useful to the theologian interested in
non-interventionist special divine action in the world? The immediate answer would
appear to be that it does not. The unpredictability of chaotic systems is generated out
of a smoothly deterministic mathematics, and so does not provide the causal
openness that special divine action appears to require. Precisely this point has often
been made in response to John Polkinghorne’s appeals to chaos theory in his accounts
of divine action. Saunders argues that this criticism of Polkinghorne misses the
broader metaphysical thesis at work in Polkinghorne’s proposal, though Saunder’s own
quite careful and effective criticism of Polkinghorne’s position also relies on noting the
deterministic character of chaos theory. Polkinghorne holds that the surprising
emergence of unpredictability in the midst of classical determinism provides the
motivation for a metaphysical conjecture: namely, that the deterministic character of
our understanding of chaotic systems is an artifact of our theory making, with its
simplification and abstraction, and not a feature of the structures in the world that we
are attempting to describe. Those structures are more supple, flexible, and sensitively
interrelated than our theory can yet capture. Saunders goes on to show, however,
that Polkinghorne’s account of divine action relies on aspects of chaos theory that
arise precisely by virtue of its deterministic mathematics. “The only reason that
sensitive dependence and strange attractors exist is precisely because the
mathematics of chaos theory are deterministic” (p. 192). Polkinghorne suggests that
God acts not by “tweaking” the initial conditions of chaotic systems but rather through
a non-energetic input of “active information” that selects among nearby paths through
the phase space of the system. Saunders replies that “active information input relies
again on the determinism of mathematical chaos to produce the required fractal
547
structure in attractors, the required infinite limit of that structure, and the
corresponding region in which energy differences between alternative possible
trajectories tends to zero” (p. 194). The dependence of Polkinghorne’s account upon
properties of chaotic systems that arise only within a deterministic mathematics
crucially undercuts his metaphysical conjecture that the actual structures modeled by
this theory are indeterministic.
At the end of the book, Saunders turns briefly to the views of Arthur Peacocke, whose
approach provides an interesting contrast to those considered so far. He too thinks it
important to affirm that God acts to affect the ongoing course of events in the world.
But he denies that God does so by exploiting causal incompleteness in the structure of
natural processes; indeed, he regards any divine action inserted among natural
causes (whether it interrupts a natural causal chain or occurs at a point of natural
indeterminism) as an “intervention.” Instead, Peacocke contends that God acts by
means of “whole-part,” or “top-down” constraints upon the world-as-a-whole. Nature,
he notes, is organized as a hierarchy of increasingly complex systems in which lower
level structures support and are incorporated within higher levels of organization.
Peacocke, as a panentheist, holds that this entire structure is incorporated within the
being of God, though God is not simply identical with the world. God, then, can be
thought of as the highest level system-of-all-systems that embraces all the structures
of nature, and God can be understood to act not as a “triggering cause” at lower levels
of the system but rather as a “structuring cause” at the highest level. That is, God
affects the operation of the world system in the way higher level organizational
properties of a whole constrain the operation of the parts.
Saunders finds Peacocke’s position to be “the most promising current theory of SDA”
(p. 213), though he acknowledges that it operates at a high level of abstraction.
Following on the heels of Saunders’s detailed critical analysis of theological appeals to
quantum mechanics and chaos theory, his brief discussion of Peacocke is something of
an anti-climax. Peacocke’s proposal is subtle and appealing, but there clearly are
critical questions that need to be raised about it. It is not apparent, for example, how
Peacocke’s God could bring about particular changes in the course of events by acting
as a structural constraint on the system as a whole. If God is to affect the structure of
the system, then God must modify the relation of its parts, and this requires that God
act upon the parts in a way that will show up in their causal history; it appears that
divine action among natural causes cannot be avoided after all.
Saunders’s discussion is rich in helpful detail. His command of the relevant science
allows him to fill in crucial background information and clear away misunderstandings.
The result is a valuable volume that contributes significantly to focusing and
deepening the engagement of theology with the natural sciences.
2003.10.10
James B. South (ed.)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale
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South, James B. (ed.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling
in Sunnydale, Open Court Press, 2003, 335pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN 0812695313.
Reviewed by Karen Bennett, Princeton University
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy—an intriguing title, especially if, like me, you
are both a professional philosopher and a rabid Buffy fan. The question, though, is
what exactly can be made of the conjunction. How much philosophy is there in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (BtVS)? Can we really use BtVS to do philosophy? More generally,
how should we think about the intersection of philosophy and things like television,
film, and literature? After all, South’s collection is the fourth volume in a series called
’Philosophy and Popular Culture’, with previous volumes entitled Seinfeld and
Philosophy, The Simpsons and Philosophy, and The Matrix and Philosophy.
It seems to me that there are three main ways to use popular culture—or, more
precisely, fiction1 —to do philosophy. First, one might write an introductory book using
a television show, movie, or what have you in order to illustrate various philosophical
positions and debates, either for a popular audience, or for an introductory course.
The aim here is straightforwardly pedagogical. It’s just an extended version of what
we do when we start talking about The Matrix in a lecture on Descartes, read from
The Brothers Karamazov when discussing the problem of evil, or show that Star Trek
episode about whether Data counts as a person during a unit on the mind-body
problem. Done well, this model can be a wonderful thing. Movies and television shows
are gripping and easily accessible, and can draw students into the dusty old tomes—or
technical contemporary articles—that they are otherwise inclined to shun.
The second way to use popular culture to do philosophy is closely related to the first.
Here, the idea is to mention the bit of popular culture in passing, in order to illustrate
or exemplify some philosophical idea being developed in a professional book or article.
Perhaps the author uses a quote as an epigraph, inserts a quick paragraph describing
a scene, or develops a thought experiment based on some incident or device in a
story. Consider the use of teletransportation in the personal-identity literature. Or, to
take a more specific example off the top of my head, consider Michael Smith and
Jeanette Kennett’s use of Arnold Lobel’s children’s story Frog and Toad Lose Control as
the basis of a discussion of self-control and weakness of the will. Again, this second
model is really just the first model scaled up to a professional level. The distinction
between the two is mostly a matter of who the intended audience is, and whether the
author is presenting her own arguments or explaining someone else’s.
Third, one might use various examples from film, television, or literature to develop
and argue for a position in aesthetics. Pieces of popular culture could presumably be
used to defend a view about the nature of beauty, what counts as art, or some other
variation on that general theme. Here, the use of the popular culture is a bit more
direct than the above. The films or what not provide more than mere analogies, and
more than mere fictional examples of a philosophical point; they constitute real
examples of the philosophical point. After all, in aesthetics, the philosophical point will
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be primarily about the representations themselves, rather than about the people and
events represented.
But notice what all three of these models have in common. None of them are in any
interesting sense about the fictional content of whatever bit of fiction they use.
Instead, they are about, well, whatever issue they are about—skepticism, the
existence and nature of god, the relationship of mind to body, the nature of action,
what counts as art. Sadly, only a few of the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Philosophy are genuinely about any interesting philosophical issue. Most of them are
instead straightforwardly about BtVS. That is, they use philosophical ideas to
illuminate BtVS, rather than the other way around. In his introduction, South even
says that while “some chapters start with a difficult philosophical issue . . . and show
how BtVS can help us to better understand the issue by providing us with examples
and themes from the show” (2), other chapters “use philosophical concepts to
understand the stories and motifs present in BtVS” (3, italics mine). But in my view
there are far too many of the latter, and I am frankly dubious that they count as
philosophy at all.
The book contains twenty-two essays, divided into five sections. The first is called
“Buffy, Faith, and Feminism,” and consists of two essays about Faith and three on
more general feminist topics. The five essays in “Knowledge, Rationality, and Science
in the Buffyverse,” include an interesting discussion (by Andrew Aberdein) of the
relationship between science and magic in the Buffyverse, and another (by Madeleine
Muntersbjorn)on the show’s implicit attitude towards the ’Science Wars’. We then
have four essays on “Buffy and Ethics”, followed by five on “Religion and Politics in the
Buffyverse”. The fifth and final section, “Watching Buffy,” seems to be a catch-all for
three essays that did not neatly fit elsewhere.2 In what follows, I am going to dispense
with plot summary and character description and assume that if you are interested
enough to read this review, you have at least a basic familiarity with the characters
and overall plotlines.
Some of these essays really do contain at least some philosophical content. I have
already mentioned Aberdein’s “Balderdash and Chicanery: Science and Beyond” and
Muntersbjorn’s “Pluralism, Pragmatism, and Pals: The Slayer Subverts the Science
Wars”. Others include Mimi Marinucci’s “Feminism and the Ethics of Violence: Why
Buffy Kicks Ass,” in which she raises some interesting questions about when violence
is called for. In “Buffy in the Buff: A Slayer’s Solution to Aristotle’s Love Paradox,”
Melissa M. Milavec and Sharon M. Kaye draw on Buffy’s three main sexual
relationships to illustrate Aristotle’s three levels of friendship. (Even Buffy fans
unfamiliar with Aristotle will be unsurprised to hear that Angel wins, Reilly loses, and
Spike is a ’pleasure friend’.) And Carolyn Korsmeyer’s “Passion and Action: In and Out
of Control” reflects on the nature of the emotions, as well as their contribution to the
aesthetic power of the show.
But the real winners on the yes-this-actually-is-philosophy! front are Jacob Held and
Jason Kawal. Held’s “Justifying the Means: Punishment in the Buffyverse” is a nice
reflection on the nature of punishment that falls somewhere in between my first and
second models of how to use popular culture to do philosophy. Held uses BtVS to
illustrate the difference between retributivist and utilitarian theories of punishment,
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and to argue that the latter is preferable to the former. He reminds us that the
vengeance demon Halfrek “prefers the title ’justice demon’“ (229), and contrasts her
chosen ’clientele’ and methodology to Anya’s. On the basis of this contrast, he argues
that there is no fully objective way to determine a criminal’s just deserts, and thus
that retributivism is untenable. He then uses the cases of Angel, Spike, and Oz to
illustrate the virtues of preemptive punishment in the interests of deterrence. Finally,
he approaches the difficult question of whether utilitarianism justifies punishing the
innocent by discussing—and applauding—Giles’ decision to kill Ben at the end of
season 6. (Ben is an entirely innocent human; the problem is that the nasty goddess
Glory needs to use his body to manifest herself.) I’m not convinced that any of this
really constitutes a novel argument in favor of utilitarianism or against retributivism,
but it certainly brings the key issues to the fore, and I can see myself assigning this in
an introductory class.
In “Should We Do What Buffy Would Do?” Kawal argues that virtue ethicists are not
well served by saying, with Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), that
an action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically . . . do in the

circumstances (149).
After all, the fact that each of us has different abilities and relationships from the
paradigm virtuous person (Buffy, Jesus, Buddha . . .) may well affect whether we
indeed should do what that person would do. For example, it is not morally right for
Xander to take on a pack of vampires alone, even though Buffy characteristically
would. And although we can instead ask what Buffy would do if she had Xander’s less
impressive physical abilities, it is clear that this is a dangerous road. Follow it too far,
and you wind up telling Xander that he should do what Buffy would do if she were
Xander, which does not exactly give him much in the way of moral compass! So the
virtue ethicist should modify her claim slightly, and say that
an action in a given situation is morally right if (and only if) a fully-informed,

unimpaired, virtuous observer (like Buffy) would deem the action to be morally right
(for this person) (158).
Now, I am not familiar enough with the literature on virtue ethics to know whether
this is either original or fair to Hursthouse. But I can say without hesitation that this is
philosophy. This is an instance of the second model above. The essay is not about
BtVS, though Buffy’s name appears on every page; it is about the proper formulation
of a key principle of virtue ethics.
As I have already indicated, though, many of the other essays really are just about
BtVS. They provide character analyses, untangle themes, uncover metaphors, and
offer diagnoses of political motivations and hidden agendas. This is all well and good,
and fun for the Buffyphile in me, but it’s not philosophy.
So is that fair? I rather expect some readers to accuse me of being a snooty, closed-
minded analytic philosopher. I must plead guilty to the ’analytic’ bit, but that’s all. I
will happily admit that questions about disciplinary boundaries can be tricky, and not
always worth pursuing very far. And I will certainly agree that questions about exactly
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what counts as philosophy—and why—are quite hard, and that a detailed answer is
well beyond the scope of this review. Nonetheless, the general outlines of the answer
are fairly clear. It’s partly a matter of topic, and partly a matter of methodology.
The methodological component is simply that philosophy crucially involves argument.

If an essay provides no arguments, but rather meanders around, makes
proclamations, or simply describes a view without trying to evaluate it, then the
author is not doing philosophy. It is worth noting in this regard that the simple fact
that BtVS embodies a certain worldview or adheres to a certain –ism is not an
argument for the truth of that –ism. It is at best an argument for the claim that the
writers believe the –ism. BtVS is, after all, fictional. Not all of the contributors to this
volume are careful enough about this point.3
The subject matter component is harder. Luckily, I do not need to provide a very
substantive account, or a comprehensive list of the Properly Philosophical Topics. All I
need to say is that BtVS is not among them. This is not a slur on BtVS; neither Hamlet
nor Ulysses is among them either. Philosophy is not English Literature or Media
Studies. Thus when Thomas Hibbs—in one of the best essays in the volume—argues
that “the mythic structure and leitfmotifs of BtVS reflect noir themes” (51), or when
Wendy Love Anderson argues that “the Buffyverse conception of religion is . . .
regularly and frequently . . . demonized” (214), they are not doing philosophy.
Philosophers are simply not in the business of studying the fictional content of
fictions.4 We want to know what the real world contains, and how it works.
Let me finish by issuing three caveats about what I’ve said here. First, I want to be
clear that most of the essays in this volume can teach someone a little bit of
philosophy, whether it be a bit of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Kant, or what was at
stake in the ’Science Wars’. After all, even those who put the philosophical ideas in the
service of understanding BtVS rather than vice versa need to explain those ideas. It’s
just that in essays that are not written with clear pedagogical intent, any knowledge
gained is only accidental, and likely to be very incomplete.
Second, I really do think that there is interesting philosophical mileage to be gotten

from BtVS—at least pedagogically. I’ve already discussed some interesting issues that
are covered in this collection. There’s probably more work to be done in ethics. And I
was surprised that none of the authors discussed personal identity, freedom of the
will, or moral responsibility—themes that are often fairly close to the surface in BtVS.
Notice too that Dawn practically is Davidson’s Swampman (1987),5 and therefore
provides a handy example for certain debates about the nature of concepts and
content. She also nicely illustrates most standard views about species individuation—
which entail that she is not biologically human—as well as Shoemaker’s (1970)
distinction between memory and quasi-memory that arises in discussions of personal
identity. So BtVS really does raise some interesting philosophical issues.
Perhaps more importantly, though, it raises lots of interesting non philosophical

issues. This is my third caveat: the fact that many of these essays are not philosophy
does not automatically mean that they are bad. With a few exceptions—which belong
in fanzines rather than tenure files—the nonphilosophical essays in this collection
range from the silly but mildly enjoyable to the really quite intriguing. After all,
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philosophy is not the only academic discipline, and academia is not the only
worthwhile pursuit. At the end of the day, I am as happy to sit around talking about
BtVS as the next fan. I just don’t pretend to be doing philosophy. So if South’s
collection were instead called something like Reflections on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
I would probably complain a lot less. Then again, if it were called that, I wouldn’t be
reviewing it here.
References
Davidson, Donald. 1987. Knowing one’s own mind. Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 60: 441-458.
Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. NY: Oxford University Press.
Shoemaker, Sydney. 1970. Persons and their pasts. American Philosophical Quarterly
7: 269-285.
Smith, Michael, and Kennett, Jeanette. 1996. Frog and Toad lose control. Analysis 56:
63-73.
Endnotes
1. First, there are many nonfiction bits of popular culture that are just not at stake
here. For example, it is hard to see any philosophical use for celebrity gossip and
faddish toys. Second, there is a lot of fiction that can’t really be called ’popular culture’
in any natural sense, but which might be philosophically useful in one way or another
(note my mention of Dostoevsky just below).
2. Actually, the contribution by Richard Greene and Wayne Yuen should probably have
gone in the ethics section, but the contribution by Tracy Little would have posed an
editorial challenge, given that it does not even purport to be about anything
philosophical. The essay by Michael P. Levine and Stephen Jay Schneider, in contrast,
really is about watching BtVS; they are looking for an explanation of the show’s
appeal to academics. But while it starts out promisingly, criticizing some of the more
excessive claims that have been made in praise of BtVS, and claiming that “it is BtVS
scholarship that warrants study at this point, not BtVS itself” (301), it soon falls astray
and provides a rather one-dimensional, Freudian explanation of the show’s popularity.
3. The fact that some of these authors do not always put enough weight on the fact
that BtVS is not real also gives rise to a different but related mistake. The mistake is
to uncritically take anything that happens on the show as evidence for the correctness
of a certain interpretation (or even, if conjoined with the mistake in the main text
above, as evidence for the truth of some view about the nature of the actual world.)
The problem is that sometimes things happen because of the constraints of the
medium, or the simple goals of entertaining a television audience. There are
occasional inconsistencies in the plotlines and in the behavior of the characters
because the show has been written over a period of at least seven years, by a
multitude of different writers. And sometimes characters do things ’out of character’,
or grow in unexpected directions, to enhance the storyline. This problematizes James
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B. South’s essay, in which he argues that Willow’s actions in season 6 “force us to

confront the possibility that irrationality can be unintelligible, not just a mistake”
(133). Here is another example. Toby Daspit makes much of the fact that very little of
BtVS takes place in classrooms, despite the fact that, during the first four seasons,
most of the main characters are either in school or working at one. He takes it as
evidence that “the type of knowledge necessary for survival on the Hellmouth is not
discovered . . . or created . . . within a banking model. Instead, other modes of
knowledge, and of education, are explored” (128). Hmmm. I’d have said that little of
the show takes place in classrooms because that would be really boring. Come on,
people. Aristotle did not have to worry about Nielsen ratings. Joss Whedon does.
4. That is not to say that they are not interested in fiction qua fiction. The prospects
for ’fictionalism’ about various problematic entities—numbers, possible worlds, moral
truths—partly turn on working out how to understand the notion of truth according to
a fiction. And both philosophers of language and metaphysicians are interested in
metaphor. Etc.
5. The force of the ’practically’ depends on whether or not it is central to Davidson’s

example that the creature come into existence by cosmic accident, rather than by
intentional creation.
2003.10.11
Peg O'Connor, Naomi Scheman (eds.)
Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein
O'Connor, Peg and Scheman, Naomi (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 472pp, $34.50 (pbk), ISBN
0271021985.
Reviewed by Mark Lance , Georgetown University
Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein (FIW) is a new installment in the Re-reading

the Canon series edited by Nancy Tuana. This series has set for itself a rather difficult
task. Many of the earliest volumes dealt with writers for which feminism, or at least
issues closely related to feminism, were central themes. It is clear now, however, that
the goal is to attempt to read a far wider range of important historical philosophers
through the lens of feminism.
In the case of Wittgenstein such a task seems on the surface particularly difficult. Not
only does Wittgenstein not discuss feminism per se, but he rarely deals with moral or
political philosophy at all, and when he does, the results are hardly his finest
accomplishments. Further, there is a strong emphasis in Wittgenstein’s work which
would seem to militate against his usefulness for feminist projects. Repeatedly
Wittgenstein urges that language – and more generally practice – is in order as it
stands, that it is philosophy which leads us into trouble. What then to make of the
554
project of using Wittgenstein for a philosophical project that is always revisionary, and
often revolutionary.
Almost none of the articles in FIW actually attempt a feminist interpretation of

Wittgenstein. This is not, however, a bad thing, as it would be difficult to imagine such
an effort being successful. Despite the above mentioned surface conflict, however, a
number of Wittgensteinian ideas, concepts, distinctions, and philosophical directions
have been utilized by feminist philosophers, and at their best the articles in this
collection develop these ideas and show how one can employ Wittgenstein in feminist
projects.
Alice Crary takes up the project of feminist epistemology, centrally its emphasis on
standpoints as a starting point for an interrogation of the ways that epistemic
practices function politically. Crary argues that there is a plausible development of
Wittgensteinian ideas which allows us to make sense of these ideas, and to
reformulate the goal of objectivity, without devolving into relativism or irrationalism.
Peg O’Connor takes up the Wittgensteinian idea of a language game, and urges,
contra Wittgenstein, that a creative approach to such games is not only possible, but
potentially politically libratory. In this way O’Connor argues, as do Wendy Lee and
others, that there are practical political strategies to be gleaned from reflection on
Wittgensteinian ideas.
The most creative, and to my mind best, articles in the collection are those of Hilde
Lindemann Nelson and Sarah Lucia Hoagland. Nelson takes on the anti-theoretical
trends in recent pragmatism and postmodernism. Both, she argues, move overly
quickly from a rejection of traditional philosophical conceptions of theory – in terms of
essences, fixed definitions, necessary laws – to a rejection of theory or even
conceptualization. She makes quite creative use of the Wittgensteinian ideas of family
resemblance and language games in her effective critique of these trends.
Sarah Lucia Hoagland focuses on the Wittgensteinian conception of nonsense to tackle

various unproductive debates in philosophy and politics. She argues that ways in
which debates over privilege, for example, often break down can be understood in
terms of a Wittgensteinian picture of the way that concepts are rooted in practice.
When disputants approach a particular issue from widely different linguistic practices,
she argues, the their claims can come across to one another as nonsense, in the
Wittgensteinian sense of that term. Hoagland goes on to make a fascinating – though
in my view unsuccessful – argument for separatism on the basis of this analysis.
Whatever the merits of the final conclusion, the article is fascinating.
As should be clear, this book is not really something that is designed for those whose
primary interest is Wittgenstein. But for those with an interest in feminist theory and
an openness to Wittgensteinian ideas, it makes many valuable contributions.
2003.10.12
Lorraine Smith Pangle
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Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship
Pangle, Lorraine Smith, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Cambridge, 2003,
264pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521817455.
Reviewed by Gabriel Richardson Lear , University of Chicago
From an Aristotelian point of view it is tempting to think that friendship can show us
something important about moral virtue since it is in this context that generosity,
courage, and selflessness come most easily. It is also in friendship that people feel
most fulfilled, and so it is tempting to think that by studying friendship we can see
how the life of moral virtue and happiness come together. In her study of the
discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, Lorraine
Smith Pangle argues that Aristotle begins with these high-minded hopes in order to
show something quite different to those who are willing to think carefully (i.e. not
necessarily to everyone who will read or hear the argument, e.g. p.131, p.235 n.10).
Pangle thinks that the idea that virtue is most perfectly and easily realized in
friendship, though true in its way, most likely rests on a confused understanding both
of moral virtue and of the goodness of friends. According to Pangle, the decent people
Aristotle addresses are likely to think that friendship is good because it is fulfilling to
devote ourselves utterly to another person and because they think moral virtue
involves precisely this readiness for self-sacrifice in the expectation of honor. She
argues that Aristotle’s purpose in NE VIII and IX is to correct these misconceptions in
a way that shows that true virtue and the best friendship arise among people who do
not seek their happiness in either. Instead, it is the friendships of philosophers that
best exemplify virtue in friendship. Thus, the books on friendship form a bridge to
Aristotle’s argument in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics that philosophical
contemplation is the most perfect happiness. This project unfolds in the course of an
astonishingly complex account of friendship: not only does Aristotle discuss
friendships based on virtuous character, he also describes relationships based on
utility or pleasure as defective, but nevertheless genuine, friendships. Friendships
between peers are standard, but he also spends several chapters discussing what he
calls friendships based on a superiority, such as between parents and children, rich
and poor, rulers and subjects. He explains why friends get into fights, when
friendships dissolve, why friendship is necessary, and what is its relationship to self-
love.
Pangle’s project is, therefore, ambitious. She develops her argument about the deeper
purpose of Aristotle’s theory of friendship in the context of offering a chapter-by-
chapter interpretation of the text. Furthermore, she augments her analysis with
lengthy discussions of Plato’s Lysis, Montaigne’s “Of Friendship”, and Cicero’s Laelius
(as well as a briefer discussion of Bacon’s “Of Friendship”), all of which she sees as
posing illuminating alternatives to the position Aristotle develops. The result is a book
that is full of fascinating discussions, not all of which directly advance her central
argument. However, I am not persuaded by her claim that Aristotle’s account of
friendship does or is intended to devalue the public, political life in favor of a life
devoted to philosophy. Before I raise an objection to that argument, though, I want to
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mention her interpretation of the importance of pleasure for friendship. For Pangle’s
book is full of insightful suggestions about Aristotle’s text and the topic of friendship
more generally.
One of the most persistent questions about Aristotle’s account of friendship is to what
extent a person’s appreciation of his friend must be self-interested. Pangle argues that
although all Aristotelian friendship involves an element of self-interest, a friend on
account of virtue is able to love the other for two reasons: as beneficial and as good
simpliciter. This, she says, is likely what Aristotle has in mind when he points out that
virtuous people are both good for each other and good in themselves (38).
Unfortunately, he is vague about the connection between these two sources of love.
But he does explain the respect in which virtuous friends are pleasant to each other:
since each is virtuous, each delights in observing virtue. Virtue is, after all, fine and
beautiful (kalon), and, according to Aristotle, the experience of the fine is a particular
sort of pleasure. But in being pleased by the friend’s virtue, one is delighting in the
other for what he is in himself. “Perhaps, then, Aristotle is hinting at the intriguing
possibility that it is through our openness to pleasure and not in our need for what is
good that we come closest to cherishing another simply for what he is in himself”
(44).
Once we see the importance of pleasure in the best friendships, we can understand in
part why Aristotle holds pleasure friendship in such relatively high regard. The
pleasure that is the basis of such friendship is the pleasure the friends take in being
together. (Aristotle’s chief examples of pleasure friends are teenaged companions.)
And even though a pleasure friend’s attachment is not to the other’s character, it
nevertheless seems closer to this ideal than the attachment of a utility friend. Pangle
does not speculate why this is so. The most she will say is that grounding pleasure
friendships in pleasure “is perhaps not quite the same as to say that they love not the
other person but only their own pleasure, and regard the other person merely as a
container or vehicle for it” (46). She also shows that Aristotle’s reluctance to call
associates of utility “friends” is based not on their lack of goodwill but in their failure
to be mutually pleasant (55). Pangle does not have time to develop these ideas in
much detail and a full defense of the position, if it is in fact Aristotle’s view, would
require a discussion of his account of pleasure and its necessary connection to its
object. But if she is right, this is another place where Aristotle acknowledges the very
important place of pleasure in our lives without claiming that pleasure itself is the
good.
Pangle’s argument about the relationship of friendship to the philosophical life comes
in two parts. In the last three chapters of her book she interprets Aristotle as arguing,
among other things, that friendship, and in particular friendship between unequals, is
desirable for the best person because he loves his own existence and, in helping a
kindred spirit engage in significant and satisfying activity, he extends or realizes his
own existence (162). Since human existence, according to Aristotle, is essentially in
activity, the question becomes which joint activity is most suitable for friendship?
Looking ahead to an argument Aristotle makes in NE X.7, Pangle argues that activity
that looks morally noble from the benefactor’s point of view is in fact not ideal. It
arises in contexts of necessity that no sensible person would choose (164).
Furthermore, Pangle thinks it unlikely that any such action ever in fact feels most
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worth choosing at the moment of action (165). Much to be preferred, she claims, are
“the engaging discussions of teacher and student that educate the student while
pushing the teacher to greater clarity” (167). Thus it emerges that the best
friendships, those between people who most clearly understand the nature of human
life and the value of moral virtue, will be friendships between philosophers.
Although the last step of her argument is a little quick, Pangle is probably right that by
putting the emphasis of his account on the activity friends share, Aristotle opens the
door to evaluating friendships on the basis of the things particular friends do together.
Thus, an intuitive high regard for friendship need not undermine the claim of the
philosophical life to be the happiest, but may actually support it.
But it is an important aspect of Pangle’s interpretation that this part of Aristotle’s

account comes after a sustained attack on the political life in NE VIII.7-IX.3. The idea
is that by the time we get to the end of Aristotle’s discussion of unequal friendships
and quarrels between friends, we will be ready for a new conception of happiness and
of friendship (137, 235 n.10).
She begins this first part of her argument in Chapter 3, when she turns to the
discussion of unequal friendships in NE VIII.7-8. Briefly, her argument proceeds as
follows: Since the inferior partner in an unequal friendship can never make an equal
return for the benefits he receives, the problem for Aristotle is to figure out how such
inequality can in a sense be equalized. Aristotle’s solution is that the inferior
reciprocates by loving more than he is loved and in proportion to the superiority of his
friend. Loving here cannot mean actively doing well by the superior friend since if the
inferior could do that, he wouldn’t be inferior. Rather, Aristotle must mean that the
inferior feels greater affection and expresses that affection in open admiration or
honor of the superior. No doubt Aristotle’s solution is odd, but Pangle believes he
undermines it almost as soon as he suggests it. In cases of not too great disparity and
for a short time, the inferior’s greater affection may create the illusion of sufficient
equality. But over time, Pangle claims, this fiction becomes impossible to maintain.
Thus, “[t]he equalization effected by giving greater affection in response to greater
merit can at best work only at the margins, to correct relatively small differences in
merit between friends” (58). The upshot of Pangle’s interpretation is that, despite
what people may think and what Aristotle himself initially suggests, greater affection
cannot equalize permanently unequal friendships, such as between father and child,
husband and wife (according to Aristotle) and a virtuous political leader and his fellow
citizens.
There are two interlocking reasons, according to Pangle, why Aristotle thinks
equalization via the greater affection of the inferior cannot genuinely equalize an
unequal friendship. First, he believes that honor has no intrinsic value and so it cannot
possibly repay what the superior has given (60). Second, any superior who benefited
his friend in the expectation of honor would not actually deserve it (127). So a political
leader or other “superior who was entirely satisfied with the equalization Aristotle
describes would seem to show poor judgement” (61) and, if not positively ignoble,
would not be as noble as he pretended.
558
Pangle does not intend to argue that genuine civic friendship between those of
unequal status and character is impossible. However, a clear-sighted superior will see
virtue as its own reward and will find an equal return not in what he receives from the
inferior but in the self-realization he achieves through him (198).1 Crucially, Pangle
believes, such a person would not see political life and the exercise of virtue with
respect to one’s fellow-citizens as the locus of happiness. He might value his acts of
civic generosity as moments of virtuous activity, but virtue that was entirely
satisfactory and worth choosing in itself could usually be more easily exercised in
private life (132). Furthermore, once the value of honor is seen to be negligible, there
is nothing to be gained from political life per se that is worth devoting a life to (130).
Thus, Pangle believes, if we are attuned to the incoherence just below the surface of
Aristotle’s account of unequal friendships, we will be primed for the new account of
the happy life that Aristotle presents in NE X.7.
Pangle is surely right that, according to Aristotle, the good of friendship is in some
sort of activity of self-realization rather than in the return of love and honor one
receives. But I am not convinced that the theory of equalization Aristotle describes in
NE VIII.7 is so confused as she suggests. Her interpretation of VIII.7-8 appears to be
at odds with later passages in which Aristotle seems to rely on the very theory of
equalization Pangle says he marginalizes. To take but one example, he says in NE
VIII.13 that “equal friends must be equal in loving and in other respects, as their
equality requires, but unequals must repay in proportion to the superiorities involved”
(1162b2-4).
Recall that in her interpretation (1) honor has no intrinsic value and so cannot possibly
repay what a superior has given and (2) any superior who benefits his friend in the
expectation of honor does not deserve it. (2) is based on the claim that no one who
acts in the expectation of honor is truly noble or deserving of it (127), but I doubt that
Aristotle would agree. After all, he calls the great-souled man – whose virtue is to
demand honor as an appropriate return for his moral greatness – an “ornament” of
virtue. Pangle wonders whether this glowing picture of the great-souled man was
“flattery” (60). We might like to see the great-souled man taken down a peg, but I
suspect this shows only that the virtuous person’s self-consciousness as morally
beautiful is an aspect of Aristotle’s ethics that is most alien to our own understanding
of moral motivation. So there is little reason to think that, according to Aristotle, a
person’s interest in honor disqualifies him for it.
As for (1), her case that Aristotle demotes the value of honor in this passage is not
clear-cut. It depends on reading him as saying that since most people desire honor,
but not being-loved, for merely instrumental reasons, honor in fact is only
instrumentally valuable. Furthermore, the instrumental value most people attribute to
it – it is a sign of the favor of powerful people and, when it comes from good people, it
is a confirmation of one’s own goodness – could not possibly be of interest to someone
virtuous. It is worth pointing out that Aristotle never affirms the merely instrumental
value of honor in his own voice and, as Pangle says, earlier in the NE he claims that it
is worth choosing for its own sake. It also is not clear to me that the second
instrumental benefit of honor is so negligible to a good person as Pangle suggests.
559
But let us suppose that honor is only instrumentally valuable and in such a way that
the virtuous person will have no need of it. How does this show that being-loved is not
adequate recompense to a superior? Aristotle’s point in mentioning the common
assessment of honor as only instrumentally valuable is to distinguish it from being-
loved: the latter is thought to be more precious since it is intrinsically valuable. He
does not explain what this further benefit is, but given the view of equalization he has
described in VIII.7, there is reason to think that it can be sufficient repayment to a
superior, as Pangle herself admits (61). True, Aristotle does go on to argue that
loving, rather than being loved, is the virtue of friends. But this claim does not
degrade the power of the inferior’s greater love to equalize the relationship. In fact, it
might be thought to support that claim. Aristotle may be saying that our success in
friendship is to be measured not by the extent and quality of affection we receive but
in the extent and appropriateness of the affection we give. When the inferior loves in
proportion to the merit of his superior friend, he is a good and, more to the point, as
good a friend as is the superior. “Since friendship consists more in loving, and lovers
of friends are praised, loving seems to be the virtue of friends. As a result, those for
whom this corresponds to worth are stable friends, and their friendship is stable. It is
in this way that unequals, too, would best be friends, since then they would be
equalized” (1159a33-b2, my emphasis). The fact that loving is the virtue of friends in
no way suggests that being-loved is not to be treasured. Nor does it show that a
person who accepts the greater love of the inferior as sufficient to equalize his
superiority in active goodwill is necessarily insecure or a lover of flatterers.
So not only does Aristotle seem untroubled by a superior who is generous in the
expectation of (though not for the sake of) honor, there is reason to think that, in his
view, greater affection and honoring can be an equalizing return.
But there may be a deeper issue here. I suspect we can share Aristotle’s intuition that
stable friendship requires a more or less equal give and take and that, where this is
strictly speaking impossible, some other form of equalization must be found. But it is
worth wondering why, in Aristotle’s view, equality is a sine qua non of friendship.
When she is drawing our attention to what she sees as the incoherence at the heart of
most unequal friendships, Pangle talks as if the return given by the inferior is what
makes the superior’s efforts on behalf of the inferior “worth it” to him (e.g. 130). If
this is the correct interpretation, then it would indeed seem likely that only honor-
lovers would actively pursue unequal friendships. The honor they expect would
motivate them to acts of generosity. From here it is easy to suspect superior friends of
hypocrisy: as friends they claim to benefit the inferior for his own sake, but their
demand for honor reveals that they were really after their own good all along (131).
But when Pangle first introduces the topic of unequal friendships, she suggests
another rationale for making equality a requirement. Since the primary pleasure of
friendship is the pleasure of spending time with a kindred spirit, equality is especially
important to the pleasure of friendship and thus to friendship itself (p.57). More needs
to be said in defense of this suggestion since it is not clear why equality of
reciprocation is necessary for seeing another person as a kindred spirit. Is her thought
that unless two people reciprocate equally they cannot see themselves as sufficiently
similar to take pleasure in spending time together? Aristotle may well believe this, and
560
it would be worth knowing to what extent the position can be justified. We would also
want to know why equalization seems so particularly important in utility friendships
where, Aristotle claims, very little pleasure is to be had.
Notice, though, that if this suggestion is correct, the requirement that the inferior
make an equal return or honor and affection need not cast a shadow over the
superior’s benevolence. For according to this interpretation, the inferior’s return of
honor is necessary not to ensure that the superior gets something out of the
relationship, but to enable him to see the inferior as a kindred spirit. This sympathy
and sense of similarity, once in place, is the origin of goodwill (47-50). Thus, receiving
the inferior’s praises would not be the superior’s goal in being generous, but rather
the condition that makes friendship (rather than some other factor) the reason to be
generous on any given occasion.
Contrary to what Pangle suggests (129-130), this is consistent with Aristotle’s

observation in NE VIII.14 that insufficient honor is a cause for complaint in unequal
friendships. Honor in proportion to merit is not only a prerequisite of unequal
friendship, after all, it is a demand of justice. When a person suspects his so-called
friends are not even treating him justly, he will indeed begin to question whether they
are friends at all.
But although I am not persuaded that unequal friendship and, in particular, political
friendship on Aristotle’s account is so deeply confused as Pangle suggests, she is
surely right that Aristotle believes it often in fact is. Where there is confusion in
unequal friendships there is likely to be confusion in these people’s reciprocations with
their equal friends. She is eloquent on the absurdity into which competition over the
noble may fall (124). Recognizing these possible contradictions is essential to
developing an account of the true value of friendship and of the Aristotelian political
life. There is much in Pangle’s book that will help philosophers do just that.
Endnotes
1. Pangle does not think Aristotle ever develops a conception of moral virtue that is
thoroughly satisfying in itself in the NE (226, n.7).
2003.10.13
Gavin Kitching, Nigel Pleasants (eds.)
Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics
Kitching, Gavin and Pleasants, Nigel (eds.), Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge,
Morality and Politics, Routledge, 2002, 320pp, $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415247756.
Reviewed by David G. Stern, University of Iowa
561
What, the reader of this review may well wonder, is the point of a collection of essays
connecting Marx and Wittgenstein? After all, “it is possible to take almost any two
thinkers of genuine insight and sophistication and to find some parallels and
commonalities in their thought. Indeed, doing so is one of the favourite intellectual
pastimes of all academics.” Indeed, one could legitimately ask whether “any two
thinkers have less in common than Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein.” Consider, for
a moment, the case for the prosecution. On the one hand we have Marx, political
activist and economic theorist, the founder of the ’science’ of ’historical materialism,’
whose Theses on Feuerbach proclaim that “philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways, the thing however is to change it.” On the other, Wittgenstein,
a philosopher who “showed virtually no interest in conventional political activity,”
famous for writing that “philosophy . . . leaves everything as it is” and who asked
himself “who knows the laws by which society evolves?” only to answer “I am sure
they are a closed book to the cleverest of men.”
Gavin Kitching’s excellent introduction to Marx and Wittgenstein not only anticipates
and responds to these objections—all of the quotations in the previous paragraph are
taken from his opening essay—but also provides a helpful orientation as to the range
of approaches taken by the contributors to this volume. Kitching’s response to these
objections is carefully measured. He sums up the point of the book in terms of three
interrelated aims, aims that echo the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis. Kitching tells us that the book as a whole aims to show that (1) there are
important commonalities in the thought of the two writers; (2) there are,
nevertheless, important differences between Marx and Wittgenstein, and among
Marxian Wittgensteinians; (3) yet a synthesis of Marx and Wittgenstein can be
“mutually enriching” (pp. 2-3).
The principal historical connections lie partly in Wittgenstein’s sympathy for certain
aspects of the left in the 1930s—he is said to have described himself as “a communist,
at heart”—and partly in the question of the role that Pierro Sraffa’s Marxism might
have played in his role as “stimulus for the most consequential ideas” of the
Philosophical Investigations.1 The principal systematic commonalities lie in Marx’s and
Wittgenstein’s rejection of the dualism of subject and object, observer and observed,
and their turn toward human action or practice. The principal differences, as indicated
above, have to do with the contrast between Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism,
and scepticism about a science of society, and the Marxist pursuit of such a science.
Furthermore, the individual contributors disagree greatly about the possibility and
desirability of a synthesis of Marx and Wittgenstein. I will return to the question how
far the book realizes its editors’ aims after a brief survey of the individual
contributions.
The fourteen essays are arranged into six parts, each bearing a title that sums up its
contribution to the story mapped out in the Introduction. In Part I, “Conventional
Wisdoms,” T. P. Uschanov reviews the reception history of Ernest Gellner’s polemical
attack on Wittgenstein’s philosophy in general, and Gellner’s caricature of him as a
covert political conservative, pursuing his political commitments under cover of
philosophical impartiality, in particular. While Gellner’s critique, largely composed of
shoddy rhetoric, insinuation and personal abuse, created considerable controversy, it
was dismissed by the philosophical establishment at the time. However, his caricature
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of Wittgenstein was enormously attractive to those who needed a convenient rationale

for dismissing him. It has since become conventional wisdom in many quarters, and
especially among social scientists, and is certainly part of the reason why a relatively
small number of social scientists on the left have taken a serious interest in
Wittgenstein.
In Part II, “Commonalities,” four different ways of connecting the two thinkers are
explored. Ted Schatzki approaches the connections between Marx and Wittgenstein by
considering their conceptions of natural history; David Rubinstein looks at their
understanding of culture and practical reason; David Andrews gives a Wittgenstein-
influenced reading of Marx on commodity fetishism; and Terrell Carver discusses their
relationship to postmodernism.
In Part III, “Wittgenstein and Sraffa,” Keiran Sharpe and John B. Davis, both experts
on economics and philosophy, provide informative and complementary accounts of
how Sraffa’s Marxism, and his particular approach to economics and questions of
economic theory, could have influenced Wittgenstein’s work on the Philosophical
Investigations. Sharpe sees the link in terms of the emphasis on the inter-relationship
between social action, criteria, and context in Sraffa’s work, and the ways this would
have led him to criticize the “asocial epistemology” (127) of the Tractatus. Davis
highlights the parallels between Gramsci’s unveiling of hidden structures of power,
Sraffa’s historicist critique of neo-classical economics, and Wittgenstein’s discussion of
family resemblance, rule-following and practice. Sharpe, by dint of carefully
assembling and arranging the available evidence, makes a surprisingly strong case for
what must be a matter of conjecture; Davis makes the far stronger, and highly
implausible, claim that Wittgenstein’s later ideas “presupposed the same philosophical
posture of critique that Sraffa’s (and Gramsci’s) possessed” (142).
Part IV, “Disjunctions,” draws our attention to a leading area of disagreement among
the contributors, concerning the nature of the relationship between the everyday use
of language and social-scientific uses of language. In view of Peter Winch’s pivotal role
in the debate over this topic, and his formative influence on most social scientists
interested in Wittgenstein, it is appropriate that both Ted Benton, in “Wittgenstein,
Winch and Marx,” and Nigel Pleasants in “Towards a critical use of Marx and
Wittgenstein,” approach this issue by means of a discussion of Winch’s interpretation
of Wittgenstein. Benton identifies a tension in Winch between the naturalistic tenor of
most of his work and his commitment to the anti-naturalistic view that one cannot
give a causal account of human action. His proposed resolution is to give up the anti-
naturalism, a position that is justified by an appeal to “Wittgenstein’s naturalism.”
Benton’s Wittgenstein has a conception of human nature that is a restatement of
Marx’s: a Wittgenstein, like Rubinstein’s and Schatzki’s, made safe for a traditional
sociological theory, by way of a reading of his philosophy as a theory of practice.
Pleasants, on the other hand, like Fann, Kitching, Carver, and Read, contends that a
construal of Wittgenstein as a practice theorist, a philosopher who put forward a
theory of the social constitution of mind and meaning in order to undermine the
methodological individualism of traditional philosophy, reproduces the very
methodological errors Wittgenstein opposes. Pleasants’ Wittgenstein conceives of
philosophy as an activity of clarification, one that brings about a change in the way we
look at things but does not consist in the production of a theory of society or of
563
practice: “what is to be avoided is the tendency—of both Wittgensteinians and

