understanding (Kant) 7 unconscious Puitosopty oF Mino For Leibniz, the unconscious comprises the appetitive intentions of a transcend- ent nature in the self, which subsequent German, idealists called the blind will or the desire of which the mind is ignorant. Freud took over this term for a fundamental concept of his psychology. The unconscious comprises mental items or processes of which we are unaware, but which we can posit through interpretation of their indirect determina tion of phenomena such as dreams, slips of the tongue, humor, and neurotic behavior. A wide range of experience influences what we think and do although we are not conscious of it. According to Freud, the contents of the unconscious that are most important for his theory of the mind are repressed and unavailable to consciousness. The unconscious, however, is dynamic in the sense that it is active in the determination of behavior. The unconscious contrasts with the preconscious, which comprises latent elements of mind waiting to be discovered. The preconscious is sometimes loosely equated with the unconscious. According to Freud, what is conscious is only a small part of the mind, with most mental contents in the unconscious. The unconscious is a wider concept than the repressed, for while everything that is re- pressed is unconscious, not everything unconscious is repressed, In his early writings, Freud considered the opposition between the unconscious and the con- scious to be a mental conflict. The unconscious has no organization, lacks differentiation, has no sense of morality, and is impersonal, yet itis the fertile source of eulture and civilization. The dynamic uncon: is the defining preoccupation of psychoanalysis. In Freud's later writings, the id takes over the attributes of the unconscious, although the ego also has an unconscious part. The theory of the unconscious was further developed by Jung and Lacan. “For the time being we possess no better name for psychical processes which behave actively but nevertheless do not reach the consciousness of the person concerned and that is all we mean by our “unconsciousness.” Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9 understanding (Heidegger) Mopsaw Evrorran puitosoruy [German Verstchen] ‘Traditional philosophy takes understanding to be one of the major cognitive abilities of the subject or mind and subordinates the question of the understanding to the problem of knowledge. Heidegger breaks with this tradition by claiming, that understanding is a basic mode of Dasein’s being. Rather than discovering or making assertions about the particular faets of the world, understand- ing is the awareness of possibilities, that is, the di which of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Understand- ing operates in terms of projecting those possibilities that are tied to Dascin’s worldly situation. It has a threefold “fore” structure, that is fore-having, fore- sight, and fore-conception. In this way, understand- ing is Dasein’s selfunderstanding. While the state of mind, another mode of Dasein’s being, discloses facticity, that is, Dasein’s thrownness into this world, understanding becomes aware of its inevitable freedom, For Heidegger, the traditional conception of the understanding is derived from the under- Josedness (Erschlossenheit) of the for-the-sake-of standing as the existential awareness of possibil- ities. Working out the possibilities projected in understanding is interpretation, Heidegger's the- ory of understanding establishes the basis for the hermeneutic tum, “With the term ‘understanding’ we have in mind a fundamental existentiale, which is neither a definite species of cognition distinguished, let us say, from explaining and conceiving, nor any: cognition at all in the sense of grasping something, thematically.” Heidegger, Being and Time understanding (Kant) EpisrEMOLOoY, METAPHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY OF MOND [German Verstand, corresponding to Greek dianoia and Latin intellectio] Kant distinguished understand- ing from sensibility and reason. While sensibility is receptive, understanding is spontaneous. While understanding is concemed with the range of phe= nomena and is empty without intuition, reason, moves from judgment to judgment concer ing phenomena, is tempted to extend beyond the limits of experience to generate fallacious infer- ences. Kant claimed that the main act of understand- ing is judgment and called it a faculty of judgment. He claimed that there is an a priori concept or category corresponding to each kind of judgment as its logical function and that understanding is con- stitured by twelve categories. Hence understanding,uniformity of nature unexpected examination paradox, another name for surprise examination paradox unhappy consciousness EpisTEMOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY oF Minn Hegel’s term for @ consciousness that desires complete knowledge of itself but cannot obtain it, Hegel believed that self-consciousness proceeded in history from pre-history (the struggle for recognition) to Greece and Rome (Stoicism and skepticism) and medieval Christianity (unhappy consciousness). At the stage of skepticism, consci- ‘ousness claims that all knowledge is relative to the subjective point of view. However, to make this claim meaningful, it must be assured that there is a that all knowledge is thus relative. As a result, a skeptic has to admit that he is unable to justify these beliefs outside of his own contingently held point of view. He has a divided form of consciousness, with a tension between its subjective and objective points of view. Here skepticism gave way to the stage of unhappy universal point of view to consciousness. Such a consciousness is internally divided, for it has to assume both points of view. It is the consciousness of separation between man and nature and between man and man, Christianity’s message is a call to men to restore the lost unity of consciousness by bringing their subjective points of view into line with the impersonal eye of God. In general, the unhappy consciousness describes a form of life in which people’s conceptions of them- selves and of what they claim to know involves an enduring state of erisis. Such a mental state is later called by Kierkegaard “despair.” “Hence the unhappy consciousness, the Alienated Soul which is the consciousness of selfas a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being,” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit unified science Piitosoray OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF sociAL science [German Einheitswissenschafi] Logical posit- ivists held that no essential differences in aim and method exist between the various branches of science. The scientists of all disciplines. should collaborate closely with each other and should unify the vocabulary of sciences by logical analysis. According to this view, there isno sharp demarcation 713 between natural sciences and social sciences. In particular, to establish sciences may be difficult in practice, but it is cersal laws in the social not impossible in principle. Through Otto Neurath, this ideal of scientific unity became a program for logical positivists, who published a scries of books in Vienna under the heading Unified Science. Afier the dissolution of the Vienna Circle, Neurath renamed the official journal Evkenntnis as The Journal of Unified Science, and planned to continue publication of a series of works in the United States under the general title The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. He thought that the work would be similar in historical importance eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie under the direction of Diderot. Unfortunately, this work was never completed, although Carnap and Morris published some volumes originally prepared for it under the title Foundations of the Unity of Science. to the “We have repeatedly pointed out that the formation of the constructional system as a whole is the task of unified science.” Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World uniformity of nature Morapnysics, ePistEMoLooy, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A principle claiming that nature is uniform and that consequently the future will resemble the past and that generalizations holding for observed cases will apply to unobserved cases so long.as the background conditions remain sufficiently similar. In traditional epistemology, Francis Bacon and J. S. Mill assumed the principle to be the ground for the validity of inductive reasoning and scientific predictions. ‘The aim of science is to find uniformity. Buc Hume argued that the principle can only be justified by induction and thus that justifying induction by appeal to the principle involves vicious circularity or question-begging. Popper, in his rejection of inductive method, claimed that the uniformity of nature is a matter of faith. “The belief in the uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that has happened or will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no exceptions.” Russell, The Problems of Philosophy