Marxists—to automatically assume there must be an authentic ’Wittgensteinian’ or
’Marxist’ line on whatever engages their interest” (165).
Part V, “Forerunners,” complicates the relatively self-contained story told so far, as it

draws connections with previous work on the Marx-Wittgenstein connection. The first
published essay on Marx and Wittgenstein, Ferrucio Rossi-Landi’s rich and provocative
“Towards a Marxian use of Wittgenstein,” originally published in Italian in 1966, is
reprinted in a slightly shortened version. Joachim Israel’s “Remarks on Marxism and
the philosophy of language” looks at the encounter between Wittgenstein and Marx
within Marxist philosophy of language. He first considers Volosinov and Bakhtin as
anticipators of Wittgenstein, then turns to a critique of Rossi-Landi’s reading of
Wittgenstein, and ends by recommending Markus’ use of Wittgenstein in developing a
contemporary Marxist philosophy of language.
Part VI, “Knowledge, morality and politics” reprises the subtitle of the book and
promises the most direct engagement with the aim of showing how the encounter
between Marx and Wittgenstein can be philosophically productive. Kitching’s “Marxism
and reflectivity” approaches the question of whether Marxism is a science by way of a
highly critical reading of Wright, Levine, and Sober’s Reconstructing Marxism. He
identifies the leading failure of that book as a lack of reflexivity, the very reflexivity
that Kitching identifies as central to both Marx’s and Wittgenstein’s approach to
understanding practice. Read’s “Marx and Wittgenstein on vampires and parasites”
draws parallels between Wittgenstein on the relationship between the language of
everyday and philosophical language, and Marx’s account of exploitation in capitalism.
Finally, Fann’s “Beyond Marx and Wittgenstein (A confession of a Wittgensteinian
Marxist turned Taoist)” provides an apt autobiographical conclusion. It tells the story
of his journey from postwar Taiwan to the US in search of a rational faith, his
combination of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics with Marxism-Leninism’s critique
of capitalism, his proselytizing support for Mao’s Cultural Revolution, his rediscovery
of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism after the collapse of communism, and his Taoist
rejection of Wittgenstein’s and Marx’s demanding ideals in favor of a life lived as an
end in itself, not as a means to an end.
To what extent, then, will the book as a whole realize its editors’ hopes that bringing
Marx and Wittgenstein together in this way will lead to an open, intense, and honest
“dialogue both among and between Marxists and Wittgensteinians” (xv)? That
depends, to a very large extent, on how one conceives of such a dialogue. Given the
differences in outlook and loyalties separating most Marxists and most
Wittgensteinians—the differences briefly summarized at the beginning of this review—
it seems unlikely that this collection of attempts to forge links between Wittgenstein
and Marxism will have any more impact on “dominant understandings of Marx or
Wittgenstein” (Kitching, 11) than the surprisingly large number of previous attempts
to do so, a tradition that already includes a number of books (Manser 1973,
Rubinstein 1981, Easton 1983, Kitching 1988, Pleasants 1999) and many more journal
articles.
However, that would be an overly narrow way to answer the question of the potential
impact of this book. Pleasants provides a helpful framework here, distinguishing three
564
broad kinds of attempts at relating Marx and Wittgenstein (161). First, there are
accounts that try to show that Marx influenced Wittgenstein, either through
Wittgenstein’s reading of specific texts of Marx, or via some intermediary. As
Pleasants notes, these projects are a familiar, and fairly limited, kind of intellectual
history. Furthermore, given the very scanty evidence, they will always seem
speculative at best, wishful thinking at worst. Second, there are interpretations that
argue for some similarity, or parallel, between certain aspects of their views, a
“conventional scholarly exercise in textual interpretation and theoretical construction”
(161). The principal problem with this approach, as T. E. Wilkerson unkindly but
pithily observes in his review of another “Wittgenstein and . . . “ project, is that “any
two philosophers are similar in some respect, but there is often little profit in dwelling
on the similarity.”2
Third, there are writers who go further afield than the historians and the drawers of
similarities. Typically, they use methods or ideas derived from one thinker to
reconstruct the other, or draw on both for social and political criticism. It is this
project—making use of Marx and Wittgenstein, rather than interpreting them—that is
encapsulated in the epigraph to Rossi-Landi’s contribution: “Do not seek for the
meaning of a philosopher, seek for his use: the meaning of a philosopher is his use in
the culture.” (Pleasants, 161; Rossi-Landi, 185) These parts of this collection, those
that go beyond the letter of what Marx and Wittgenstein had to say, are the ones that
have the greatest promise and will hold the most interest for a readership extending
beyond those specializing in Marx and Wittgenstein. Indeed, the particular topics
discussed in this book are connected with a number of broader currents of
contemporary thought. For there is a renewed interest at present in bringing together
Wittgenstein’s contribution to a critique of traditional philosophy, and his emphasis on
bringing words home to their ordinary uses, on the one hand, and a radical, or
liberatory, ethics and politics, on the other. Three collections of new essays that
exemplify these developments are The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or
Deconstruction (ed. Ludwig Nagl and Chantal Mouffe; Peter Lang, 2001); Slow Cures
and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine and Bioethics (ed. Carl Elliott;
Duke University Press, 2001) and Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (ed.
Naomi Scheman and Peg O’Connor; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
Furthermore, there is a strikingly autobiographical dimension to many of the essays in

this collection; taken together, they cast light on the Nietzschean idea that
“philosophy is always autobiography” (Fann, 282). In contrast to most professional
philosophy, which aspires to read as if written from nowhere, many contributors tell
us about the relationship between their professional and personal lives and the ideas
they discuss. Carver’s insightful essay draws our attention to the need that readers
have to construct an authorial persona when reading Wittgenstein or Marx, a
characterization of the “who, when and why of writing it,” in order to understand what
the author wrote. Carver notes that we do not only have to be able to tell a story
about what motivated Marx and Wittgenstein in order to interpret what they wrote.
The same point about emplotment “certainly applies to the way that interpretations of
texts by Marx and Wittgenstein are constructed by commentators . . . Readers thus
have the job of learning about commentators as authors when reading their texts, as
well as learning about Marx and Wittgenstein when reading theirs” (96). Similarly, we
readers of Marx and Wittgenstein have the job of learning about the contributors to
565
the volume as authors when reading their texts. One of the pleasures of this book is
the willingness of a number of authors to tell us about how their personal, political,
and philosophical lives are related. Part of what we learn from their autobiographical
stories is the moral seriousness of their interpretations of Marx and Wittgenstein: the
sense of elation felt on discovering that they could reconcile certain views, or their
distress at finding that certain aspects of one or the other’s thought had to be
rejected. We also learn that the most interesting connections between Marx and
Wittgenstein that the book draws are neither historical connections between those two
figures, nor systematic parallels between their thought, but rather the connections
that have been forged by their readers.
Endnotes
1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Preface. Ray Monk reports that

Wittgenstein once told Rowland Hutt: “I am a communist, at heart” (Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 343. New York, Macmillan, 1990.)
2. T. E. Wilkerson, review of Russell Goodman’s Wittgenstein and William James, Mind

2003, p. 346. I should add that I do not agree with Wilkerson’s harsh assessment of
Goodman’s book.
2003.10.14
Dominicus Gundissalinus, John A. Laumakis (translated)
The Procession of the World (De processione mundi)
Gundissalinus, Dominicus, The Procession of the World (De processione mundi),

translated by John A. Laumakis, Marquette University Press, 2002, 100pp, $10.00
(pbk), ISBN 0874622425.
Reviewed by Charles Burnett , Warburg Institute, London
The importance of Dominicus Gundissalinus (or Gundisalvi) in searching out

philosophical texts from Arabic and combining them in a fruitful way has been noted
by scholars such as Ludwig Baur, Manuel Alonso Alonso, Etienne Gilson, and Jean
Jolivet. The original Latin works attributed to him have been edited, but the
publication under review is the first attempt, as far as I know, to provide an English
translation of any of his works.
Gundissalinus’s style is to juxtapose sets of arguments for a succession of theses. He

uses these arguments first to prove that there is a creator (pp. 34-7), that this creator
must be the first cause (p. 37), that it must have necessary being (pp. 37-40), and be
one (p. 41) and untouched by differences (p. 42), and, finally, that it is God alone (p.
44). He then differentiates between causes (pp. 44-7), and describes the principles of
matter and form (pp. 47-62), the motion of creation (p. 62), the elements (pp. 63-4),
the first union of matter and form (pp. 64-6), the different kinds of forms (pp. 67-8),
566
corporeal and incorporeal substance (pp. 68-9), the simultaneity of the composition of
first matter and form and creation (pp. 71-2), the secondary cause, which is the
heavenly bodies, moving the lower bodies of the universe (pp. 72-4), and the third
cause, which operates among the lower bodies. He ends with a summary of the
process of creation and elemental generation (pp. 74-5), which is then explained in a
different way by numerology (pp. 75-6). This piling up of arguments is betrayed by
Gundisalvi’s frequent use of the phrases such as ’let us show this in another way’ (pp.
42 and 43), or ’this is also understood in another way’ (p. 54).
This review of the topics shows that the De processione mundi is a work of
metaphysics. A large amount of material is taken directly from the metaphysical
section (i.e. the beginning) of Hermann of Carinthia’s On the Essences. This fact was
unknown to the editor of the Latin text, Georg Bülow, and the parallel passages have
helpfully been signalled by Laumakis in the notes. (Unfortunately the extent to which
Gundissalinus follows the letter of Hermann’s text is often obscured by Laumakis’s use
of the English translation of On the Essences rather than the original Latin, since
Laumakis and the translator of Hermann chose different terminology and expressions
for the same Latin phrases.) The extent of the borrowing goes even further than
Laumakis indicates; e.g. on p. 34, the phrase ’the human mind ascends to the
contemplation of God (better translated as ’by contemplation to God’), and the divine
goodness descends to man’ corresponds exactly to On the Essences, p. 80, line 12;
and on p. 65, the phrase ’form is the ornament . . . of matter’ corresponds to On the
Essences, p. 77, lines 28--9. But Gundissalinus goes beyond Hermann by adding
arguments from works that he had translated: the Metaphysics or First Philosophy of
Avicenna, the Fons Vitae of Avicebron, and the Liber caeli et mundi of Hunayn ibn
Ishaq. Even more significant is the fact that he was apparently indebted to a work
that he did not translate: the Exalted Faith of Abraham ibn Daud. This work, written in
Toledo in Arabic 1160 or 1168, was never translated into Latin. Either Gundissalinus
knew of its contents through direct contact with Ibn Daud (which would lend weight to
the identification of Ibn Daud with the Jew ’Avendauth’ who collaborated with
Gundissalinus in translating the part Avicenna’s Shifa’ concerning the soul), or
Gundissalinus used Arabic texts alongside Latin translations. Both hypotheses are
eminently possible.
While Gundissalinus uses a large range of authorities, he never acknowledges his

source. His only authorities (aside from the Bible: ’Moses’: p. 63 from Genesis I, 1-2)
are the Classical references in his immediate sources: Augustine and Apuleius (p. 69,
within a quote from Hermann), and Aristotle (p. 71, most likely from Hunayn ibn
Ishaq); the quotation from Plato (p. 63) is too general for its immediate source to be
recognized. By omitting mention of his sources he can achieve more of a semblance of
a continuous argument, leading inevitably to restating the necessary being of the
Christian God.
Laumakis’s translation is sometimes over-literal (e.g. to translate ’autem’ regularly as

’however’ runs the danger of distorting the sequence of thought), but has been
carefully done. A great effort has been made, in the notes under the translation, to
find all Gundissalinus’s sources, and to show how he used them. Laumakis
summarises this information on the sources in the introduction, which also contains a
useful account of what we know of Gundissalinus and his writings, the date of
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composition of the Procession of the World (’no earlier than 1160’), and the structure
and content of the work. The introduction ends with an open-ended discussion of the
significance of the work and its influence on later scholasticism. Gundissalinus is seen
as a pioneer in using philosophical arguments in the service of Christian revelation.
Among Laumakis’s secondary works there is good representation of recent works by
Spanish authors, but no mention of the discussion concerning Gundissalinus’s identity
by Adeline Rucquoi (’Gundisalvus ou Dominicus Gundisalvi’, Bulletin de philosophie
médiévale, 41, 1999, pp. 85-106) and Alexander Fidora and María Jesús Soto Bruna
(’“Gundisalvus ou Dominicus Gundisalvi”? Algunas observaciones sobre un reciente
artículo de Adeline Rucquoi’, Estudios eclesiásticos, 76 [Universidad Pontificia
Comillas], 2001, pp. 467-73). It is to be hoped that further translations of the texts of
Gundissalinus will follow.
2003.10.15
Allan Silverman
The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato's Metaphysics
Silverman, Allan, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato's Metaphysics, Princeton

University Press, 2002, 408pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 069109179X.
Reviewed by Robert S. Colter , Centre College
In The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato’s Metaphysics, Allan Silverman presents

the reader with a remarkable synoptic treatment of Plato’s metaphysical philosophy.
Silverman offers an interpretation that takes on most of the major points of
contention among scholars such as central issues in the Theory of Forms, the relation
of ontology and language and the notorious receptacle. I cannot explore all of the
details of Silverman’s closely argued book, but I hope to give the reader some flavor
of this important work.
Silverman’s work is located in the center of the Anglo-American, analytic tradition of

Plato scholarship, a pedigree he openly acknowledges. His position in that tradition, as
becomes clear in the course of the book, is not one of mere orthodoxy; many of his
conclusions are original and quite controversial. He is a developmentalist who believes
that Plato’s views developed over his rather long career, and he reads the dialogues
as vehicles for Plato to express his own philosophical doctrines. He also accepts a
fairly orthodox, within the tradition, chronology of the dialogues. None of these
assumptions is universally held, and all have been called into question recently.
Nevertheless, while Silverman is not blind to the assumptions he makes, he does
make them without apology.
The book is divided into seven chapters, with an introduction, a conclusion and an
appendix. In each of the seven main chapters, Silverman limits the scope of
discussion to a specific set of issues, often within a particular dialogue, but sometimes
to a group of dialogues or only a portion of one. The result is a rather clear
568
development of the overall position that Silverman advocates. I hope to give some
sense of this position as well as highlight some controversial points.
Chapter 1 begins with a more-or-less uncontroversial synopsis of platonic

metaphysics. It has been accepted since at least Aristotle that for Plato the most basic
beings are Forms, and that these Forms are in some sense “separate” from other
entities, especially material particulars. It has also been a problem since antiquity how
to understand this notion of separation, which is related to, or, according to
Silverman, identical with the idea that the Forms are “themselves by themselves.”
Silverman uses this notion as his starting point. There are (at least) three ways of
looking at separation. One is the idea that Forms are separate ontologically from
sensible material particulars. The second is that of the separation of beings that are
“themselves by themselves” and beings that are the same as themselves. Silverman
calls this the separation between Being and Identity. The third and final way is that
there is a separation between the mind of the one who knows the object in question
and the object of knowledge itself. Silverman then claims, “Plato’s metaphysics
develops in tandem with his views on these three aspects of separation” (14). At the
most basic level, however, the notion of separation depends on the fact that the
Forms have a peculiar relationship to their essence, and have a very different
relationship to material particulars. Silverman cashes out these relations by looking to
the Phaedo, where Plato notoriously claims that “Beauty is beautiful.” This, of course,
raises the notorious problem of self-predication. Silverman offers a solution that is a
variant on the solution proposed by Alexander Nehamas: When one says that Beauty
Is (Silverman’s capitalization) beautiful, or that any form F-ness Is F, what one really
means is that Beauty (or F-ness) is what-it-is-to-be beautiful (or F). This is not to say,
as others have, that in self-predication statements with a Form as the subject, a Form
is identical with its essence, i.e., with what it is to be the Form it itself is. For
Silverman, Being the thing the Form is is somehow prior to identity, for nothing can
be either the same as itself or different from anything else unless it is the thing that it
is. On the other hand, when one says that Helen is beautiful, one really means that
Helen partakes in beauty. That is, Helen stands in a relation to Beauty that gives her
the property of beauty. Thus, Being is not, for Silverman, a characterizing relation,
whereas partaking is, and both are primitive relations.
Chapter 2 discusses the possibility that there are some metaphysical views in the
“Socratic” or early dialogues. Silverman argues that there is no well worked out view
to be found, at least until the Meno, which heralds the beginning of Plato’s theorizing
about the nature of properties and definitions. In other early dialogues, according to
Silverman, Socrates does not have a metaphysical “theory,” but does make use of
what can be reasonably seen as points of metaphysical “doctrine.” That is, while no
investigation is made into the ontological status of things such as Piety and Virtue,
Socrates and his interlocutors do not hesitate to treat them as things with some
legitimate ontological status.
Chapter 3 looks at some central parts of the Phaedo and Republic, in which Silverman
sees the basic outline of the Theory of Forms. As Silverman acknowledges, there is
much that is not developed in these dialogues, but some fundamental views are
expressed. In particular, Silverman focuses on the introduction of the idea of the
“forms-in-us” in the Phaedo. What is meant by this is the subject of a good deal of
569
scholarly controversy. Silverman, calling them “form-copies,” defends them as

legitimate items in Plato’s ontology. Silverman is certainly correct that the Phaedo
makes use of these entities, but it is less clear that they appear in the Republic and
later. As I understand it, Silverman’s most powerful argument for these items is not in
this chapter, but occurs in the final chapter of the book, on which see below.
The first three chapters, then, lay a basic groundwork for the more difficult
philosophizing that comes out of the next several chapters. For the rest of the book
Silverman focuses on the later dialogues, Parmenides, Sophist, Philebus, and Timaeus.
Most who are not Plato scholars, and many who are, tend to avoid these dialogues,
which are notoriously difficult, dense, and confusing. In Silverman’s view, the true
heart of Plato’s metaphysical theory lies in these dialogues, and thus it is not only
justified, but necessary that these dialogues receive Silverman’s most careful
attention.
Chapter 4, “Refining the Theory of Forms,” is a detailed study of certain aspects of the
Parmenides. As Silverman puts it, “The Parmenides is both one kind of challenge to
the Hypothesis of Forms and a response to the challenge” (105). The crux of the
response to the challenge, according to Silverman’s interpretation, comes from the
beginning of the passage known as the second Hypothesis (142b1-155e3), in which,
Silverman claims, we come to understand more clearly the relation between a Form
and its essence. If his earlier claim that this relation is the fundamental one for the
notions of separation at play and indeed for Plato’s metaphysics in general, then his
interpretation of this passage is absolutely crucial. The Second Hypothesis, according
to Silverman, shows that Being and One-ness must partake of one another. That is,
for something truly to Be, i.e., have an essence, it must exist as some one thing. On
the other hand, for something to Be its essence, it must have that essence uniquely.
Thus every Form is a “one-being,” which is to say that each Form partakes in both
Being and One-ness in order to be the very same self-identical thing that it is. Another
feature of the Forms that immediately becomes clear is that they cannot be isolated
from one another, but must be inter-related, at least logically, and so the Forms have
properties.
The final three chapters contain what are, in my view, Silverman’s most interesting
and controversial arguments. Chapters 5 and 6 are focused on the Sophist. Chapter 5,
“Forms and Language” centers on the famous communion of Forms and the five
“greatest kinds.” Given Silverman’s explanation of the result of the Parmenides that
the Forms must have properties of some sort, Plato the metaphysician must further
explain the relations between the Forms. Thus, the Sophist continues a project begun
in the Parmenides, one that further distances the theorizing of the Sophist from the
picture we get in the Phaedo, for example. Silverman argues powerfully against the
view, first championed by Gilbert Ryle, that Plato abandons substantial Forms in the
Sophist, and that the “kinds” are merely “syncategorematic judgments.” The most
important and most difficult part of his argument is to show that the Forms
participate, which seemed to be required for the solution to succeed. Silverman
explains that, for Plato, to participate in Being is to become a legitimate object, that is
a Form. Thus, to “Be” is to become “essenced” (180).
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Chapter 6 focuses on the problem of “not-being,” as it is developed in the Sophist.

The discussion is divided into two major parts. The first is on the relation between
not-being and Difference, and the parts thereof. The second concerns the role of the
method of collection and division in the investigation of not-beings. Silverman argues
that Plato begins in this dialogue to recognize that there is a difference between the
ontological and conceptual orders. In particular, one result of the use of collection and
division is that there are concepts, i.e., contents of our thoughts, that do not have
corresponding Forms. Silverman also spends several pages arguing against the view,
which he calls a “new orthodoxy,” (210) that the method of collection and division
shows that Plato is now endorsing some form of coherentism according to which no
Form can be known in isolation, but must be considered in the light of the conceptual
structure and interrelations exhibited by collection and division in order to be known.
While Silverman raises a number of important criticisms of this view, such as the point
that such a coherentism seems to require that one know everything in order to know
anything, he does not address what seems to me the most compelling evidence for
this “new orthodoxy.” That evidence comes from the “dream” passage of the
Theaetetus, and seems to conclude that nothing can be known in isolation. Exactly
how to interpret the “dream” passage is controversial, but one way to understand it is
as an argument showing that non-discursive knowledge cannot succeed, because all
knowledge requires the ability to give an account. On many interpretations, this is
taken to be the main point of the Theaetetus as a whole. Many of the accounts
canvassed in the Theaetetus are of an inter-relating sort, and this suggests to many a
form of coherentism or holism. Silverman seems to recognize a tension here, saying
that it “points to the irreducible and ineliminable gap between the discursive and
intuitive accounts of knowledge in Plato” (216). I would like to see more argument
than Silverman provides to establish that the gap is in fact as he describes. Of course,
I recognize that such a discussion would go beyond the immediate scope of
Silverman’s project, but I find his argument on this point uncompelling without
consideration of the argument of the Theaetetus.
Chapter 7, “The Nature of Material Particulars,” explores the nature of these lesser
objects in Plato’s ontology as it is developed in the Philebus and Timaeus. As
Silverman notes, this has not been a topic that scholars have chosen to pursue, and
thus his contribution constitutes the longest and perhaps most difficult chapter of the
book. Silverman argues that material particulars become a more important part of
Plato’s metaphysical thinking than they are in earlier dialogues, and that Plato’s
treatment of them in the Philebus and Timaeus is a sort of “rehabilitation” of them
(219). One result of this is that material particulars become respectable objects of
cognition and of the method of collection and division in particular.
I cannot possibly do justice to Silverman’s extensive argument in this chapter, but his
conclusions are roughly as follows, as I understand them. Material particulars are, in
the end, the composites that result from the interaction of the receptacle, which is a
completely natureless medium, and the form-copies that are the properties of the
particulars. Thus, it is still the case that, for Plato, particulars are dependent entities,
since those form-copies are themselves dependent on the Forms. What then is the
receptacle? One way to understand it is as matter, and so to understand a particular
as a composite of matter and properties, as Aristotle does. But this is not Plato’s
position, according to Silverman. Matter itself is a construct. Recall that the receptacle
571
is utterly natureless and has no properties whatsoever. But matter has the properties
of extension and place. These properties, according to Silverman’s Plato, are the
result of the interaction of the receptacle with the geometrical form-copies that are so
prominent in the Timaeus. Thus, it is this understanding of material particulars that
constitutes Silverman’s best argument for form-copies, namely that without them, no
coherent account of material particulars could be given.
In sum, Silverman has produced an important contribution to contemporary

scholarship on Plato’s metaphysics. While one might find certain details of his account
less than convincing when taken in isolation, the coherence and detail of his overall
interpretation make a compelling case. But beyond that, Silverman has also made a
compelling case for Plato the metaphysician and that his metaphysical thinking should
play more of a role in contemporary discussions of these issues than it has. On
Silverman’s interpretation, Plato’s metaphysical philosophy, especially in the later
dialogues such as Sophist, Philebus, and Timaeus, is as philosophically respectable as
any competitor today, and any student of issues surrounding universals and
particulars would be well served to spend more time studying it.
Copyright © 2004 Notre Dame Philosophica
2003.11.01
Richard Eldridge (ed.)
Stanley Cavell
Eldridge, Richard (ed.), Stanley Cavell, Cambridge, 2003, 260pp, $20.00 (pbk), ISBN
0521779723.
Reviewed by Steven G. Affeldt , University of Notre Dame
Including the substantial Introduction by Richard Eldridge, this volume consists of nine
previously unpublished essays each of which focuses upon a single region of Cavell’s
work. While the scope of the issues considered in the volume can be only incompletely
indicated by listing the regions addressed, they include: ethics, philosophy of action,
the normativity of language, aesthetics and modernism, American philosophy,
Shakespeare, film, television, and opera, and the relation of Cavell’s work to German
philosophy and Romanticism. The volume also contains a useful index, and a brief
annotated bibliography of works by and about Cavell.
Both the format of the volume, segmenting Cavell’s work into more or less discrete
regions and assigning a single essay to each, and the nature of many of the individual
essays, are to a significant extent determined by the fact that the volume appears in
the Cambridge University Press series “Contemporary Philosophy in Focus.” The
description of the series specifies that the volumes are intended as “introductory,”
that they “consist of newly commissioned essays that cover major contributions of a
preeminent philosopher in a systematic and accessible manner,” that the essays “do
572
not presuppose that readers are already familiar with the details of [the] philosopher’s
work,” and that they “will thus combine exposition and critical analysis in a manner
that will appeal both to students of philosophy and to professionals and to students
across the humanities and social sciences.”
This can sound like a sensible mandate for (marketing) a series of volumes, but it is
not obviously practicable. Beyond the evident and quite general difficulty of producing
essays that will be at once accessible to readers with no prior familiarity with the
details of a philosophers work and useful for those more deeply involved with it, there
are special obstacles to realizing this mandate when the work of the philosopher in
question is Stanley Cavell. Three immediate such obstacles are the following. First, as
many of the contributors to this volume note, although Cavell’s work unfolds across an
unusually wide range of areas, it is also deeply unified by systematic continuities of
concern; and this unity is, to an important extent, incompatible with segmenting it
into discrete “major contributions” treated in isolation from the rest. Second, Cavell’s
work relies upon, and demands, such scrupulous attention to the specificity of words
and the contexts of their employment that any attempt to address it at a level that
prescinds from the fine-grained structure of its details is likely to be either quite
misleading or very nearly empty. And third, there is arguably no contemporary
philosopher who has more acutely challenged the idea of an (orderly or predictable)
“introduction” to the work of philosophy. That is, there is no telling in advance what
will open an issue or the work of a philosopher for one philosophically, as opposed to,
for example, as a matter of intellectual history.
That the individual essays in this volume so successfully negotiate the hazards internal
to the mandate they were asked to meet is a significant measure of their quality.
I will briefly touch upon many of the essays shortly. Before doing so, however, it will
be helpful to sketch two different conceptions of the “introductory” in terms of which
they may be characterized and grouped. One the one hand, the introductory may be
understood to involve situating the work of a thinker within its historical and
disciplinary context or the context of his/her further work and in this way illuminating
its motivations and aims, summarizing its principle claims and arguments, articulating
questions raised by the work, and the like. Such a conception of the introductory will
presume little prior familiarity with the work in question, will operate at a level more
or less distant from its details, and will tend in the direction of removing the need (for
a certain type of reader with certain kinds of interests) to read the work in question.
One is given the general idea. On the other hand, the introductory may be understood
as directed less toward conveying the central ideas to those with little prior familiarity
with the work than toward providing readers at any level with resources or avenues
for more fruitfully taking up and going on from the work. This second conception of
the introductory may or may not also perform some of the same functions as the first,
but will necessarily engage more closely with specific details, and will be less
concerned with summary than with developing a helpful angle on (some aspect of) the
work and returning readers to it with new questions and transformed perspective. In
this second sense, much of Cavell’s own best work may be described as seeking to be
introductory.
573
No essay in this volume embodies either of these conceptions of the introductory

unalloyed, but each tends, and some heavily, toward one or the other. Among the
essays hewing most closely to the first conception of the introductory, those that do
so most productively are Stanley Bates’ “Stanley Cavell and Ethics,” Anthony J.
Cascardi’s “’Disowning Knowledge’: Cavell on Shakespeare,” and William Rothman’s
“Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera.” Each not only provides a lucid general account
of the issues and main claims within its respective region of Cavell’s work but also
includes moments that provoke deeper critical attention. For example, Bates
importantly urges the necessity of situating the chapters of Part Three of The Claim of
Reason against the background of early analytic moral philosophy, and provides a
quite helpful sketch of that background, while also arguing against the impression
that, therefore, these chapters have no continuing relevance and suggesting several
ways in which they do. Cascardi offers a brief but quite suggestive set of remarks
about the sense in which, for Cavell, human consciousness and experience are
inherently dramatic in form. And, among a number of quite suggestive claims that
emerge within Rothman’s essay, I will note only his discussion of how and why film,
as a medium, is committed to moral perfectionism and his suggestion that to the
extent that the difficulty of assessing the thought of film is the same as the difficulty
of assessing our everyday experience, Cavell’s work on film provides a way into and
through that difficulty.
Among the essays hewing more closely to the second conception of the introductory, I
find most stimulating Richard Eldridge’s “Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and
Avoidance,” Timothy Gould’s “The Names of Action,” Stephen Mulhall’s “Stanley
Cavell’s Vision of the Normativity of Language,” and Jay Bernstein’s “Aesthetics,
Modernism, Literature: Cavell’s Transformation of Philosophy.” Each is difficult and no
reader of Cavell will agree with all that any contains. But their difficulty is, for the
most part, necessary and, if readers may disagree, they will also have to acknowledge
that the disagreements are over deep points and not quickly to be settled.
Again, I will only briefly note a few specific points. Eldridge draws upon his long-
standing concerns with achieving expressive freedom to sketch a provocative proposal
concerning the dynamics of avoidance and acknowledgment in Cavell’s work; and
while one may doubt that his wish to find a balance and harmony between these
would seem as reasonable had their specific relation to skepticism in Cavell’s writing
been given more attention, the essay opens a genuinely helpful perspective on much
that is most central in Cavell. Gould’s essay powerfully argues that Cavell’s peculiar
approach to issues of action--the issues are both pervasive and often all but invisible--
is bound up at once with the difficulty internal to characterizing “ordinary actions” and
with his efforts to transform how the philosophy of action is conceived. Mulhall
carefully examines Cavell’s apparent hostility to appeal to rules in accounting for the
normativity of uses of language, and argues, controversially to be sure, that Cavell’s
specific arguments against appeals to rules do not generalize and that his positive
views are, in fact, not only compatible with the more nuanced view of rules he finds in
the work of Baker and Hacker but dependent upon such a view. Bernstein’s especially
rich and searching essay is, in the end, nothing less than an attempt to argue that
Cavell’s work is essentially modernist in both its methods and its aims, and that, for
this reason much of what is most central and challenging in that work may be
understood through what Bernstein calls the logic of exemplarity.
574
As useful as the individual essays comprising this volume are, it is even more helpful
as a volume. It is not simply that the individual essays offer sometimes widely
differing views of Cavell’s work and exemplify different ways of engaging and
employing it. It is also, and more importantly, that read together the essays both
complement or supplement one another and, frequently, may be brought into
argument with one another. For example: One cost of Bates’ careful attention to
Cavell’s engagement with ethics in Part Three of The Claim of Reason is that he is able
to give only very brief attention to his more recent writing on moral perfectionism and
perfectionist exemplarity. But this cost is significantly defrayed by the fact that
Rothman gives a good deal of direct attention to these issues and that Bernstein so
thoroughly develops the issue of exemplarity more generally. William Desmond’s
essay on Cavell’s relation to German philosophy and Romanticism (which is unique
among the essays in this volume in giving very little direct attention to any of Cavell’s
texts), argues that a notion of transcendence is deeply implicated in Cavell’s work and
that this notion, as Desmond understands it, requires a religious backing that Cavell
fails to provide. This essay may, then, be brought into argument with Bernstein’s,
which not only provides resources for resisting Desmond’s conception of
transcendence but argues that Cavell’s modernism can only make sense in a setting
after the death of God. One central argument of Mulhall’s turns on Cavell’s early
Austinian perception that speaking is a kind of doing, that when we talk about talking
we are talking about a species of action. But his use of this thought is powerfully
challenged by Gould’s argument, drawing on material in Cavell’s . Pitch of Philosophy,
that speaking is, in important ways, not simply a species of action. A number of
further examples could be provided. These should suffice, however, to suggest that,
for all of their individual value, it is through the ways in which these essays may be
read with and against one another that this volume will be most helpful in encouraging
the kind of attention to Cavell’s work that it both merits and demands.
One final point must be noted. It is a deeply peculiar, indeed quite puzzling, feature of
this volume that it includes no essay dealing specifically with Cavell’s work on
traditional epistemology and skepticism. Anyone familiar with Cavell’s work will know
that issues of skepticism are at the heart of nearly everything he has written, as is
attested by the fact that most of the essays in this volume at least touch on one or
another aspect of his engagement with skepticism. Rather than remedying this
omission, however, this fact only makes more pressing the need for an essay treating
this material systematically.
2003.11.02
J.N. Mohanty
Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography
Mohanty, J.N., Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography, Oxford, 2002,
224pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195648358.
Reviewed by Lester Embree , Florida Atlantic University
575
Hardly ever do philosophers write so fine (and concise) a story of how their years
have gone. Most of us lack so much to look back on and few write so well.
Mohanty is now in his seventies (he was born in 1928). He grew up, studied, and
began to teach in India, but in his twenties he went to Göttingen and then, after a
while back in India, he spent over thirty years in the United States. Because he never
committed to emigrating, he has always considered himself an Indian and never an
Indian-American. From Germany on, Mohanty has always been conversant with both
Eastern or Western cultures and has straddled both. He writes to explain his life in the
West to readers in the East and vice versa. Beyond this, we can wonder why he went
West, as well as asking what has interested him philosophically.
Much about Mohanty himself is indirectly indicated by his descriptions of places and
others. There are a dozen short chapters relating to the situations he lived in.
Although the following sketch is not up to his standard of expression, it may
nevertheless draw colleagues into a fine reading experience and into a deeper grasp of
a type of interworldly intellectual now increasingly encountered.
We are treated to loving descriptions of an extended family, some remarkable

individuals—many of them women (we rarely read of men without reading of their
wives)— and Mohanty’s village (he has always considered himself a village boy). His
father belonged to the landed gentry, was a judge, and always supported him with
whatever was needed, but he was emotionally closer to his mother. His home
language is Oriya; he went to government English schools during the Raj and had
tutors, receiving firsts and prizes from the beginning. He also began learning Sanskrit
at home: “Every morning three of us would recite conjugations and declensions of
Sanskrit verbs and nouns loud enough to be heard outside the house; we would
compete to do it first. The pandit taught me all the grammar that I learned later. He
also taught this ten-year-old boy the primer of logic Tarkasamgraha, and Kalidasa’s
Raghuvamsam” (6).
Born when he was, Mohanty lived through the culmination of India’s independence
struggle. Some aunts and uncles followed Gandhi and were at one time jailed, while
others were Marxist and went underground. Police came around. The alternatives of
Marx and Gandhi were debated by Mohanty within himself as well as with others
through most of his life. An uncle sought to merge Gandhi, Marx, and Tagore.
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were also discussed in a time Mohanty compares with
Periclean Greece and the 1781-1832 period in Germany. Gandhi seems to have
affected him most:
Earlier in my youth, I spun on a spinning wheel—following the Mahatma’s example—

and used only hand-spun and hand-woven clothes, practiced vegetarianism, walked, if
not on bare feet, with a locally made pair of sandals, said, when possible, the evening
prayers for all major religions, read and memorized large parts of the Bhagavadgita,
washed my own dishes after meals (this was not usually done in middle-class families
in India), and tried to cultivate a spirit of empathy with nature and my fellow villagers.
It was a way of life—where religion, social activism, and ethical spirit merged
together. After finishing high school, I was spending the summer in the village,
translating Tagore’s poems (originally in Bengali) into Oriya, when I decided to learn
576
tilling the land with a bullock-drawn plough, as was the practice then (and also now).
It was hard work, but I wanted to experience what work in the field meant. (17)
First, he went locally to college to study mathematics, Sanskrit, and English. He

abandoned his initial attempt to read Kant, but began his preoccupation with the
writings of Sri Aurobindo. In 1945, after coming in first on examinations, he went on
to Presidency College in Calcutta. Academic life may bring little pay in India, but many
statuses and titles are mentioned. About that city and time, he much later spoke in a
lecture of “a sixteen-year-old boy from the neighboring state of Orissa coming to
Calcutta, carrying an insatiable curiosity to learn and to make friends and immediately
falling in love with the city” (102).
While at Presidency he helped defend the residence buildings with stones, boiling
water, and live electric wires during the communal conflicts over partition. Otherwise,
“my central philosophical concern was: ’Are the world and finite individuals real even
from the point of view of the highest metaphysical knowledge, as Sri Aurobindo would
have it, or is the world, along with finite individuals, only an appearance, mithya,
sustained by ignorance (avidya) of the ultimate reality, as Samkara holds” (27). Many
teachers and fellow students are remembered fondly. He was among the first
graduates in independent India, receiving his first-class degree in 1949. He then did
some teaching on Sri Aurobindo, studied Vedanta at the Sanskrit College, and fell in
love and married.
Mohanty went to Göttingen in October 1952 and stayed two and a half years. We are
not told why he chose that university, but it was staffed by top faculty trained before
the war. The reader still senses his thrill half a century later. With funding from his
father, he left behind parents, wife, and child for an intellectually exciting situation
(which was gone when he returned there in the 1990s). He continued to study
mathematics (no doubt also German) and Sanskrit, in the latter working on the Vedas
in a way that seems indelibly stamped in his memory:
Our task was to translate [a hymn] into German, point out and resolve problems in
translations, identify grammatical problems, and solve them with the help of Panini as
well as other Vedic grammars. “Never use,” he warned us, “any existing translations,
never use Sayana’s commentary (for, he said, Sayana is closer to us in time than to
the Vedic period); use dictionaries, especially nirukta and grammar books, and
prepare your own translations and report.” And when you presented yours in the
class, Waldschmidt would critique you, question you at every step, and tear your
arduous work to pieces. He once said to the class, “My goal is to train you in such a
way that given a fragment of a manuscript, you can make something of it, date, build
a reasonable hypothesis about its style, internal and external cross-references,
produce a translation, and raise a host of questions.” And in all this, he remained a
philologist—an excellent one at that—with no interest in the value and validity of the
ideas, concepts, or philosophies in the texts. That was German Indology at its best.
(44)
Few philosophers in the United States know that Mohanty is also a world-class
Sanskritologist.
577
There are good discussions of the physicists who delayed progress on the German
nuclear bomb, the involvements of various figures with National Socialism, and the
first comment on Heidegger, “who never even regretted his ’political error’ but always
came up with devious ’ontological’ explanations!” (43; cf. 114) In contrast, “Politically
conservative though he was, Husserl did not fall into the trap, and as a result suffered
indignity because of his Jewish heritage, at the hands of his hand-picked successor”
(54).
Back in India, Mohanty joined the land-gift movement of Gandhi’s foremost disciple,
Vinoba Bhave, discussing with him the Isa, Kena, and Katha Upanishads as they
walked from village to village. Later he translated and commented on some lectures of
Vinoba. In 1955 he became a lecturer at Calcutta in a delightful way too elaborate to
explain here. His Western degree was valued and his network of friends was growing.
He used Sanskrit texts to teach Indian philosophy and Kröner’s Vom Kant bis Hegel for
German philosophy. His own Husserl’s Theory of Meaning and Phenomenology and
Ontology stemmed in part from his subsequent lectures on epistemology. Later he
lectured on political philosophy using Hegel and Marx. Still later, he also helped
establish the philosophy department at Burdwan University, to which he commuted
from Calcutta for six years, after which he returned to the University of Calcutta.
Yet the Calcutta department was no longer exciting. He did not want to be the chair,
particularly with the challenges of the Maoist Naxolite movement, and accepted the
invitation to the University of Oklahoma and the small town of Norman. Initially, the
plan was to visit merely for two years. Being there longer brought him into contact
with something called “Indian culture”:
This was more due to “homesickness” and boredom than due to the love for and
understanding of that culture. If I look at it with the eyes of young children who were
growing up, in high schools or in colleges, “Indian culture,” for their parents, meant a
certain taste in food, music (mostly film songs), Bhajan (religious songs), and certain
religious rituals. A young person is said to be “Americanized” if he prefers to eat
hamburgers, prefers Western music, and does not understand the Bahjan or puja
[religious rituals]. For many parents, cultivating Indian culture, including religious
ceremonies, was meant for en-culturing the children, and the latter need this so that
they, when they grew up, do not marry American girls (or boys). “Understanding” the
culture was of no concern to anyone, for no one understood all that, in any case. This
perhaps explains why the children in the beginning accompanied their parents to
feasts and festivals, but eventually gave up. (81, but cf. 101)
Oklahoma and Norman were also not that exciting, so in 1973 Mohanty accepted the
invitation to visit the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New
School for Social Research—an invitation that came from Aron Gurwitsch, who hoped
to find a successor. Like Calcutta, New York is a real city, and Mohanty appreciated
how the Graduate Faculty was established by refugees. He and Gurwitsch had too
much in common for extensive influence and, in any case, Gurwitsch soon died. But
Hans Jonas and especially Hannah Arendt did influence him, the latter proposing that
he distinguish Heidegger the thinker from Heidegger the man. While at the New
School, Mohanty came to appreciate the early Marx as well as to appreciate history,
and, as he once told the present writer, he became a transcendental philosopher
578
there. He also led the struggle to preserve the New School’s Ph.D. program in
philosophy. He went back to Oklahoma in 1978.
In 1982 Mohanty was a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford, and used the Sanskrit
resources there in order to advance the preparation of Reason and Tradition in Indian
Thought. Among other things, he got Michael Dummett started on an intensive study
of Husserl. In 1994 he spent a summer at Freiburg to read Husserl manuscripts (I still
hope he can finish his Gesamtdarstellung of the phenomenologist.) He offers a
charming comparison of Oxford and Freiburg.
In 1985, after seven more years in Norman, Mohanty retired from Oklahoma and
accepted Joe Margolis’s call to Temple. Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought was
finished in 1990. (He also visited Emory repeatedly in the 1990s.) He saw his
granddaughter, Padmini (whom he once told colleagues at dinner that he had taken to
a rock concert, not an easy place to imagine him!), through high school and then Bryn
Mawr: “I had so long carefully guarded her and protected her, now she could go her
own way, making her own choices” (103).
Meanwhile, however, the need to return again and again to India was strong. While
his papers in the West were of a scholarly and scientific type, in India he sought a
more practical impact: “But a merely scholarly, ’scientific’ philosophy had never
captured my mind. The old interests of my youth—Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo—were
not totally gone. Like Kant, I continued to believe that philosophy had to be, in spite
of its scientific character, a theory of Welt Weisheit and Husserl’s idea that the
philosopher had to be a ’functionary’ of humankind did not cease to appeal to me”
(106).
Concerning India today, however, he has misgivings about the new and Americanizing
middle class there, and especially about renunciations of Gandhi, as well as about
those who say that the conservative BJP party shows the way back to the ideology of
Hindutva. “The ideologists of Hindutva are not believers in Hinduism” (108). The last
chapter affectingly describes how, even though he is an atheist, he performed the
final rituals for his mother’s ashes. One can be spiritual without being theistic.
Once I clearly and unambiguously rejected belief in God, the idea of spirituality,
despite its equivocations and ambiguities, became more interesting. Philosophy, as a
search for the transcendental ground of mundaneity, began to make sense. I also
attempted to recover the sense of religiosity that was important for me. Religiosity
now meant to me a sensitivity to the irreducible sacredness of things; the sacredness
of life; sacredness of humanity; and the sacredness of nature; the moral responsibility
to preserve life, nature and humankind, to let humans flourish and develop to their
best ability—in brief, using Whitehead’s expression, “world-loyalty.” (120)
In the penultimate chapter he describes in a few rich paragraphs (and not without
some bitterness) the United States he has seen over the past forty years and the new
society that seems to be emerging there. He disapproves of Germany becoming a
multicultural society like the United States. He had found that he could send down
roots in Germany as well as India, but not in America. He is nevertheless grateful to
have been able to participate in the vibrant American intellectual life.
579
And the antepenultimate chapter and the appendix are about his philosophical journey
and contribution. Mohanty asserts that “my life has been primarily dedicated to the
pursuit of philosophical ideas” (ix) and there is no reason to doubt his self-
understanding. Here we can return to the questions posed at the beginning, i.e., What
interested him philosophically? answering them in the light of remarks throughout the
text. He does not remember what initially lead him to philosophy, but the interest in
Western as well as Indian philosophy emerged early. Kant is often in the background
for him. He acknowledges a proclivity for analytical thinking. Besides the philosophy of
logic and mathematics already studied in India, there was the Gandhi vs. Marx issue
and also Sri Aurobindo in social and political philosophy. Since at least Göttingen,
where he jumped into the controversy of consciousness vs. language, the problem of
Platonism—or at least the status of abstract or ideal objects—has been central, and
thus he resisted empiricism and historicism, as well as “the growing anti-Platonism of
analytic thinkers in England and America” (111). Thereafter he proceeded from both
Western and Indian philosophy.
Husserl, beginning from the Logical Investigations, is focal for Mohanty.

“Phenomenology asks us to focus on the way things are presented in consciousness,
on the meanings that things have for those experiencing consciousness.
Understanding consciousness as intentional and meaning-giving, phenomenology
raised consciousness, in its transcendental (i.e., world-constituting) role, as the
foundational principle for philosophy” (112). At Temple he was concerned to respond
to the post-modern critique of Husserl. He wanted to mediate between Continental
and analytic philosophy. And he would have liked to have modeled a work on the late
Husserl. “Singularly free from Hegel’s ’Absolutism,’ with a sense for the open-
endedness of the march of the human spirit—unfortunately still caught up in the
’Eurocentrism’ of Hegel—Husserl showed the way. Blending Hegel and Husserl,
bringing in our knowledge of Oriental and African experiences, I thought I could write
a new Phenomenology” (115).
And why did Mohanty come to the West? Going West to study and practice philosophy
is certainly understandable as a combination of motivation and opportunity. He left
parents, wife, and child in order to learn in the exciting Göttingen; the invitation from
Oklahoma came at a good time; the call to the New School was also opportune; his
research projects for Oxford and Freiburg are clear; and he went to Temple “for a
more intellectual climate” (99). What stands out throughout, however, is that he did
not come West to immigrate, but in order to do some research. And ultimately, when
he was freed from theism and materialism, he felt “free to think” (120).1
Endnotes
1. There is a concise and factual “Self Presentation” that complements this book in
minor respects and also a bibliography up to then in Phenomenology: East and West,
Essays in Honor of J.N. Mohanty, ed. Frank M. Churchland and D.P. Chattopadhyaya
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
580
2003.11.03
Immanuel Kant, Henry Allison (eds), Peter Heath (eds)
Theoretical Philosophy after 1781
Kant, Immanuel, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, edited by Henry Allison and Peter
Heath, translated by Gary Hatfield, Michael Friedman, Henry Allison, and Peter Heath,
Cambridge, 2002, 544pp, $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521460972.
Reviewed by Manfred Kuehn , Philipps-Universitat Marburg
This volume brings together translations of seven works by Kant written after 1781.
They are all more or less based on the edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften,
published by the Königlich preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1900-).
But the translators are continuing the tradition begun in the earlier volumes of this
series and carefully attempt to improve on the texts of the Berlin Academy edition. Of
the works presented here, five were published during Kant’s lifetime, namely the
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Come Forward as a
Science of 1783 (translated by Gary Hatfield), the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science of 1786 (translated by Michael Friedman), On a Discovery whereby any New
Critique of Pure Reason is Made Superfluous by an Older One of 1790 (translated by
Henry Allison), On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy of 1796,
Settlement of a Mathematical Dispute Founded on Misunderstanding of 1796 and
Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treaty of Perpetual Peace in Philosophy
of 1796 (translated by Peter Heath). Also included is What Real Progress Has
Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (translated by
Peter Heath), which was written in 1793, but published posthumously in 1804 by F. T.
Rink. It also contains a translation of the notes appended by the editors of the
Academy edition.
The volume follows what has become the standard layout of this edition of Kant’s
works (though it does not contain the “Biographical Sketches” found in some of the
other volumes). Apart from the “General Editor’s Preface,” it includes most useful
Introductions by Henry Allison (“General Introduction,” and an “Editor’s Introduction”
to What Real Progress?) and detailed and equally useful translators introductions to
most of the works, but On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority, Settlement of a
Mathematical Dispute and Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treaty of
Perpetual Peace in Philosophy do not have Introductions and their translators are not
indicated. Furthermore, there are extensive editorial notes to all works except to the
short Settlement of a Mathematical Dispute. The edition is rounded out by a glossary,
an index of names and an index of subjects.
As I indicated in an earlier review of the volume on Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-

1770, one might quibble with the general conception of this work (and accordingly the
edition as a whole): Why divide the volumes into Theoretical Philosophy, Practical
Philosophy, Religion and Rational Theology, Anthropology, History and Education? To
581
some extent this way of dividing up Kant’s philosophical work is of course founded in
his texts, but it also remains largely anachronistic and separates what should not be
separated. Why did the editors not follow a strictly temporal order, like that of the
Academy edition? Some of the problems connected with this division show up most
clearly in this volume. As Allison notes in the “General Introduction”, the writings
collected in this volume “constitute only a small portion of Kant’s total output after
1781” (1). And one might add, a portion that can be understood only with great
difficulties apart from the other works of this period. This is especially true of the
three works from 1796 that must clearly be seen in connection with the more famous
Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project of 1795, not included here. “What is
Enlightenment?” “What is Orientation in Thinking?” “On the Use of Teleological
Principles in Philosophy,” and “The Definition of Race,” are also elsewhere. In any
case, the two last essays of the volume, directed against Johann Georg Schlosser,
might be said to belong more properly in the context of practical philosophy. One
might also object to the fact that a work that Kant himself did not see fit to publish
himself (What Real Progress?) is here found together with published works. It might
well be argued that it belongs together with other posthumous “works” of Kant. But
these are quibbles, after all. Allison is quite clear on the problematic character of this
text. Furthermore, when the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant is
complete all works will be equally and easily available in good and consistent
translations for those who read Kant in English, and that is clearly more important
than in what particular volume one finds which work.
The most important work included in this edition is the Prolegomena. Its translation
“is a variant of” Hatfield’s edition in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy
(46), containing a more extensive critical apparatus and a revised translation of
“schwärmerisch” as “visionary” and of “Bedeutung” as “significance” or “signification”
when Kant uses it to indicate that the categories have no application outside of
experience. The second most important work is the Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science. Friedman departs significantly, perhaps even “fundamentally” (179)
from the two previous translations of this work; and it is clearly much more readable
than they are. On a Discovery represents a complete revision of Allison’s earlier
translation in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (1973). Kant’s planned contribution to
the prize essay competition of 1792 (see p. 339) is an entirely new translation that
follows in some points the French translation of this work by Louis Guillermit (1973).
While most of the works contained in this edition fail to break new ground (with the
exception of the Prolegomena and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science),
the translations will be useful to those seeking better to understand Kant’s main works
and especially the Critique of Pure Reason. One of the most important functions this
edition serves consists in providing materials for a better understanding of Kant’s
relationship to “Leibnizian” and “Platonic” philosophy, where “Leibnizian” and
“Platonic” refers of course not primarily to Leibniz and Plato, but to the followers of
Leibniz and Plato during Kant’s lifetime. Kant argues in these works against Johann
August Eberhard, who claimed that Leibnizian philosophy contained not just Kant’s
critical discussion of traditional metaphysics but also a “well-grounded extension” of it.
He claimed that Eberhard had actually misunderstood Leibniz and that his own work
was closer to the spirit of Leibniz than that of the supposed “Leibnizians.” Schlosser,
who spread an esoteric form of platonizing Christian doctrine, which considered
“feeling” as a privileged access to truth is criticized even more harshly by Kant. This
582
volume sheds light on these issues. It is therefore an important contribution to Kant

scholarship.
One may hope that the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science will soon be
published as a paperback. I would also hope that some of the shorter and more
significant pieces of this and other volumes will be collected to form a paperback of
Kant’s minor writings.
All in all, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 represents an excellent edition and
translation of some of Kant’s works written after the publication of the first edition of
his Critique of Pure Reason. It can, of course, be no real substitute for reading Kant in
German, but it will give those who venture on this task invaluable help and provide
those who are unwilling or unable to do so the next best thing: a solid translation. The
book testifies to the high quality of work done on Kant in English, a quality that often
exceeds by far that done in Kant’s native language.
2003.11.04
Richard Joyce
The Myth of Morality
Joyce, Richard, The Myth of Morality, Cambridge, 2002, 264pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN
0521808065.
Reviewed by R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley
This book is an impressive and stimulating treatment of central issues in metaethics.

It is extremely well-written, combining clarity and precision with an individual style
that is engaging and very often witty. It presents a general commentary on the
contemporary metaethical debate, on the way to defending a position in that debate—
moral fictionalism—that is distinctive and worthy of reaching a wider audience. The
book is full of arguments, presenting a wealth of stimulating ideas, objections, and
suggestions on all the topics addressed.
A significant virtue of the book is Joyce’s success at clarifying the menu of

fundamental options in the metaethical discussion. He does an excellent job
throughout of defining the issues under dispute, stating precisely the differences
between the available positions, and locating the most significant considerations for
and against those positions. The book could easily serve as a clear introduction to the
main issues in the contemporary metaethical debate for those who are new to the
subject.
Joyce’s favored position combines two main parts. There is, first, an error theory of
moral discourse, to the effect that such discourse is typically used in an assertoric
manner, but that moral assertions by and large fail to state truths (9). And there is,
second, the distinctively fictionalist claim that it may be sensible and useful to
583
continue to deploy moral discourse even after we have come to see that it is
fundamentally flawed.
The bulk of the book is given over to the defense of the error theory. By Joyce’s own
account, this involves identifying a central or ’non-negotiable’ commitment of moral
discourse that is nevertheless false. Joyce takes as his starting point in this endeavor
J. L. Mackie’s suggestion that it is the objective prescriptivity of moral assertions that
is most problematic about them. What exactly might be meant by talk of objective
prescriptivity in this connection? In chap. 1 Joyce considers the ’internalist’ idea that
judgments of moral obligation are necessarily motivating. He contends that
internalism in this form is implausible, but he does not think that it can be shown
decisively to be a non-negotiable commitment of moral discourse. A better candidate
for such a commitment results when we interpret objective prescriptivity as a claim
about reasons for action, in particular as the claim that moral obligations provide
agents with inescapable reasons for complying with them—reasons that obtain
regardless of the agent’s desires and interests. Chap. 2 defends the thesis that the
aspiration to provide categorical reasons of this kind is a non-negotiable commitment
of ordinary moral discourse, something without which we would not understand a
person’s assertions as moral claims. Chaps. 3-5 proceed to argue that this central
commitment of moral assertion is false, defending a non-Humean version of the
instrumentalist claim that all normative reasons for action depend on the agent’s
interests and desires. If this claim in the theory of practical reason is true, of course,
then there are no categorical reasons of the kind morality affects to provide, and the
non-negotiable commitment of morality to provide agents with such reasons is false.
The discussion in these chapters forms the crux of the negative part of Joyce’s
discussion, defending the conclusion that moral discourse is flawed (in a way
analogous to the way in which we take Polynesian discourse about the ’tapu’ to be
systematically flawed). The argument for this conclusion is intricate, and it proceeds
largely through critical engagement with the writings of other contemporary moral
philosophers (above all Michael Smith, but also Bernard Williams, Christine Korsgaard,
and others). The most successful and important aspect of this argument is the
distinction Joyce draws between subjective and objective dimensions of practical
reason. He contends, plausibly in my view, that it is not necessarily irrational for
agents to fail to do what they have reason to do; if I reasonably believe that the glass
before me contains a gin and tonic, when in fact it is full of gasoline, then it is not
irrational for me to try to drink the liquid in the glass, though objectively speaking
there is a compelling reason for me not to do so, and the reason I take to speak in
favor of drinking the liquid does not really obtain. Questions of practical rationality are
conditioned by the epistemic situation of an agent, and the mere fact that I would
desire to do X if I had true beliefs (about my circumstances and the consequences of
X-ing) does not make it rational for me to decide to do X. This is an important point,
whose consequences for the theory of practical reason may be more significant than
Joyce lets on (he mostly makes use of the distinction to counter certain claims of
Smith’s). For instance, it enables a defender of external reasons for action—reasons
that are not grounded in the agent’s subjective motivations—to ascribe reasons to
agents that those agents are not willing to acknowledge, without being saddled with
the often implausible further contention that such agents are guilty of irrationality.
The abusive husband (to take one of Williams’ famous examples) may have reason to
584
desist from his abusive behavior, but his failure to acknowledge that reason makes
him cruel, insensitive, brutish, etc., not irrational.
These good points about the relations between reasons and rationality, however, are
embedded in a baroque and unhelpful apparatus of further distinctions. Joyce
multiplies reasons beyond necessity, referring at various points to institutional
reasons, subjective reasons, objective reasons, normative reasons, irrational reasons,
and Williams-style reasons. This is confusing, and detracts from clarity. To my mind,
there is only one notion of a reason that is relevant to Joyce’s discussion. This is the
notion of a normative reason, in the basic and familiar sense of a consideration that
counts in favor of a given person’s doing something (say, X-ing). An ’objective’ reason
is a genuine normative reason in this sense, a consideration that really does count in
favor of the person’s X-ing. ’Subjective’ reasons are not really reasons at all, but
rather beliefs of agents about what they have reason to do.1 ’Irrational’ reasons are
beliefs of this kind that are unwarranted or irrational (given the rest of what the agent
believes and is in a position to find out). Institutional considerations are sometimes
and for some agents genuine normative reasons for action. But when this condition is
not satisfied, they do not become reasons of some further kind (i.e. institutional as
opposed to normative reasons); rather there are institutional rules or regulations that
wrongly present themselves are normative reasons. Finally, Williams’ influential
writings about this issue do not introduce yet another kind of reason (the ’Williams-
style’ reason), rather they offer an account or theoretical framework for understanding
reasons in the basic sense of a normative consideration. The crucial issue for Joyce’s
purposes, in these terms, is whether there are any categorical reasons in the basic
normative sense, reasons that obtain regardless of the interests and desires of the
agent. If not, then the central commitment of morality to provide reasons of this kind
will be unfulfilled, justifying the claim that assertoric moral discourse systematically
fails to state truths.
When they finally get to Joyce’s main argument against such reasons, however,
readers may find themselves somewhat disappointed. Joyce agrees with Williams that
normative reasons must be capable of moving the agent who has them to action, and
he appeals to the familiar Humean theory of action-explanation in support of the idea
that reasons can motivate only if they are appropriately grounded in the agent’s
subjective desires and interests (109-11).2 But the role of desires in the explanation of
action does not support this conclusion (as even Smith, the prime defender of the
’Humean theory of motivation’, would agree). At least since Nagel’s The Possibility of
Altruism, it has been pretty clear that at least some of the pro-attitudes or intentions
that are implicated in action are not themselves sources or conditions of the agent’s
reasons, but rather responses to the recognition of reasons on the part of the agent.
Furthermore, there are numerous models available in contemporary moral psychology
that aim to render intelligible the capacity of such normative cognitions to generate
new motivations in this way (e.g. through the postulation of higher-order dispositions
that are partly constitutive of rationality, or by appeal to the capacities for self-
determining choice that distinguish rational agents from other creatures capable only
of more rudimentary agency). I do not of course mean to suggest that this issue has
been decided conclusively one way or another; but given that this is the crux of
Joyce’s positive case for his error theory, it would be reasonable to expect a deeper
585
level of engagement with alternative ways of accounting for rational motivation in this
part of the book.3
The argument about reasons is supplemented by a discussion of evolutionary ethics

(chap. 6), which is exemplary in its clarity and good sense, and which brings a
refreshingly new set of considerations to bear on the metaethical issues. Joyce argues
that evolution can account for our tendency to deploy moral concepts, suggesting that
a primitive tendency to think of actions as ’required’ might have been exploited by
natural selection to encourage cooperation in human communities (secs. 6.0-6.1).
This contributes to Joyce’s error theory, insofar as it renders intelligible the
widespread tendency to use a form of discourse that is manifestly defective. But Joyce
thinks that it also contributes positively to the case in favor of an error theory of
morality, arguing that the evolutionary explanation he has offered shows that the
process whereby we form moral beliefs is an unreliable one (162-3). The idea is that
the evolutionary explanation entails that we are disposed to form moral beliefs
regardless of the evidence to which we are exposed, and this independence of moral
beliefs from the truth shows those beliefs to be unjustified (without, however,
providing independent evidence that such beliefs are false: cf. 168).
I find this argument from evolution unpersuasive. The evolutionary account on offer
operates through the general human capacity for belief formation, since the account
attributes to agents a tendency to form the belief that cooperative behaviors are
categorically required. But surely the general human capacity for belief formation is
one that does not operate independently of the evidence for or against the beliefs that
are held. If evolution is to exploit this mechanism by inducing a disposition to form
moral beliefs with a certain content, it is plausible to suppose that it will be able to do
this only if the disposition induced does not operate in a way that is independent of
the truth. In other words, if we just consider the evolutionary evidence by itself, there
seems no good reason to hypothesize that the disposition to form beliefs about
categorical moral requirements operates in a way that is independent of the
evidence—perhaps no such disposition would have emerged from evolution if the
moral belief had been false. (Of course Joyce takes himself to have other grounds for
holding that moral beliefs must be false; but at this point in the book we are supposed
to be getting an independent argument for the error theory based on natural
selection: cf. 148).
This brings me to the most interesting part of Joyce’s book, which is the fictionalist
account of morality offered in chaps. 7-8. Joyce’s fictionalism maintains that we have
good pragmatic reasons for continuing to deploy moral discourse despite the falsity of
the claims that are made through its use. This fictionalist position may be thought of
as having three parts. There is, first, a distinction between different contexts of
reflection and discourse: critical contexts on the one hand, in which we acknowledge
the error that is latent in moral discourse, and uncritical contexts of deliberation and
action, in which defective moral discourse may continue to be deployed (sec. 7.4).
Second, there is a noncognitivist account of what we might be doing in uncritical
contexts when we use moral discourse that we know to be false (sec. 7.6). According
to this noncognitivist account, uncritical moral language functions to express—not
desires or emotions or pro-attitudes, as traditional noncognitivist theories hold—but
rather thoughts about what is the case (by contrast with the beliefs that are
586
expressed by ordinary assertoric language). Third, there is a pragmatic argument for

the advantages of deploying moral discourse in this expressive way outside of critical
contexts of reflection and inquiry. The argument here is that, by comparison with the
alternative of abolishing altogether the use of moral discourse, it would be more
beneficial to continue to use such discourse in the expressivist manner outside of
contexts of critical reflection. Doing so promises to bring with it many of the
undoubted advantages of moral beliefs when it comes to the kind of self-control that
enables us to promote our own long-term interests, but without the costs that come
with full-scale false beliefs (secs. 7.1, 8.0-8.1). Much as we might summon a grisly
mental image of a blackened lung when we feel tempted to light up another cigarette,
so too we might entertain the thought that lying is wrong when we feel tempted not to
tell the truth, and in this way ensure that we retain the benefits that typically accrue
from cooperation.
This is certainly not very plausible as an account of how we actually operate with
ordinary moral discourse. But Joyce is not proposing fictionalism in that guise. He is
an error theorist precisely because he takes it that we use moral language
assertorically to make assertions that systematically fail to state truths. Fictionalism is
offered as a revisionist response to the acknowledgement that moral discourse is
defective in this way, one that is to be preferred on cost-benefit grounds to the
abolitionist alternative of throwing morality out the window. Joyce’s presentation of
this position is characteristically clear and sophisticated, and it is good to have his
engaging defense of this neglected option in metaethical discussion. But I do not
myself believe that fictionalism about morality has much of a future; let me mention
in closing a few reasons for this conclusion.
First, Joyce’s way of distinguishing between critical and uncritical contexts of reflection
seems to me problematic. The assumption is evidently that we do our critical thinking
when we abstract from deliberative contexts, and engage in detached metaethical
reflection about the status and commitments of our moral concepts; this is the
philosophical context in which we arrive at the conclusion that moral discourse is
defective. This distinctively philosophical context is supposedly more critical and
reflective than the deliberative contexts in which we are deciding what to do in the
face of various temptations, where we are encouraged to adopt an expressive use of
moral language. But it seems dubious to me to assert that the philosophical context is
necessarily the more critical one. Reflective deliberation about difficult practical
problems is itself a highly critical context of enquiry, in which we marshal our beliefs
about our deliberative situation, and scrutinize our values and commitments, with the
aim of arriving at a well-grounded conclusion about what it would be best to do. This
context of critical deliberation is to my mind the most authoritative venue for testing
claims about our normative reasons for action. Moreover it is precisely the kind of
context in which moral issues and values often loom large. But it is hard to see how a
fictionalist deployment of moral discourse might hold up under conditions of critical
deliberation such as these. Critical reflection, in short, is not something reserved for
the philosopher’s study, rather it is a part of life, and to the extent this is the case it
will be hard to find an appropriate context for the noncognitive mobilization of moral
thoughts that are rejected under critical reflection.
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Furthermore, even when we can distinguish between more and less critical contexts, it
is not obvious to me that these contexts are as hermetically independent of each
other as Joyce seems to suppose. (In this respect, his fictionalist theory shares a
problematic assumption with ’two-level’ versions of consequentialism.) Joyce imagines
that we can steel ourselves to act for the best in the face of temptation—where, I take
it, the ’best’ action is the one that advances our own long-term interests and
projects—by applying to our situation moral concepts in thoughts we entertain without
really believing. But if the critical background is really one in which we reject moral
claims as false, I do not believe that entertaining moral thoughts in ’uncritical’
deliberation could have the practical benefits Joyce envisages. Here it is helpful to
contrast other familiar strategies of self-control. When I summon a mental image of
the blackened lung to help me fight the temptation to light up a cigarette, I am not
entertaining a cognition that I would reject under more critical conditions of inquiry.
Rather I am forcing myself to focus on a consideration—namely, the risk of an early
and unpleasant death—that I critically accept as a compelling reason not to smoke,
but that I might be inclined to forget or downplay when faced with the immediate
gratifications of a cigarette. There is here a conceptual consistency and continuity
between the more critical contexts and those allegedly less critical circumstances that
call for special methods of self-control, and the effectiveness of the methods used in
such circumstances hinges on their being anchored in our more critical convictions. By
contrast, it would hardly be a very effective strategy of self-control to entertain the
thought that smoking is (say) against the law, if I believe upon reflection that this
thought is false. Essentially the same objection applies to the fictionalist proposal that
we should entertain moral thoughts that we know to be false in order to bring our
behavior into alignment with our true interests.4 The strategy, it seems to me, simply
wouldn’t work, and the reason is that the borders between the more and less critical
contexts that Joyce distinguishes are permeable.
Finally, I believe that Joyce operates with too limited a battery of options when he
runs his cost-benefit analysis of fictionalism. The main alternative to it that he
considers is abolitionism, the complete rejection of moral discourse in all contexts as
fundamentally flawed. The implicit assumption seems to be that, once we have
accepted that there are no categorical reasons of the kind morality affects to provide,
we must either reject morality out of hand, or treat it as a kind of elaborate pretense
in special deliberative situations. But this seems to me an artificially monolithic way of
thinking about morality. Even if we grant Joyce the idea that the commitment to
provide categorical reasons is a ’non-negotiable’ part of morality as we understand it,
it is not the only distinctive part of morality. A different option, one that Joyce does
not consider, would be to reject the aspect of morality that turns out to be
problematic upon critical scrutiny, while retaining as much of the rest as we continue
to find useful and important. Thus morality is not just an abstract form of discourse, it
also collects a set of concrete values that people find themselves committed to for
various (sometimes contingent) reasons, values such as fairness, decency,
consideration, respect, and solicitude. I do not myself accept the conclusion that
values of these kinds do not ground reasons for action that are categorical or external.
But if I did, I would want to try to retain a central place for these values in my life
(and in the lives of people in my community), even while acknowledging openly that
our conventional understanding of the reasons they provide must be rejected.
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This is the path taken by Bernard Williams, for instance, who rejected the
commitment to abstract categorical imperatives at the center of the ’Morality System’,
while arguing that we could continue to live in the spirit of the concrete values
distinctive of morality. Williams did not see himself simply as offering an interpretation
of morality—with the rejection of the categorical moral ’must’, he thought, something
important to morality really is lost—but he also did not think that the whole structure
should be discarded once this point is accepted. This is an important respect in which
moral discourse differs from discourse about phlogiston (cf. 2-7). Given the purpose of
the latter discourse to offer an explanation of certain physical phenomena, there is
really nothing left to salvage once we have come to see that these purposes are better
served by theories that dispense with the concept of phlogiston. With morality, by
contrast, the rejection of the claim to provide categorical reasons leaves us with a
variety of values and ideas whose point and purpose is not exhausted in the aspiration
to ground such categorical reasons. If you are moved by Joyce’s arguments for an
error theory, it seems to me you should think about the non-categorical reasons we
have to care about such values as decency, justice, and respect, and try to find a way
to incorporate such values in your life while openly acknowledging that they are not all
that they once seemed to be.5
Endnotes
1. Joyce would disagree with this typology—he suggests (100, 108) that normative
reasons should be identified with an agent’s ’rational subjective reasons’ But this
strikes me as misleading: if, unbeknownst to me, a tiger has escaped from the local
zoo and is now lurking in my garden, then it seems I have a very good normative
reason for staying indoors, insofar as there is a consideration that decisively speaks in
favor of that course of action. Whether I am irrational in failing to act on this reason is
a different question, one that is only obscured by introducing ’objective’ reasons into
the picture that are somehow different from normative reasons.
2. Actually it is a little unclear to me how ’interest’-based reasons are supposed to be

vindicated by Williams’ account, insofar as some people’s subjective motivational sets
might be such that they just don’t care about satisfying their future desires, and no
amount of improved information and careful reflection would generate a concern for
future satisfactions.
3. Joyce devotes three chapters to the discussion of reasons. But chaps. 3 and 4 are
mostly devoted to inconclusive skirmishing with Smith, culminating in the suggestion
that the burden of proof is on the side of those who hold that there are reasons that
all rational agents would converge in acknowledging. Chap. 5 responds to a number of
critics of Williams’ internal reasons account without really engaging systematically
with the issues in the theory of rational motivation that are alleged to support the
claim that all reasons are grounded in agents’ subjective interests and desires.
4. There is a more technical question about how exactly this is supposed to work.
Does Joyce mean to say that the (false) thought that an action is wrong, and that its
wrongness is a categorical reason for action, can motivate us to act accordingly? If so,
then it would seem that cognitions alone can motivate us to act, and this appears to
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call into question the Humeanism about motivation that Joyce relies on in his
argument against categorical reasons.
5. Joyce might contend that this is tantamount to abolitionism, but that would be to
reassert the monolithic view of morality I am rejecting here. There is a nontrivial
sense in which decency, respect, justice, and so on are moral values, a sense that
does not simply derive from the thought that these values are sources of categorical
requirements. We might put this by saying that a commitment to promote values of
these kinds is an independent non-negotiable part of morality as we understand it.
Hence someone who lives in the spirit of these values, while acknowledging that they
do not provide categorical reasons, has not given up on morality altogether.
2003.11.05
Mark Morford
The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the death of
Marcus Aurelius
Morford, Mark, The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the
death of Marcus Aurelius, Routledge, 2002, 288pp, $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415188520.
Reviewed by Wolfgang Mann, Columbia University
excudent alii spirantia mollius aera (credo equidem), uiuos ducent de marmore uultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: tu
regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere
morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
(Vergil, Aeneid VI, 847-53)
Others will hammer out the breathing bronze in more supple ways (yes, I’m sure), will
draw forth living faces from the marble, will plead cases more eloquently; and the
paths of the heavens with a compass they will trace, and tell of the stars’ risings. You,
Roman, must remember to rule the nations with your empire— these will be your
arts—to place the imprint of decency on peace, to spare the conquered, and to crush
the proud.
So speaks the shade of Anchises to his son, Aeneas, in the Underworld, foretelling, in
the aftermath of Troy’s destruction, a future of Greek civilization (“Others”) to be
followed by a Roman empire—all in an epic which, it has often been thought, was
written to celebrate Augustus and the foundation of that very empire by linking it to
the mythical, Trojan past and Aeneas’s divine ancestry (Venus). In these famous
lines, Vergil gives expression to (the persistent possibility of) a sense of Roman
cultural inferiority and belatedness vis-à-vis the Greeks, while at the same time
commemorating Rome’s ultimate triumph, which, at least in the ideology of Anchises’
speech, trumps all the cultural achievements of those others. And while philosophy is
590
not mentioned here, it too, surely, belongs among the accomplishments in which the
Greeks achieved such preeminence that one may well wonder whether there is any
such thing as Roman philosophy, properly speaking.
Morford is convinced that there is. And in this book, which he has “written as a
classicist and historian of ideas, with the aim of providing a concise, but not
superficial, survey of the writings and ideas of the principal philosophers in the Roman
world from the middle of the second century BCE down to the death of Marcus
Aurelius in 180 CE” (ix-x), he aims, explicitly, to turn away from the Hellenocentric
bias of the historiography of ancient philosophy, and, implicitly, to make up for the
neglect of philosophy and philosophical themes on the part of so many historians of
Latin literature. In Chapter 1, Philosophia Togata (meaning, “Greek philosophy in
Roman dress,” and also the title of two collections of papers, edited by Jonathan
Barnes and Miriam Griffin [Oxford, 1989 and 1997], concerned with topics involving
“the mutual interaction of philosophy and Roman life”), Morford attempts to define
“Roman philosophy,” something that proves not so easy to do, as we will see.
Chapter 2, “The Arrival of the Greek Philosophers in Rome,” begins by describing the
Athenian embassy, sent to Rome in 155 BC, to address a particular political matter
(14). It was on this occasion that the Academic philosopher, Carneades, conspicuously
demonstrated the Sceptic’s commitment to arguing in utramque partem, to arguing on
both sides of a (disputed) question—by defending justice on one day, and attacking it
on the next. Morford rightly situates this incident in its historical context, making clear
that this was, as it were, the first official Roman encounter with Greek philosophy, one
which, through its simultaneous display of dialectical virtuosity and, as many Romans
saw it, (moral) outrageousness, helped set the stage for the often ambivalent attitude
the Romans were to take towards philosophy. To my mind, it is among the more
successful chapters, and one that even readers who are fairly familiar with Hellenistic
philosophy will read with interest. (However, see also J. G. F. Powell, “Introduction:
Cicero’s Philosophical Works and their Background” in Cicero the Philosopher, ed. J. G.
F. Powell [Oxford, 1995], pp. 1-35, esp. 11 ff.)
The remaining chapters follow a (roughly) chronological sequence: c. 3,”Cicero and his
contemporaries,” c. 4, “Lucretius and the Epicureans,” c. 5, “Philosophers and poets in
the Augustan Age,” c. 6, “Seneca and his contemporaries,” c. 7, “Stoicism under Nero
and the Flavians,” and c. 8, “From Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius.” As these chapter-
headings already make clear, Morford offers an overview of a large number of figures,
including many who are not, or are not primarily, philosophers in their own right, but
who are influenced by, or in some other way, reflect, philosophical thinking. This
range is potentially one of the most exciting features of Morford’s work, since writings
by historians of philosophy typically do not discuss, say, Horace or Vergil. But this
range, and the fact that there are only 239 pages of text, also makes clear that
Morford’s work is, necessarily, an introductory one. Therefore, it needs to be
approached as just that, i.e., not in the way one thinks about a scholarly monograph
on a single author, or even, on a single movement.
There are, it seems to me, three desiderata which a work of this kind should meet. (i)
The writing itself should be clear, straightforward, and, ideally, engaging. (ii) Although
the author will, inevitably, need to simplify and streamline the presentation of
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complicated material, he or she should signal clearly on which points there is large-
scale agreement, and on which points there is significant controversy. (iii) There
should be suggestions for further reading which take into account the non-expert
nature of the intended and likely readership.
Morford succeeds admirably with (i). However, (iii) is a source of real disappointment.
In a “Bibliographical Note” (240-41), Morford refers us primarily to the extensive
bibliographies in the collections edited by Barnes and Griffin (see above), and, in a
blanket way—no details provided, except for especially recommending the volume on
Stoicism—to the articles in the relevant six massive tomes (= II. 36, 1-6) of the
gigantic encyclopedia, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt; but many of
these articles (some of near monograph-length) are not in English, or are devoted to
truly narrow and specialized topics. Yet Morford makes no mention of the ongoing
series of proceedings of the Symposia Hellenistica (which began with Doubt and
Dogmatism. ed. M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes [Oxford, 1980]; subsequent
volumes have appeared at roughly three-year intervals), containing some of the very
finest recent philosophical scholarship on Hellenistic philosophy. (If it is a mistake to
treat Roman philosophy as the poor relation of Greek thought, it is also clear, and
wholly uncontroversial, that in order to make progress in understanding the thinkers
and writers from “the Roman world” whom Morford considers, one needs as thorough
and as fine-grained a grasp of Hellenistic philosophy as possible.) Morford’s own
“References” (269-77) are simply an unanalyzed list, unhelpfully divided into “Books”
and “Articles and Book Chapters.” For a sense of how this sort of thing can be done
right, one need look no further than A. A. Long’s splendid Epictetus: A Stoic and
Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford, 2001): almost every chapter ends with a section
entitled, “Further Reading and Notes”; there Long (in most cases) provides numerous
recommendations together with fairly precise comments about how the different
works mentioned are relevant to the specific topic of the chapter, or to some other,
related, issue. (While Long focuses on a single thinker, he is decidedly not writing only
for fellow scholars and historians of philosophy; indeed, his book could be used
successfully in everything from an introductory survey-course on Greek philosophy to
a graduate seminar on Stoicism.) And although Morford is correct in holding that the
bibliographies from Barnes and Griffin are useful—N.B.: they do group the entries
under many separate headings and sub-headings!—needing to track down those
volumes for their bibliographies is inconvenient, and it undercuts the idea that
Morford’s book is a self-contained survey of what he discusses. (Morford’s
“References,” of course, include many important and interesting works; and if his
book were a scholarly monograph, the fact that the bibliography is a mere list would
be no problem at all. But in the case of a book that so clearly is introductory, it surely
would be helpful if some guidance about the works listed were provided.)
I also have some serious reservations on (ii), that is, the need to be clear about what
is generally accepted versus what is the subject of ongoing inquiry or, even, dispute. I
will consider only two examples in detail. In c. 5, after some nice introductory remarks
about the transition from the late Republic to the early Empire (131-35), Morford
turns to three Augustan poets: Horace, Vergil, and Ovid. His discussion of Horace
(136-46) is symptomatic (I believe) of how the desire for a simple and clear picture
leads to over-simplification and confusion.
592
On the one hand, Morford tells us that “the Epicurean lathe biosas, ’live unobtrusively’
[= withdraw from public and, especially, political affairs—WM], is the most significant
element in Horace’s philosophy of life” (138); and he quotes Epistles I, 18, 96-112,
which Morford calls “fundamentally Epicurean” (140), as “distil[ling]” Horace’s
“philosophy of life” (139), indeed, as “stand[ing] as his final statement of a philosophy
of life” (140). Morford thus seems to be saying unequivocally that Horace was an
Epicurean. On the other hand, from the opening of the Epistles, he quotes the lines (I,
1, 10-14) where Horace first announces his intention of giving up “poetry and other
trifles,” in order to concentrate on “what is true and [morally] fitting”; Horace
concludes by saying, “I don’t feel bound to swear allegiance to any master” (line 14),
in other words, he is not going to be an orthodox follower of any of the established
philosophical schools or movements. Morford elaborates on what he calls this “lack of
rigidity” (138), by noting that Horace will sometimes maintain that he is as “austere”
as any Stoic when it comes to refraining from sensual pleasures, but will at other
times lapse into the hedonism of Aristippus (an associate of Socrates and the founder,
or at any rate, the philosophical ’ancestor’ of the Cyrenaic school, which identified
pleasure as the good). From that claim, Morford proceeds immediately to saying that
“the middle way between Stoic rigidity and Epicurean pleasure has a long history”
(ibid.)
Morford has done four things here. First, Horace’s statement that he follows no
philosophical school exclusively is interpreted as meaning that he locates himself
between the Stoics and the Epicureans. Secondly (and without any argument),
Aristippus’s position on pleasure has been equated with that of Epicurus. Yet given
Epicurus’s identification of pleasure with the absence of pain, more precisely, with
freedom from disturbance (= ataraxia), it is not so clear that (Morford’s) Aristippus’s
advocacy of the active pursuit of sensual pleasure really is Epicurean at all. These first
two moves of Morford’s suggest that he (tacitly) adheres to an outmoded picture of
Hellenistic philosophy, one on which it is (virtually) to be defined by a global, over-
arching rivalry between Stoicism and Epicureanism (construed as extreme points of a
sort, say, on a continuum of views about the value of pleasure), so that any potential
alternative to them needs to be described as some sort of “middle way.” But the
scholarship of the last hundred (especially, the last thirty) years has shown this
picture to be fundamentally mistaken. It is probably unhelpful to see the period as
wholly shaped by the rivalry between any two schools; but if one wants to insist on
such a view, the long-standing debate between the Stoa and the (sceptical) Academy
was far more important. And as recent studies of the late (= first century BC)
Academy and its contemporary Stoic adversaries have shown, to suggest that some
Stoics and some Academics were seeking a “middle way” between their movements’
extremes (as represented by, say, Zeno and Chrysippus for the Stoics, and Arcesilas
and Carneades for the Academics) makes quite good sense. Such a middle way could
very much look like a non-dogmatic approach to what, as it were, is best in each
philosophical school. (For example: the kind of follower of the New Academy that
Cicero describes himself as being could easily be described as attempting to do this
sort of thing.) Given that Horace (claims to have) studied in the Academy (Epistles II,
2, 42-45; cited by Morford on p. 137), if one were seeking a purely philosophical
motivation for his “lack of rigidity,” ascribing it to Academic influence might thus be
tempting—I stress the ’if,’ because there are good reasons to doubt that this is the
best way of approaching Horace.
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Thirdly, I was left wondering what, in the last analysis, Morford means by saying that
Horace is “fundamentally” an Epicurean. For Horace’s quip that he is “a pig from the
herd of Epicurus” (Epistles I, 4, 16) is highly self-conscious and ironical, and hardly
leads straightforwardly to the conclusion that he was an Epicurean; Morford’s own
discussion, e.g., of Horace’s decidedly un-Epicurean attitude towards the prospect of
his own death, already suggests that matters are more complicated; and finally, the
lengthy passage from Epistles I, 18 which he quotes contains nothing that a Stoic—
especially a ’moderate’ Stoic of the first century BC—need disagree with. (N.B.: For
purposes of this discussion, I mean to take no stand on the question of whether
Horace was, or was not, an Epicurean; my concern rather is that given how Morford
has presented things, I fail to see why we should say that Horace is an Epicurean
rather than someone who freely borrows from various philosophers, depending on his
immediate purposes. Consider Epistles I, 1, 15: having just said [in the lines briefly
considered above] that he will follow no master, Horace continues, “wherever the
storm drags me, I put ashore, seeking shelter.” This statement, even if it, too, is
deeply tinged with irony, surely suggests that Horace will avail himself of whatever
philosophical resources he happens upon, but not aim, as it were, to ’build’ a ’shelter’
from the ground up; in other words, he will not construct, or seek out, a philosophical
system. Oddly enough, Morford in effect concedes all this, when he turns to Vergil:
“Like Horace, Virgil [sic] is too complex a thinker to be identified with any one school
of thought” [147]. But now the claim that Horace is “fundamentally” an Epicurean
sounds peculiar indeed.)
Fourthly and finally, while Horace clearly was familiar with a wide range of Greek
philosophical thinking (though there is considerable debate about just how deep his
knowledge really was) and while there are (obviously) a large number of passages in
his work that can be read as expressing a Lebensphilosophie, to me it seems naive to
suppose that we can unproblematically infer that such passages express Horace’s
philosophy of life. Indeed, the famous tag, primum vivere deinde philosophari, while
not by Horace himself, seems like a suitably Horatian summary of his rejection of (any
overly technical or systematic) philosophy, no matter which school, or which
philosopher, it comes from.
Finding myself puzzled by Morford’s presentation—my recollections of Horace are

based on having read a number of the Odes in school quite some time ago—I had a
look at two articles which, by their titles, held out the promise of being helpful: John
Moles, “Poetry, Philosophy, Politics and Play: Epistles I,” in Traditions and contexts in
the poetry of Horace, ed. T. Woodman and D. Feeney (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 141-57;
and Niall Rudd, “Horace as a Moralist,” in Horace 2000: A Celebration, ed. N. Rudd
(London, 1993), pp. 64-88. And helpful they indeed were. While Rudd and Moles come
to rather different conclusions, they do not seek to downplay the complexities
engendered by Horace’s adoption of so many different (philosophical and other)
personae; above all, each of them pays more attention to the various uses Horace
makes of Greek philosophy rather than trying, in a by now outmoded way, to identify
him with this or that school. Moreover, as James Zetzel’s concise and elegant
“Dreaming about Quirinus: Horace’s Satires and the development of Augustan poetry”
(in Woodman and Feeney, pp. 38-52) reminds us, we need to read Horace against the
background of Hellenistic poetry, in order to appreciate his highly nuanced
appropriation of some, and rejection of other, of its conventions, devices, tropes,
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commonplaces, and so on: “What programmatic statements and stylistic parodies

alike demonstrate is that Horace both sees his poetry as belonging to the Alexandrian
tradition and was willing and able to distance himself from it by parody, criticism, and
revision” (44). That reminder, mutatis mutandis, should also be kept in mind when we
turn to Horace’s use of philosophy.
I have gone on at such length about Morford’s treatment of Horace, because I suspect
that many of his readers—especially those coming to The Roman Philosophers with a
background in philosophy—will not know anything about Horace, and would thus be
open to an introduction to this undoubtedly fascinating figure. But reading Morford will
either leave them thinking Horace was simply an Epicurean (yet wondering how that
really could be so) or leave them confused. Articles like those by Rudd and Moles
show that confusion need not be the inevitable result of trying to take seriously the
role of philosophy in Horace’s poetry; and it is easy to imagine discussions along the
lines they offer—presented in a somewhat simpler and briefer form, with all the texts
translated, and so on—being more useful than Morford’s, even, and especially, for
those readers approaching all this for the first time.
Similar (or related) concerns could be raised about many more parts of Morford’s
book. I will take up only one. His discussion of Lucretius is heavily indebted to David
Sedley’s important Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge,
1998). (As a matter of fact, anyone interested in Lucretius, or Epicurus, or the—
originally Greek—tradition of presenting philosophy in hexameter verse should turn
directly to this book. Sedley, of course, is looking at Lucretius in relation to Greek
philosophy; but he also provides a fascinating analysis of those passages where
Lucretius expressly seeks to forge a new, Latin vocabulary, and those where he relies
on Graecisms, offering a novel and subtle take on what is Greek, and what is Roman,
for Lucretius.) But Morford’s claim that “the poem of Lucretius is the most powerful
work in all of Roman philosophy” (98) is unhelpful hyperbole; what of Augustine’s
writings? Moreover, if true, it serves to call into question the very idea of Roman
philosophy (see also below), since, as Sedley has argued and as Morford agrees,
Lucretius uses (parts of) Epicurus’s On Nature as his sole philosophical source (i.e., he
is not relying on other writings of Epicurus himself, or on ones by contemporary
Epicureans; nor is he attacking contemporary Stoics or Academics). Here one might
be tempted to ask, if this “most powerful” work of Roman philosophy is derivative,
what are we to say about the other, less powerful ones?
Now, in c. 1, Morford had expressly denied that Lucretius is “derivative”; indeed, he

had there called him “the first truly original Roman philosopher” (5), despite the fact
that he aims to present the thought of Epicurus. Why? “[T]he exposition of Epicurean
doctrine in Latin hexameter verse called for an original genius, who created a new
language, appropriate for the dignity of epic verse, that expounded Epicurus’ teaching
with power and intensity” (5-6). Fair enough, in fact, spot on, but scarcely a basis for
calling Lucretius an original philosopher.
A little more than two thousand years after Lucretius, Mary Poppins (= Julie Andrews)
sings, “Just a spoonful of sugar will make the medicine go down/ In the most
delightful way.” In the proem to Book IV (= lines 1-25), Lucretius makes clear that
this is his project as well—to offer “in sweet Pierian song,” coated “with the honey of
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the Muses” (21-22), the perhaps overly austere teaching of Epicurus, so that he,
Lucretius, can fix your mind (officially: that of Memmius, the addressee of the work;
but in reality: that of each and every reader) on the true (Epicurean) account, so that
you can “grasp the whole nature of things and perceive its value” (25). In short, then,
Lucretius’s originality is poetic, taking an obscure and difficult subject—Epicurean
natural philosophy—and presenting it, clothed in hexameter verse, in a highly artful
and appealing way. (However, here, too, there are important precedents in Hellenistic
poetry for dealing poetically with technical and, one might say, intrinsically unpoetic
subjects—think of, say, Aratus’s Phainomena, a work Cicero undertakes to translate
into Latin.)
Morford seems so intent on counteracting (what he sees as) the neglect of Roman
contributions to philosophy that he indulges in overstatement of a sort which (I
believe) is especially misleading in an introductory work, aimed at non-experts. In
addition and of perhaps still greater concern, there is this. What Morford has to say
about the actual details of (Lucretius’s) Epicureanism is not especially helpful either.
The reader who has not previously encountered an ancient atomic theory of nature
(whether Democritus’s or Epicurus’s) will be confounded. (Morford’s account, on pp.
100-102, of the relation between Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Epicurus’s On
Nature, is too short to be helpful, but long enough to interrupt the flow of his
presentation. In any event, it does nothing to explain either the content of the
atomism or the philosophical motivation for it.) And while Morford may well be right
that Lucretius’s interest is, ultimately, in the ethical implications of Epicurus’s thought,
the fact remains that, on the face of it, De Rerum Natura is not so focused on these
aspects of Epicureanism (excepting the beautiful discussion of the fear of death, in III,
830-1094), a fact incidentally corroborated by Morford’s turn to Epicurus’s Letters for
the ethics. But if we have accepted Sedley’s arguments (as Morford says he has), why
we should look at those letters for insights into Lucretius?
It seems to me that Lucretius is in fact very effective at presenting both the

(meta)physical theory and its ethical implications. Like all Greek philosophers since
Parmenides, Epicurus—and thus Lucretius too—accepts a version of the following
conservation principles: at the most fundamental level of reality, nothing comes to be
from nothing (De Rerum Natura I, 150 ff.); and no thing, when it ceases to be,
disintegrates into nothing (I, 215 ff.). At the level of experience, of course, it does
(sometimes) seem that things come to be from nothing, or that they disintegrate into
nothing. We therefore need an account of how the level of experience depends on,
and is linked to, the fundamental level in such a way that what appears to be
happening at the level of experience proves compatible with how things are at the
fundamental level. Atomism is an attempt at such an account: the atoms themselves,
which are too small to be observed directly, and the void, are not subject to
generation or destruction (nor indeed to change of any sort, except, in the case of the
atoms, change of place—the void itself is simply changeless). And the generation and
destruction to which the objects of experience seem to be subject, are to be explained
in terms of changing combinations and recombinations of the (intrinsically
unchanging) atoms. (Lucretius spends the bulk of Books I and II expounding the
atomic theory.) Thus the metaphysical task of linking fundamental (Parmenidean)
reality with reality as it is experienced by us has been accomplished.
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But there remains the epistemological problem of justifying the choice of atomism
rather than one of its competitors. Here Lucretius does a very good job indeed. On the
basis of a number of thought-experiments and quasi-empirical observations, he
concludes that atomism provides what is, in effect, the best explanation of the
observed phenomena. But now the link to Epicureanism’s ethical implications also
becomes clear. How?
Lucretius suggests that anomalies at the level of experience (e.g., a perfectly healthy
person suddenly becomes ill and then dies) led people to suppose that something at a
deeper, unobserved level must have been happening to account for those anomalies
(e.g., a God was angry with the person for having done, or failed to do, such-and-
such). But supposing that the Gods behave this way leads to anxiety and
unhappiness, since the world of experience does not prove systematically intelligible in
its own terms and we thus are forced to view the underlying workings of the Gods as
being inscrutable. In other words: we can never know what the Gods really want, thus
never really be sure whether we are pleasing or angering them, and so also can have
no confidence in a blessed (rather than a torment-filled) afterlife. Yet if we recognize
the truth of Epicureanism, we will see, first, that the underlying level of reality (=
atoms and the void) is much more systematic and ordered than we might have
thought; secondly, that genuinely unintelligible events are so due to an intrinsic
randomness inherent in (some of) the atomic motions, and not to the inscrutable
verdicts of capricious Gods; and thirdly, that there is no afterlife, since we, too, are
combinations of atoms: thus when the particular combination that is, for example,
me, is dissolved, then, although the atoms of course do remain (and are ready to
enter into other compounds), there is nothing remaining that is me, and therefore also
nothing that could be the subject of my afterlife, properly so called. Moreover,
fourthly, rational reflection on the very idea of divinity makes clear that it would be
incompatible with the nature of genuine Gods for them to be concerned about, much
less to meddle in, human affairs in the ways in which traditional religious thought (and
folk superstition) supposes. Thus a rational understanding of nature and its workings
(and of our human place within nature) makes possible a life free from disturbance, at
least free from the disturbance which comes from having the various false views most
of us, under the influence of tradition and superstition, as a matter of fact do have.
This sketch of Lucretius’s Epicureanism would obviously need to be elaborated and

qualified in various ways; and it could, no doubt, be challenged on some points.
Nonetheless, it clearly is possible to present what Lucretius is doing in a largely self-
contained way, (more or less) along the lines suggested. I would have thought that in
a work devoted to Roman philosophy, this would be the natural approach to take.
On a more positive note: one matter which does stand out as particularly valuable is
Morford’s discussion of Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus (203-208).
Musonius’s historical importance is undeniable; including him in a book of this sort is
thus welcome, especially since even the scholarly literature on him is sparse.
(However, C. Lutz’s “Musonius Rufus: ’The Roman Socrates’,” Yale Classical Studies
10 [1947], pp. 3-147—not mentioned by Morford—remains fundamental: after a
succinct introduction, she includes a collection of fragments and testimonia, along with
translations.) Biographical details about Cicero and Seneca are easier to come by;
still, having a brief version of them assembled here (in Chapters 3 and 6, respectively)
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is helpful. (Nonetheless, readers will also want to turn to three works absent from
Morford’s “References”: M. Griffin’s “Philosophy for Statesmen: Cicero and Seneca,” in
Antikes Denken—Moderne Schule, ed. H. W. Schmidt and P. Wülfing [Heidelberg,
1987] [= Gymnasium, Beiheft 9], pp. 133-150; and B. Inwood’s exceptional “Seneca
and his Philosophical Milieu,” as well as G. Striker’s beautifully concise “Cicero and
Greek Philosophy,” both in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 [1995], pp. 63-76
and 53-61, respectively.) And more generally, the comments Morford makes about
extra-literary and extra-philosophical historical events, while simple and basic, provide
a kind of context often missing from more overtly philosophical histories of
philosophy. Finally, the translations Morford provides are accurate and readable; and
he (rightly) supplements the translated passages with a large number of references to
the relevant primary texts. Thus his readers are in the position of being able, with
only a minimum of effort, to look up for themselves what the authors discussed were
saying. On all these points, Morford’s book is indeed recommendable.
Lastly, I would like to turn a larger and, as it were, more theoretical question, namely,
what might be meant by “Roman philosophy”? Morford’s official statement is the
following: “after Cicero we can for the first time define a Roman philosopher as a
Roman student of Greek philosophy, who has adapted Greek doctrines for the needs
of Roman society and politics, with a prevailing focus on ethics” (5). But he also says
that “Epictetus is included as a Roman philosopher because of his Roman citizenship
(he became a citizen on being freed from slavery), his years of residence in Rome,
and the direct relevance of his doctrines to Roman life” (10). (Recall that although
Epictetus at one point countenances the possibility of explaining Chrysippus in Latin
[Diss. I. 17. 16], he was himself a Greek; that his Discourses, written down by Arrian,
are in Greek; that the exempla from mythology he employs are Greek; and that he
quotes or alludes to Greek philosophical predecessors.) On the other hand, according
to Morford, Plutarch
is definitely not a Roman philosopher, and he himself boasts of his loyalty to his home
town (Chaeronea) and admits that he did not learn Latin thoroughly. He was a Roman
citizen, highly honoured by the emperor Hadrian and the friend of many prominent
Romans. His enormous output makes it impossible to leave him out of any
consideration of philosophical developments in the second century CE. His views on
Roman character and leadership, seen in his Roman Lives, and his criticisms of Stoic
and Epicurean doctrines in the Moralia, are important in any assessment of Roman
philosophy. (Ibid.)
I can see no reason why Epictetus does, but Plutarch “definitely” does not, count as a
Roman philosopher; and matters are not helped by being told that, for all that,
Plutarch will nonetheless be discussed. If we recall that at the very beginning of his
book, in the Preface, in a sentence quoted above, Morford had spoken of the “writings
and ideas of the principal philosophers in the Roman world” (between 155 BC and AD
180) (see p. ix), it would seem that Plutarch, and many others as well, should, on this
more generous conception of Roman philosophy, count as Roman philosophers.
Equally strange: Arius Didymus, the author of an important summary of ethics
(preserved by Stobaeus), gets mentioned (134-36), it appears, because he was “a
friend and adviser” of Augustus (135); but Thrasyllus, whom tradition associates with
the tetralogical order of Plato’s dialogues—the order which was to prevail for
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centuries—and who for a time was the court-philosopher and court-astrologer of

Tiberius, makes no appearance in the The Roman Philosophers. Morford adds to my
puzzlement by relying on Diogenes Laertius at various points but excluding any real
references to Galen or Sextus Empiricus (whose reports and criticisms are at least as
important as those of Plutarch). Moreover, Morford’s chronological stopping-point (AD
180) seems peculiarly arbitrary, since Augustine (AD 354-430) and Boethius (ca. AD
480-524)—for a time, a Roman senator!—surely were Roman philosophers (as
Morford happily grants, see pp. 12-13); indeed, they were ones who wrote in Latin.
This unclarity about what Roman philosophy is supposed to be, it seems to me, results
from failing to distinguish clearly (at least) three different enterprises or subject-
matters.
1) The reception of Greek philosophy by educated Romans. An illuminating inquiry

into this Rezeptionsgeschichte would need also to compare the reception of other
technical disciplines (e.g., medicine or astronomy) with the one accorded to
philosophy. Here we would be dealing not so much with anything that should be
labeled “Roman philosophy” per se, as with the impact of (Greek) philosophy on
Roman intellectual and cultural life, and, perhaps, thereby also on Roman (political
and social) institutions.
2) The attempts by some educated Romans, e.g., Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca, both
literally to translate Greek philosophical writings into Latin, but also, and more
importantly, to create (as Morford says) a new Latin vocabulary so that philosophical
questions could be formulated and addressed in Latin. (For some important
differences in the character of the Latin terminology introduced by Lucretius and,
especially, Cicero, on the one hand, and by Seneca, on the other, see Inwood’s
“Seneca in his Philosophical Milieu.”) Here, too, it would be illuminating to look at the
attempts made in (and for) other disciplines, enabling them to carry on discussion of
their central topics in Latin. Looked at this way, Roman philosophy would turn out to
be philosophy done in Latin. While such a restricted focus is undoubtedly important if
we are primarily interested in developments within literary Latin, there is no reason to
expect that there will be any philosophically important divide between those who write
in Latin and those who continue using Greek. More cautiously: one would like to see
some evidence that such a divide is philosophically important. (On the whole matter of
Latin as a language for philosophy, see the collection: La Langue latine, langue de la
philosophie: Actes du colloque organisé par l’École Française de Rome, ed. P. Grimal
[Rome, 1992].)
Two potentially very interesting comparison cases would be rhetoric and grammar. To
what extent do Roman technical writings in these disciplines accommodate features of
the Latin language, as opposed to seeking to impose essentially Greek categories onto
Latin? And, in the case of rhetoric, to what extent do Roman rhetorical works
recognize the quite different political realities of Rome—whether Republican or
Imperial—as compared to those of the Greek city-states, especially Athens, of the fifth
and fourth centuries BC? And if they do recognize such differences, do they do so in
ways that makes it appropriate to speak of a distinctively Roman art of rhetoric?
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(In addition, there is this. Over the course of the last thirty or so years, historians and
linguists have produced a rather large body of important work on the interrelated
topics of: literacy in antiquity; bilingualism, especially, that involving Latin and Greek;
and the use of particular languages as ways of expressing national or cultural identity.
Some of their results may well prove of interest and direct relevance to historians of
philosophy. To see why, consider only one example: Cicero seems, in his
correspondence, to adjust the amount of Greek he quotes, and the number of
Graecisms he uses, depending on whom, exactly, he is writing to. I believe that it
would be well worth investigating if there is, say, quite generally a greater reliance on
Greek, or, more to the point, on Graecisms within Latin, in philosophical writing as
opposed to writing in other specialized fields, such as, again, grammar or rhetoric, on
the one hand, or medicine, astronomy, or mathematics, on the other. Morford,
unfortunately, takes no steps at all in the direction of considering matters of this sort,
which is a pity, given the newly favorable context that the recent scholarship from
ancient history, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics has created for inquiry into
precisely these kinds of issues.)
3) One could also investigate the impact of Roman expansion and, later, the existence
of the Empire and its institutions, on both the practice and the content of philosophy.
Thus we might now label as “Roman philosophers” either those who identify with the
Empire (or are reacting against it) or those who are, somehow, influenced by it in
other ways. Yet proceeding this way involves stepping onto slippery ground indeed:
there are philosophers, e.g., Plotinus, whom no-one would want to call Roman
philosophers, who, however, do certain things, e.g., move to the city of Rome,
precisely because of the status of Rome as the capitol of the Empire, the presence
there of other intellectuals, and so on. Moreover, from a certain point onwards, all of
ancient philosophy is done “in the Roman world.” Should it all therefore be thought of
as Roman philosophy? Here it seems telling that P. A. Brunt, in one of the true gems
of historical and philosophical scholarship, his “Stoicism and the Principate” (Papers of
the British School in Rome, 43 [1975], pp. 7-35)—not mentioned by Morford in his
“References,” although he must surely know it—is able to enhance enormously our
understanding of the philosophers’ (principally, the Stoics’) thinking about the Empire,
and of the emperors’ attitudes towards philosophers, without, so far as I can see, ever
using the expression, “Roman philosophy.”
Calling into question the label, “Roman philosophy,” is in no way meant to call into
question a central part of Morford’s underlying claim: that the figures he considers
deserve the full attention of those aiming to understand the philosophy of antiquity.
Their neglect (though it is not quite as severe as Morford makes it out to be) is due to
a variety of factors, not least of which are: the excessive valorization of ancient
Greece in nineteenth century Germany and Britain (and the concomitant desire to see
everything Roman as merely derivative); the frequent reluctance by historians of
philosophy to study closely authors who are not obviously, or who obviously are not,
philosophers; and the unwillingness of all too many historians of literature to
countenance the possibility that a writer who is not a philosopher, e.g., a poet, might
be taking philosophy seriously. It is something of an irony, then, that in using the
expression, “Roman philosophy,” in the ways in which he does, and thus running
together the three subject-matters briefly mentioned above, Morford shows himself to
be, tacitly, following the very sort of tradition he is seeking to overcome. For what
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unites the figures he includes under this heading is nothing principled or systematic,
only a convention—one whose source(s) it would in fact be worth getting clear about—
of including them (but not others) in treatments of Roman philosophy, or philosophy
done in Rome. As our understanding of philosophical activity during the late Hellenistic
period and during the first several centuries of the Empire increases and deepens, we
need to ask whether continued adherence to that convention will help us make further
progress, not take for granted that it will do so.
Now someone might object that it is churlish to complain about the lack of such
methodological explicitness and self-consciousness in an avowedly introductory book.
I could not disagree more strongly. It is especially in such works that clarity on these
kinds of matters is needed. It would have been far preferable if Morford, after having
acknowledged the absence of a systematic, theoretically grounded conception of
Roman philosophy, had said something like this: any treatment of anything we might
call “Roman philosophy”—or, at least, any treatment of Roman philosophical writing—
must include discussions of, for example, Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca; but to
understand these writers, one must also know something about certain other figures;
moreover, while perhaps not, strictly speaking, necessary for understanding either the
principal or the secondary figures, there are still other texts (or other sorts of
historical detail), knowledge of which can enhance, say, our appreciation of the
accomplishments of those in whom we are most interested; thus some discussion of
these further texts (or further points of detail) is also desirable. Such a procedure
would, no doubt, have something of an ad hoc flavor; but if presented clearly, it would
let readers know of the author’s sense of his or her subject. As Morford’s book stands,
one is confronted with the frustrating task of trying to figure out what basis he relied
on in selecting those figures to be included, and those to be excluded. Finding no such
basis, the inexperienced reader (or student in an introductory course) might
reasonably enough conclude: well, this just is what Roman philosophy is. But, as I
have been suggesting, matters are not so simple: caveat lector.
2003.11.06
Jay Rosenberg
Thinking About Knowing
Rosenberg, Jay, Thinking About Knowing, Oxford, 2002, 257pp, $39.95 (hbk), ISBN
0199251339.
Reviewed by Chad Mohler, Truman State University
Jay Rosenberg’s Thinking About Knowing is a rousing defense of an anti-skeptical,

pragmatist, perspectivalist account of our epistemic lives. According to this account,
the proper aim of our cognitive endeavors is not true belief, but justified belief, where
the justification of a belief arises from the reason- and explanation-giving activities of
individuals “situated” in particular epistemic contexts. Those contexts determine both
the appropriateness of knowledge attributions and the presuppositions of inquiry—
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presuppositions that, in Moorean style, make it possible for us to fend off skeptical
challenges to our beliefs.
In Chapter One, Rosenberg argues that doomed to failure is the project, inspired by
Descartes’ First Meditation, of showing that the mere epistemic possibility of radical
deception should give us reason to doubt our beliefs. One of Rosenberg’s primary lines
of attack goes like this. Whether it is epistemically possible (i.e., logically consistent
with what we know) that we are dreaming or otherwise radically deceived appears to
depend on how much else we know. If I know a lot, then the claim that I am
dreaming or that I am a brain in a vat will not be consistent with much of what I
know; for instance, it will not be consistent with the knowledge that I am actually
typing in the study right now. So if I have that sort of knowledge, it will not be
epistemically possible that I am dreaming or am a radically deceived brain in a vat. It
is only if I know relatively little that what I know will be consistent with the dreaming
and brain-in-a-vat hypotheses. So for those hypotheses to be genuine epistemic
possibilities for us, we must assume that we know very little. For the Cartesian skeptic
of the First Meditation to make such an assumption, however, is for him to beg the
question against the anti-skeptic, since such a skeptic’s consideration of dreaming and
scenarios of radical deception was supposed to show that very assumption to be true
(33).
The skeptic may, of course, insist that regardless of what we know, our sensory
experience having the phenomenal character it does is logically consistent with our
dreaming that experience or our being otherwise radically deceived. Regardless of
what we know, then, there is at least the logical possibility that we are mistaken in
our beliefs, and contemplation of that possibility is enough to give us reason to doubt
those beliefs.
Here, Rosenberg says that pointing out the mere possibility of radical error does not
suffice to give us reason to doubt our beliefs. The skeptic also has to provide an
argument indicating why we do not know that we are not being radically deceived
(53).
At this point, a skeptic may insist that she can provide such an argument, in terms of
a contextualist theory of knowledge. We lack the knowledge that we are not being
radically deceived, according to her, because we cannot reliably distinguish between
the envisioned scenarios of radical deception and the possibility that the world is
largely as we take it to be. Those scenarios, in other words, are alternatives that are
relevant in the context of discussing whether or not we know that we are radically
deceived; and as such, our phenomenal evidence must allow us to eliminate them if
we are to know that we are not being radically deceived. Since we cannot so eliminate
them, we also cannot know that we are not being radically deceived. That is true for
any context in which we are considering whether we have that knowledge, since any
such context is one in which the possibility of radical deception is raised.
It is important to note that the negative answer that the skeptic gives here to the
question, “Do we know that we are not being radically deceived?” is not an answer
that merely assumes that we know very little. In fact, contextualist theories of
knowledge allow that we can know quite a bit. It should be clear, then, that the
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“contextual skeptic” that I am considering here is not a full-blooded global skeptic who
questions whether we know anything at all. But since this moderate skeptic at least
provides us with an argument for why we cannot know that we are not being radically
deceived, she provides us with a reason to doubt our beliefs, according to Rosenberg’s
criterion.
As it turns out, Rosenberg himself goes on to defend something like a contextualist

theory of knowledge in the fourth and fifth chapters of his book. I say here
“something like” such a theory, because Rosenberg wants to put some distance
between his own theory—which he calls “perspectivalist”—and the contextualist’s.
While both theories allow that the truth of knowledge claims can vary with the context
of utterance, the perspectivalist, unlike the contextualist, judges the truth of
knowledge claims made in some context other than his own current context according
to the standards of that current context of his. Thus, for instance, consider Fred
Dretske’s famous zebra example, according to which in one context someone S claims
to know that a particular animal is a zebra, but then the possibility is raised that the
animal is perhaps a cleverly painted mule that one cannot distinguish from zebras.
The contextualist would say that even in the new context, we should be willing to say
that S’s previous knowledge claim was true (since we judge that claim according to
the standards of the earlier context), even while at the same time we now say (since
our new context has higher standards) that S did not know then that the animal was a
zebra. The perspectivalist, by contrast, insists that we have to judge all claims about
knowledge from our current context. In the context in which we are contemplating
cleverly painted mules, we cannot say that S’s previous knowledge claim is true
because we judge that claim—”I know that’s a zebra”—on the basis of our current
standards for knowledge, which do not allow that a person can know the animal is a
zebra without first eliminating the possibility that the animal is a cleverly painted mule
(163-164).
Since Rosenberg’s perspectivalist account of knowledge is still roughly contextualist in

nature, should he not admit the contextually minded skeptic’s proposal above? What
allows him to reject that skeptic’s claim that we do not know we are not being
radically deceived? Rosenberg provides an answer to this question in Chapter Five.
The chapter builds on results from Chapter Three, in which, drawing on Wilfrid Sellars’
contributions to epistemology, Rosenberg argues that knowledge is an essentially
normative notion—to know that p is an achievement of epistemic excellence for the
knower, indicating that the knower is in an optimal epistemic position both objectively
and subjectively with respect to p. Being in an optimal subjective epistemic position,
in turn, requires that the knower be able to locate p in the “space of reasons”: the
knower is doing the best he can to “proportion his subjective convictions to his
objective epistemic entitlements” by supporting one’s belief that p with reasons (130-
131). This element of justification in knowledge is what Rosenberg calls proceduralist
in nature. According to a proceduralist view of justification, what is fundamentally
justified or not is the conduct of individuals as they go about validating their beliefs
through reason-giving practices (113-114).
The proceduralist notion is important, for it makes possible Rosenberg’s Chapter Five
response to the skeptic. If we are to have knowledge or justified belief in any
particular area, then according to proceduralism, we have to engage in an inquiry that
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conforms to certain “epistemics”— “procedures for transforming propositions from

open questions into propositions with settled status” (188). In the course of the
inquiry, those engaged in it will keep track (implicitly or otherwise) of which
propositions remain open questions and which propositions are settled and hence
capable of serving as presuppositions of future inquiry. When it comes to inquiries
concerning skepticism, Rosenberg argues that any “inquiry” investigating whether or
not we know we are being radically deceived is not really a genuine inquiry at all. That
is because those engaged in the inquiry will not regard as an open question what the
inquiry is trying to open as a question. The inquiry “begins by proposing to open
questions, concerning, for example, the very existence of other persons— questions
which, in the context of any collaborative enquiry, informed by a shared epistemics
and conducted within a shared global context of settled background information, are
already necessarily closed” (199). Rosenberg’s answer to the skeptic, then, is that
there is no context in which the possibility of radical deception could ever be
legitimately entertained— no context in which the possibility that we are being
radically deceived is not already eliminated. His answer is very much in the Moorean
spirit that he cultivates throughout Chapter Five.
Rosenberg makes much here of the claim that inquiry is governed by “public norms of
correctness”—hence, the closure of the question concerning whether other persons
exist. Rosenberg does not, however, make it clear why that inquiry must take place
only in the context of some community. What Rosenberg does not explicitly rule out is
the possibility that those norms could be established within a single individual who,
solely for the purposes of inquiry, countenances his fellow inquirers (including even
the skeptic herself) as potentially no more than convenient fictions, well-placed in his
mind for furthering his internal dialogue about the possibility of radical deception.
Perhaps Rosenberg could develop a Wittgensteinian-style private language argument
to support the notion that norms and procedures for inquiry could not be established
solipsistically. But no such argument is in evidence in what Rosenberg actually says.
Without such an argument, Rosenberg’s inroads against global skepticism are not as
well-paved as they could be.
One of the more intriguing portions of Rosenberg’s book is his discussion of what the
aim of inquiry is and what shape that aim gives to our belief-forming practices. It may
be a little disingenuous here to speak of “the” aim of inquiry, since it is reasonable to
think that our cognitive endeavors potentially have several aims—to improve our
emotional health, to come to a greater understanding of some particular subject, to
improve the organizational unity and coherence of our beliefs, and so on.
Nevertheless, perhaps we can think of “the” goal of inquiry as a goal of inquiry more
fundamental than any of these—more fundamental in the sense that pursuit of it is in
some way involved in the pursuit of any one of the just-mentioned particular goals.
One such general goal might be the goal of having true belief. Rosenberg’s bold claim
in Chapter Six is that the aim of inquiry is not, in fact, true belief; rather, it is justified
belief. The reason, he says, is that neither do beliefs have epistemically accessible
“truth-determinative” features—they do not “wear on their sleeves,” as it were, their
truth or falsity—nor do we have independent means of establishing the beliefs’
reliability or any sure connection between our beliefs’ justification and their truth.
Thus, we cannot realistically treat true belief as the end of inquiry, since we can never
be sure we ever get there (215-218).
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Given Rosenberg’s earlier advocacy of the view that all inquiry is perspectival and
“situated” in a community with its particular open questions and its settled ones (187-
188), this line of reasoning is an odd one for him to be making. If, in fact, any inquiry
accepts certain claims as established and given, then Rosenberg has a natural way for
us to establish the truth-justification link or the reliability of our beliefs: our beliefs
can be assessed as reliable (or not) relative to those propositions which we take for
granted and accept as given. To worry about the reliability of our belief in those
“closed question” propositions in addition to the reliability of our belief in those
propositions which still pose open questions for us—and hence to worry about the
reliability of our beliefs as a whole—requires us to admit as a real possibility that
possibility which Rosenberg says we cannot admit in any legitimate inquiry—the
possibility that our beliefs taken as a whole are mostly false.
Having rejected true belief as the end of our cognitive activity, Rosenberg puts in its
place justified belief. Rosenberg is influenced here by Pierce’s contention that the end
of inquiry is settled opinion or fixed belief, opinion from which the “irritant” of doubt
has been removed. Stability in opinion is not sufficient to serve as the end of inquiry,
though, since our opinion’s being settled now does not preclude fanatical dogmatism
(232-233), nor does it guarantee the capacity for our beliefs to remain relatively
stable in the light of future inquiry (235). What Rosenberg says we need for our
beliefs is a “fixative.” That fixative, he suggests, is provided by the beliefs’ being
justified. To understand why justification fixes belief, Rosenberg has us consider the
way Pierce says science allows us to reach some stability in our “matter-of-factual”
(empirical) beliefs. In broad terms, Pierce’s account goes like this. Our perceptual
experience occasionally leads us to form judgments that are “dissonant” with our
previous expectations for that experience. That dissonance leads to the creation in us
of doubt about those expectations, and that doubt is eliminated when we can
accommodate those judgments in an explanatory account that explains not only our
current experience but also future experiences that we may come to have. The beliefs
that come about as the result of this abductive reasoning are justified by that
reasoning. Doubt is eliminated, and the so-justified beliefs thereby enjoy relative
stability (244).
Rosenberg’s account here is quite suggestive and promising; I hope his future work
addresses questions that this last chapter leaves hanging. For instance, as noted
above, Rosenberg admits that stability and the elimination of doubt, on their own, are
not sufficient to serve as the ends of inquiry. What else, though, does being
abductively justified in our beliefs give us, if, in fact, we are no longer thinking of
justification’s link to truth as the point of having justified beliefs? Is it appropriate to
think of explanation itself as the end of inquiry which abductive justification
constitutes? Also, are there any constraints we may face in extending Rosenberg’s
conclusions about abductive justification beyond the realm of science to other areas of
inquiry: ethics, religion, and aesthetics, for instance?
Those readers who have the motivation to work through all the exegetical detail
Rosenberg gives us will be duly rewarded by a compelling journey that makes us
further appreciate the contributions Descartes, Kant, Sellars, Moore, Pierce, and
others have made to the investigation of important issues in epistemology.
Rosenberg, drawing in insightful, original, and provocative ways on these
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philosophers, gets us to think anew about the problems of skepticism, knowledge, and
the aim of inquiry. Thinking About Knowing will lead its readers to some fruitful
“thinking about knowing” of their own.
2003.11.07
Lisa Shabel
Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy
Shabel, Lisa, Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy, Routledge, 2003, 192pp,

$65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415939550.
Reviewed by Houston Smit, University of Arizona
Lisa Shabel’s Mathematics in Kant’s Critical Philosophy appears in the Routledge

Series of Outstanding Dissertations. It was accepted by the University of Pennsylvania
in the Fall of 1997 as her doctoral dissertation, and appears in its original form,
without updates or revisions. Part of the material in the book appeared in Shabel’s
award-winning 1998 article, “Kant on the Symbolic Construction of Mathematical
Concepts”(Studies in the History and the Philosophy of Science). But there is much
else of considerable interest in this outstanding book.
Shabel’s title is, in one respect, somewhat misleading. For her book is devoted as
much to Euclid’s Elements and to the history and philosophy of early modern
mathematics as it is to the critical Kant’s treatment of mathematics. The title is,
nonetheless, appropriate. For Shabel discusses Kant’s predecessors in the service of
providing background she argues is crucial to understanding the account of
mathematics that figures in the Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover, Shabel’s
overarching aim is to clarify the conception of synthetic a priori cognition central to
the critical philosophy, and to do so by shedding light on Kant’s account of the
construction of mathematical concepts. Shabel’s strategy turns on carefully examining
the role that the production of diagrams plays in the mathematics of the early
moderns, both in their practice and in their own understanding of their practice. For,
she argues, attending to this background – one with which Kant was, through the
mathematical textbooks of Christian Wolff, intimately acquainted – guards against
anachronisms that have lead even the best of Kant’s commentators to ascribe to him
a philosophy of mathematics that is obviously inadequate and implausible. Indeed,
Shabel contends, attending to this background allows us to see that Kant’s account of
mathematics is in fact an insightful account of the mathematics that early moderns
were engaged in.
Shabel largely succeeds in her aims, and does so admirably. She demonstrates that
her interpretive strategy – namely, that of examining Kant’s philosophy of
mathematics in light of the actual practice of early modern mathematics – is a fruitful
and important one. Her pursuit of this strategy yields readings of many central tenets
of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics that are invariably rich and provocative – even if
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some of these readings are not, in the end, entirely convincing. The book is an
important contribution to scholarship on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics; it will be
of interest to anyone working on Kant’s theoretical philosophy. What is more, Shabel’s
book contains valuable treatments of Euclid, Descartes, and Wolff, as well as of Kant.
I highly recommend this book, not only to Kant scholars, but also to anyone interested
in the history and philosophy of early modern mathematics.
The first of the book’s three chapters is devoted to a detailed examination of Euclid’s
Elements, one that focuses on explaining how diagrams play an integral role in
Euclid’s reasoning. Shabel argues that Euclid’s project is to provide definitions and
common notions that allow a geometer to demonstrate propositions through the
construction of diagrams. Euclid thus does not regard diagrams as merely heuristic
supplements to demonstrations that are given independently of these diagrams.
Rather, he takes the construction of diagrams to be what makes the reasoning that
yields geometric demonstrations possible, by warranting this reasoning. In particular,
constructed diagrams directly warrant inferences about spatial relations by exhibiting
these spatial relations. Euclid, then, was not out to provide a formal axiomatization of
geometry – a set of first principles from which all geometric propositions can be
derived deductively. And he did not rest the establishing of mathematical objects on
the consistency of such an axiom system. Rather, Euclid took the construction and
interpretation of diagrams, guided by the definitions and common notions he supplies,
to be what originally grounds the methods of geometry and establishes the existence
of its objects.
Shabel’s treatment of Euclid’s Elements is carefully crafted, and a pleasure to read.

She presents the material elegantly, along with a wealth of acute and perceptive
commentary on interpretative details that support her contention that the construction
of diagrams is integral to Euclid’s geometry. Shabel also defends Euclid’s method from
some standard objections by appealing to her interpretation of the character and role
of the construction of diagrams in this method. Shabel’s treatment of the Elements is,
moreover, indispensable to her overall project, because it provides the basis for the
story of early modern mathematics she goes on to tell. Early modern treatments of
geometry took the form of re-interpretations of Euclid’s Elements, and Shabel attends
to the details of these re-interpretations to shed light on the conception of geometry
that early moderns took to their study of Euclid. Moreover, according to Shabel, early
modern revolutions in mathematics can be understood properly only when viewed in
light of the way early modern mathematicians assimilated Euclidian geometry.
Specifically, changes in the conception of number over the 17th and 18th centuries, as
well as the development and application of algebraic and analytic methods by Viete,
Descartes, and others, lead to changes in the way in which the disciplines of geometry
and arithmetic were understood. But they did not lead either to the rejection of
Euclid’s basic conception of geometry or to the severing of algebra or arithmetic from
geometry. Rather, Shabel contends, early moderns all made plane Euclidian geometry
– understood, with Euclid, as integrally dependent on the construction of diagrams –
foundational to all of mathematics, including arithmetic and algebra.
The second chapter consists of a discussion of early modern mathematics that ranges
over the work of Viete, Descartes, Williamson, Barrow, Lamy, and several others.
Shabel structures the chapter around the overarching task of clarifying aspects of
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Wolff’s Elementa Matheseos Universae with most direct bearing on Kant’s account of
mathematical construction. After briefly introducing Wolff’s mathematics texts and
surveying the reception of Euclid’s Elements in the early modern period, Shabel takes
on two ambitious projects. The first is to clarify how geometry and arithmetic are
related, both in early modern mathematical practice and in the early modern
understanding of that practice. Shabel argues that early moderns, including Wolff,
retained understandings of number, the object of arithmetic, that rely on traditionally
geometric conceptions of line length and commensurability. They did so on the
grounds that only the construction of line segments of uniform length represents
magnitudes with the clarity and distinctness requisite to establish the objects of
mathematics. The second project is to clarify how Wolff and his contemporaries
conceived of algebra and analysis in relation to the sciences of arithmetic and
geometry. According to Shabel, algebra does not, for these figures, serve to
demarcate its own objects, but rather provides methods for reasoning about the
objects of arithmetic and geometry. Algebraic equations symbolize geometric
constructions and provide new resources for solving traditional geometric and
arithmetic problems. These points are reflected in the fact that, in early modern
mathematics texts, the algebraic construction of equations consists in the geometric
construction of lines and figures. Shabel closes the chapter by examining in detail
Wolff’s treatment of the Hypotenuse Problem, one that illustrates how he conceived of
constructed line segments as what constitute solutions to traditional geometric
problems. Her culminating thesis is that Wolff, echoing a consensus among the early
moderns, conceives of arithmetic and algebra as dependent on the more fundamental
discipline of geometry, on the grounds that geometric constructions are what define
any species of magnitude, the object of mathematics.
Shabel makes a convincing case that, following Euclid, early modern mathematicians –
both in practice and in the understanding of this practice – accorded the construction
of diagrams a fundamental and indispensable role in geometry. This is itself an
important, and controversial, result. Moreover, in attending to the way in which early
moderns assimilated Euclid, Shabel brings out helpfully how they took the mental act
of geometric construction itself, as against the diagram that this act produces, as what
makes the nature of mathematical objects transparent to the subject. More generally,
they held that an act of mathematical construction makes manifest the rule it follows
in constructing its object; and since this rule is definitive of the constructed object, the
act of construction thereby makes manifest the definition, and thereby the real
possibility, of that object. Less convincing is her case for the claim that all the early
moderns, including Wolff, conceived of arithmetic and algebra as dependent on the
more fundamental discipline of geometry. Indeed, as Daniel Sutherland has recently
argued, Stevin, Wallis, Euler, and Wolff arguably all subscribe – consistently or no – to
the view that arithmetic operations can ground notions of number independently of
geometric constructions. In any case, Shabel’s sophisticated discussion bears careful
study, for it makes important contributions to our understanding of the evolving
relation between geometry, arithmetic, and algebra in the early modern period.
The third chapter builds on the second chapter’s treatment of early modern
mathematics to provide a new interpretation of Kant’s account of mathematics as a
body of synthetic a priori cognition produced through the construction of mathematical
concepts. Now the construction of a mathematical concept consists, on Kant’s
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account, in the exhibition of a pure intuition corresponding to that concept. Shabel’s

first move is to draw on her treatment of early modern mathematical practice to
clarify this difficult notion of pure intuition. She proposes that, on Kant’s account, one
and the same sensible object – say, a diagram – can constitute either a pure or an
empirical intuition. It constitutes a pure intuition insofar as, in being aware of that
object, one attends to one’s own act of constructing that diagram in the manner that,
Shabel has argued, was commonly practiced in early modern geometry. But it
constitutes an empirical intuition, insofar as one inspects it merely as an empirically
presented object, and so apart from the procedure for its construction. Mathematical
cognition derives the necessity and universality characteristic of a priori cognition
through the awareness of one’s procedure in constructing objects and thus through
the exhibition of objects in pure intuition. One particularly promising way in which
Shabel develops and defends her reading is by appeal to Kant’s account of schemata
of pure sensible concepts: she argues that these schemata are the rules that govern
and characterize acts of mathematical construction. Shabel next shifts her attention to
Kant’s account of algebraic cognition, focusing on his conception of the symbolic or
characteristic construction by which algebra proceeds. According to Shabel, the
prevailing view of Kant’s account of symbolic construction takes this construction to be
one out of algebraic symbols, just as geometric or ostensive construction is the
construction of a mathematical object (say a triangle) out of other mathematical
objects (lines). Constructed algebraic formulae exhibit in intuition concepts of variable
numeric quantity in the same way that constructed geometric figures exhibit concepts
of those figures. On this view, moreover, the rules of symbolic construction are to be
understood on analogy with numerical rules of calculation, and symbolic constructions
themselves exhibit mathematical objects in intuition to establish genuine synthetic a
priori cognition of mere magnitude. Shabel rejects all aspects of the prevailing view.
She argues that symbolic constructions do not exhibit objects in intuition, and thus
are not themselves constructions of our concepts of abstract algebraic relations;
rather, they merely symbolize ostensive constructions of these concepts. Thus, for
Kant, algebra is not solely, or even primarily, concerned with arithmetic relations.
Rather, in keeping with the early modern consensus examined in Chapter 2, Kant
regarded algebraic symbolism as nothing but a useful short-hand for the
manipulations of geometrically constructible objects. He held that the generation and
manipulation of algebraic symbols in symbolic construction cannot itself serve, as does
ostensive construction, to establish any genuine mathematical cognition.
There is much in Chapter 3 that warrants close critical discussion, but here I can only
raise a concern about its reading of symbolic construction. Shabel makes a strong
case that Kant should not, and does not, conceive of symbolic construction as
exhibiting mathematical objects in intuition, in the way that ostensive construction
exhibits lines and figures. In particular, he should not, and does not, conceive of
inscribed algebraic formulae as constructed objects of mathematics, in the way that
lines and figures are. Symbolic construction is not a construction in intuition of objects
that correspond to algebraic concepts, as ostensive construction is of objects that
correspond to geometric concepts. But it seems overly hasty to conclude from this, as
Shabel does, that symbolic constructions cannot themselves exhibit algebraic concepts
in intuition, and can do nothing more than symbolize the only constructions that do –
namely, ostensive constructions. Indeed, Kant’s description of symbolic construction
as construction “in which one exhibits in intuition by signs the concepts, especially of
relations of quantities” (A734/B762) certainly suggests that he conceives of symbolic
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construction as itself exhibiting our concepts of the relations of mere magnitude in

intuition.
But how can symbolic construction exhibit algebraic concepts in intuition, if not by
constructing in intuition objects corresponding to these concepts? We can find a first,
and schematic, approximation of Kant’s answer in the following passage:
[Algebra] chooses a certain notation for all construction of magnitudes in general

(numbers), as well as addition, subtraction, extraction of roots, etc., and, after it has
also designated the general concept of quantities in accordance with their different
relations, it then exhibits in intuition all procedures through which magnitude is
generated and altered in accordance with certain general rules; where one magnitude
is to be divided by another, it places their symbols together in accordance with the
form of notation for division, and thereby achieves by a symbolic construction equally
well what geometry does by an ostensive or geometrical construction (of the objects
themselves), which discursive cognition could never achieve by mere concepts.
(A717/B745)
What the algebraist exhibits in intuition are not the objects that correspond to
algebraic concepts – magnitudes in general, determinations of a thing through which
it can be measured or counted (A242/B300) – but rather certain procedures. These
procedures are ones for generating and altering magnitudes in general in a way that
exhibit in time, the form of our inner sense, our concepts of their relations. Kant’s
thought seems to be that the algebraist employs these procedures, in his
manipulation of algebraic formulae and so through his imagination, to generate and
alter magnitudes as they are represented in these formulae. And in doing so, the
algebraist applies algebraic concepts to the manifold given in the form of our inner
sense (one that exhibits the character of temporal succession in intuition) so as to be
directly conscious of how this application determines the general rules that specify and
govern these procedures. In this way, the algebraist generates synthetic a priori
cognition of relations of magnitude, insofar as magnitudes in general can be given to
us in our sensibility and thus to our cognition. And he does so in a way analogous to
that in which – as Shabel herself insightfully explicates – the geometer is conscious, in
ostensive construction, of the rules that specify the procedures he employs in that
construction. That symbolic construction can itself establish genuine synthetic a priori
cognition just as well as ostensive construction can is, I take it, what Kant is saying in
this passage when he likens what the symbolic construction of a relation of division
achieves to what ostensive construction achieves. According to Shabel, what Kant
here says symbolic construction does “equally well” as ostensive construction is
merely to determine the quotient, not to exhibit the concept of the division in intuition
so as to establish synthetic a priori cognition (p. 127). But this reading seems strained
– especially in light of the final clause of the passage, which implies that symbolic
construction, like ostensive construction, itself achieves something that requires
intuitive representation.
2003.11.08
Husain Sarkar
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Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck
Sarkar, Husain, Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck, Cambridge,
2003, 326pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521821665.
Reviewed by Stephen I. Wagner, St. John's University
Husain Sarkar has done a service for Cartesian scholars and for others interested in
Descartes’ thought by offering a sustained discussion of Descartes’ first certainty, his
cogito. Sarkar’s work--the only book-length analysis of Descartes’ first truth in his
order of discovery--helps us to clarify central elements of Cartesian thought and offers
us suggestive directions for further discussion.
Sarkar makes it clear that his thesis is a very specific one—namely, that Descartes’
cogito should not be understood as an argument. He offers us, too, his own
alternative reading of the cogito, as an “experiment.” Sarkar urges “that the negative
claim offered here, namely, that the cogito is not an argument, is decisive. But that is
not so with the positive thesis as to what the cogito is” (x). In the service of
establishing his negative claim, Sarkar offers us a series of intensive analyses,
attempting to show that the various ways of understanding the cogito as an argument
fail.
Sarkar’s central thesis leads him to consider a broad range of issues related to his
analysis of the cogito. Some of these are intriguing new contributions, such as the
nature of the ideal inquirer, a characterization of perfect problems and their solutions,
and a discussion of the first- and second-order mental states and processes involved
in the cogito. One of the most significant of these issues, Sarkar suggests, is his
identification of a new Cartesian Circle, which has central implications regarding his
negative thesis.
Sarkar also offers us reflections on previous discussions of some central Cartesian

issues, including the will, memory, degrees of doubt, Descartes’ struggle with the
issue of the Eucharist, and attempts to resolve the Circle. His discussions of Descartes’
logic and the “content of the cogito” are especially thought-provoking. As a final step,
Sarkar provides a wide-ranging series of appendices, commenting on writings by
Robert Nozick, Anthony Kenny, and Jeffrey Tlumak and tying in his thoughts about the
Port-Royal Logic and Francis Bacon. Overall, Sarkar offers us a wealth of ideas and
questions to consider. Here, in line with Sarkar’s primary focus, I will concentrate my
comments on the issues most closely connected to his discussion of the nature of the
cogito.
Acknowledging that he cannot do justice to all of Descartes’ statements about the

cogito, Sarkar hopes to provide “an interpretation that will save as much as possible
of what is profound and interesting in Descartes” (x). In this pursuit, Sarkar proceeds
according to what he calls his “Sulmo principle” (acknowledging a debt to Ovid)
regarding a philosopher’s work: “Only after his death can we say that, if he had tied
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his views together at the end into a single consistent system, he would have done so
in this way or that; only then can one judge the worth of the system” (xi).
To establish his negative thesis, Sarkar considers five ways in which the cogito has
been analyzed as an argument. He considers two versions of a syllogistic reading (one
“fully elaborated” and one enthymematic), Jaako Hintikka’s version of an argument
employing quantification theory, Edwin Curley’s analysis involving an unstated “rule of
inference” and Bernard Williams’ analysis relying on the “relation of presupposition.”
He also considers Hintikka’s “performative view,” which Sarkar sees as ultimately
relying on “an argument making use of several principles of logic and inference”
(172). By gathering together these arguments, Sarkar has provided a valuable
resource for those thinking about the cogito; his detailed analyses are suggestive for
further thinking about these interpretations.
As Sarkar then puts it, “the heart of my thesis” follows these individual analyses--
”there is one difficulty so deep and so irreparable that we had better conclude that the
cogito is not an argument” (175). At this point, Sarkar applies his Sulmo principle,
“bringing together elements that the philosopher himself did not bring together”:
The problem I have set myself is to determine the truth value of a counterfactual. It
goes something like this: If Descartes had given us in the first meditation . . . his
theory of deduction, his metaphysical doubts, the doctrine of the creation of the
eternal truths, and the theory of memory, could Descartes have regarded the cogito
as an argument . . . at the end of the third paragraph in the Second Meditation? (177)
Having posed the problem this way, Sarkar’s “proof” that the cogito cannot be
construed as an argument seems to follow. On Sarkar’s proposal, Meditation I puts
the principles of mathematics and logic in doubt—”the demon may well be deceiving
[Descartes] into thinking that these principles of inference, like the cognate principles
of mathematics, are true when in fact they are not” (187). And, “knowing that an
argument is valid presupposes knowledge of the principles of inference” (187). But the
inference rules cannot be justified prior to the discovery of the cogito and of the
“general rule” that clear and distinct perceptions are true which “emerges . . . from
the cogito” (93). Thus, Sarkar concludes that the cogito cannot be established as true
in Meditation II through any process which relies on deductive inference.
Sarkar’s suggestion regarding a “new Cartesian Circle, more devastating than the old
one” arises from this same aspect of the Meditation I doubts. “Prior to the proof of the
existence of God, no principles of logic can be certified to be true or reliable. Without
true or reliable principles of logic, Descartes could not execute the proof of the
existence of God” (267-8). It is the role of the cogito and the general rule to provide
that certification. Sarkar’s claim here regarding the circle seems to be an extension of
a focus offered by George Nakhnikian regarding the strains put on Descartes’ project if
his doubts extend to the reliability of deductive inference. Sarkar does well to
emphasize the force of this concern.
Sarkar also supports his negative thesis by explaining that, for Descartes, both
mediate and immediate inferential arguments must rely on memory. Sarkar points us
here to what he sees as a crucial passage from the Rules for the Direction of the Mind,
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in which Descartes says that “self-evidence is not required for deduction, as it is for
intuition; deduction in a sense gets its certainty from memory.” Sarkar reads this as a
claim that deduction and intuition cannot be equally certain and he urges, “There is no
evidence that ’deduction’ here refers only to mediate inference and not to immediate
inference as well” (182, note). Since Sarkar’s Sulmo view takes the doubts of
Meditation I to impugn memory, he concludes, on these grounds as well, that that the
cogito cannot be either an immediate or mediate inference. Sarkar has presented an
intriguing portrayal of Descartes’ project of doubt and its implications for the cogito. I
will point to some reservations about both his negative and positive theses.
My primary reservation about Sarkar’s negative thesis involves the formulation of his
problem. Descartes surely stated, at points in his writings, his metaphysical doubt, his
doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths and his concerns about memory. It is not
clear, though, that we should reconstruct Meditation I in a way which incorporates all
of those doubts. Sarkar contends that “Such a reconstruction is permissible so long as
it is consistent with his major views” (176). But Descartes’ insistence on the order of
reasons and the order of discovery in the Meditations suggests, for example, that
Descartes’ metaphysical doubt is appropriate only where it appears, in Meditation III,
after the discovery of the cogito. The metaphysical doubt seems directed specifically
toward Descartes’ assent-compelling perceptions. Its appearance in Meditation III
seems to be an indication that there are no such perceptions in Meditation I and that
the doubt represented by the demon only impugns perceptions involving some
element of sensation or imagination. (Sarkar does look at Harry Frankfurt’s reading
along these lines, on pages 207-8.) The question of the scope of the Meditation I and
Meditation III doubts is, perhaps, the critical issue for understanding Descartes’
“validation of reason.” I am unsure that Sarkar’s characterization of Meditation I is
appropriate; but he has comprehensively demonstrated many of the consequences
which follow from constructing the doubts in the way that he has.
A similar concern could be raised regarding Sarkar’s claims about memory. Sarkar has
helpfully pointed out Descartes’ hesitation, in the Rules, about the elimination of the
fallibility of memory within our deductions. But in the Principles of Philosophy (I, 13)
and in the Conversation with Burman (AT V, 148-9; CSM III, 335), we find Descartes
expressing a different view. In the Principles, Descartes says that we can attend to the
proof that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles and be “completely
convinced” of its truth. To Burman, Descartes says “we are able to grasp the proof of
God’s existence in its entirety. As long as we are engaged in this process we are
certain that we are not being deceived, and every difficulty is thus removed.” Sarkar’s
analysis seems to indicate that Descartes’ views on this issue may have changed over
time. And this change raises some questions about Sarkar’s reading. Nevertheless,
Sarkar’s analysis highlights the importance of attending to Descartes’ concerns about
memory.
Since Sarkar does not offer his positive thesis as decisive, I offer my concluding
remarks to help to draw out some greater clarity in his proposal. Sarkar’s analysis
would indeed be most intriguing if it can save Descartes from “the great shipwreck,”
even in the presence of the comprehensive doubt which he builds into Meditation I. In
describing the “thought experiment” which is his version of the cogito, Sarkar says
that the meditator “sees—notices, perceives, intuits, witnesses—that it is true that in
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this particular case, his doubting now ensures his existence now” (78), explaining that
this is a “clear and distinct notion” (82) which involves “the truth of the proposition of
the cogito” (268). To ground Sarkar’s positive thesis, we need to understand how this
intuition escapes the force of the Meditation I doubts.
Sarkar suggests one answer when he explains that the “principles” Descartes is
doubting in Meditation I are “the five senses and the intellect” and that, in his reading
of the cogito, he wants to “distinguish between the intellect principle and the principle
of intuition” (50). But it is not obvious that this is a distinction which Descartes would
acknowledge—intuitions do seem to be the clear perceptions of the intellect. At
another point, Sarkar seems to portray the Meditation I doubt as more limited: “The
doubting process will purify the mind and rid it of the intrusion of the senses . . . the
better to hear the voice of reason” (69). This characterization suggests that Sarkar
might intend his “intuition” to signify an intellectual grasp which can survive the
doubt. A bit more clarity on this issue would help to solidify his positive thesis.
A further, and related, clarification seems important regarding Sarkar’s description of

the precise intuition that is involved in the cogito: “. . . the doubter in the cogito-state
learns to join the particular doubting thought with his particular existence” (78) And
“the joining takes place in a simple, single mental state and does not involve a
complex mental process” (82). It would add to the clarity of Sarkar’s positive thesis if
we could spell out a bit more fully what is involved in this “joining.” We get some
indication of an answer when Sarkar compares his view to Anthony Kenny’s analysis
of the cogito and considers “a Kenny-like counterposition”—”Cogito ergo sum is an
argument, but it is an argument that does not require the use of memory; the
following of sum from cogito is an object of immediate intuition” (205, note 31).
Sarkar raises some objections to this reading, stemming from Stoic logic and from his
claims about the use of memory. He concludes by saying:
Finally, it is difficult to fathom the precise difference, if any, between the immediate
intuition of the Kenny-like argument and the immediate intuition of a single
proposition. (205, note 31)
Sarkar’s own view seems to involve this same “immediate intuition of a single
proposition.” Further clarification of this point might well lead us to a way of more
clearly differentiating or perhaps reconciling Kenny’s “argument” and Sarkar’s
“experiment.”
Sarkar’s work has advanced our understanding of the nature of the cogito and of its
place in the overall structure of Descartes’ metaphysical project. I think that the point
to which he brings us—the immediately intuited “joining” of the meditator’s doubting
and existing—is the issue which will most profitably repay further clarification.
Sarkar’s work reminds us of the richness of Descartes’ thinking, and of his cogito in
particular, as an area for ongoing investigation and as a source of unending insight.
2003.11.09
Hans-Johann Glock,
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Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality
Glock, Hans-Johann, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality,

Cambridge, 2003, 330pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521821800.
Reviewed by Cory Juhl , University of Texas, Austin
Glock’s most recent book is a critical examination of the views of Quine and Davidson.
One of the novel features of the book that will prove helpful to most readers is Glock’s
comparative treatment of the two. Glock not only thoroughly articulates their views,
he also points out significant differences between their basic assumptions and
between the goals driving their various projects. For example, Glock compares Quine’s
’radical translation’ project with Davidson’s ’radical interpretation’ project, pointing out
interesting differences in assumptions and purposes. Another unusual feature of the
book is that Glock is himself fundamentally at odds with both Quine and Davidson,
and holds views that are broadly Witttgensteinian. Thus, unlike most extant books on
Quine and Davidson, Glock’s strives to make manifest various weaknesses of their
arguments and views, rather than to show how they can be salvaged from what would
appear to be devastating criticisms. However, while fundamentally critical, Glock’s
book is not particularly polemical. He clearly and forcefully presents the views that he
criticizes and defends positions of his protagonists from criticisms that he takes to be
off-target or unfair.
Glock, like Wittgenstein, shares many conclusions with Quine and Davidson. In
particular Glock notes their shared anti-Cartesianism and anti-’Platonism’. The
fundamental disagreement that Glock has with them is their scientism or ’naturalism’.
Glock thinks that the outlooks of Quine and Davidson are both driven at a
fundamental level by a desire to assimilate semantic phenomena to physical
phenomena, a project that Glock believes is doomed to failure. Throughout the book
Glock provides brief characterizations of his own positive views, including deflationism
about truth and ontology, and anti-reductionism with respect to semantic concepts.
Sprinkled throughout the book are the occasional humorous passages. Among the
more noteworthy is this one, from early on in the book: “On some points, I shall
argue, Quine and Davidson are simply wrong. This creates a problem. Being wrong is
the fate of lesser mortals. Great philosophers instead suffer the indignity of being
constantly misunderstood. In this time-honoured tradition, Quine, Davidson and their
followers occasionally seem to think that any radical criticism must be based on
misunderstanding. The risk of misinterpretation is real. But part of the blame must lie
with our protagonists. They have many philosophical virtues. Yet excessive sensitivity
to tensions in their own work, whether they be synchronic inconsistencies or
diachronic changes of mind, is not one of them” (5). For this reason Glock focuses on
the original statements, which are straightforward and provocative, and later deal with
subsequent modifications (6).
Glock calls their shared view ’logical pragmatism’, emphasizing the joint influence of
logical positivism and pragmatism. One noteworthy difference between Quine and
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Davidson that Glock mentions is that Davidson does not accept Quine’s assimilation of
epistemology to ’physiological psychology’. Rather, Davidson thinks that there is a
fundamental difference between reason-based explanation and other causal
explanations (32).
The book deals in great detail with a wide range of issues and is dense with argument.
It will be impossible to summarize in this review the dialectics of even a single
chapter. Instead I will give some idea of Glock’s treatment of a few issues that are
probably of particular interest to a fairly broad philosophical audience: chapter two on
ontology, chapter three on analyticity, and chapters five through eight on issues
having to do with Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Davidson’s ’radical
interpretation’, and Davidson’s truth-theoretic treatment of meaning.
Concerning Quine’s ontological views, Glock argues that any adequate notion of
’ontological commitment’ is intensional. Glock reviews attempts by Quine to come up
with extensional versions, but one of these leads to no commitments for false
theories, and other variants have the consequence that any false existential claim,
such as the existence of ether, commits one to Homeric gods and phlogiston. Appeal
to ’the most parsimonious translation’ reintroduces intensional notions (49). Next
Glock argues that Quine’s claims about singular terms and their failure to generate
ontological commitments are unpersuasive. One main Quinean argument appeals to
the fact that claims involving singular terms are ’paraphrasable’ via sentences not
involving such terms. But Glock notes that paraphrasability in other terms does not
entail eliminability. Further, the purported paraphrases may not be explicable in the
absence of singular terms. The very predicate ’Pegasizes’ seems inexplicable without
appeal to the term ’Pegasus’ (54). There is much else in this very interesting chapter,
including the final section, where Glock presents some of his own ’deflationary’ views
about ontology. Glock ends this chapter by concluding that there is ’. . . an
incoherence in Quine’s position. On the one hand, his naturalism construes
philosophical problems of existence as factual or internal. On the other hand, his
extensionalism repudiates the answers which, on this construal, are appropriate,
because of metaphysical scruples for which he has left no room’ (70). Glock argues
that Quine explicitly takes his ontological work to be a natural extension of the
scientific ’limning of reality’. But Quine’s actual work, on closer examination, appears
to place . priori constraints on what science can acceptably countenance.
Analyticity is the focus of Glock’s third chapter. Glock convincingly argues that Quine
cannot show that intensional notions are obscure without appeal to the indeterminacy-
of-translation arguments, which arguments Glock spends a great deal of time on in
later chapters. His own positive account of analyticity is not obviously successful,
although it is not obviously unsuccessful, either. Glock’s proposed definition is ’a
sentence s expresses an analytic proposition =: if a speaker sincerely denies or rejects
s, this shows either that x fails to understand s or that x is deliberately employing s in
a novel sense’. One potential difficulty for Glock’s proposal is that if analyticity is to
play the sort of epistemic role that many have wanted it to play, it is not obvious that
his definition will work. It may be, for example, that anyone who rejects ’Santa lives
at the North Pole’ fails to understand the sentence as standardly employed, but it is
nevertheless false that Santa lives at the North Pole. More fundamentally, the
justification of the inference from ’belief or acceptance is criterial for understanding of
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s’ to ’s is true’ or ’s is known to be true by those who understand s’ is not completely

clear, at least to this reader. On the other hand, if we don’t care whether analytic
sentences are readily known to be true . priori, then Glock’s sort of definition may
supply such a notion. Although the second disjunct in effect appeals to meanings, and
hence the definition is ’circular’, this is not an objection that Glock will worry about at
this stage of the dialectic, since by this time Glock has argued at length that unless
indeterminacy of translation is genuine and thereby shows that such notions as
meaning are obscure, the circularity involved is not vicious.
Glock argues later at length that Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of
translation fail. The gist of a very helpful and illuminating discussion is that ’Quine’s
method of translation cannot yield even the meager results it is supposed to, without
tacitly smuggling in either a prior understanding of the natives, or hermeneutical
methods and intensional notions which he disowns’ (175). A simple yet powerful point
along these lines is that the ’radical translator’ must take for granted that the natives
are trying to cooperate with the translator, to teach him the language, applying terms
in paradigmatic situations, and so on. An amusing story Glock recounts has it that the
early French translator Labillardiere pressed natives for numerals for numbers higher
than twenty. The expletives that he received in reply were taken to be those
numerals. Glock thinks that ’the only alternative to taking this kind of understanding
for granted is to assume that the native knows that the radical translator is trying to
establish the stimulus-meaning of her words. For Quinean translation to work, the
natives had better read a translation of Word and Object!’ (179)
Glock argues that once we make use of common human tendencies and reactions,
terms such as ’gavagai’ acquire determinate translations. Quine’s substitute for
meanings, ’stimulus meanings’, which involve nerve-ending stimulations, is castigated
for its lack of publicity. We generally don’t know, for example, whether others have
the same types of neural firings in similar environmental circumstances. And if we
don’t, such facts are irrelevant to meanings. Davidson improves the picture
somewhat, Glock thinks, by appealing to middle-sized dry goods as the common data,
but even so Davidson slips into describing the data in ’physicalistic’ terms, thereby
violating the requirement that Quine and Davidson both lay down for acceptable
views, that they appeal to data that are readily known in common. Glock points out
that we quite often don’t share common knowledge of our environments as
characterized in physicalist terms. For example, we can see the anger in someone’s
expression without being able to give a physical description of the relations between
parts of the face. Worse, Davidson eventually regresses to an even less plausible view
by taking as basic a notion of ’preferring to be true’ between sentences. Unlike the
case of assent and dissent, it is not even prima facie plausible that there are
characteristic behaviors associated with ’preferring to be true’.
The final chapters of the book deal mostly with Davidson. Glock presses well-known
worries about whether Davidson’s truth-conditional accounts of meaning can solve the
’extensionality problem’. Much of this discussion will be familiar to both friends and
foes of Davidson, but Glock’s overviews are illuminating and penetrating. While a
convinced Davidsonian will probably not be budged, those not already convinced will
come away thanking Glock for saving them the trouble of pursuing what would appear
to be a doomed project. Davidson’s principles of charity, as constitutive of correct
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interpretation, come under fire as well. Davidson’s principles suggest that ’radical
interpretation starts by projecting all of our beliefs on to the natives, allowing for the
ascription of error only as a second step’ (196). Glock points out that ’It is glaringly
obvious that this is not how we interpret from scratch. The Spanish conquistadors . . .
[and others] . . . did not start out on the assumption that the natives shared all of
their beliefs, including . . . that ships can sail against the wind, or that infectious
diseases are caused by micro-organisms . . . ’ (196). Glock considers Grandy’s
substitute ’principle of humanity’, but thinks that what the radical translator must
ultimately appeal to is ’a framework of shared cognitive capacities and conative
propensities (needs, emotions, attitudes)’ (197).
In the final chapter Glock deals with, among other issues, the question whether
animals can have beliefs. Glock thinks that some of Davidson’s arguments have some
merit, but that the argument that Davidson thinks is most compelling (that in order to
have beliefs one must have the concept of belief) is actually without merit. Even
convinced Davidsonians will read the latter half of the book with interest, if only to see
a particularly clear and thorough attempt at dismantling various central aspects of the
Davidsonian framework. Glock clearly agrees with much in Davidson. Yet Glock
believes that Davidson goes astray, like Quine, due to scientistic tendencies.
A neat summary of the main conclusions that Glock reaches is at the end of the
introduction. There he explains that his book “rehabilitates the idea that there is a
qualitative difference between science, which is concerned with empirical facts, and
philosophy, which is concerned with conceptual issues and hence . priori. It also
counts against those numerous and highly influential forms of naturalism which insist
that human behavior consists au fond of nothing but sounds and movements, or that
all facts are (reducible to) physical facts. I do not purport to refute this kind of
naturalism. But I hope to show that it finds no succour in Quine and Davidson. Rightly
understood, some of their claims even militate against such a position. And although
they subscribe to it in many respects, they do not provide sound arguments in its
favour. In particular, the flight from intensions, the indeterminacy thesis included,
presupposes rather than demonstrates that intensional discourse is obscure and non-
factual” (11).
Glock’s book is one that every philosopher should have on his or her shelf, and most
will find it an enjoyable and illuminating work. Glock tells us that the book is geared
’mainly to graduate students and professionals’ (6). It is admirably clear, insightful
and provides critical overviews of the most important arguments of two of the most
influential philosophers of the twentieth century, from the point of view of a critic
rather than a sympathizer. There is something valuable here for everyone, whether
friend or foe of Quine or Davidson.
2003.11.10
Richard Swinburne (ed.)
Bayes's Theorem
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Swinburne, Richard (ed.), Bayes's Theorem, Oxford University Press, 2002, 160pp,
$24.95 (hbk), ISBN 0197262678.
Reviewed by Branden Fitelson , University of California'Berkeley
This is a high quality, concise collection of articles on the foundations of probability

and statistics. Its editor, Richard Swinburne, has collected five papers by
contemporary leaders in the field, written a pretty thorough and even-handed
introductory essay, and placed a very clean and accessible version of Reverend
Thomas Bayes’s famous essay (“An Essay Towards the Solving a Problem in the
Doctrine of Chances”) at the end, as an Appendix (with a brief historical introduction
by the noted statistician G.A. Barnard). I will briefly discuss each of the five papers in
the volume, with an emphasis on certain issues arising from the use of probability as
a tool for thinking about evidence.
In the first essay, Elliott Sober contrasts Bayesian accounts of evidential support with
an alternative, non-Bayesian, likelihood-based approach. The crux of Sober’s non-
Bayesian proposal involves the following sort of claim about contrastive evidential
support:
Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2.
Here, the alternative hypotheses H1 and H2 need not be mutually exclusive. Sober
proposes that we should unpack this relational concept of favoring using likelihoods,
as follows:
Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2).
This principle is sometimes called the “Law of Likelihood” (see Royall (1997) for the
history and theoretical basis of this “law”). From a Bayesian (and, I think, intuitive
point of view), this “law” is far from obvious. Consider a case in which E entails H1 but
fails to entail H2. Intuitively, in such a case, E should favor H1over H2. After all, E
guarantees the truth of H1, but fails to guarantee the truth of H2. It is important to
note that the “Law of Likelihood” is inconsistent with this intuitive principle. That is,
there can be cases in which Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2), despite the fact that E entails H2
but fails to entail H1. Of course, these will be cases in which H1 and H2 are not
mutually exclusive, but a likelihoodist cannot object to such counterexamples on these
grounds (since mutual exclusivity is not a requirement for the likelihoodist’s “favoring”
relation). A proper, Bayesian theory of contrastive confirmation, on the other hand,
need not have this undesirable consequence.
Bayesians typically understand relational support in terms of non-contrastive

confirmation. For a Bayesian, E supports (or confirms) H – in a non-contrastive sense
– just in case E raises the probability of H (on a suitable, rational credence function).
There have been various proposals concerning how a Bayesian ought to measure the
degree to which E confirms H, or c(H, E), for short (see Fitelson (1998) for a survey).
But, no matter which Bayesian c-measure one favors, one would be inclined to define
619
contrastive support (or favoring) in terms of this non-contrastive confirmation

measure c, as follows:
Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if c(H1, E) > c(H2, E).
Interestingly, this “reduction” of contrastive support to non-contrastive (Bayesian)

confirmation need not be at odds with the “Law of Likelihood”. As it turns out, there is
one (and only one, out of all the historical proposals!) Bayesian measure of
confirmation that entails the “Law of Likelihood”, assuming this standard Bayesian
definition of favoring in terms of confirmation (see Milne (1996)). This is important, as
it shows that the Bayesian need not reject the “Law of Likelihood.” However, those
who think the “law” is false (like myself) would be forced either to abandon the
reductive principle stated above, or to choose a different measure of non-contrastive
confirmation. Indeed, many have opted for the latter approach. While I would
recommend endorsing both the former approach and the latter approach, it is worth
mentioning that the following weakened version of the “Law of Likelihood” should be
acceptable to all parties here, Bayesian or otherwise:
Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if
Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ¬H1) ≤ Pr(E | ¬H2).
Joyce (2003) shows that this principle is satisfied by all reductive Bayesian
confirmation-theoretic approaches to favoring (that is, all Bayesian measures of
confirmation c will lead to definitions of “favoring” that satisfy this weak likelihood
principle). This is a nice way to see precisely where Bayesian and non-Bayesian
accounts of evidential support come apart. Bayesians are perfectly happy to talk about
the likelihoods of the denials of alternative hypotheses: Pr(E | ¬H1) and Pr(E | ¬H2).
But, non-Bayesian Likelihoodists will not feel comfortable with such probabilities, since
they involve averaging over the likelihoods of concrete alternative hypotheses. And,
the “weights” in these averages will depend on the dreaded prior probabilities of the
alternative hypotheses: Pr(H1) and Pr(H2). While Bayesians are happy to use priors in
their account of evidential support, non-Bayesians like Sober are strongly opposed to
such a move, since they think the prior probabilities are (in general) subjective and
that they lack probative force. Ultimately, it seems to me, whether terms like Pr(E |
¬H1) should be countenanced in our theory of evidence will depend on the overall
relative adequacy of Bayesian vs non-Bayesian accounts of evidential support. Howson
(pp. 52–53) argues in his contribution to this volume that such likelihoods are crucial
for properly understanding evidential support. And, I am inclined to agree (see
Fitelson (2001) for some further reasons why). Indeed, even non-Bayesians will use
such terms sometimes — when it seems to be essential to obtaining the right answers
about contrastive evidential support (see Royall (1997, pages 1–2), and even Sober
(2003) for some clear examples of this kind).
Sober’s paper concludes with a discussion of recent instrumentalist, non-Bayesian

approaches to statistical inference. Here, he highlights the work of the Japanese
statistician Akaike, which aims to show how the simplicity of a model can be tied to its
predictive accuracy. This is a very important area of research in contemporary
statistics and also in the philosophy of science. Sober argues that Bayesian
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approaches to these issues and problems cannot adequately account for the
importance of simplicity as a factor in determining how predictively accurate a
statistical model is. Howson, and other Bayesians, are usually not convinced by such
arguments. And, in fairness to the Bayesian approaches, I think there is more that can
be said on this score (for a nice Bayesian discussion of simplicity in this context, see
Rosenkrantz (1977)). I conclude my discussion of Sober’s paper with a detail that the
minute reader may find puzzling. In the first part of his paper, Sober talks about
“favoring,” which, presumably, involves evidence favoring the truth of one hypothesis
over another (not, say, favoring the predictive accuracy of one over another), but in
the second part he talks only about comparative judgments of predictive accuracy and
not about truth. It is unclear to me how the likelihoods appearing in Akaike’s theorem
are to be interpreted. Are they still capturing what the evidence says about the truth
of competing theories, or are they merely containing information relevant to assessing
relative predictive accuracy? It is interesting that (either way) likelihoods would then
seem to be essential both to the instrumentalist and to the non-instrumentalist (who
is concerned with evidence regarding the truth of competing theories). It would be
nice to know how and why likelihoods are able to play this dual role.
In contrast to Sober’s contribution to this volume, the papers of Howson, Dawid, and
Earman adopt a Bayesian stance. The first part of Howson’s paper contains a wealth of
historical, philosophical, and statistical wisdom. He discusses the role of Bayesian
methods (and, by contrast, some of their most notable non-Bayesian rivals) in
statistical theory and practice, beginning with the very first Bayesian methods used by
Laplace (and Bayes himself), leading all the way up to the most recent foundational
issues addressed by Bayesian statisticians and philosophers, including debates about
“informationless” prior probabilities, and the importance of simplicity in hypothesis (or
model) choice. Howson’s treatments of Fisherian and Neyman-Pearsonian statistical
methods (and philosophies) are particularly informative and useful (the analogies with
Popperian and hypothetico-deductive conceptions should be especially illuminating for
philosophers). And, Howson’s discussion of Lindley’s Paradox is refreshing (it seems to
me that not enough philosophical ink has been spilt over this important statistical
conundrum).
The second part of Howson’s paper (on which I will dwell a bit) is written from a more
“logical” point of view. Here, he proposes a systematic, and general Bayesian (non-
deductive, of course) “logic,” which is described in a way that makes it sound strongly
analogous to (classical) deductive logic. He talks about “consistency” and “soundness”
and “completeness”, etc. Some of the logicians among us will probably have deep
worries about this analogy, and no doubt they will view use of this logical terminology
as a non-trivial stretch. I must confess, I found myself feeling rather uncomfortable
about the degree of force with which Howson pushes the analogy. I will focus here on
Howson’s notion of “inconsistency,” but I think similar worries will apply to his other
“logical” notions. When a (classical) logician talks about inconsistency, it is a notion
that is directly relevant not only to decision-making and other (broadly) pragmatic
disciplines, but also to epistemology (understood here in a traditional, non-pragmatic
sense). It’s not entirely clear to me that Howson’s notion of “consistency” has such
direct relevance to epistemology. Here, I am not worrying about the problems
involving prior probabilities mentioned above. I am willing to grant (arguendo) that
they do have epistemic and probative force. What I do not see is why someone who is
621
“inconsistent” in Howson’s sense should feel any epistemic pressure to revise their
degrees of belief. It seems logically consistent with Howson’s “inconsistency” that such
an agent’s degrees of belief are inter alia as accurate as they have ever been (or ever
will be). This is (arguably) not the case when the agent’s beliefs are logically
inconsistent. In that case, the agent knows there is something false in what they
believe (and this is transparently a bad thing, from an epistemic point of view). What
is the analogous thing that an “inconsistent” agent (in Howson’s sense) knows that
would inspire them to change their degrees of belief? In this connection, it seems to
me that Howson’s discussion is somewhat vague. He presents his “logic” without
crucial details concerning the proofs of the key theorems that purport to forge the
strong analogy between deductive logic and his Bayesian “logic”. For instance,
Howson does not explain how the additivity axiom follows from his “consistency”
assumptions (indeed, he even claims to establish the “inconsistency” of violations of
countable additivity, which is even more controversial). This leaves one wondering
whether the compelling objections to Dutch Book arguments that have been voiced by
philosophers like Schick (1980) and Maher (1993) might have some bearing on
Howson’s approach. Such philosophers seem to provide examples of cases in which it
seems perfectly rational to violate the additivity axiom (and, therefore, Howson’s
“consistency”). It would be nice to hear Howson explain what, precisely, makes such
agent’s degrees of belief “bad” or “irrational” (in any compelling sense). More
traditional logicians may want to have a look at Carnap’s (1950) insightful discussion
of the relationship between deductive and inductive logic. Carnap’s inductive logic
program may have failed, but its aim was to provide a notion of partial entailment
that was logical in the very same sense (not merely in an analogous sense) that
deductive logical consequence is logical, and thereby to avoid a pragmatic and/or
subjective turn in inductive logic (which seems implicit – although now deeply buried –
in Howson’s talk of “betting quotients” and “fairness”). It seems to me that this aim
may still be achievable (albeit, probably in a non-Carnapian way), and until it is
demonstrated that this goal cannot be achieved, perhaps it would make more sense to
reserve the term “logic” for the non-pragmatic, non-contingent, and objective
conception that traditional logicians have in mind. In the meantime, why not just stick
with the term “rational”, as opposed to “logical” when characterizing Bayesian
accounts of credence? Would anything really be lost?
Dawid’s paper provides a very clear, simple, and sound introduction to the use of
Bayesian theories of evidential support (and weighing evidence) in legal contexts. A
fair amount of work has been done in this area over the past thirty years or so, and
Dawid’s paper serves as a nice overview of the basic techniques that are applied by
Bayesians in the context of legal evidence. One of the best things Dawid does is to
make very clear the distinction between prior probabilities (degrees of belief) and
likelihood ratios (degrees of support or weight of evidence). Many of the same issues
discussed above in connection with Bayesian theories of evidential support arise in
concrete and simple examples in Dawid’s paper. Dawid proposes the likelihood ratio
measure l(H, E) = Pr(E | H) / Pr(E | ¬H) as the proper Bayesian measure of degree of
support. This measure has been skillfully defended by I.J. Good for many years (see
Good (1985)), and more recently has been shown to have various advantages over
other Bayesian measures of confirmation (see Eells and Fitelson (2000), and Fitelson
(2001)). Importantly, because of its sensitivity to the “catch-all” likelihood Pr(E | ¬H),
l violates the strong “Law of Likelihood” discussed above (endorsed by Sober). And,
yet, as Dawid’s examples illustrate, it often seems crucial to take account of such
622
terms in our assessments (both contrastive and non-contrastive) of weight of

evidence. In this sense, Dawid’s legal examples provide a nice testbed for clashing
intuitions in the Bayes/non-Bayes controversy about evidential support. I think
Dawid’s examples provide further reasons to worry about the legitimacy of the strong
“Law of Likelihood,” and further reasons to retreat to Joyce’s (2003) Weak Law of
Likelihood.
Earman’s paper can be viewed as a sampler of a much longer essay he has written
[Earman (2000)] on Hume’s arguments concerning miracles (an essay which I highly
recommend, by the way). Earman provides a detailed historical trace of the
arguments of Hume and his contemporaries concerning the possibility of compelling
testimony about the occurrence of miracles. By carefully and skillfully applying
Bayesian techniques to these arguments, Earman ends up with some very interesting
(albeit somewhat anachronistic) new reconstructions of these infamous historical
arguments. By and large, Earman’s reconstructions are accurate and novel, and his
analyses are trenchant. His Bayesian treatment of multiple testimonial reports is
especially illuminating. The only complaint I have about this paper is that it may focus
too heavily on posterior probabilities Pr(H | E) of the various hypotheses H in
question, given the various sorts of evidence E he considers. It would also be
interesting to see parallel analyses done which focus more on the likelihood ratios l(H,
E) that result in each of the reconstructions. I suspect the ensuing facts about degree
of support would be harmonious with Earman’s conclusions about degrees of belief in
these cases. But, examining things from the weight of evidence perspective (as Dawid
does in the legal context) may shed further light on some of the issues and
arguments. This is a minor complaint, and Earman is to be commended for the rich
historical/philosophical tale he tells, and for the interesting applications of Bayesian
machinery he musters.
The final contemporary paper in this collection (aside from Swinburne’s solid
introductory piece on which I have chosen not to comment explicitly) is Miller’s brief
(but important) essay on the propensity interpretation of probability. Roughly, the
propensity theory recommends interpreting Pr(X | Y) as the (presumably, causal)
propensity Y has for bringing about X (usually, in some experimental context). Popper
(1957) was one of the first to endorse a propensity interpretation of conditional
probability, and many others have followed suit since. Humphreys (1985) pointed out
that there seem to be deep problems with the existence and interpretation of the
“inverse propensity” Pr(Y | X), since (presumably) Y’s having a causal propensity to
bring about X does not imply X’s having a causal propensity to bring about Y. But, if
“Pr” is to satisfy the probability axioms, then it must also satisfy Bayes’s Theorem,
which would imply a perfectly well-defined and interpretable inverse probability Pr(Y |
X). This became known as Humphreys’s Paradox. Many people came to believe that
Humphreys had shown that propensities cannot satisfy the axioms of probability (or
Bayes’s Theorem). [Indeed, it seems that some people already believed this before
Humphreys’ paper appeared (see Fetzer and Nute (1980)).] In his contribution to the
volume, David Miller shows that this is not the case. Indeed, Miller sketches a
perfectly coherent and sensible propensity theory that is also a probability theory. As
such, Miller shows how to diffuse Humphreys’s Paradox and restore the satisfaction of
Bayes’s Theorem for propensities. As it turns out, there are various ways to mitigate
623
Humphreys’ paradox in this sense. See Gillies (2001) for extended discussion of
several approaches, including Miller’s.
The volume closes with an Appendix containing a very polished reproduction of

Bayes’s classic “An Essay Towards the Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances”.
The Essay still reads very well, and it should be on every probabilist’s “must read” list.
I feel quite comfortable saying something almost as glowing about this entire volume.
I found this book very edifying and clear, and the debates and issues it encompasses
are of great importance for contemporary philosophy of probability, statistics, and
decision-making. I highly recommend this book to anyone with interests in these
areas, and I commend Swinburne for putting together this neat little book.
References
Carnap, R., 1950, Logical Foundations of Probability, Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.
Earman, J., 2000, Hume’s Abject Failure - The Argument Against Miracles, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Eells, E. and Fitelson, B., 2002, “Symmetries and Asymmetries in Evidential Support,”
Philosophical Studies 107: 129–142.
Fetzer, J. and Nute, D., 1980, “A Probabilistic Causal Calculus: Conflicting

Conceptions,” Synthese 44: 241-246.
Fitelson, B., 1999, “The plurality of Bayesian measures of confirmation and the
problem of measure sensitivity.” Philosophy of Science 66: S362–S378.
Fitelson, B., 2001, “A Bayesian Account of Independent Evidence with Applications,”

Philosophy of Science 68: S123–S140.
Gillies, D., 2000, “Varieties of Propensity”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
51: 807–835.
Good, I. (1985). “Weight of evidence: A brief survey,” In Bayesian Statistics, 2

(Valencia, 1983), pp. 249–269. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Humphreys, P., 1985, “Why propensities cannot be probabilities,” The Philosophical

Review 94: 557–570.
Joyce, J., 2003, “Bayes’ Theorem”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-
theorem/
Maher, P., 1993, Betting on Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Milne, P., 1996, “Log[p(h/eb)/p(h/b)] is the one true measure of confirmation,”

Philosophy of Science 63: 21–26.
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Popper, K., 1957, “The propensity interpretation of the calculus of probability, and the
Quantum Theory,” in S. Körner (ed.): Observation and Interpretation in the
Philosophy of Physics.
Rosenkrantz, R., 1977, Inference, Method and Decision. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Royall, R., 1997, Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm. London: Chapman &
Hall.
Schick, F., 1986, “Dutch Bookies and Money Pumps,” Journal of Philosophy 83: 112–
119.
Sober, E., 2003, “Likelihood and the Duhem/Quine Problem,” unpublished manuscript.
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2003.11.11
Nomy Arpaly
Unprincipled Virtue
Arpaly, Nomy, Unprincipled Virtue, Oxford, 2003, 216pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN
0195152042.
Reviewed by Julia Driver , Dartmouth College
I felt sure I would like Nomy Arpaly’s book when I opened it to the first page and saw
John LeCarré’s name in the first sentence. I was not disappointed. Arpaly uses an
engaging mix of literary examples and rigorous analysis to present and argue for a
variety of interesting claims relating to virtue. Arpaly has something novel and
interesting to say about autonomy, agency, moral worth, and virtue. This is an
excellent book, and one of the best I’ve read recently.
Arpaly believes (and I agree) that moral theory has all too often been concerned with
discussions of unreal agents; ones who are either positive or negative moral
exemplars. Thus, the fuzzy middle cases tend to be avoided. Yet, she argues, these
are the cases that have much to show us about moral worth in the real world.
Let’s consider first the LeCarré example she uses, that of Oliver Single, who makes a
momentous decision to side with the legal system and against his own father, and
who makes this decision in a kind of mental haze. One can see that when it comes to
momentous decisions, surely, people are often not the clear-headed rational paragons
discussed in most of the philosophy literature. They are complicated, fuzzy, and while
responsive to reasons not always clearly aware of the very reasons they seem to
respond to in their actions. This sort of case is dear to my heart, since I have long
held that virtue ethics in particular sets the bar way too high when it comes to criteria
for moral virtue.1 Good people often don’t have a clear understanding of their own
motivations and the reasons that drive them. This is a theme that Arpaly deftly takes
up in her own work, though she is focusing on the issue of autonomy and moral
worth. Her account of moral worth offers, in one respect, an improvement over other
accounts in the past – mainly focusing on virtue, again – which sought to account for
similar sorts of cases. For example, in my account I try to argue that characters like
Huckleberry Finn are virtuous, yes – and I give a consequentialist account of character
traits to account for this. Arpaly, however, avoids the tangled debate over which
account of moral evaluation is correct. Instead, she focuses on the more basic reason
for why someone like Huck is praiseworthy: he is responsive to the right sort of moral
reasons. And this is what counts, even though he cannot correctly represent those
reasons as moral reasons, and he himself does not understand the nature of his
actions. Her account is simple and elegant and captures the intuitive force behind the
different cases without making contentious claims about the criteria for moral
evaluation. Of course, that’s not to say she doesn’t make other contentious claims.
626
Let’s look at her claims about moral worth. Her main project is to come up with an
account of ’praise’ and ’blame’ that is not autonomy based. One of the things she
would like to do is give an account of why in some cases ignorance does not make one
morally blameworthy, whereas in other cases it does. What is the relevant difference
between the cases? On her view it is the quality of the will and the motivation. Is the
person’s heart in the right place, is she responsive to the right sorts of reasons, is her
action ’authentic’? If the person satisfies these criteria, she is praiseworthy. Consider
again the case of Huckleberry Finn, a case well discussed in the virtue literature.2
Huckleberry is naïve and utterly mistaken about what is morally right – he helps a
friend escape slavery, and actually feels guilty about it. Yet, in the end he does the
right thing. The diagnosis of this case for Arpaly is that in spite of what he consciously
believes, Huck is nevertheless responsive to the right sorts of reasons. I suspect that
one reason we think well of Huckleberry Finn is that we do think that, transplanted to
21 st Century America, he would not have the ignorant views he in fact had. His basic
will is a good one. This is not true of the inveterate racist, whose will is such that he is
really simply looking for an excuse to hate. It is these sorts of thoughts that affect our
intuitions in these cases. But I’d like to add another one. We feel that, in light of these
personality differences, one won’t see someone like Huckleberry Finn hurting people,
actually causing harm to others; whereas, in the other case, we don’t feel nearly as
confident. I think that Arpaly is neutral on this point, at least for now. She
acknowledges that an account of what makes an action right is a gap in her account.
But, as I noted earlier, this could also be viewed as an improvement, since her
account makes the case for the goodness of these qualities – like Huck’s brand of
sympathy – which doesn’t depend on a particular background theory.
One of her targets in the later part of the book is the claim that agent-autonomy
underlies normative-autonomy. Agent-autonomy is the ’self-control’ sense of
autonomy, and there are numerous ways to spell out this sense. However it is spelled
out, though, it is distinct from normative-autonomy, which is respect for persons, or
respect for their autonomy. Many hold the view that in order for normative-autonomy
to be warranted, the agent must be exhibiting agent-autonomy. Arpaly critically
discusses this claim, focusing on cases where it seems that we ought to respect a
person’s decisions (i.e. normative-autonomy) though that person does not seem to be
fully agent-autonomous. Her aim is fairly modest; she simply wants to show that
there is no obvious connection between the two.
I guess that what I would want from the account is more sharpness and precision. To
say that “both reason responsiveness and authenticity, if depth of concern is a
substantial part of authenticity, are relevant to moral praiseworthiness and
blameworthiness, and hence to moral responsibility”(131) doesn’t do much to
differentiate her account from what a lot of other different accounts would be
committed to. “Relevant” covers a lot of territory, and her claims are driven more by
cases than by theory. For example, I would very much agree with her on this, that
’responsiveness to reasons’ is relevant, but then disagree with her take on some of
the examples she uses. The agent, to even be an agent, needs to be responsive to
reasons. It is responsiveness to the right sorts of reasons which contribute to
praiseworthiness, but in the end what really matters is – what does the agent do, how
does her behavior make a positive difference (or, more realistically, how could it
reasonably be expected to make a positive difference)? Arpaly doesn’t want to go in
627
this direction, but on my view this is one other way to differentiate the Huck Finn’s
from the monsters who act horribly, though tormented by their own behavior. They
are responsive to the right sorts of reasons emotionally, but it makes no difference to
what they actually do. However, Arpaly doesn’t want to commit herself in this
direction. But this is basically a quibble. Arpaly has done an excellent job of
generating an account of moral worth that is far more nuanced than most.
There are gaps in the account, which she readily acknowledges, but these can and
should be viewed as interesting issues for future exploration. Arpaly has written a
book that is philosophically interesting and engaging. I encourage you to read it. You
will not be disappointed.
Endnotes
1. See my discussion of this issue in Uneasy Virtue (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), particularly in Chapters 1 and 2.
2. See, for example, Jonathan Bennett’s essay “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,”
Philosophy (1974), 123-34.
2003.11.12
Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft
Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology
Currie, Gregory and Ravenscroft, Ian, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy

and Psychology, Oxford University Press, 2003, 248pp, $21.95 (pbk), ISBN
0198238096.
Reviewed by Peter Carruthers , University of Maryland
Recreative Minds is an insightful and wide-ranging discussion of the nature of

imagination and its role in human cognition. Topics covered include the distinctions
amongst different kinds of imagining (for example, between belief-like imaginings and
perception-like imaginings), the mechanisms underlying visual and motor imagery,
the role of imagination in mind-reading (that is, in mental-state attribution), the
nature and developmental significance of childhood pretence, our emotional responses
to literature and theatre, and explanations of autism and schizophrenia as (distinct)
kinds of disorder of the imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft write clearly and
engagingly throughout, and their careful dissection of many of the issues and
arguments that they consider is quite masterful. The book deserves to be widely read
by both philosophers and psychologists interested in any of the above topics. I shall
say just a little about the main focus of each of the book’s chapters, before zeroing in
on, and briefly developing, three lines of criticism.
628
Following a short introduction, Chapter 1 distinguishes amongst a number of different

phenomena that commonly go under the name of ’imagination’, and identifies and
marks out one of them that is to be the authors’ main target, which they call
’recreative imagination’. The states of mind involved in episodes of recreative
imagination are states that are significantly like states of belief, desire, or perception,
but they lack the full causal roles of beliefs, desires, and perceptions. Chapter 2 then
investigates the nature of recreative imagination somewhat further, and shows how
imagery, fantasy, and supposition are all forms of this sort of imagination.
Chapter 3 takes up the simulation / theory debate about the nature of our mind-
reading abilities. It defends a modest version of the simulation approach, showing how
this implicates the imagination and distinguishing it from the more extreme views of
some other simulationists (notably Robert Gordon). Chapter 4 examines what is
known, and what can plausibly be inferred, about the mechanisms underpinning
imagery, particularly visual and motor forms of imagery. Then Chapter 5 argues that
there are important differences between propositional kinds of imagination and
perceptual kinds.
Chapter 6 looks at the development of imagination in childhood and at its

relationships with pretence. Chapter 7 argues that autism is best understood as
involving a deficit of imaginative capacity. Chapter 8 discusses recent explanations of
schizophrenia and argues that it, too, is best understood as a (different) kind of
disorder of the imagination. (Schizophrenia is said to result from a failure to
introspectively monitor one’s own acts of imagination properly, as opposed to a failure
of imagination per se, as is the case in autism.) And then finally, Chapter 9 discusses
our emotional responses to literature and the performing arts, paying special attention
to our emotional response to tragedy.
While the book’s treatment of the simulation / theory debate (in Chapter 3, and then
again in Chapters 5, 6 and 7) is in many respects admirable, there is one regard in
which the authors make life far too easy for themselves. For they characterize theory-
theorists about our mind-reading capacities as claiming that such capacities involve
nothing but theory. Not surprisingly, they are able to show that such a view is highly
implausible, and they therefore declare that simulationism is the victor in the debate.
But I know of no-one who calls himself a ’theory-theorist’ who believes any such
thing. (I certainly don’t; nor do Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich.) In recent debates,
the real locus of conflict between theory-theory and simulationism has come to
concern the character and origins of our mental-state concepts, like belief and
attention, as well as the sources of our capacity to make basic inferential moves
amongst mental-state types, so that, for example, one will go from, ’X is perceptually
attending to a situation in which it is the case that P’, to, ’X (probably) believes that
P’. Theory-theorists now accept (convinced by the arguments of simulationists like
Alvin Goldman and Jane Heal) that mind-reading often involves the re-deployment of
our regular reasoning and decision-making capacities, and hence is partly constituted
by a form of simulation of the minds of other people. But they continue to insist that
our core knowledge of the nature of the mind is theory-like, and arises in
development either through a process of theorizing, or through the maturation of a
domain-specific and innately structured ’module’, or by some combination of both.
629
Now, as it happens, Currie and Ravenscroft explicitly and openly concede that some of
our central mentalizing concepts — especially the concept false belief — can’t plausibly
be thought to emerge in development through processes of simulation. And in their
descriptions of how simulation actually operates, they take mental-state concepts as a
given. But they say nothing about the nature of such concepts, nor about where they
and their core inferential liaisons are supposed to come from. So if the only viable
alternative to simulationism is some form of theory-theory, this looks like it gives the
main victory in the current debate to the latter, after all.
Let me move on to another line of criticism. At various points in the book, the authors
commit themselves to the existence of desire-like as well as belief-like imaginings.
Just as there are states that are belief-like, but which aren’t beliefs (such as the state
of supposing that the banana is a telephone), so (the authors claim) there are states
that are desire-like, but which aren’t desires. These would be states that stand to the
state of wanting to call grandma on the telephone, in something like the way that the
state of supposing that the banana is a telephone stands to the state of believing that
the banana is a telephone — they wouldn’t actually be desires (e.g. a desire to call
grandma), but they would have causal roles significantly like those of desires. Notice
that the claim here isn’t that we can, in imagination, suppose ourselves to want to call
grandma on the telephone. For this would be a belief-like supposition which happens
to have, as part of its content, that I possess a particular sort of desire. This isn’t what
is in question. Rather, the idea is that we can engage in a kind of supposing that is
relevantly desire-like with the content that I call grandma on the telephone.
The main difficulty for this sort of view is that we cannot, in our imaginings, adopt
contrary-to-desire suppositional desire-like states at will, in the way that we can adopt
contrary-to-belief suppositional belief-like states at will. It is easy for us to adopt alien
beliefs while imagining. (Consider how easy it is for us to become immersed in a work
of science fiction, in which people can totally transform their bodily size and shape as
they wish — e.g. turning into an insect — or can have the strength to move a planet,
or can travel faster than the speed of light.) But it is by no means equally easy for us
to adopt alien desires and values in imagination. It is hard for us to identify with a
character in a novel whose main desire is to kill and cook little children. And novelists
will have to devote considerable effort and skill if they are to induce us to take a story
seriously that requires the adoption of an alien moral system as one of its central
background assumptions. Currie and Ravenscroft acknowledge these points, but make
no real attempt to explain them.
Now, as is quite familiar, imagination can certainly evoke real emotions — imagined
insults can make you angry; imagined danger can make you afraid; the death of a
character in a novel or film can make you sad; and so forth. So why shouldn’t we also
accept that imagination can evoke real desires? And indeed, imagined delicacies can
make you hungry (wanting food), as imagined sex can make you sexy (wanting
sexual relief). Our account can then be that suppositions (belief-like imaginings) aren’t
just taken as input by a suite of inferential mechanisms that would otherwise be
employed in generating new beliefs from old, or in practical reasoning, as Currie and
Ravenscroft claim, but that they are also taken as input by a variety of desire-
generating and emotion-creating mechanisms. Hence we can claim that the desire-like
states that occur in imagination are actually real desires, produced by the normal
630
operations of such mechanisms in response to suppositional input. And this is the only
way in which such states can be generated — passively, in response to belief-like and
perception-like imaginings.
But how can they be real desires if they don’t lead to real actions? (Although
frightened by the film, I don’t run out from the theatre; and although saddened by a
character’s death, I don’t go into mourning.) The answer to this is easy. It is that real
desires will only lead to real actions when interacting with real beliefs. We are allowing
that suppositions and belief-like imaginings aren’t real beliefs. They differ from real
beliefs in crucial aspects of their functional roles. For example, the deduced
consequences of suppositions are themselves merely suppositions, and aren’t stored
in memory and reactivated in the manner of beliefs; and practical reasonings that
may take place within the scope of belief-like imaginings don’t normally give rise to
actions, nor directly to intentions to act. So it is easy to allow that the desire-like
states that occur during episodes of imagining are genuine desires, while explaining
why they don’t have all of the usual functional consequences of desires. This is
because those desires aren’t, during the episode of imagining, interacting with real
beliefs. (Notice, however, that once you finish fantasizing about the meal that you
propose to order during your next visit to Paris — in the course of which you haven’t
really tried to call a waiter, of course — the real hunger that you have generated may
send you heading to the kitchen for a snack.)
Why should there be this sort of difference between beliefs and desires in respect of
their suppositional counterparts? Arguably, the explanation derives from the role of
supposition in the mental rehearsal of action, and in reflective practical reasoning
more generally. Once an initial plan has been hit upon – ’I’ll do Q’ – mental rehearsal
consists of running the supposition that I do Q back as input through the various
inferential systems (including desire-generating and emotion-generating systems), to
see what other effects can be created or predicted. These in turn generate
motivational and emotional responses, which can be monitored and summed to
determine whether or not Q would be a good thing to do all things considered. (See
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, for arguments and evidence that soma-sensory
monitoring has a crucial role to play in normal human practical reasoning.) If we
suppose that mental rehearsal is what the human suppositional capacity was originally
for, in evolutionary terms, then it is easy to understand why the inputs to supposition-
based processes should all of them derive from the factive (belief-like or perception-
like) side of the mind. For it is by supposing that I do something, or by imagining
myself doing something, that such rehearsals get started.
This sort of account can readily explain why it is so difficult for us to adopt alien
desires or values in imagination. This is because there isn’t any desiderative
equivalent of supposing, or because there is no such thing as desire-like imagining.
What a novelist or playwright has to do, in order to evoke in us a motivational
response that we wouldn’t normally have, is to manipulate our belief-like imaginings
in such a way that a response of that kind might naturally be created. And I suspect
that what an author has to do in order to bring us to full imaginative acceptance of an
alien moral system, is to encourage us to imaginatively take on a rich network of
normative beliefs (’It is good for the weak to suffer’, ’The strong ought to express
their dominance over the weak’, or whatever), and then to rely on the fact that such
631
attitudes are designed to straddle the belief / desire divide in order to produce in us at
least some echo of the corresponding motivations and emotions.
This kind of account also has the resources to explain why it is that children engage in
episodes of pretence, I believe. Consider how this might go in a particular case. The
child sees a banana, and the overall similarity of shape between it and a telephone
handset prompts the child to entertain the belief-like supposition, ’The banana is a
telephone’, or more simply, ’That is a telephone’. Supposing that the banana is a
telephone, and recalling that grandma can be called on the telephone, might activate
the child’s standing-state desire to call and talk to grandma. Then by acting-out doing
so (and by representing her movements as acts of dialing, of talking to grandma, and
so on) the child can gain some of the motivational rewards of a real phone-call. For
within the scope of the initial supposition, the child’s real desire to talk to grandma is
satisfied, or at least quasi-satisfied. (No real talking with grandma actually takes
place, of course, so the desire isn’t objectively satisfied. Nor does the child actually
believe that she is talking with grandma. Rather, she represents what she is doing as
talking to grandma, and her motivational system responds accordingly.) Of course,
the satisfaction only lasts as long as the pretence continues; as soon as it finishes, the
child is no longer thinking that she has recently spoken with grandma, and her desire
to talk with her either reverts to dormancy, or remains active and unsatisfied. And
indeed, it is common for children in such cases, when finishing a game of this sort, to
say, ’Now let’s really call grandma’.
This account of the motivations behind pretence utilizes mental rehearsal mechanisms
that we already have some reason to believe in anyway; and it explains why pretence
tends to consist of activities that children find genuinely desirable. For notice that
when children act out scripts – e.g. bathing the baby, talking with an imaginary friend,
and so on – these tend to involve roles in which those children actually want to
engage. But what about pretending to be a steam-train, for example? Surely the
explanation for this behavior can’t be that the child actually wants to be a steam-
train? In fact our explanation can be as follows, remaining within the spirit of our
approach: the child finds steam-trains admirable (he really does); by acting out the
movements of a steam-train, and hence by representing himself as a steam-train, the
child is then representing himself as something admirable, and that is why he does it;
for within the scope of his pretence, he can find himself admirable (which is
enjoyable).
These considerations lead quite naturally into my third line of criticism of Currie and
Ravenscroft’s book, which concerns their account of autism. On their view, autism is
basically a failure of the imaginative systems of the mind, manifested most centrally
in the failures of autistic children to engage in pretend play. This contrasts with the
’orthodox’ account of autism, which sees it as a condition resulting from damage to, or
from failure to develop, core mind-reading abilities. (The latter is the now-familiar
’autism as mind-blindness’ hypothesis defended by Simon Baron-Cohen.) On Currie
and Ravenscroft’s account, the reason why autistic children have difficulty in
attributing mental states to other people, derives from the role that imagination
normally plays in enabling us to simulate the minds of others, rather than from lack of
core mind-reading ability. (So those difficulties don’t result primarily from problems
involved in the children’s possession of mental concepts per se, nor from their lack of
632
knowledge of core inferential liaisons.) For, by lacking imagination, autistic people will
lack simulative abilities too.
The main alleged virtue of this account is that it explains the absence of pretence
amongst children with autism. (Absence of pretend play is, along with lack of proto-
declarative pointing and shared-attention behaviors, one of the three main diagnostic
criteria for autism in very young — eighteen month old — children.) In contrast, it is
said to be obscure why a lack of core mind-reading abilities should be associated with
an absence of pretence. But given the points already made above, such an
explanation can actually come quite readily to hand. For it is widely accepted that
younger autistic children have significant problems with the recognition of agency, and
in categorizing the actions of agents as such. (Autistic children have a marked
tendency to treat other people as objects, using them as items of furniture, or as tools
to achieve desired ends — e.g. pushing a care-giver’s hand in the direction of a
desired object.)
So we can propose that the central deficit in autism lies within core mind-reading
ability, initially affecting the child’s developing conception of agency and intentional
action. (A number of developmental psychologists have proposed that the earliest
form of mind-reading involves a simple kind of action-psychology, categorizing actions
by the goals to which they are directed.) This then makes it difficult for the child to
represent his own movements as the performance of another sort of action (e.g. to
represent the act of holding a banana to his ear as an act of lifting a telephone),
necessary to reap the motivational rewards of pretence. So the reason why autistic
children don’t pretend, on this account, isn’t because they can’t, but because they
don’t enjoy it. And indeed, there is significant evidence that autistic children can
pretend when prompted. They just don’t normally see the point of doing so.
(Admittedly, they also tend not to be very good at pretending when they do engage in
it, but this is only to be expected if they don’t do it very often. Perhaps pretence
improves only with practice.)
There are two basic kinds of book review. There are reviews that tell you in
considerable detail what the book is about, and what the book’s contributions are to
issues of current debate; and there are reviews that are mostly critical, attempting to
push along and develop some of those debates still further. The present review has
been firmly in the latter camp. But I wouldn’t want this to disguise my admiration for
Recreative Minds, nor to give the reader the impression that I think the book isn’t a
good one. On the contrary, Currie and Ravenscroft have written an excellent and
wide-ranging discussion of the character and role of the imagination: read it and
profit.
2003.11.13
Hallvard Lillehammer (eds.), Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.)
Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge
633
Lillehammer, Hallvard and Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo (eds.), Real Metaphysics:

Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge, 2003, 256pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN
0415249813.
Reviewed by John Divers , University of Sheffield
This festschrift appears on the occasion of Hugh Mellor’s transition from Professor to
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. The edition contains a brief
academic and intellectual biography (pp.1-2) as well as a comprehensive bibliography
(pp.239-45) of Mellor. The core of the book consists in a dozen substantive essays
that have been contributed by Mellor’s “colleagues, mentors and students” (his own
characterization, p. 212). The contributors and their topics are (in order of
appearance) as follows: David Armstrong (truthmakers for modal truths), David Lewis
and Gideon Rosen (truthmakers for contingent truths); Peter Smith (deflationism
about truth and inflationism about facts); Chris Daly (truth and communication); Tim
Crane (subjective facts) Frank Jackson (the conceptual dimension of physicalism);
Paul Noordhof (mental causation and epiphenomenalism); Peter Menzies (the ontology
of causation); Issac Levi (dispositions and conditionals); Alexander Bird (the
essentiality of dispositional properties); Arnold Koslow (the reduction of possibilities to
nomological explanations); Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (the relational theory of
change) and Nathan Oaklander (presentism). In keeping with tradition, Hugh Mellor
replies to the contributors, and a concise summary of the contents of the papers and
of Mellor’s replies to them are given in the brief editorial introduction (pp.2-11).
By way of an incidental observation, I note that there is some evidence here of a

conscious ideological positioning of Mellor and his work. The editors have given the
festschrift a title that lends itself to interpretation as a provocative claim about what
really counts as metaphysics. Perhaps no more than an innocent hybrid was intended
(Mellor being the author of “Real Time” and “Metaphysical Matters”) but, even if so,
one might imagine that Hugh Mellor would not be too disturbed by the unintended
connotation. The editors (who are, of course, philosophers in the Cambridge tradition)
also congratulate Mellor on remaining “faithful to the Cambridge tradition of straight
thinking, clear writing and sharp argument” (p.1). The curious reader might be drawn
to speculate about where faux metaphysics is practiced or about which other
“traditions” have no such claims on the aforementioned philosophical virtues. But on
with the main business.
The standard of papers throughout the volume is high and many are likely to become
important points of reference in the subjects that they deal with. However, it is often
the case with editions in this style that a distinctive kind of illumination is generated
by the replies, and Mellor’s replies here present a very informative picture of his
overall philosophical position and temperament. The forum of the reply is of course
useful in allowing Mellor the chance to correct misconceptions about his positions and
to give his own version of how his own position relates to that of the author. But in
this forum we also find out what Mellor thinks is important in the papers and even -
occasionally - that he has changed his position and why. I think that it is this aspect of
the edition which is most usefully sketched in a review.
634
David Armstrong (“Truthmakers for modal truths”) and David Lewis (“Things qua
Truthmakers” and its Postscript, co-written with Gideon Rosen) both attempt to
advance the project of finding truthmakers for certain truths. Armstrong’s central
proposal is that whatever is a truthmaker for p, where p is contingently true, will also
be a truthmaker for the truth that it is possible that not-p. Lewis’s central proposal is
that counterpart theory allows propositions predicating contingent features to
individuals (Possum is black) to have the individuals in question (Possum) as
truthmakers. Armstrong is motivated in his search by acceptance of the working
hypothesis that every truth has a truthmaker. And the pivotal problem in both the
Armstrong and the Lewis paper is how to find truthmakers (for the propositions that
are their respective concerns) that satisfy the requirement of necessitation -
necessarily if the truthmaker exists then the proposition in question is true. Mellor
(pp.212-16) chooses not to engage his interlocutors much in the detail of their papers
since, we find, he parts ways with them at a relatively early stage in the dialectic.
Specifically, Mellor rejects both the principle that every truth has a truthmaker (pace
Armstrong) and the requirement of necessitation (pace Armstrong and Lewis). But
what we do learn from Mellor’s reply is how his disagreement with Armstrong on
truthmaking is relatively superficial while his disagreements with Lewis are deep. Thus
Mellor sides with Armstrong against Lewis in insisting upon actualism and non-
mereological composition. However, the allegiances do not always fall this way.
In his reply (pp.216-17) to Peter Smith (“Deflationism: the facts”), we learn that
Lewis and Smith have succeeded in persuading Mellor to reject a correspondence
theory of truth - or at least to withdraw the claim that a correspondence theory is
forced upon Mellor by the other things he believes about truth: that truth is a matter
of the success of beliefs, and that some truths need truthmakers. This success
account of truth to which Mellor subscribes also receives much needed clarification in
his response (pp.217-20) to the detailed and probing objections of Chris Daly (“Truth
and the theory of communication”).
Mellor also departs from Armstrong by rejecting most of the important theses of
physicalism that Armstrong endorses and also much of the born-again physicalism of
Frank Jackson (“From H2O to Water “). But Mellor goes along with Lewis (and
Armstrong) in rejecting Jackson’s one time contention - and the present contention of
Tim Crane (“Subjective facts”) - that learning what red looks like involves the
existence and cognition of a subjective fact. While unpersuaded by Crane’s central
argument, Mellor is again moved to useful clarification of an aspect of his own
position, this time prompted by the desire to maintain consistency with his
independently held view that complex truth-functional propositions stand in no need
of full-blooded truthmakers.
Paul Noordhof (“Epiphenomenalism and causal asymmetry”) seeks to enlist an

amended Mellorian theory of causation in strengthening and extending the case
against epiphenomenalism. But Mellor (224-9) is, by and large, keener on an
unamended Mellorian theory of causation, and although he is prepared to accept most
of the claims made by Peter Menzies in support of the thesis that causation is a
genuine relation - including some “polite corrections” of Mellor’s previous claims - he
is not moved to accept the thesis itself.
635
Isaac Levi (“Dispositions and Conditionals”) departs from Mellor by denying that
dispositional truths entail counterfactual conditionals, but the deeper and underlying
disagreement is over Lev’s denial that counterfactual conditionals have truth-values.
More radically yet, Levi (p.142) professes neither understanding nor interest in a
distinction, fundamental to Mellor’s views on many matters, between predicates that
pick out properties and those that don’t. Yet Mellor (pp.229-30) proves surprisingly
flexible in his capacity to find congenial elements within Levi’s “anti-ontological”
approach to dispositions. Alexander Bird (“Structural properties”) deals with the
questions of whether various properties are dispositional or categorical, and of
whether dispositional properties are essentially dispositional. Here, Mellor (pp.230-2)
seems reluctant to accept the distinctions that Bird wants to draw, or at least he is
reluctant to accept Bird’s view of the nature (ontological or not) and import of the
mooted distinctions. But once he orientates the questions to his liking, Mellor endorses
the claim that all properties are both categorical and dispositional and admits to being
strongly tempted by the view that all lawful connections among properties are full-
blooded necessitations.
Arnold Koslow (“Laws, explanations and the reduction of possibilities”) proposes a

reduction of possibilities to laws and explanations. But - as I understand it - the
relevant possibilities are entities, and the relevant kind of reduction is neither
conceptual analysis nor the identification of each possibility with some sort of
construct out of reducing entities. In any event, the kind of natural modality
(possibility) which proves amenable to such reduction does not sustain the validity of
the inference from Necessarily P to Possibly P. And while Mellor (pp.232-4) views this
feature as a defect that stands in need of a remedy, he finds much in Koslow’s essay
to illuminate tricky issues about chances since these can be counted among Koslow’s
range of possibilities.
The relational theory of change has it that those properties that can change are
relations to times. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (“What is the relational theory of
change?”) and Mellor (pp.234-5) are united both in rejecting the relational theory of
change and in rejecting the standard objections to the relational theory of change.
This unity gives way, however, on the question of exactly what is wrong with the
theory. Ultimately, Rodriguez-Pereyra has it that the relational theory fails, not in the
detail of this or that version, but for the quite general reason that it is - when viewed
aright - eliminative rather than explanatory of the occurrence of change. Mellor resists
this suggestion and maintains, against Rodriguez-Pereyra’s criticisms, that the theory
has the unacceptable consequence that every thing that has a changeable property
must have that property at some spacetime point.
The series of exchanges ends in perfect harmony since the respondent finds nothing in
Nathan Oaklander’s essay (“Presentism: a critique) with which to disagree. Rather,
Mellor takes Oaklander to have provided a “demolition of th[e] delusion” (p.236) that
a presentist A-theory of time is immune from objections that do for other varieties of
A-theory and subsequently uses Oaklander’s essay as a means of amplifying his
(Mellor’s) long-standing complaint that Prior’s presentism fails to add an ontological
basis to his A-theoretic semantics for tensed sentences.
636
In sum, what is on offer here is exactly what one would expect - an impressive
overview of Hugh Mellor’s substantial contribution to metaphysics over his long and
productive career. This overview is illuminated by a collection of philosophers who are,
at the least, very accomplished and who are, for the most part, ’onside’ of Mellor’s
conception of what is important in philosophy and of how philosophy should be done.
It should be clear from the foregoing that this does not preclude disagreement
between Mellor and his interlocutors on any number of details or on some of the most
fundamental issues in metaphysics. On the other hand, none of the essays amounts to
a taking of fundamental issue with Mellor on any of the tenets that are central to his
philosophical identity - say, the existence of facta or the tenseless theory of time.
Perhaps a festschrift is not the time or place for full scale battles of that sort, but in
some ways such a bold departure would have suited Mellor’s reputation as a forthright
and combative opponent in debate. But no doubt such exchanges are yet to come
elsewhere. For on present evidence Mellor has lost none of his enthusiasm for his
project and shows every sign of continuing to offer original contributions to
metaphysics and related disciplines - contributions which are often both entirely
distinctive and yet unpredictable.
637
2003.12.01
Hilary Kornblith
Knowledge and its Place in Nature
Kornblith, Hilary, Knowledge and its Place in Nature, Oxford, 2003, 177pp, $ 29.95
(hbk), ISBN 0199246319.
Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of Missouri, St. Louis
We seek to represent the world. When our representations succeed in a particularly

fortuitous manner, we term the result ’knowledge.’ But questions then arise: which
representation qualify as knowledge, and why? One of the divers epistemological
theories lately bruited about would assimilate all empirical knowledge—
representations of the world properly obtained—to results certified by the various
sciences (liberally understood). Call this doctrine ’naturalism.’
Yet mention naturalism, and many philosophers smirk. The reason? Too vague and
underspecified, or so some epistemologists claim. This places a special burden on
those seeking to advance the cause of naturalism (I include myself here) to clarify
naturalism’s relation to more conventional forms of philosophizing. In this regard,
Hilary Kornblith’s Knowledge and its Place in Nature both succeeds and fails. Success
occurs in those chapters where Kornblith directly addresses and defends naturalism
against two prime forms of mystery-mongering rampant in philosophy—invoking
intuitions and sacralizing norms. However, and more importantly, Kornblith ultimately
fails to advance the case for naturalism. For he attempts to link his variant of
naturalism—a decidedly anti-metaphysical doctrine as usually understood — to a
deeply problematic claim that knowledge constitutes a “natural kind”—a stubbornly
metaphysical doctrine as usually understood. The result disappoints.
The book has six chapters. Chapters 1, 5, and 6 explore the meta-theme of how
Kornblith conceives of naturalism’s relation to more traditional conceptions of
philosophy. Chapter 1 contrasts appeals to intuition and naturalism as methodological
arbiters of philosophical practice. Kornblith examines arguments by George Bealer to
the effect that if naturalists have no room for appeal to intuition, then so much the
worse for naturalism. Bealer and others charge that naturalism must be ruled out as a
philosophy because it cannot accommodate what is, in point of fact, standard
operating procedure for philosophers. Although Nelson Goodman’s name appears
nowhere in the text and Kornblith cites no works of his, Kornblith’s defense here has
the appropriate Goodmanian flavor, viz., that “Recognition of appropriate inferential
patterns is an empirical affair for the naturalist” (22). Kornblith effectively rebuts the
various cavils against naturalism raised by friends of intuitions. He rightly, I would
say, identifies philosophy as more a particular set of questions, and not as possessing
its own special methods or unique . priori insights.
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Chapters 5 and 6 also concern methodological issues, first in the guise of whether or
how a naturalistic approach can deal with questions regarding normativity (Chapter 5)
and questions regarding just how philosophy as a practice fits into a naturalistic view
of matters (Chapter 6). The accounts of normativity Kornblith considers in detail are
those of Goldman and Stich. Quine he dismisses for failing to take seriously enough
the question: “What, ultimately is the source of epistemic normativity?” (139) I would
have thought that a good naturalist eschews just this sort of question. In any case, his
critique of Goldman proceeds much more straightforwardly than does his critique of
Stich. For Goldman, unlike Stich or Kornblith, seems content in the end to offer a
decidedly unnaturalistic conceptual analysis of notions such as justification (165).
Kornblith, quite rightly, questions how this analysis squares with Goldman’s
acknowledgment that some other notion of justification might be preferable to the one
we now possess (143-45).
His critique of Stich proves much more elusive and labored. One wonders whether this
reflects the fact that less separates Stich and Kornblith than Kornblith insists.
Kornblith imagines that what separates his account from both Quine’s and Stich’s is
that he gives reasons they lack for the importance assigned to truth. Yet, as I object
below, Kornblith helps himself to a notion of truth for which he provides no argument
and which rests uneasily with his naturalism. Thus, his philosophical distance from
Quine and Stich may well be less than he imagines. However, it remains to Kornblith’s
credit that he does clarify just why questions of normativity pose no special difficulty
for a naturalist.
Chapter 6 concerns how Kornblith distinguishes philosophy from the special sciences
used to answer philosophical questions. I take this as Kornblith’s way of approaching
Quine’s (in)famous remark regarding the “mutual containment” of philosophy and
empirical psychology. Kornblith appears to deny mutual containment. For he asserts,
“Philosophy may properly be viewed as empirically informed theory construction
without, at the same time, turning it into a series of chapters within the special
sciences” (177). But does philosophy per se constitutes a form of knowledge?
Kornblith encourages the thought that it does in remarks such as the following: “I do
not see it [epistemology] as nothing more than a branch of cognitive ethology” (172).
On one reading, this implies that philosophy does constitutes a type of special science
in its own right. Yet philosophy in a naturalized perspective cannot be segregated from
whatever processes one uses to study knowledge production. “Knowledge,” Kornblith
insists, “is a feature of the world” (159). I remain unclear as to just how Kornblith
would specify philosophy as a non-redundant form of empirical inquiry.
In chapters 3 and 4, Kornblith critiques what he takes to be the main competitors to

his notion of knowledge as natural kind. Chapter 4 builds on familiar grounds,
rehearsing a variety of externalist arguments against those who would put some
internalist requirement on what to count as knowledge. Central to the notion of
knowledge as Kornblith defends it is the view that non-language-users can and do
have knowledge. Kornblith assembles some of the usual suspects—Descartes, Sosa,
BonJour—for examination and summary dispatch.
Troubles typical of Kornblith’s case manifest themselves in the remaining chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on those, such as Brandom and Davidson, who would account for
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knowledge in terms of social practices, paradigmatically linguistic ones (163-4). On

their view, knowledge, in its various forms, presupposes linguistic representation, in
its various forms. But Kornblith maintains a form of reliabilism which denies that
linguistic representation constitutes a necessary condition for knowing. Yet central to
his account is his unexplicated and undefended notion of truth. For he defines
reliability by reference to truth (full stop). This permits a conceptual disengagement of
Kornblith’s account of reliability from social practices. Reliability, anchored by Truth,
becomes the standard by which to evaluate competing social practices. “Knowledge
does not require engagement with the epistemic practice of any community. What is
good and bad in a given social practice is best measured by the standard of reliability,
a standard that may be met with or without engagement in social epistemic practices”
(102). Of course, determining what identifies this standard is something Kornblith
leaves as an exercise for the reader.
The temptation to read the analytic/synthetic distinction back into Kornblith’s work
constantly asserts itself. Knowledge links to reliability, and reliability links to truth.
Truth, it seems, links to accurate representation. “What make this category [the
category of knowledge] an important one, on my view, is not that people in our
society have the concept; rather, it is that this category accurately describes a feature
of the world” (165). The conception of knowledge endorsed by Kornblith “requires
reliably produced true belief” (58, 62). Yet truth is not a property that appears to the
senses. So while Kornblith makes it a defining property of the kind, nothing in either
what he does or could tell us indicates what empirical property it is.
But why then his recurrent homage to Quine? The account of knowledge as accurate
representation seems more Tractarian than Quinean. I thought problems began with
the discovery that no sentence-by-sentence account of “accurate description” works.
Put another way, to speak unproblematically of “accurate representation” for single
sentences by-passes Quine’s reasons for naturalizing epistemology. If one takes
seriously the problematic which Quine bequeaths to epistemology, one cannot simply
help oneself to an unexplicated notion of truth qua “accurate representation.” (As Jim
Maffie pointed out to me, Kornblith owes an account of truth that covers non-linguistic
representations.) We literally, from a Quinean perspective, cannot understand what
this means without falling back into ways of speaking about the world-word relation
which Quine rejects. Kornblith imagines himself entitled to have it both ways. Just
why I simply do not comprehend.
Chapter 2 stands as the philosophical core of this book, its raison d’être. For here
Kornblith mounts his primary account and defense of his claim that knowledge
“constitutes a legitimate scientific category. In a word, it is a natural kind” (29). The
claim is novel, and on the face of it puzzling. Naturalism in its original American
incarnation promised to link philosophy to science in the perennial philosophic quest to
clear away what obscures rational inquiry. Declaring that naturalism links to natural
kinds, however, undoes this by burdening the relatively unproblematic notion of
empirical inquiry with that of natural kinds.
In a Quinean spirit, I note that the occurrence of ’natural’ in ’naturalism’ and its
occurrence in ’natural kinds’ constitutes an orthographic accident. They stand
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conceptually unrelated, for the latter notion reads necessities into nature which no
empirical method could possibly discover or divine.
For a naturalist, the term ’natural’ cannot itself be explanatory or invoked as a

fundamental concept. The term goes proxy for a denial of . priori knowledge (and
methods, e.g. conceptual analysis, that rely on appeals to . priori insights) and for
situating the pursuit of philosophical questions within the methods of and evidence for
empirical science. Nothing is natural simpliciter. “Nature” is itself not an analytic
primitive. Naturalists cannot fall back on appeals to “nature” or “the natural” without,
in short, ceasing to be naturalists. In this regard, an appeal to, e.g., a natural kind
can only be understood as a shorthand reference to further properties, ones
empirically specifiable within some science or other.
To the best of my knowledge, no one prior to Kornblith has attempted to effectively

reify the notion of knowledge by claiming for it kind-like status. Why think of natural
knowledge as a type or natural kind? Kornblith’s answer, as best I understand it,
reifies knowledge in order to account for the causal role it plays in scientific theories.
“The category of knowledge is, on my view, an important category because it has a
certain theoretical unity to it, that is, it plays a causal and explanatory role within our
current best theories” (165; see also 159, 164). Which “best theories” does Kornblith
reference? Ones in cognitive ethology. Here we find what empirical case he makes for
the critical claim that knowledge has a “theoretical unity,” a unity which underwrites
and legitimates, Kornblith believes, the causal/explanatory role ethologists assign to
it.
The specific argument here starts from the fact—and it is a fact—that animal
ethologists use intentional descriptions to characterize various types of animal
behavior. Of special interest are highly coordinated behaviors, such as ravens
“tricking” other birds in order to steal eggs or “deceptive” behavior by piping plovers
to lure predators away from nests (31-2). Indeed, Kornblith insists, adversion to
intentional descriptions of animal behavior proves to be necessary; without it,
scientists could not characterize what the behaviors had in common, and so could not
use it to explain and predict (34).
Reliabilism works in just here. For, Kornblith maintains, “it is beyond dispute that the
animal will need to represent features of its environment if it is to deal with it
effectively at all” (38). That is, if intentional and belief states can be justly attributed
to any animal, that animal (indeed, the species (56-7)) can be said to have
representational states. Moreover, this representational capacity, while it may
supervene on physical states, cannot be identified with the physical states. “No doubt
beliefs are entirely physically composed; but this does not require that they form a
homogenous physical kind” (40). All that remains once Kornblith has argued that
animals have representational states is to argue that these states are produced by
reliable mechanisms. “It is the focus on this adoption of these cognitive capacities to
the environment that forces us to explain the possibility of successful behavior, and it
is the explanation of successful behavior that requires the notion of knowledge rather
than mere belief. Knowledge explains the possibility of successful behavior in an
environment, which in turn explains fitness” (57). Reliable representations constitute
knowledge; animal behaviors can be best explained as a response to these reliable
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representations; therefore, knowledge has a necessary role in both explaining and

predicting behavior.
What establishes the kindness of knowledge qua reliable representation is its special
role in a theory that “succeeds in prediction and explanation” (40). The essential
homogeneity of reliable systems—their kind-constituting feature—is thus specified
functionally, not physically. “Knowledge is a robust category in the ethology literature;
it is more than belief, and more than true belief. It requires reliably produced true
belief. Understood in this way, knowledge is properly viewed as a natural kind” (68).
Kornblith interprets knowledge in terms of fitness, as reliable adaptation between an
organism and its environment. “Knowledge,” he states, “is an ecological kind: it has to
do with the fit between an organism and its environment” (65). The relationship need
not be static; what matter is just that changes in the ecological niche register in a
reliable way on and for the organism. “I take natural kinds to be homeostatically
clustered properties, properties that are mutually supporting and reinforcing in the
face of external change” (61). The properties, whatever they are, support inductive
inferences. Whatever makes representations reliable suffices, on this account, to
make the associated categories projectible.
This brings me to my central complaint. Kornblith’s entire case for taking ethologists
at their word with regard to imputing knowledge to non-human animals rests on the
asserted explanatory and predictive value of doing so. But, in the ethologists’ case,
absolutely nothing Kornblith provides establishes either claim as legitimate. Start with
the claim for predictive efficacy. Paradigmatic here is his discussion of the ravens who
’distract’ a hawk in order to steal its egg. Nothing in Kornblith’s account, or in any of
the accounts he provides, shows the theoretical necessity of imputing knowledge in
order to predict what the ravens do. Indeed, nothing Kornblith says shows that the
specific incident could have been predicted in this way, apart perhaps from noting
“ravens do things like this.” Put ravens around eggs and they will do what they can to
take them. What, in short, does adding the assertion that ravens know something or
believe something do to enhance the predictability of what ravens do in these
situations? Put another way, what properties in the world would a naturalist have to
uncover in order to establish that, indeed, knowledge states are at work? What would
the discovery of “knowledge” be the discovery of?
Ditto for claims that imputing beliefs and desires explain. Kornblith asserts, regarding
such animal behavior, that while “the behavior is straightforwardly explained by
appealing to beliefs and desires, no one has ever offered an explanation of such
complex behaviors in terms that obviate the need for representational states” (42).
But the necessity for using this vocabulary works in only because Kornblith defines
reliability by appeal to truth. An animal’s ability to succeed in its ecological domain is
then attributed to knowledge, i.e., reliably produced true beliefs. Only by definitionally
smuggling truth in does he legitimate talk of knowledge in his desired sense:
When we turn to an explanation of the cognitive capacities of the species, however,

the theoretical enterprise we are now engaged in requires more than mere belief. . . .
It is the focus on this adaptation of these cognitive capacities to the environment that
forces us to explain the possibility of successful behavior, and it is the explanation of
successful behavior that requires the notion of knowledge rather than mere belief.
642
Knowledge explains the possibility of successful behavior in an environment, which in

turn explains fitness. . . . The resulting true beliefs are not merely accidentally true;
they are produced by a cognitive capacity that is attuned to its environment. In a
word, the beliefs are reliably produced. The concept of knowledge which is of interest
here thus requires reliably produced true belief. (57-8)
Successful adaptation requires attribution of certain cognitive capacities; explanation

of how the cognitive capacities adapt the species to the environment requires
attribution of knowledge. Knowledge means, by definition, representations that are
reliably produced. Reliability means, by definition, the process engendering the beliefs
produces more truths than falsehoods. Definitional sleight of hand, not science, makes
truth and knowledge an inextricable part of Kornblith’s ethological picture.
Understanding the definitional factors proves critical as well to accounting for what
supposedly makes knowledge a natural kind. Knowledge qua kind consists of the set
of reliable belief-producing mechanism and their outputs, whatever these might be.
“What is being claimed here is that natural selection is selecting for knowledge-
acquiring capacities, that is, processes of belief acquisition that tend to produce truths
. . . .” (59). If such processes and their outputs were not “homeostatically clustered,”
Kornblith assumes they would not provide a basis for stable inferences. In other
words, the “various information processing capacities and information gathering
abilities that animals possess are attuned to the animal’s environment by natural
selection, and it is thus that the category of beliefs that manifest such attunements—
cases of knowledge—are rightly seen as a natural category, a natural kind.” (62-3)
The kind has biological reality because the environment selects for it.
Which natural, i.e., empirical feature allows anyone to identify a process as a member
of this kind? For reliability itself does not exist as any single or necessary empirical
property of any system. Reliability characterizes only functioning (or, functioning-in-a-
specified-environment). To think otherwise would be to commit a version of a Rylean
category mistake. Kornblith’s category mistake mistakes the parts of a system—
individually or jointly—for the property of interest.
Put another way, the sole identifying characteristic for Kornblith’s knowledge qua
natural kind is that “the properties that are ultimately responsible for this homeostatic
unity are also responsible for a wide range of the kind’s characteristic properties”
(62). Now, when dealing with atomic structure of water (Kornblith’s example),
reference of “the properties” which account for homeostatic unity seems clear enough.
We have in hand a theory specifying the relevant features and how they interrelate.
But nothing answers to the definite description Kornblith must take “the properties” to
entail generally in the case of reliable systems of natural knowledge. Reliability entails
no determinate set of natural features and their articulated interrelationship. But if it
is not identified necessarily with any of the parts, or with any known relationship of
these parts, how can reliable systems constitute a natural kind? The reliability in the
case of diverse natural systems can be known only ex post facto given the very
definition of the term. Any list of properties such as Kornblith imagines can thus be
only contingent and functional, and so not the stuff of which necessities and natural
kinds are made.
643
Reliable systems may all be natural systems, but that does not entail that any
physically discernable feature of any system marks it as reliable. Absent a theory of
reliability on the order of, e.g., theories of atomic structure, no reason exists, contra
Kornblith, for believing that reliability marks out a natural kind.
2003.12.02
Jurgen Habermas
The Future of Human Nature
Habermas, Jurgen, The Future of Human Nature, translated by Hella Beister and
William Rehg, Polity Press, 2003, 136pp, $19.95 (hbk), ISBN 0745629865.
Reviewed by Mary V. Rorty, Stanford University
Germany—even when contrasted with other European countries—has taken a very

conservative attitude toward anything that smacks of eugenics (for clear historical
reasons), and Habermas has been one of the most prominent voices reminding his
countrymen that they cannot and dare not forget the errors of their past. In the three
lectures compiled in this recent book he speaks out on some issues that are of great
interest to contemporary bioethics, which he sees as related to the history of
eugenics. Habermas questions the ethical justification for genetic interventions,
embryo research and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).
This book consists of a translation of a German essay first published in 2001 by

Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany, plus two sections not included in the original German
text. A clarifying postscript to the first two chapters was written after presenting the
original text to a skeptical audience at a New York University law school colloquium in
2002, and the author also includes his address on the occasion of receiving the Peace
Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001. The collection constitutes an important
contribution to national and international controversy on current and proposed
scientific and medical advances in biomedical research, and will be of interest to any
reader of Buchanan, Brock, Daniels and Wickler’s From Chance to Choice or Kass’ Life,
Liberty and the Defense of Dignity.
In Germany legislation currently forbids PGD and any research involving the
destruction of embryos (as well as therapeutic cloning, surrogate motherhood and
physician-assisted suicide). But the issues there, as in the United States, are currently
under debate, and Habermas wishes to contribute to that debate, considering
proactively issues that are agreed to be currently scientifically impossible. He prefers
to evaluate them before they become possible, lest people try to argue about stuffing
genies back in bottles, or sticking fingers in already leaking dikes. He approves of the
prohibition on both PGD and research involving the destruction of embryos. He
acknowledges that genetic interventions into embryos are now scientifically
unfeasible, but may not remain so, and speaks to what kinds of restriction should be
placed on their use. Although Habermas speaks from a continental position, rather
644
than an American one, and lards his text with references to the German and EU
debates, his stature as a liberal post-metaphysical political thinker will probably mean
that this book will be widely read in the US, as well as in Europe.
The title of the original German book is Die Zunkunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf
dem Weg zu einter liberalen Eugenic? By ’liberal eugenics’ he means a practice that
entrusts decisions about any interventions into the genome of an embryo to the
discretion of the parents (p. 78), a position that he thinks increasingly common in
anglo-american bioethics discussions, and one that might better be described as a
libertarian position. His objection is a ’foundational’ one. It is not that he thinks that
the civic freedom of the resulting person is necessarily directly imperiled by such
interventions, but he does think that some of the presuppositions of that freedom are
indirectly affected.
I. A ’species ethic’
A good part of the first chapter is devoted to explicating the position from which
Habermas criticizes possible genetic interventions. He distinguishes (a) “moral” issues
– things that have to do with the just way of living together: arrangements between
fellow citizens, members of a community who share common notions of rights and
obligations, public justice—and (b) “ethical” issues, identity-forming beliefs that have
to do with our self descriptions that ’guide our own identification as human beings, . .
. our self-understanding as members of the species’ (pp 38-9). Ethical questions have
to do with individual responses to the most general considerations of who we are qua
human, and what values direct our life history and forms of life. In modern pluralistic
societies the ’metaphysical or religious interpretations of the self and the world are
subordinated to the moral foundations of the constitutional state, which is neutral with
respect to competing worldviews and committed to their peaceful co-existence’ (p.
40); the moral, the right, takes precedent over specific configurations of values, the
good. Because we respect the most central values of others, we configure modern
societies in such a way as to respect the autonomy of the individual, to protect those
individual values. This is the object of the procedural justice that constitutes and
protects pluralistic modern society.
But the abstract morality of reason proper to subjects of human rights is itself
sustained by a prior ethical self-understanding of the species, which is shared by all
moral persons. This is the ’species-ethic’ that Habermas argues is affected by
contemporary developments in genetics. The various traditional understandings of
what it is to be human converge in a minimal ethical self-understanding which
provides the foundation and justification for morality and procedural justice. Central to
our contemporary (post-metaphysical) understanding of what it is to be human and
members of a moral community is the capacity to see ourselves as ethically free and
morally equal beings, guided by norms and reasons. In our social arrangements we
prioritize the autonomy of the individual and draw limits on the impositions that can
be made on others.
This species ethics, the minimal self-understanding of ourselves as human,

presupposes that we are all individual authors of our own lives; that we approach
others as persons of equal birth, themselves individual authors of their own lives; and
645
that we want to be moral—that is, that we want to live with those others in a society
that is so constituted as to protect and nourish our and their ethical decisions about
our own lives and how to live them. Habermas does not deny that above this minimal
ethic there are elaborations of specific traditions and cultures, individual or cultural
models for the good life. But he quotes with approval Rawls’ conclusion, which he
formulates as follows: “the ’just society’ ought to leave it to individuals to choose how
it is that they want to ’spend the time they have for living.’ It guarantees to each an
equal freedom to develop an ethical self-understanding, so as to realize a personal
conception of the ’good life’ according to one’s own abilities and choices” (p. 2).
The answer to the question ’why should I be moral?’ is rooted in this self-
understanding that we share as human beings. I should be moral—I should construct
and support a society that treats others with respect—because of the kind of thing I
am and acknowledge myself to be: self-creating and autonomous, self-individuating.
Further, I acknowledge morality as both the logical consequence and causal condition
for being that kind of thing. So public ’morality,’ as Habermas uses the term—justice—
is tied very closely to this private (individual but not particularized) commitment to
my own values, qua human being. To be human is to be capable of morality in this
sense. And its actualization depends upon being in a community of fellow-agents. The
details are spelled out in various discursive communities—traditions, cultures,
societies, constitutional arrangements, poloi and civitates. Habermas spells this out in
terms of the intersubjectivity provided by being language-users: “the logos of
language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the
subjectivity of speakers” (p. 11).
Habermas is a defender of a liberal society in these terms. He describes his enterprise

as trying to establish what attitude is appropriate toward genetic interventions of the
sort he considers. He takes positions on three issues.
1) Genetic interventions might be able to be approved under certain circumstances.

He distinguishes between therapeutic genetic interventions and genetic
enhancements. He talks about ways in which the former can be justified within the
terms of a liberal morality, and reasons why the latter cannot. He is willing to allow
legalization (under regulation) of “clinical” or therapeutic interventions which can
ameliorate extremely damaging monogenetic diseases. That can be done, he
suggests, by the decision of parents for an affected potential person, on the
assumption of presumed informed consent: that is, if there is reason to believe that
the potential person would prefer not to have a disease that would lead to a shortened
life span or a life of great suffering. The sort of disability for which this is appropriate
must be determined not only by the individual decision of the parents but also by a
broader social consensus of what falls within that category, and regulation should
allow interventions only within that regulated sphere.
2) Genetic enhancements he describes as positive eugenics, and unlike therapeutic, or

negative, genetics, should be forbidden. (The difficulty of drawing a line between
therapy and enhancement, a central feature of some discussions of genetic
interventions, is not raised in this book.) The reasons for forbidding eugenic
enhancement occupy the majority of this small book, and are raised in the broadest
possible context of what it is to be human, to be moral, and to respect the humanity
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and autonomy of others. Habermas’s objection to genetic enhancements is a quasi-

Kantian one: he considers it logically incompatible with morality as we understand it.
He speaks of the impact on our notions of what it is to be human and what it is to be
moral. We have a perfectly fine functioning system as it now stands—inadequate in
implementation, to be sure, but consistent in theory—but practices of some sorts, if
allowed within democratically constituted societies, would shake our current self
understandings both of humanity and morality to their foundations.
3) Habermas considers the prohibition on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis

appropriate because of the implicit judgment, in selecting among embryos, about
what kind of life is worth living for another. Selection by criteria decided by one side
only (not by mutual communicative deliberation) is instrumentalizing of human life,
and if the criteria for selection include disability, increases the social acceptability of
discrimination against people with disabilities. He has the same objections against
elective selective abortion, although he seems at some places to consider the
feasibility of strictly regulated selection for medical reasons.
II. The morality of genetic interventions
Habermas considers the issue of genetic intervention on several levels: on the level of
individual citizens, (A) what attitude genetic intervention represents on the part of the
intervener; and (B) what genetic intervention does to the intervenee; and on a more
general level, (C) what the effects would be on a liberal society of normalizing that
kind of intervention.
A. The programmer: To impose your preferences upon a potential person, is to treat

that person as an object, a thing made, rather than to treat as a subject, an
autonomous individual. To impose upon another a decision about his genetic
composition according to your own preferences is to treat a person as a creature of
your preferences, and to constrain that person’s ability to self-actualize. It is to adopt
an attitude of domination, of instrumentalizing.
Habermas puts the question like this: Is it morally acceptable for moral agents to alter
the genome of future generations?
1. moral agents are members of a moral community who owe duties to each other
of reciprocity, mutuality and equality.
2. but: the alteration of the genetic identity of another requires a diminution in
this presupposition of equality, and cannot be reciprocal or mutual.
3. So such an act is not a moral act, of the sort we would want done to us without
our explicit informed consent. We would consider it inappropriate if we did it to
adults. It is not an interpersonal act of mutual respect. So it is not a moral act.
B. The programmed: on the level of the intervenee, the person programmed by

another, there will be an effect upon the subjective self-perception, and the mode of
existence, of the person programmed. There will be an impact on the resulting
eventual person of having been tailored toward someone else’s expectations.
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This section is harder to get your fingers on, and you can tell Habermas is wrestling
with it because he gets there by way of exegesis of Kant and Aristotle. But it is the
heart of the book. He has a lengthy discussion of the importance of birth. For
Habermas, birth marks the boundary between what he calls the natural fate of a
person (the organism) and the socialization fate of a person (parental expectations,
education, opportunities, social inequalities). Growth, especially adolescence, marks
the transition to authentic personhood, where I interpret the world from my own point
of view, according to my own motives, and am the source of my own aspirations. It is
this transition to moral autonomy that Habermas fears is threatened by the possibility
of genetic interventions. A person who becomes aware of his programmed genetic
nature will feel less free and less authentic. Instead of being able to distinguish
between what I am given and what I make of it, even what I make of it is to some
extent given. He speaks of the importance of “the existence of a natural fate going
back before our socialization.” It seems to be important for our awareness of our
freedom.
He speculates that it is essential as well for our capacity to be ourselves. What I

experience as being my inviolable self is a result of instrumentalizing my nature. I will
confront in my being what Habermas calls “the programmers’ sedimented intentions.”
These are different than external contingencies which might constrain the scope of my
actions; instead, the programming of my genome constitutes “a co-determinant of my
actions.” He expresses doubt that under such circumstances the persons themselves
could consider themselves members of an inclusive community of peers owed equal
respect—a moral analogue to the biological question of others: whether such a person
would still be human, still be a member of the same species.
Habermas asks: Does altering my genetic inheritance imperil my standing as a moral

agent?
1. Moral agents are capable of forming intentions for their life plan, have the
freedom to choose a life of their own. They can contest their parents’
expectations given them through their socialization.
2. Genetic alteration genetically encodes parental (or social) expectations, beyond
the reach of critical reappraisal or revisionary attitudes and entails a
prejudgment of specific life projects.
3. So genetic alteration imperils my autonomy and standing as a moral agent.
C. What are the effects on liberal society of allowing the normalization of such
interventions as accepted social practice? Having argued that genetic interventions
would both constitute immoral action, as we now understand it, and imperil the
production in future generations of moral agents as we now understand them,
Habermas can conclude that the normalization of genetic interventions as accepted
social practice would mean the abdication of morality as we now understand it: the
end of the liberal ideal.
In his last section he asks: so what? So why should we be moral? For Habermas, the
answer lies in his distinction between the ethical and the moral, a recursion to his
theme of a “species ethic.” Because of the kind of being we are, we need this kind of
morality. We are beings who consider ourselves the undivided authors of our own
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lives. We need and want interpersonal relationships that acknowledge us to be so and

respect our right to be so—egalitarian relationships of mutual respect. The morality of
our interrelationship with each other is crafted upon the recognition and protection of
those values, for ourselves and, in logical consistency, for others. We include within
our moral community anyone who is in this sense—in the sense of holding those
values—one of us. That is the species ethic that underwrites liberal morality. That is
what Habermas considers to be threatened by genetic interventions, and he
concludes, “if we do not want the end—results that call the “us” into question—then
we don’t want the means that will lead to that end.”
The argument then looks like this:
1. Our current understanding of what it is to be moral a—presupposes a self image

of ourselves as free, autonomous, self-legislating beings, and b—requires us to
treat other moral agents in a way that attributes the same self-understanding
to them.
2. Genetic intervention in future generations to select desirable dispositions entails
prejudgment of specific life projects, which a—threatens the self-image of a
putative moral equal, and b—requires us to act toward a putative equal in a
way that is incompatible with the action of a moral agent
3. Therefore, what is at stake is the ethical self-understanding of the species:
whether or not we can continue to see ourselves as beings committed to moral
judgment and action.
III. On a path to a trans-species ethic?
Suppose we follow Habermas’ reasoning and agree that we cannot accommodate

genetic interventions (and several concomitant genetic practices) within our liberal
ethic as we currently understand it. Underlying his discussion of species-ethic is the
assumption that if you fiddle with mother nature, alter the genetic composition of
what we have always assumed it was to be human, you are going to find yourself in a
pre-liberal society where we distinguish between the ’real’ humans and the not-quite
(or super-) humans in the way we used to distinguish between full-righted humans
and, say, slaves.
But suppose we take a more optimistic approach: one that in a strange way echoes
that super-consequentialist, Peter Singer. Do we really need to restrict membership in
our moral community, our moral discourse, to members of our own species? After
all—we could maintain a society in which the bearer of genetic alterations could have
the rights of any other legal person. And what about the world of Star Trek or a rich
variety of science fiction worlds, in which people with no visible similarity, much less
primary genetic identity to us, are treated as moral equals, or incorporated in a larger,
trans-species variety of a just society? Maybe the technological advances that allow
the possibility of genetic tailoring will also enable the development of a trans-liberal
morality, not exactly like our current liberal understanding, but close enough to satisfy
what Habermas considers our species-intrinsic need to be moral, in something very
much like his understanding of what it is to be moral. After all: the extension of rights
to ever-more inclusive groups of people—to barbarians, slaves, different races, and
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even, heaven forbid, to women, is often taken to be the optimistic story of moral
progress.
Habermas might well be able to accommodate such a trans-species morality. But it

will not be a permissive version that allows us to continue on our current merry
libertarian course of doing anything to anyone if parents say we can. He would be
very reluctant to approve of any morality that was founded on a trans-species ethic
that did not respect the value and inviolability of the life of a moral agent. He could
accommodate the incorporation of other sentient rational beings capable of morality
into his universe of moral discourse; but I imagine that he would insist that we accord
them the same respect at a pre-personal level of development that he wishes us to
accord to members of our own species.
That means: acknowledging the dignity of a prepersonal human life, the embryo; not
using it as a means to any other end than its own best interests and future autonomy.
That means: no experimentation on embryos: not even for the sake of advancement
of genetic sciences for the improvement of present patients or future generations.
2003.12.03
Anthony Kenny
Aquinas on Being
Kenny, Anthony, Aquinas on Being, Oxford, 2002, 200pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN
0198238479.
When, in 1980, Anthony Kenny published his brief introduction to Aquinas in the Past
Masters series (OUP), it created something of a stir. First, he praised in quite strong
terms a part of Aquinas’s work that had often been thought obsolete, his philosophy of
mind. Then, he attacked Aquinas’s theory of being – widely regarded as the highpoint
of his philosophical achievement – as giving rise to “sophistry and illusion” (60). In
1993, Kenny tried to make good on the first of those claims with a more lengthy
monograph entitled Aquinas on Mind (Routledge). Now Kenny has taken up the
challenge of defending the second claim, in a fairly short book devoted to showing
that on the subject of being Aquinas “was thoroughly confused” (v).
These charges are hard to ignore. It is arguable that Kenny is the best philosopher to
have engaged seriously with Aquinas since the much earlier work of Peter Geach.
Moreover, Kenny is unrivaled in his ability to place Aquinas within the larger context of
philosophy as a whole, having devoted himself to the whole history of philosophy,
including important studies of Aristotle, Descartes, and Wittgenstein (among much
else). Finally, Kenny is among the most clear-headed and engaging champions of
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Aquinas’s philosophy. For him to attack Aquinas on being is an important event in the
field.
Even so, the project is a peculiar one. First, although Kenny reasonably suggests that
one can learn as much from historical failures as historical successes (x), one might
well urge that the raison d’être of philosophical history is to put on display the insights
of past generations. Where dead philosophers have made mistakes, these are best
ignored and forgotten. The job of a philosophical historian, then, is to call attention to
the good in neglected or obscure works of old; although we should try to learn from
the dead, and benefit from their failures, they need not be refuted.
In the present case, admittedly, there may be special reason to violate this principle.
No part of Aquinas’s thought has excited as much admiration, in modern times, as his
philosophy of being, and so Kenny may be thought of as Locke up against the
twentieth-century Thomists, an under-laborer clearing the ground a little, removing
some of the rubbish that obscures Aquinas’s real accomplishments. This, however,
leads to a second worry about the current project. Kenny begins by declaring that “the
subject of Being is one of the most important of all philosophical concerns” (v),
anointing his topic from the start with the seriousness of capitalization. But though
many philosophers seem to be persuaded that this is so, I myself have the suspicion
that being (lowercase) is one of our thinnest and least interesting concepts.
Accordingly, when Aquinas announces at the start of On Being and Essence that being
is among “the first things grasped by intellect,” my own inclination is to applaud. Yes,
of course it is, because although the concept is absolutely global in application, it also
lacks richness and complexity. Kenny, in contrast, since he takes our concept of being
to be “abstruse and sophisticated” (1), cannot help but see Aquinas’s doctrine as
entirely implausible (2). The worry, then, is that our concept of being is hardly rich
enough to have become “thoroughly confused.”
As it happens, neither of these worries quite materializes. With respect to the first,
although Kenny sets out as if the chapters that follow will be devoted to a single-
minded attack on one narrow topic, the book is in fact remarkably wide ranging.
Among the many good things it contains are a clear and extended exposition of On
Being and Essence, an incisive analysis of Aquinas’s treatment of the ontological
argument, and an interesting proposal for how to understand one of Aquinas’s
cosmological arguments. So although Kenny makes a great many discouraging
remarks about Aquinas on being, those passages are leavened by a great many useful
and insightful discussions of some of (what Kenny regards as) the better things in
Aquinas.
With respect to the second of the above worries, it turns out to be at least somewhat
misleading to describe the focus of Kenny’s criticisms as “Aquinas on Being.” What
becomes abundantly clear, as Kenny proceeds, is that Aquinas does not really have a
theory of being. What he has are two Latin words (’ens’ [a participle for ’being’] and
’esse’ [for ’to be,’ though used much more widely than our infinitive]), some scattered
and brief remarks about the different meanings of these two words, and a number of
sometimes obscure metaphysical theses that get formulated in terms of these words.
Kenny’s primary interest is in these theses, and his principal claim turns out to be that
when we try to get clear on what ’ens’ and ’esse’ mean in the context of these, the
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theses themselves turn out to be nonsense. (Hereafter, I will follow Kenny’s practice
of leaving ’esse’ untranslated.)
Kenny’s preface reports that “there are no fewer than twelve different ways” in which
Aquinas uses ’esse’ (ix). The list is supplied in the final chapter: specific existence
(e.g., there are bears); individual existence; substantial being; accidental being;
common being; actual being; absolute (divine) being; intentional being; fictional
being; possible being; predicational being (’is’ as copula); identical being (’is’ of
identity). Even without going into the details, it is clear on the whole that there is
nothing embarrassing about Aquinas’s recognizing so many kinds of being. These are
distinctions that he routinely makes explicit and that it seems perfectly plausible to
insist upon. As it turns out, Kenny himself is not concerned about the list per se. His
conclusion is instead this: “Aquinas, I submit, failed to bring into a consistent whole
the insights he displayed in identifying these different types of being and different
senses of ’esse’“ (192). So the fact that there are these twelve senses of being at
work is not a bad thing; on the contrary, it displays some insight. The problem is that
the list is not brought under systematic control.
Kenny immediately goes on to list the “three principal defects”:
First, there is no satisfactory recognition of the difference between being and

existence . . . . [T]here is at no stage of Aquinas’ career a clear awareness of the
profound syntactic difference between the ’there is’ of specific existence and the other
types of ’is’ he discusses.
Secondly, the theory that there are spiritual substances that are pure forms or
essences involves a celestial Platonism of a kind that Aquinas rightly rejects at the
sublunar level . . . .
Thirdly, there is a deeply disturbing problem about Aquinas’ identification of God with
subsistent being . . . (192-93).
The last alleged defect concerns two claims in Aquinas to which Kenny gives sustained
attention:
(1) God’s essence is nothing other than his esse.
(2) God is esse ipsum (pure esse, as Kenny puts it).
(These claims are to be set in contrast to a third claim to which Kenny also gives some
attention:
(3) In creatures, esse and essence are distinct.)
Kenny raises many hard questions about these doctrines, and I will not try to
summarize them here. It is worth asking, though, whether faults in these doctrines
can fairly be regarded as faults in a theory of being. Although Kenny thinks that the
difficulties here lie with confusions about being, it is not as if he himself offers a
conception of being on which (1) and (2) become newly perspicuous. My own
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suspicion is that Aquinas is driven to make being something obscure in these contexts
because of the mysteries surrounding the divine nature, rather than because of any
intrinsic obscurity in his conception of being.
The second alleged defect seems even less to undermine Aquinas’s general conception
of being. All the same, it displays another central theme of Kenny’s book, the way
Aquinas at certain junctures seems Platonic in ways he should not be, given his
general rejection of Platonic realism. In this case, Kenny’s attention is drawn to
Aquinas’s repeated comparison of the angels to Platonic Forms – for instance, at
Summa theol. 1a 50.2 ad 4, where he compares an angel’s mode of existence to how
Whiteness would exist if it were a separated form. There is of course nothing wrong
with drawing a comparison to a philosophical theory that one believes false. But
Kenny thinks the comparison ought to embarrass Aquinas, because it highlights just
what is wrong with his conception of the angels as, in effect, separated forms:
“separated substances – angelic spirits and the like – are, as understood by Aquinas,
forms that are not forms of anything, and his way of conceiving them seems open to
all the objections an Aristotelian would make against a Platonist” (165). This is too
quick. Many of Aquinas’s complaints against the Forms make the point that they are
ill-suited to an account of the physical world (e.g., Summa theol. 1a 84.1c). So those
sorts of difficulties would not apply to a Platonic conception of the angels. More
worrisome is Kenny’s observation that separated forms “are not forms of anything.”
This is a worry not just about the angels but also about the separated human soul
(and potentially about God, inasmuch as God too is described as pure actuality). But it
would take some hard work to say exactly what the problem is, and then to canvass
possible solutions to the problem.
Kenny is aware of just how hard it is to convict a major philosopher of so sweeping a

failure. As he remarks at the start, “in order to defend a text, it is sufficient to find
one reading of it which makes it coherent and plausible; if one wishes to expose
confusion, one has to explore many possible interpretations before concluding that
none makes the text satisfactory” (ix). What Kenny does not say – though he surely
must be aware of it – is that the present book falls far short of the patient, thorough
effort that would be required to make his negative conclusions stick. Indeed,
throughout, Kenny strikes me as all too quick to find confusions where a longer,
harder look might see a way out. (In fairness, perhaps this is simply a matter of taste;
Kenny has recently criticized my own work for “a tendency to be too charitable . . . .
He perseveres . . . when it might have been wiser to give up” [TLS March 7, 2003].)
The first of the three defects alleged above – that Aquinas fails to distinguish being
and existence – is hard to evaluate. This is the only one of the three that calls directly
into question Aquinas’s conception of being. But Kenny does not make it very clear
just what the problem is here. There can be no doubt – after reading this book – that
Aquinas might have given us a more perspicuous account of his various uses of ’esse.’
The whole situation would be much clearer, however, if Kenny had done more to craft
a clear account on Aquinas’s behalf. Because he proceeds in a strictly chronological
fashion, we get scattered passages from various works that promise to shed light on
Aquinas’s central usages of ’esse.’ As they come, Kenny criticizes them. This
procedure – though it will be helpful to anyone interested in a specific text, and
though it certainly must have made the book easier to write – strikes me as
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unfortunate. For instance, it forces Kenny to wait until the very end to discuss the
Metaphysics commentary, even though that treatise surely ought to be central to a
discussion of Aquinas on being. More generally, it seems to me crucial to read
Aquinas’s various treatises in an overlapping manner, as so many rough drafts on the
way to a finished product. Although there are occasions where it is reasonable to think
Aquinas’s views underwent change, it seems far preferable in general to treat them all
together as a single opus from which a single master account of a given subject can
be drawn.
If we try, very briefly, to construct this sort of master account for esse, using Kenny’s
book as a guide, we might first (drawing on I Sent. 33.1.1 ad 1, III Sent. 6.2.2c, and
Quod. IX.2.2c) arrive at a distinction between
Esse1 – a thing’s quiddity or nature;
Esse2 – the actuality of essence (actus essentiae);
Esse3 – the verbal copula signifying the composition of a proposition.
As Kenny suggests (57), esse1 looks to be an outlying usage that we can generally set
aside, though we should of course keep it in mind as an interpretive option. (Kenny
himself might have been helped by keeping it in mind at various places, as when
[174-75] he tries to make sense of Metaph. VIII.2.1694.) As for the second, Quod.
IX.2.2c among other passages suggests that we should locate within esse2 the various
sorts of being described in the Categories, substantial and accidental. As for the last,
Contra gentiles I.12.78 suggests that under esse3 we might want to locate existence
in the most familiar and theoretically innocent sense.
This rough scheme promises to consolidate a good many of Kenny’s twelve senses of
being. Of course, a great many questions might now be asked. The most obvious
question – and perhaps the issue driving Kenny’s first principal defect – is how esse2
(actuality of essence) differs from esse3 (existence). Surely the first thing that needs
to be said about this question is that, in ordinary English (even ordinarily philosophical
English), the verbs ’to be’ and ’to exist’ are generally used in something like the third
sense of esse, to such an extent that it is very hard for us to see what else someone
might mean by these words. The second thing to say is that Aquinas, when using
’esse’ as a verbal noun (as he so often does), can generally be assumed to have in
mind the second sense. No wonder, then, if we often find Aquinas’s remarks on esse
obscure: very often, he is talking about something for which we lack the concept.
But I think that matters are not as dire as that last comment might suggest. Aquinas
tells us that esse2 is the actuality of essence. That by itself is no help at all, but he
often enough gives helpful examples. Esse is the actuality of being, he says, just as
lighting is the actuality of a light (III Sent. 6.2.2c), or living is the actuality of a living
thing (I Sent. 33.1.1 ad 1). So the first step toward acquiring the concept of esse2 is
to have the concept of actuality: esse2 just is a kind of actuality. Well, what kind?
Kenny scarcely addresses this issue at all, focused as he is on the various substantive
theses concerning esse. A useful point of departure is a witticism of Ryle’s that Kenny
draws on several times (59, 108): that we should not suppose existing is an activity
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indulged in by everything there is – something like breathing, only quieter. To be

sure, this picture would be blatantly wrong for our conception of existence (and
blatantly wrong for esse3), but it is only subtly wrong for esse2. It is wrong even there
because, first, as Kenny rightly stresses (59), esse2 is not an activity in our sense of
the term. It is an Aristotelian first actuality rather than a second actuality (like
breathing). This is to say that esse2 should be regarded not as an actual doing of
something, but as an actual having the power to do something. Ryle’s image is wrong
for a second reason, too. We should not think of esse2 as a generic actuality that
everything that exists shares in. Instead, the sort of actuality a thing has depends on
the sort of essence it has: the actuality of a human essence is very different from the
actuality of a bovine essence, and so the esse2 of a human being and a cow will
accordingly be very different.
These remarks should make clear just how alien Aquinas’s conception of esse is, at
least in one of its primary senses. No wonder, then, if we have a hard time making
sense of the various theses in which we find this concept of esse at work. Whether an
account developed along the above lines could render coherent these various theses is
a very large question, and Kenny would no doubt find the foregoing sketch entirely
inadequate for that purpose. In this short space I mean to suggest only that Aquinas’s
various conceptions of being and existence are perhaps not as obscure as they can
seem to be – and that we are very far from having to accept Kenny’s ultimate verdict
that “it is not possible to extract from his [Aquinas’s] writings a consistent and
coherent theory [of being]” (189). Kenny’s book, interesting and important though it
is, falls far short of establishing that that is the only possible outcome.
I owe thanks to Chris Shields and Eleonore Stump for their helpful comments on this
review.
2003.12.04
Jon Marenbon
Boethius
Marenbon, Jon, Boethius, Oxford, 2003, 266pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195134079.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Hause, Creighton University
It is easy to see why we find little secondary literature on Boethius’s work as a whole.
The Boethius of the commentaries seems to be an Aristotelian; the Boethius of the
theological treatises seems to be a neoplatonic Christian theologian; and the Boethius
of the Consolation seems to be a neoplatonic philosopher. How can one write a single
monograph on works so diverse by so apparently protean an author? Moreover, many
scholars find Boethius’s most original work muddled, and his solid and interesting
work unoriginal.
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If all this were correct, we could expect a book on the Boethian corpus to be a mere
collection of essays and not a unified work; that some of the essays would contain
little worth reading, since they would be on muddled and unoriginal texts; and
moreover, that some would be of interest only to literature scholars, others only to
philosophers and still others only to theologians. John Marenbon’s Boethius is most
decidedly not like this, and that is not just to Marenbon’s credit of course, but to
Boethius’s as well. Marenbon’s discussions of Boethius’s varied works is unified by the
common threads he finds connecting works in the Boethian corpus. In addition, he
argues persuasively that the Consolation and theological treatises are truly great
philosophical works.
The Logical Works
As Marenbon points out himself, there is not much that is original in Boethius’s logical
works, yet they are worth study both for their extraordinary influence on medieval
thinkers before the recovery of Aristotle and for the insight they afford into the
method and content of Boethius’s truly original, great works, the Opuscula sacra and
the Consolation of Philosophy. The selection from the commentaries Marenbon treats
in greatest detail is the famous discussion of universals in the Second Commentary on
Porphyry’s Isagoge. All later mediaeval authors took this as their point of departure in
treating universals, and the way Boethius characterizes the issue colors all subsequent
medieval treatments. For this reason, and because Marenbon devotes more time and
attention to this text than to any other in Boethius’s logical works, and because
Marenbon’s interpretations are themselves perplexing in some respects, it is worth a
closer investigation.
Boethius argues that there are no universals in extramental reality (27):
1. Everything that really exists is one in number.

2. Nothing that is common to many at the same time can be one in number.
3. Genera and species are common to many at the same time.
4. Therefore, genera and species do not really exist.
Since the argument is valid, and Boethius seems to take (2) and (3) as analytically
true, that leaves only (1) open for criticism. But Marenbon’s only defense of (1) is that
it “is a fundamental principle accepted by Boethius and many other philosophers”
(27). However, “fundamental” does not imply inarguable, and acceptance by “many”
other philosophers gives us a reason not to dismiss it, but not necessarily to accept it.
Not all philosophers accept (1) (and, most tellingly for Boethius, not all neoplatonist
philosophers accept it).
This argument’s conclusion generates an epistemological worry. Since we attempt to

understand reality by classifying beings under genera and species, if there are no
genera or species, our attempts are all failures. We in fact know nothing, since our
ideas of genera and species are simply figments. To resolve this problem, Boethius
explains that the process by which we arrive at our ideas of genera and species is not
falsifying, but truth preserving. However, as commentators have often noted,
Boethius’s solution is vague. Marenbon, accordingly, offers a detailed account of the
solution, dividing it into three stages.
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In forming ideas of genera and species, we first use mathematical abstraction. By

division, we see the incorporeal nature in itself without the body that nature is fixed
in. Next, we use inductive abstraction. Considering the numerically many singulars in
which species are, the mind collects their likeness. The resulting thought is a species.
Third, Boethius adds this thought: The objects under discussion are both singular and
universal; when such an object is “perceived sensibly in those things in which it has
being” (30), it is singular; when considered in thought, it is universal.
This solution is supposed to dispel our epistemological worries, but it is quite vague. Is
Boethius advocating realist abstractionism or constructivism? Unfortunately, Marenbon
does not characterize constructivism as clearly as he might. What he says is that on a
realist view, what the mind grasps are really existing objects; while on a constructivist
view, the contents of one’s thoughts do not correspond “directly” (28) or
“straightforwardly” (30) to any one thing. What this means, I take it, is that if the
relation between the object of thought and one’s thought contents falls short of formal
identity, this implies constructivism. If this is right, then if one’s thought contents
have different properties from the properties of the object one is grasping, or if one’s
thought contents are not isomorphic with the object, then one’s thoughts are
constructs. However, if this is what Marenbon means by constructivism, then inductive
abstraction is quite compatible with realism. This stage of the process of forming ideas
might simply be a means of correctly identifying the species or genera. If one’s only
experience of human beings was Socrates, it would take meeting Euthyphro to show
that “human being” is not defined as “wise and rational animal.”
Marenbon, in his first of two interpretations, thinks there is some reason to view
Boethius as a realist abstractionist, for he seems to be claiming (the text is a little
vague) that the likeness that various singular things bear to one another (what some
other thinkers call their “nature,” though Boethius does not use this word) is both
singular and universal: singular in extramental reality and universal when grasped in
thought. When we abstract them from bodies, then, we are discovering things that
really exist. And in fact, Boethius goes on to say that “genera and species subsist in
one way, but are grasped by the intellect in another way.” But if the intellect grasps
them as universals, then is this not constructivism? Marenbon does not offer any
answer, but perhaps his idea is that because universality and singularity are not parts
of the nature, the universality of one’s thoughts does not count against identity with
the object.
However, Marenbon offers a second interpretation, inspired by what he calls the

Modes of Cognition Principle. According to this principle, which plays an important role
in the Consolation’s discussion of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, the way
a cognitive power cognizes something is determined by the nature of that power, not
by the thing cognized. Reason, because of its nature, will grasp things through
universals. According to Marenbon, if in fact Boethius is relying on this principle, then
the view he presents will be a sort of constructivism, but one that makes a bow to
realist abstractionism. But it is difficult to see why Marenbon reaches this conclusion.
First, why does the introduction of the Modes of Cognition Principle make this view
more constructivist than the view presented in the first interpretation? Perhaps, on
this second interpretation, genera and species—or perhaps we should say the natures
identical to them—do not exist in reality, even as particulars. But that would be hard
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to reconcile with Boethius’s claim that they “subsist in sensible things.” And if the
Modes of Cognition Principle simply tells us that reason will grasp these genera and
species as universals, then this view will be constructivist only to the extent that this
implies a lack of identity between the contents of one’s cognition and the extramental
object of one’s cognition. But this principle does not introduce any barrier that was not
considered in the first interpretation, and so if the first one could count as realist
abstractionism, I do not see why the introduction of the Modes of Cognition Principle
would make any difference.
Opuscula Sacra
Despite their wide variety of subject matter, the Opuscula were originally published
together and, Marenbon argues, form a unit. OS IV, On the Catholic Faith, sets out
problems the rest will discuss. Each of OS I-III concerns a problem about predication
involving God (and creatures as well, in OS III). And OS I, II, III, and V share a
common method: Boethius appeals to Aristotelian philosophy, in particular logic, to
expose flaws in his opponents’ views, and uses the same philosophy to construct less
assailable views. However, in the spirit of his neoplatonic predecessors, Boethius does
not think that Aristotelian logic can be applied to God in the same way it can be
applied to creatures; at some point the logical apparatus will simply break down. Still,
he thinks it can it can provide us with “an analogy to guide us in our understanding”
(76). Boethius’s ideas about the relationship between faith and reason are implicit
here. If logical incoherence shows a theological position is unacceptable, then
Boethius sides with Origen against Tertullian in thinking faith and reason cannot
conflict.
Marenbon shows this methodology at work in OS V, which argues for an orthodox

Christology against the heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. Nestorius argued that
because Christ has two natures he must be two persons. Eutyches, in contrast argued
that because Christ is only one person, he must have only one nature. Boethius’s goal
is to explain how a single person can have two natures. In a move whose cleverness
Marenbon makes apparent later, Boethius picks this Aristotelian definition from among
several candidates: “Nature is the specific differentia which informs a thing” (70, citing
OS V 1.111-112). On the Porphyrian tree, a schema of universals on which a highest
genus is divided and subdivided until the lowest species are found, it is differentiae
that divide genera into species and thus constitute their natures.
Boethius next offers a definition of “person” that would become the standard definition
throughout the mediaeval period: “A person is an individual substance of a nature
endowed with reason” (72, citing OS V 3.171-172). While this definition has the
advantage of explaining how human beings, as well as the members of the Trinity, are
all persons, it seems to violate a well accepted principle of orthodox Christian and
even neoplatonist theology—one that Boethius himself advocates: The transcendent
God cannot be captured on the grid of the categories. Boethius recognizes this,
however, and explains that God is a substance of a different sort from created
substances. Like all substances, each divine person “substat,” that is, stands under.
Created substances stand under, are subjects of, their properties. But each divine
person stands under in the sense that it is the origin of all created things. In other
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words, the divine persons are ontological bedrock. The definition of “person,”
formulated in terms of the categories, applies only by analogy to divine persons.
Marenbon finds that Boethius has struck a serious blow to the heresies by removing
their motivation. Nestorius and Eutyches formulate their views because they conceive
of a nature as something individual; hence, if a being has more than one nature, it
must be more than one person. However, Boethius defines “nature” as something
universal, and thereby removes the barrier to thinking that a single person could not
have more than one nature. Marenbon is right to emphasize the originality of
Boethius’s solution, and he might have brought it out more vividly by contrasting
Boethius with another party to this discussion, Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril battled against
his contemporary Nestorius and in many particulars anticipated Boethius’s account a
century earlier. But Cyril too thought of natures as individual, and for that reason
denied two natures in Christ, even though he argued for Christ’s full divinity and
humanity in a single person. Boethius’ genius was to see how Aristotelian philosophy
could make sense of the orthodox doctrine of Christ. Of course, Boethius’s solution
does not eliminate all the paradoxes of the orthodox view. It is still hard to see how a
single person can have these two natures, which are so ontologically different. But in
this respect, his view is no worse off than that of Eutyches, who holds that the single
nature of Christ is somehow the result of combining divine and human nature.
The Consolation of Philosophy
By far the strongest and most interesting portion of the book is its detailed explication
of the Consolation (96-163). Marenbon guides the reader through each key argument
of the text, and his interpretations of the individual arguments reveal a brilliance in
Boethius that other commentators sometimes miss. He also points out that the work
suffers from incoherence: The positions Lady Philosophy argues for are deeply
incompatible with each other. It is implausible that Boethius did not care about the
incoherences on the grounds that he was simply writing a consolation for a general
readership; for although he was indeed writing a consolation, it is, especially in its
second half, full of difficult, technical argumentation. Marenbon argues instead that
the incoherences are intentional, part of Boethius’s plan for the Consolation. Although
this might seem a desperate attempt to save Boethius from the bin of second-rate
philosophers, Marenbon makes an interesting and fairly convincing case for this thesis.
The Consolation belongs to the tradition of Menippean satire, prosimetric in form and
satirical in content. By Boethius’s time, however, the genre included works whose
satirical content was quite subtle. Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Mercury and
Philology, for instance, is a work of “earnest didacticism,” and yet Martianus
“encourages us to see that [his enterprise as an educator] has its pretensions and
absurdities” (160-161). Boethius knew Martianus’s work and may have been following
in his footsteps. Boethius’s work evinces enormous respect for philosophy, but Lady
Philosophy’s arguments, while they advance Boethius toward answering his questions,
do not result in a coherent, fully satisfactory reply. Philosophy is no goddess; she is
human, and it may be that “the pretensions of her goddess-like initial appearance are
satirized in the Consolation” (162).
The final chapter of the book traces Boethius’s immensely successful post-mortem
career. Influence is hard to measure, but by any standard Boethius’s was enormous,
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and it extended not just to philosophy but to literature as well: The Consolation
figures prominently not just in philosophical and theological texts, such as Aquinas’s
treatment of happiness in the Summa theologiae, but in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la
Rose and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. My only disagreement with Marenbon is
that, in my view, he underestimates Boethius’s influence. He claims, for example, that
Anselm did not use the Consolation as a source for his moral philosophy (176).
However, in On Freedom of Choice, Anselm’s arguments that the good are always
strong, while the wicked are weak, made slaves to sin by their own choice, are at
least echoes of Book IV. Anselm’s dialogues also show the influence of Boethius’s
logical works, especially the works on topical reasoning.
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2003.12.05
David Papineau
The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and

Probability
Papineau, David, The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution,

and Probability, Oxford, 2003, 239pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199243840.
Reviewed by Horacio Arlo Costa, Carnegie Mellon University
This volume gathers together five essays on related topics that the author has
published in various journals since 1997. In addition chapter 5 (on causality) is
entirely new. Chapter 4 on probability was originally written in collaboration with
Helen Beebee. The book succeeds at presenting an articulated and coherent view in
various areas of epistemology and philosophy of science, treating a series of issues
ranging from the foundations of decision theory and probability to various interesting
problems in the cognitive sciences.
The first three chapters center on classical epistemological issues as well as on certain
aspects of the evolution of cognition. Together they present a forceful and original
naturalistic account, which, at times, is directly at odds with widespread philosophical
views on the nature of content, knowledge and the aims of inquiry. The last three
chapters on probability, causation and quantum mechanics form another cohesive part
of the book. Even when the topics discussed in these last three chapters are of a more
technical nature, they are presented in a very accessible and readable manner.
The first chapter focuses on normativity and judgment. One of the basic ideas
articulated in this chapter is that all ’oughts’ relating to judgments are derived oughts,
arising because personal or moral value is attached to the pursuit of truth, understood
as a fundamental goal of inquiry. In other words, norms of judgment are ’prescriptions
to the effect that, in order to achieve the truth, you ought to judge in such and such
way (p. 7)’. The author seems to be interested in the normativity of methods for
forming, fixing and changing beliefs not only in the context of scientific inquiry, but
also in everyday reasoning.
This naturalist approach to normativity stands opposed to most contemporary theories

of content, which tend not to be of a naturalist type. Section 3, in chapter 1, presents
some problems for non-naturalism and section 6 develops a more refined analysis of
the spectrum of theories of content which might cohere with the author’s naturalist
account of norms.
Papineau classifies methods for fixing belief externally in terms of how good they are
in producing certain outputs, namely in yielding true pieces of information. In order to
do so truth is assumed as a primitive used by the theorist in order to classify methods
of belief fixation. So, the notion of truth that arises from this consequentialist analysis
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cannot be equated with some form of ’rational assertibility.’ And the corresponding
notion of aiming at truth cannot be construed either in terms of warranted
assertibility, as authors like Crispin Wright and Davidson have recently proposed.1
Here Papineau has to face some contemporary arguments to the effect that the
enterprise of seeking truth is incoherent when truth is not equated with warranted
assertibility:
We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is
which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor
recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a
value, so the “pursuit of truth” is an empty enterprise unless it means only it is often
worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or
checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our
beliefs is true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched,
most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth
is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified
by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors or is good to steer by.) But here we
have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can
give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a
norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t
consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think
they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but
pointless as a goal. (Davidson, 1998, pp.2-3.)
The view rests on a familiar articulation of fallibilism, according to which held

information is always polluted by doubt. A thorough probabilism (and anti-
inductivism) in philosophy of science, for example, is a position compatible with this
account. The pursuit of truth under this point of view is deflated to the mere
enterprise of increasing the degree of credence in our beliefs, gathering further
evidence and checking calculations. Papineau sketches a response in footnote 5 of
chapter two (p. 48). The idea is to compare different methods by their outputs and to
invoke as well theoretical considerations, in order to figure out which method is
unreliable for truth. This response broadens the consequentialist approach defended
throughout the book, but ultimately the reader is referred to a previous book for
precisions about this issue.2
Papineau seems to recognize as well that seeking truth cannot be the sole relevant
goal when it comes to classifying methods of belief formation. ’There seems no good
reason to privilege the desideratum of reliability for truth over others when we
evaluate methods of belief formation. True, an economical method that generates lots
of important falsehoods is not generally worth much. But neither is a reliable method
that consumes costly resources in generating trivialities (p. 22).’ It also seems (see p.
79) that when the goal of seeking truth is invoked it is taken as a proximate goal of
inquiry, rather than a goal to be achieved in the long run.3 This seems to bring the
offered theory closer to well-established decision-theoretic accounts of belief fixation,
where seeking truth is articulated as the pursuit of valuable error-free information in
the next step of inquiry.4 Nevertheless, according to Papineau a method of belief
fixation is ’epistemically rational’ as long as it is specifically reliable-for-truth. Methods
exhibit ’wide theoretical rationality’ when they produce an optimal mix of the different
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desiderata imposed on them. Even when epistemic rationality seems to offer a narrow
view of rationality (for the reasons specified by the author himself in the quote
above), epistemic rationality is the standard of rationality that drives much of the
discussions about the evolution of knowledge in chapter two.
In chapters two and three an evolutionary perspective is used in order to explain how
beings with our evolutionary story come to be so good at theoretical rationality. The
discussion touches interesting issues related to the status of experimental findings in
psychology, which seem to indicate the presence of widespread irrationality in human
agents. In page 42 Papineau offers a menu of some of the classical experiments,
which seem to indicate that normal subjects in experimental settings ignore base
rates, violate basic laws of probability, etc. The author uses results from evolutionary
psychology and behavioral decision making, in order to conclude that ’ it is agreed on
all sides that human thinking depends on ’quick and dirty’ problem-solving strategies
which often go astray in modern environments’. So, when evaluated via the
consequentialist approach used in the book, human subjects are not ’epistemically
rational’. Papineau wonders whether we are ’widely theoretically rational’ after all, but
the thought is not pursued further. What matters for him is that the data indicates an
apparent failure of epistemic rationality. So, he asks, rhetorically, ’If we’re so dumb,
how come we sent a man to the moon?’ His straightforward answer is that we have
the ability to deliberately identify ways of thinking that are reliable for truth and set
ourselves to practice them. One of the main issues in chapters two and three is how
are we evolutionarily capable of doing this in spite of our biological limitations (i.e. in
spite of the fact that our mind operates as a Swiss Army knife, comprising an array of
’fast and frugal’ modules designed to solve specific problems quickly). The solution
offered by Papineau is ingenious, although in many crucial aspects it remains sketchy.
First, one has to suppose that our ancestors were capable of identifying the end of
truth and that they knew how to achieve it.5 Second, Papineau needs to postulate that
evolution selects the desire for truth. Third, he has to explain the relationship between
the outputs of ’fast and frugal’ modules and our best theories of rationality. His idea is
that the outputs of the modules are not supplanted by rational outputs. When
rationality and the fast modules give conflicting answers, the agent retains both of
them. This goes smoothly with the idea that in most psychological experiments we are
the victims of ’cognitive illusions’ sustained by hard-wired modules giving responses in
conflict with the recommendations of rationality at the time. So, the situations in
psychological experiments would work as the cognitive counterpart of the visual
illusion one suffers in looking at the Muller-Lyer lines. The two lines look different
lengths to you, and moreover they continue to do so even when you know that they
are the same length. The means-ends reasoning that goes into selecting epistemically
rational methods is explained at length in chapter three.
As I said above Papineau’s proposals are ingenious, and they might go a long way
towards explaining some of the current data on irrationality. I think, nevertheless,
that the ultimate view of theoretical rationality on which the proposal is based relies
too much on ’the standard psychological understanding of the experimental data on
irrationality’ (p. 54). Perhaps the ideas of the author can be successfully used in order
to explain ’framing’ situations, where one and the same option is ’framed’ differently,
leading to preference reversals and other inadequacies. But most of the data that
inspired the initial work of the ’heuristics and biases community’ is based on rather
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different type of phenomena, which are usually classified as ’paradoxes’ of rationality.

Examples are the so-called paradoxes of Allais and Ellsberg. These paradoxes seem to
question the hardcore of the received views on rationality by challenging the
normative validity of some of its central axioms. The seminal work of the
psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky seemed to have proceeded in a
different manner. Their idea is to develop a theoretical framework (prospect theory)
capable of describing robust patterns of human behavior which violate basic axioms of
rationality, without at the same time challenging the received view on normative
standards of rationality. In other words, in the face of recalcitrant evidence a
normative view of rationality can either be revised descriptively or normatively. When
the revision is done descriptively, the violating behavior is interpreted as irrational and
explained as a blind spot of a cognitive strategy that normally yields reasonable
results. When the revision is done normatively the idea is that the violating behavior
is, after all, rational. The paradoxical situation is then seen as revealing a theoretical
defect in the received view, not as a cognitive illusion. Papineau’s position is aligned
with the idea of explaining violating behavior as irrational, as in the Kahneman-
Tversky tradition. But there are compelling reasons for seeing the phenomena studied
in psychology experiments on (alleged) irrationality as reminders of the inadequacies
of the orthodox theories of rationality,6 rather than as ’cognitive illusions’.
One of the main question that Papineau asks in this part of the book is: ’If the
ordinary intuitions of ordinary people don’t support objective standards of rationality,
then what is the status of these standards? What makes it right to reason in certain
ways, even when reasoning in those ways seems unnatural to most people?’ (p. 46) A
quick answer to the last question could be ’Nothing’. When the orthodox view is
revised normatively in a sufficiently sophisticated way, phenomena of recalcitrant
irrationality are minimized.7 Some of the most successful approaches are sensible to
the fact that in common decision situations our values are indeterminate and our
probabilities imprecise.8 There is, to be sure, an interesting philosophical debate as to
which revised normative standards one should adopt. Rather than taking this path
Papineau does not question the orthodox view. Every time that the (postulated) ’fast
and frugal’ modules yield a response conflicting with the recommendations of the
orthodox view on rationality, it is this latter recommendation that is labeled as
epistemically rational. One can extract, nevertheless, completely opposed lessons
from psychological experiments. Why, for example, is the pattern of choice violating
Savage axioms in the Ellsberg paradox intrinsically irrational?9 There are perfectly
good manners of accommodating this behavior as rational by, for example,
recognizing that in this situation probabilities are indeterminate (and accommodating
this by, in turn, rejecting the axiom of ordering).10 It seems to me that the
experimental evidence of the last thirty years or so does not paint such a bleak picture
regarding our everyday irrationality. The data might be seen instead as providing
interesting insights as to what are the desiderata and the limits of an adequate theory
of normative rationality. Papineau might be right though in reporting that this is not
the dominant view among contemporary psychologists. He also takes for granted this
view and incorporates it as corroborating evidence in favor of his account on the
evolution of knowledge. I remain considerably less convinced than Papineau by the
tenets of this research program in psychology. Evolutionary psychology, with its
picture of the mind as a Swiss Army knife, is perhaps an even more questionable
source of insights about cognitive structure, in the light of its many methodological
664
fragilities. But perhaps Papineau can run his evolutionary arguments without
appealing heavily to either branch of contemporary psychology.
In a nutshell, at least some of the most salient experimental results in psychology and
economics (like the ones related to the Ellsberg paradox) seem to call for a revision of
our best theories of rationality, rather than being corroborating data in support of the
heuristics and biases research program. Of course, there are countless ways in which
agents might fail to meet normative standards of rationality. Normative standards are
not met in an effortless manner, even when theoretically more adequate. Papineau is
right in pointing to the fact that one of our distinctive abilities as a species is being
able to create institutions that help us in implementing normative standards. And
perhaps he is also right in insisting that the pursuit of truth has played a central
evolutionary role in shaping this ability. It is more contentious to determine how
exactly one should articulate the goal of seeking truth and how the goal is related to a
general and (more) adequate normative theory of rationality.
Chapter five focuses on re-examining the debate between ’evidential’ and ’causal’
decision theorists. Papineau’s idea is to discuss the issue by taking into account new
papers defending the ’evidential’ side of the discussion. One of these papers is a
recent piece by Christopher Meek and Clark Glymour.11 This paper, together with
similar pieces written independently by other authors, focuses on determining the
shape of decision rules for agents who know the causal relationships of a given
problem. Since this knowledge is encoded in the form of a directed graph it is not
trivial how to adapt standard decision theory to this particular case. This new wave of
papers and books does introduce a novel spin on the on-going debate in the
foundations of causal decision theory. So, Papineau is quite right in selecting this
material in order to re-examine the debate. Ultimately he wants to argue that there
are some examples that this new type of evidentialism cannot handle. Here is one of
these examples:
Suppose you are considering whether to have a cigarette, and are concerned to avoid
getting lung cancer. Whether or not you have a cigarette is a chance function of two
factors, whether you consciously decide to smoke, D, and probabilistically independent
presence of a certain psychologically undetectable addictive chemical, H, in your
bloodstream. (Thus, for example, you are 99.9 percent certain to smoke if you decide
to, and have H; 95 percent if you decide to, and lack H; still, 40 percent likely to
smoke if you decide not to, yet have H, and 1 percent if you decide not to, and don’t
have H). Now suppose further that H causes lung cancer, quite separately from
inducing people to smoke. Smoking itself, however, doesn’t cause lung cancer. Among
people with H, cancer is equally likely whether or not they smoke and similarly among
people without H. And suppose finally, that you know all this.
Papineau’s intuition is that in this case you should recommend smoking. He also
thinks that ’there seems no good way for evidentialists to recommend smoking’ in this
case (p. 199). The causal structure that the author seems to have in mind in this
example can be presented graphically as follows:
12
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We can also calculate P(LC = 1 | D = 0) via this procedure, which illustrates the
method of proof in the so-called Manipulation Theorem.13 It is not particularly difficult
for the evidentialist to accommodate the preference for the decision to smoke in this
circumstance (i.e. in all cases where the value of (LC = 1 | D = 1) does not exceed
the value of P(LC = 1 | D = 1)). So, at first sight the position of the evidentialist is not
so hopeless here. The concrete example used by Papineau in order to present a
problem for the evidentialist is actually easy to handle via an adaptation of the
Manipulation Theorem.
Now, one should remark here, on behalf of the spirit if not the letter of Papineau’s
objection, that there is no published complete theory of how to set up interventions in
order to solve decision problems of the kind he has in mind.14 For example, if there is
a causal influence from S to LC (even a slight one) it seems that the procedure
sketched above gives incorrect results.15 There is perhaps a different interpretation of
manipulation (more in line with Pearl’s ideas about the use of truncated Markov
factorizations).16 Intervening in order to set S either to 1 or to 0 can be seen as a
hypothetical policy that either prohibits or mandates smoking. In this case the idea
could be to truncate the graph by deleting all arrows from direct parents of S to S (i.e.
the arrow from DS to S and the arrow from H to S). This intervention yields more
reasonable results in the case in which there is causal influence from S to LC – and
avoids having to use probabilities like P(S|DS).
Towards the end of this chapter Papineau considers a harder case, namely:
17 The gist of this rival of conditioning is that the revision of a mixture of two
probability functions is the mixture of the revisions. When ’causal decision theory’ is
presented in this general way, it is quite clear that the theory need not apply only to
causal problems. John Collins has argued, for example, that a theory of this sort can
make sense of an anti-Humean account of motivation (which is otherwise incompatible
with conditioning, and therefore with most ’evidential’ decision theories).18 But in
cases of this sort there might not be interventions available, for the simple reason that
there is no causal structure for the problem to begin with. The intervention approach
can only be applied to cases where this causal structure is indeed available.
In a nutshell, to the extent that Papineau’s examples are examples of rational

decisions at all, it seems that unmodified versions of them can be handled by applying
the Manipulation Theorem. But there is a delicate philosophical point raised in this
chapter about the nature of interventions in graphs containing decision nodes, which
actually might be at the center of discussions about the foundations of causal decision
theory. This point, I think, remains open and valid.
Chapter four elaborates the connection between means-end reasoning and probability.
It also intends to offer an account of probability useful in chapter five. Papineau
argues that the relevant notion is not chance but what he calls knowledge-relative
probability, i.e. the objective probability of results relative to those circumstances the
agent knows about.
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Finally chapter six proposes a puzzle. Suppose that there is a machine that produces
two kinds of quantum-mechanical-devices. When operated (’spun’) either device
displays either H or T. The first device is H-biased, giving H a 0.9 chance and T a 0.1
chance. The second device is T-biased having H a 0.3 chance and T a 0.7 chance. The
machine itself proceeds on quantum-mechanical basis, and on any occasion there is a
0.6 chance of an H-biased device, and a 0.4 chance of a T-biased one. What is then
the estimated probability of H(T)? Here is an option: there is a 0.66 probability of H
(0.6 x 0.9 + .4 x 0.3) and so a 0.34 probability of T. Papineau mounts a defense of
these knowledge-relative probabilities by appealing to the many-minds interpretation
of quantum mechanics.19
There are interesting and fruitful continuities throughout chapters four to six, as well
as some tensions. In general chapters four and six seem to be more open to an
’evidential’ view of probability and choice than chapter five, which defends causal
decision theory. The tension, for example, is revealed when the author offers an
argument for conditionalization in chapter six. Many defenders of causal decision
theory think that conditioning gives the wrong kind of account of the act of supposing
that enters into the calculation of expected utility.20 Actually the appeal to intervention
can be seen as a maneuver in order to give an account of imaging in terms of
conditioning plus relevant manipulations in a directed graph. But the main topic of
chapter five is to reject the intervention method as a possible reduction of this kind.
Perhaps Papineau is appealing here to a distinction between temporal
conditionalization and the act of supposing, as encoded by different update methods.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Even in partial disagreement with some of its
main ideas and presuppositions, I did find the book quite intellectually stimulating and
insightful. Can the naturalist find good foundational answers when facing open and
interesting problems in the evolution of cognition, the theory of choice and the
philosophy of probability? Papineau does a superb job at answering these questions.
The book is very well written. Its arguments flow quite naturally and clearly, even in
areas where technicalities could have impaired the transparency of the exposition. The
book deals with almost all the main puzzles that matter in the area of rational choice
as well as with interesting repercussions in broader areas in the philosophy of mind
and cognition, evolution and epistemology. I do recommend reading the book to any
person with interests overlapping any of these areas.
Endnotes
1. See, Wright, C. (1992), Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press;
as well as Davidson, D. (1998), “Truth Rehabilitated,” to be published.
2. Papineau, D. (1987) Reality and Representation, Oxford, Blackwell.
3. A reliabilist account where the goal is convergence to the truth in the long run is
fully articulated by Kevin Kelly, in Kelly, K. (1996) The Logic of Reliable Inquiry,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. This does not seem, nevertheless, the kind of
reliabilism that Papineau has in mind.
667
4. Levi, I. (1980), The Enterprise of Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. See
also a recent manuscript where the type of neo-pragmatism that motivated
Davidson’s quote above is criticized for not being a good reflection of the views of the
classical American pragmatists: Levi, I. ’Seeking Truth,’ manuscript, Columbia
University, April 2000.
5. This issue is obviously connected with topics treated in the first chapter about
whether seeking truth can be differentiated from the point of view of the inquirer from
warranted assertibility.
6. This applies as well to the phenomena that Papineau has chosen in order to
illustrate the idea that there is widespread irrationality in the standard behavior of
human subjects. The so-called conjunction fallacy seem to depend crucially on how
the words ’probability’ and ’and’ are interpreted and framed; and in the case of
’taxicab’ problems many have noted that it follows from updating through
conditionalization and Bayes theorem that the use of the precise base rate relative to
the less specific reference class cannot be consistently required. See K. Tentori, N.
Bonini and D. Osherson, (2003) ’Conjunction and the Conjunction Fallacy,’ University
of Trento and Princeton University; as well as J. Koehler (1996) ’The base rate fallacy
reconsidered: Descriptive, normative and methodological challenges’, Brain and
Behavioral Sciences, 19:1 (as well as various responses to the target article).
7. The residue of irrational phenomena are, in this approach, the so-called ’framing’
effects. These are the effects most similar to visual illusions, and the ones that cannot
be easily accommodated in a weakened version of the classical normative theory of
rationality.
8. Levi, I. (1986) ’The paradoxes of Allais and Ellsberg,’ Economics and Philosophy, 2,
23-56.
9. Not being open to ’money pumps’ could be a minimal constraint on possible

revisions of the received view on normative standards of rationality. One might argue
that some of the alternative proposals do not manage to meet this constraint. ’Regret
theory’, for example, fails to enforce the transitivity of preferences and it is therefore
open to such criticisms. But not all normative revisions (especially the ones which
relinquish ordering) suffer from this problem.
10. Craig R. Fox and Amos Tversky follow the opposite strategy by explaining the
Ellsberg paradox in terms of what they call a ’comparative ignorance effect’ (see
(1991) ’Ambiguity Aversion and Comparative Ignorance,’ Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 110:3, 585-603). The gist of the idea is that a form of ambiguity aversion
will be present when individuals evaluate clear and vague prospects jointly. The
explanatory strategy consists in postulating a ’psychological effect’ which explains
away the failure to obey otherwise correct norms of rationality. This is consistent with
the ’heuristics and biases’ program, and with the explanatory strategy of the author,
but certainly does not coincide with Ellsberg’s views about his own problem (stated in
the same journal thirty years earlier). Here is Ellsberg’s own diagnosis: ’Thus none of
the familiar criteria for predicting or prescribing decision-making under uncertainty
corresponds to this pattern of choices. Yet the choices themselves do not appear to be
668
careless or random. They are persistent, reportedly deliberate, and they seem
predominate empirically; many of the people who take them are eminently
reasonable, and they insist that they want to behave this way, even though they may
be generally respectful of the Savage axioms. There are strong indications, in other
words, not merely of the existence of reliable patterns of blind behavior but of the
operation of definite normative criteria, different from and conflicting with the familiar
ones, to which these people are trying to conform.’ The paragraph is from page 654 of
Ellsberg, D. (1961) ’Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms,’ Quarterly Journal in
Economics, 75, 643-669.
11. Meek, C. and Glymour, C. (1994) ’Conditioning and Intervening,’ British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science, 45.
12. I am assuming (as Papineau does) that the agent knows the initial graph and that
the probabilities of the manipulated graph can be easily estimated. This avoids further
complications linked to the Bayesian credentials of the type of causal inference we are
considering here. There is a further issue related to the interpretation of the
probabilities of the truncated graph. Consider for example P(S | DS = 0). Perhaps one
possible interpretation of P(S | DS = 0) is in terms of the probabilities of a reflective
agent who is thinking about himself as a third person. Then, for example, the
aforementioned probability can be moderately high if you are predicting that you will
be a victim of weakness of the will. It is not immediately clear to me whether this
interpretation is compatible with the one proposed by Papineau in chapter four.
13. Spirtes, P., Glymour, C. and Scheines, R. (2000) Causation, Prediction and
Search, second edition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, theorem 3.6, p. 51.
14. One notable exception is: Spohn, W. (2001) ’Dependency equilibria and the causal
structure of decision and game situations,’ Logik in Der Philosophie, Universitat
Konstanz, Nr. 56.
15. Clark Glymour suggested this point in conversation. I am grateful to him for
various remarks and observations regarding the use of the Manipulation Theorem.
16. See Pearl, J. (2000) Causality: Models, reasoning and inference, Cambridge
University Press, p. 72, section 3.2.3.
17. See, for example, Joyce, J.M. (1999) The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
18. See: Collins, J. (1996) ’Supposition and Choice: Why `Causal Decision Theory’ is a
misnomer, manuscript,’ Columbia University.
19. The author notices as well that in this case the chance of H is either 0.9 or 0.3
depending on the device you have. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing in passing that
Papineau’s knowledge-probabilities can also be seen as the chance for the coin landing
heads on the compound trial consisting of running the first chance device (which
determines the bias of the coin-flipping machine) followed by flipping the coin. I am
grateful here to Teddy Seidenfeld who suggested this remark in conversation.
669
20. Notice that Papineau is committed to maximize (where Ri are results) (CEU) (Σm i
= 1 u(Ri) P(Ri\Aj), where: P(.\Aj) = (ΣK P(K) P(./Aj&K), and where K is a partition
dependency hypothesis. But as Joyce clearly explains in his recent book (cited above)
for each recommendation according to this method there is an imaging operator `\’
that outputs the same recommendations. So, commitment to (CEU) seems to
translate into commitment to imaging as the right encoding of supposition in
maximizing expected utility.
2003.12.06
Marilyn Friedman
Autonomy, Gender, and Politics
Friedman, Marilyn, Autonomy, Gender, and Politics, Oxford, 2003, 272pp, $19.95
(pbk), ISBN 0195138511.
Reviewed by Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University
The ideal of autonomy has been criticized by feminist philosophers on grounds ranging
from claims that autonomy promotes character ideals such as independence and self-
sufficiency that historically have been associated with masculinity and social privilege,
through to claims that the ideal assumes the existence of a metaphysically dubious
true self. One prominent charge is that the notion of autonomy is excessively
individualistic and that ideals of autonomy ignore the social dimensions of selfhood
and the importance of relationships and community to agents’ identities. Relational
approaches to autonomy have developed in response to these kinds of charges.
Briefly, relational theories are motivated by two interrelated concerns. The first is to
explore the implications of the social dimensions of agency and identity for theories of
autonomy. Thus relational theorists have focused attention on the ways in which
agents’ self-conceptions, values and beliefs, are shaped by the social environment and
on the contributory role of that environment to the capacities and competences
necessary for autonomy. The second concern is to demonstrate the value of autonomy
for agents who are subject to oppressive social relationships and institutions and to
analyze the ways in which oppressive socialization can impair agents’ autonomy.
Autonomy, Gender, Politics makes an important and challenging contribution to the

development of relational approaches to autonomy and to the ongoing debate about
how best to articulate a relational approach. The debate centres on two issues. One is
whether relational theorists should endorse a content-neutral or a more substantive
account of autonomy. Content-neutral, or procedural, approaches stipulate that an
agent is autonomous with respect to her motivations, values, or choices just so long
as these have been subjected to appropriate critical scrutiny, irrespective of their
substantive content. Proponents of substantive approaches charge that the constraints
on critical reflection required by content-neutral theories are insufficient to distinguish
autonomous from non-autonomous reflection. Substantive approaches thus propose a
range of substantive constraints on the content of an autonomous agent’s choices,
670
beliefs, values and motivations. The other, connected, issue is whether sociality or
relationality should be understood as merely causal or whether it should be
understood as constitutive. In brief, is autonomy social just in the sense that human
selfhood is social and the social environment provides the necessary causal conditions
for the development of autonomy competence? Or is autonomy constitutively social?
One way of articulating this claim would be to argue that autonomy is inconsistent
with social relationships that subordinate an agent to the will of others. Another way
of articulating the claim would be to argue that the reflective capacities necessary for
autonomy are intrinsically social.
Friedman presents a powerful defence of a content-neutral approach to autonomy that

is relational in the causal, rather than the constitutive, sense. Two themes recur
throughout the discussion and emerge as central to her account of autonomy. The
first is the idea that the value of autonomy is grounded in the value of an agent’s first-
person perspective or her perspectival identity. Thus she suggests that ’an ideal of
personal autonomy is based on the presumption that there is value in a life lived in
accord with the perspective of the one who lives it’ (p. 56). Friedman characterizes
perspectival identity in terms of an agent’s deeper wants, values and concerns; her
perspectival identity is an expression of who she is and what matters most to her. The
capacity for autonomy is the capacity to reflect on one’s wants, values and
commitments and to be able to make this reflection effective in practical deliberation
and action. An agent is autonomous just so long as she can engage in this kind of
reflection free from coercion and manipulation and can act in accordance with her
deeper concerns or her perspectival identity, despite some degree of opposition by
others. The centrality of the first-person perspective to Friedman’s account of
autonomy explains the emphasis she places on the importance of individuality.
Although Friedman’s approach to autonomy is relational, she argues nevertheless that
since each person is a separately embodied being, with a distinct identity and life
narrative, autonomy is crucially bound up with individuality and individuation; it is
about shaping a life of one’s own, expressing one’s distinctive individual identity. The
more autonomous an agent is, the more distinctively individual she is.
The second crucial theme in Friedman’s discussion is the recognition that our
individual identities, and the values and concerns that we regard as expressive of who
we are, are shaped by our social situation and by significant social relationships.
Further, our very capacities for reflection are themselves developed in a social
environment that may foster and encourage the development of those capacities or
undermine and thwart them. These factors do not undermine the possibility of
autonomy, in Friedman’s view. So long as an agent reflectively endorses her choices,
values and concerns, however they arose, she is autonomous with respect to them.
However, these factors do draw attention to the causal, or contributory, role of the
social environment in the development of autonomy competence.
The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, comprising the first three
chapters, Friedman develops her content-neutral account of autonomy and defends
the coherence of the concept of autonomy against a variety of charges. She also
argues that personal autonomy is a precondition of moral competence, and stresses
its importance for women in providing a normative standpoint from which oppressive
social relationships, norms and practices can be criticized. Although much of the
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material discussed in this section covers ground that will be familiar to those versed in
the literature on autonomy, these chapters provide a clear and engaging overview of
the central debates. Further, Friedman’s contribution to the debate is sufficiently
distinctive and controversial to be of interest to theorists of autonomy. I found the
discussion in Chapter Three of the centrality of the first-person perspective to
autonomy and of the connection between personal autonomy and moral competence
particularly thought provoking.
The second and third sections of the book, comprising chapters four through seven,
focus on the social and relational dimensions of autonomy and seek to answer the
following kinds of question: In what ways are social relationships necessary for
autonomy? What kinds of relationships promote personal autonomy and what kinds of
relationships undermine it? Is autonomy a potential catalyst for disrupting social
bonds, and if so is this always a bad thing? In answering these questions, Friedman
advances two main claims. The first is that feminists have been correct to emphasize
the importance of personal ties and of wider social networks to agents’ identities.
Further, acknowledging the social grounding of identity is not inconsistent with valuing
personal autonomy. However, and this is the second claim, some social relationships
are inimical to autonomy. For example, romantic love relationships in which one
person’s needs, desires and goals are always, or usually, given priority over the
needs, desires and goals of their partner may seriously compromise the autonomy of
that partner. Similarly, many physically and/or psychologically abusive intimate
personal relationships subject the victims of abuse to a degree of control and
intimidation by another that is incompatible with autonomy.
The fourth section, comprising chapters eight and nine, locates personal autonomy
within the broader context of political liberalism. I found the discussion in Chapter
Eight of the paradoxes within liberal conceptions of political legitimacy concerning the
political coercion of unreasonable people somewhat tangential to the concerns of the
rest of the book. However, Friedman’s discussion of the implications of her account of
autonomy for important questions of social policy is one of the book’s main strengths.
In Chapter Seven she focuses on the fraught issue of what the response of the law
and professional caregivers should be to women who will not leave, or press charges
against, their abusive partners. Chapter Nine discusses the difficult and topical issue
of how liberal societies should respond to minority cultural practices that violate the
rights of women and girls. Friedman’s response to both issues centers on the claim
that respect for autonomy involves respect for the first-person perspective of agents.
In relation to domestic abuse, she argues that legal policy ought to be driven by the
aim of reducing domestic violence in the population as a whole. The law should,
therefore, mandate proceedings against abusers, even if the woman who has been
abused does not wish to cooperate with legal proceedings. Professional caregivers, in
contrast, should provide uncritical support for whatever choice a woman makes in
such a situation, rather than attempting to persuade her to leave an abusive
relationship. In relation to cultural practices that violate women’s rights, Friedman’s
argument is that such practices are permissible if the women in question consent to
them.
Friedman is of course well aware that agents who are subject to oppressive
socialization can consent to institutions, practices and relationships that undermine
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their flourishing. This is why the two cases she considers pose significant challenges
for social policy. However it seems to me that her hands-off response to both cases
reveals a tension within her approach between her minimal interpretation of the
requirements for content-neutral autonomy and her claim that autonomy is valuable
in providing a normative standpoint from which to criticize oppressive social
institutions, practices and relationships. On the one hand, she argues that the
threshold for autonomous critical reflection should be minimal, such that ’practically
any self-reflective reaffirmation will do’ (p. 7). Further, the default assumption should
be that all agents are competent, autonomous decision-makers whose judgments
about the choices that are best for them should be regarded as trustworthy. In this
respect, her interpretation of content-neutrality is considerably less demanding than
the constraints on autonomous critical reflection required by most procedural
theorists. On the other hand, she suggests that ’autonomy promotes in individuals a
greater degree of critical reflection on traditional norms and customary practices and
that this reflection gives individuals greater opportunity to recognise norms that are
harmful to them’ (p. 70). This kind of normative social critique, however, seems to
assume quite stringent constraints on adequate critical reflection.
Friedman would argue, in response, that autonomy is a matter of degree and that the
requirements for autonomy can, therefore, be more or less stringent. Her objections
to the more stringent requirements of substantive conceptions of autonomy are
twofold. First, she argues that such accounts require a substantive commitment to the
value of autonomy itself. However, agents can be autonomous without endorsing the
value of autonomy. Second, accepting a lower threshold for autonomy is more likely
to promote respect for others’ first-person perspectives. While I agree that autonomy
is a matter of degree, I was somewhat perplexed by Friedman’s interpretation of
substantive conceptions. Most substantive conceptions require either that autonomous
agents possess certain psychological characteristics, such as a sense of self-worth or
capacities for self-trust, or stipulate normative competence – the capacity to reflect on
and question social norms and practices – as a condition of autonomy. Friedman
herself seems to waver between the weaker content-neutral account of reflection she
explicitly endorses and a stronger, substantive, normative competence account to
which she implicitly appeals in her claims about the value of autonomy in enabling
agents to question and resist oppressive norms and institutions. In addition, I was
unpersuaded by Friedman’s claims that more demanding accounts of autonomy may
risk treating others who do not meet the requirements for autonomy as unworthy of
respect. If autonomy is a matter of degree there may be good reason to accept a low
threshold for autonomy when it comes to political citizenship, and the rights and
liberties it guarantees, including the right not be treated paternalistically. However, if
one of the values of an ideal of personal, as opposed to political, autonomy is that it
can provide a normative standpoint for criticizing oppressive or manipulative social
structures, there are good reasons to require a more demanding account of the
conditions for autonomous reflection.
Autonomy, Gender, Politics makes a major contribution to the philosophical literature

on autonomy and gender. Whether or not one is ultimately persuaded by her content-
neutral account of autonomy, Friedman’s discussion of the philosophical and social
policy issues raised by a relational approach to autonomy is illuminating, challenging
and insightful.
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2003.12.07
Deen K. Chatterjee, , Don E. Scheid (eds.)
Ethics and Foreign Intervention
Chatterjee, Deen K. and Scheid, Don E. (eds.), Ethics and Foreign Intervention,
Cambridge, 2003, 316pp, $21.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521009049.
Reviewed by Robert L. Holmes, University of Rochester
This book deals, not with foreign intervention in general, as its title would suggest, but
with so-called “humanitarian intervention” (or more precisely, “humanitarian military
intervention” as the editors label it). The issue is whether states may intervene in the
internal affairs of other states for the protection of innocent persons within the
borders of those states. Sovereignty, if taken as an absolute value, would preclude it.
So, on the face of it, would international law as enshrined in the UN Charter. But both
the practice of states in recent decades and the growing emphasis upon human rights
worldwide, would seem to render humanitarian intervention permissible or even
obligatory when necessary to prevent abominations like massacres or genocide. This
book explores both the legal and ethical dimensions of the issue.
The book’s four sections deal with conceptual and normative issues, just-war
perspectives, secession and international law, and the critique of interventionism.
Some of the essays are highly theoretical; others deal at least in part with specific
cases, such as those of Bosnia or Kosovo. The authors include philosophers, political
scientists, and specialists in international relations, many of them prominent in their
fields. Their contributions were written specifically for this volume.
Although the authors differ widely in the perspectives they bring to the issue, they
differ little in their conclusions. They do not view sovereignty as an absolute value.
Many say that it is conditional, depending upon the respect states pay to the rights of
persons within their borders. Virtually all say that states may sometimes intervene in
other states for humanitarian purposes. Indeed, much of the discussion deals not so
much with whether humanitarian intervention is justified as with when it is justified
and for what reasons.
Some, like Stanley Hoffman, in the lead article, clearly favor humanitarian
intervention (“We owe it to the victims of internal crises and crimes”) but without a
clear account of what justifies it. Claiming that traditional just war criteria are not fully
adequate, he puts the challenge to defenders of humanitarian intervention to
undertake “a realistic assessment of the magnitude of their task” (28). He himself
looks forward to a new world order that gives greater priority to individual rights.
Others, like George R. Lucas, Jr. likewise favor intervention but provide detailed
criteria to justify it. With Hoffman, he believes just war criteria are inadequate. He
says, “[t]here is a straightforward, almost pedestrian, sense in which jus ad bellum
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does not apply to humanitarian operations; they are not, nor are they intended to be,
acts of war on the part of the intervening forces” (77). Humanitarian intervention aims
at enforcement of justice, protection of rights, and restoration of law and order. Thus
we need a jus ad pacem to complement jus ad bellum. Its criteria, patterned after
those of just war theory (just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, etc.) will be
specifically tailored to govern humanitarian intervention.
Still others focus more specifically upon the question of what one is justified in doing
in the course of humanitarian intervention. Henry Shue analyzes bombing strategies
as they apply to dual-purpose facilities. Although conceding its apparent legality in
terms of the definition of military objectives in the 1977 Protocol additional to the
1949 Geneva Convention, Shue argues that the NATO bombing campaign against
Serbia in 1999 “flagrantly violated the principle of discrimination by intentionally
causing civilian distress as a means to producing acceptance by Milosevic of NATO’S
terms” (114).
Erin Kelly finds the notion of corporate liability for wrongs done by a group (that is,
holding the group liable but not individual members) inadequate to justify fully the
infliction of harms in humanitarian intervention. She argues for a conception of
distributive collective liability, in which it is the individual members of errant groups
who are held liable. Insofar as distributive justice provides an account of how to
distribute burdens as well as benefits, her account can be regarded as an account of
distributive justice in cases of harms to be inflicted in humanitarian interventions (“a
fair distribution of the costs of alleviating serious injustice” (133). Dismissing the idea
that rights are absolute, she not only maintains that the rights of innocent persons
may sometimes justifiably be violated in such actions, but also that many members of
such groups actually lose their rights not to be harmed. The upshot of her position,
differing significantly from standard just war jus in bello criteria, is that “harming
civilians, perhaps even deliberately, is not necessary prohibited” (135).
Tom J. Farrer, Christine Chwaszcza and Allen Buchanan contribute useful discussions
of different dimensions of the question of whether humanitarian intervention is
justifiable in the cases of harms committed in the course of secession and the
attempts to repress it.
Michael Blake sees the need for a new approach to “international liberal justice.” He
explores the problems of sovereignty in light of Rawlsian liberalism. If stability at the
international level is sought through reciprocity, that is, agreement among all of the
parties affected, there is still the possibility that justice for individual persons within
the entities that are parties to the agreement will be sacrificed. Stability and equality
are achievable within states, he maintains, but not readily achievable at the
international level. What he calls an “ethics of disequilibrium” will not privilege
agreement among states. Generally disfavoring intervention, Blake seems in the end
to settle for a utilitarian calculus: “Intervention is prohibited where the costs of such
intervention would not be justified by the good to be accomplished” (66). Though he
does not say so in so many words, one gets the impression that he favors intervention
where the costs would be justified by the good to be accomplished. If so, his would be
a consequentialist justification of humanitarian intervention rather than a
deontological one (on balance) of the sort that just war theory might provide.
675
The deepest venture into ethical theory in connection with the issue is Chris Brown’s,
“Selective humanitarianism: in defense of inconsistency.” The issue of consistency
arises when we ask: Why intervene in one situation and not in another? Given that we
can’t intervene in all of the areas of the world in which human rights abuses take
place, why some and not others? Citing critics like Chomsky and Luttwak, Brown
acknowledges that U.S. policy seems not to be based on a moral rule. But he
questions whether a search for a moral rule is the right way to go in the first place.
Indeed, he maintains that “the demand that the United States and other Western
countries formulate an uncompromising and universal principle which will tell them
when to intervene and when not to intervene, is fundamentally misconceived” (43).
After a cursory discussion of virtue ethics, Brown emphasizes the importance of
judgment as opposed to the application of a rule or principle. He does allow that the
application of a principle, say, like the Categorical Imperative, can involve the making
of judgments, but he apparently believes that even then a principle-oriented ethics
falls short of the demands of a virtue ethic. The problem with virtue ethics, he
recognizes, is that states are not persons, and it is unclear what it would mean for
them to cultivate virtues. The just-war tradition, he seems to think, is a good starting
point for trying to decide whether a particular intervention is justified. With its range
of criteria, it requires taking account of many facets of the situation one is facing. But
in just-war theory there is still a tendency to reduce decision-making to the
application of rules, which Brown resists. In the end he calls for the cultivation of
moral sensitivity among leaders and the making of the best judgments they can.
While it is difficult to be certain of the actual position he ends up with, this has the
look of a kind of existentialist or situation ethic applied to humanitarian intervention.
In a related vein, Richard W. Miller argues for an approach that disavows the search
for a single “master value” on which to base intervention. It insists instead on “the
diversity and variable rank of the relevant considerations and seeks specific
constellations of reasons, frequently realized in actual situations, which sustain a case
for or against intervention” (215ff.). Indirectly critical of U.S. policy to a greater
degree than most of the other contributors, he speaks of the “hypocrisy of world
powers, above all, the sole superpower” (216). More cynicism toward U.S. policy, he
believes, “might more often tip the balance against dangerous and hegemonic
intervention processes, while favoring rescues that genuinely serve human interests
worldwide” (245).
Iris Marion Young usefully brings to bear upon the discussion an analysis of power and
violence, inspired by Hannah Arendt, and C.A.J. Coady explores the problems
humanitarian intervention creates for just war theory which, in its more recent forms,
allows only wars in self defense, which the use of force for humanitarian purposes is
not, or at least is not primarily. Both, in the end, however, allow the permissibility of
humanitarian intervention in some cases.
The volume makes a useful contribution to the growing discussion of humanitarian

intervention. It should be particularly valuable to those who have already decided that
humanitarian intervention is justifiable and want to understand better the possible
moral and legal rationales for it. There is, however, little here to challenge
conventional thinking on the fundamental moral issue. No firm moral opposition to
humanitarian intervention is defended by any of the authors. No pacifist perspective is
676
represented in the readings, and there is no exploration of nonviolent alternatives to

the forceful repression or overthrow of oppressive regimes.
2003.12.08
Jurgen Habermas, Barbara Fulmer (edited and translations)
Truth and Justification
Habermas, Jurgen, Truth and Justification, edited and with translations by Barbara
Fulmer, MIT Press, 2003, 349pp, $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 0262083183.
Reviewed by Richard Rorty , Stanford University
The range of issues discussed in this collection of recent essays by Jürgen Habermas
is suggested by the title of its Introduction: “Realism after the linguistic turn”.
Habermas says that that turn shifted “the standard of epistemic objectivity from the
private certainty of an experiencing subject to the public practice of justification within
a communicative community”. It thereby encouraged a “contextualist challenge to the
realist intuition”, for it raised the question of “whether any sense of context-
independent validity can be salvaged from the concept of truth” (249).
Habermas formulates this challenge in the terms suggested by the title of one of the
essays: “From Kant to Hegel and back again: the move toward
detranscendentalization”. His expositions and criticisms of the work of Robert
Brandom, Hilary Putman, and other contemporary philosophers are written with an
eye to the Kant-Hegel contrast—the opposition between the universalism aimed at by
transcendental philosophy and the particularism and localism necessitated by Hegelian
historicism.
Habermas is one of the few philosophers who is as much at home with Hegel, Hamann
and Heidegger as he is with Davidson, Sellars and Dummett. So he is able to move
back and forth, smoothly and perspicuously, between small-scale critical analyses and
insightful historical comparisons and generalizations. The result is a survey of the
contemporary philosophical scene that is far more imaginative, and far more
stimulating, than the sort found in books whose authors’ range of reference is limited
to the last few decades’ worth of work within analytic philosophy.
This book will be of great interest both to students of Habermas’ universalistic

discourse ethics and to philosophers interested in the debate between philosophers
sympathetic to Wittgenstein and to pragmatism (such as Davidson, Putnam and
Brandom) and their critics—especially those critics who, after conceding a great deal
to Wittgenstein’s attack on empiricism, are still concerned to preserve what McDowell
calls “answerability to the world”.
Habermas regards Brandom as representing “the state of the art of pragmatic

approaches in analytic philosophy of language”, but thinks that Brandom’s
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“assimilation of the objectivity of experience to the intersubjectivity of communication

is reminiscent of an infamous Hegelian move” (7-8). He reads Brandom as an arch-
contextualist, whose inferentialist theory of the nature of propositional content
“obliterates the distinction between the intersubjectively shared lifeworld and the
objective world”. Brandom, he says, “does not rescue the realist intuitions by recourse
to the contingent constraints of a world that is supposed to exist independently and
for everyone” (155), and so is driven to a linguistified version of Hegel’s objective
idealism.
Habermas argues that we need a concept of empirical truth that “connects the result
of successful justification with something in the objective world” (42). This means
keeping intact the distinction between the availability of a “justification-independent
point of reference” for assertions of empirical fact and the absence of such a point of
reference when we turn to moral judgments and norms. In morality, he says, we lack
“the ontological connotation of reference to things about which we can state facts”
(42). So he criticizes Brandom’s refusal to accept any version of the Kantian
distinction between theoretical and practical uses of reason.
Habermas treats Putnam more sympathetically. He shares Putnam’s fear of relativism,

and thinks that Putnam succeeds in offering a “theory of direct reference” that enables
us to “recognize objects under different descriptions, or if, necessary, across
paradigms” (219). But, although he thinks Putnam to be sounder than Brandom on
the subject of empirical truth, he is dubious about the absence of what he calls “the
moment of unconditionality” in Putnam’s account of moral norms. Putnam’s Deweyan
and Aristotelian “virtue ethics”, he thinks, does not do justice to the distinction
between “a universalist morality of justice and particularist ethics of the good life”
(228).
Throughout this book, Habermas is concerned to keep distinctions in place that

Hegelians and pragmatists urge us to dissolve. In particular, he sees the historicism
common to Hegel, Heidegger and Dewey as endangering Kantian claims to the
universal validity of, for example, the prohibition against torture. He is not willing to
think of that prohibition as something local and recent—an innovation of the European
Enlightenment. He insists that such absolute prohibitions are grounded in the nature
of linguistic communication—in the ability of human beings to give and ask for
reasons. He sees pragmatism’s assimilation of empirical truth to practical advantage
as smoothing the way for moral relativism.
Like Putnam and the late Bernard Williams, Habermas wants to naturalize and de-
transcendentalize philosophy, and to disconnect morality from metaphysics. So he is
willing to concede a lot of ground to Nietzsche’s polemics against Plato—and in
particular to give up on the correspondence theory of truth. But he nevertheless holds
on both to claims of unconditionality and to what he calls “the natural Platonism of the
lifeworld”—a Platonism that insists on “a justification-transcendent standard for
orienting ourselves by context-independent truth-claims” (254).
The philosophers whom Habermas thinks have gone too far in an Hegelian direction
agree with him that in the modern world “the moral universe loses the appearance of
an ontological given and comes to be seen as a construct” (263). But they differ from
678
him on two points: (1) whether to respond to this change by giving up the notion of
“an ontological given” across the board--in empirical science as well as in morality; (2)
whether, after recognizing the moral universe to be a construct, we need worry about
whether it is a local construct or whether it contains elements that are more than
merely local.
One’s reaction to Habermas’ new book will depend on whether one believes that
retention of something like the “natural Platonism” of common sense is essential to
our hopes for a decent society, or instead thinks that a change in common sense
might help us realize these hopes. Those who follow Dewey in thinking of context-
independence as a Platonist shibboleth will see Habermas as trying to nudge us back
from Hegel to Kant at just the wrong moment—the moment when Hegelian ideas are
beginning to revitalize analytic philosophy of mind and language. But if one thinks that
Plato and Kant were on to something that Hegel was wrong to abandon--that playing
the game of giving and asking for reasons requires both the notion of ontological
givenness and that of unconditional obligation--then one will find this book very
welcome indeed. Both sorts of readers will find the book as broad-gauged as it is
incisive, and as forcefully argued as it is fair-minded.
679

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NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003

Reviews Archive of 2003

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As explained by Kusch, a communitarian epistemology is one that holds (a) that