This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

In this short paper, I respond to Keith Raymond Harris’ paper “Synthetic Media, The Wheel, and the Burden of Proof”. In particular, I examine his arguments against two prominent approaches employed to deal with synthetic media such as deepfakes and other GenAI content, namely, the “reactive” and “proactive” approaches. In the first part, I raise a worry about the problem Harris levels at the reactive approach, before providing a constructive way of expanding his worry regarding the proactive approach.

Deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media are widely regarded as serious threats to our knowledge of the world. Various technological responses to these threats have been proposed. The reactive approach proposes to use artificial intelligence to identify synthetic media. The proactive approach proposes to use blockchain and related technologies to create immutable records of verified media content. I argue that both approaches, but especially the reactive approach, are vulnerable to a problem analogous to the ancient problem of the criterion—a (...) line of argument with skeptical implications. I argue that, while the proactive approach is relatively resistant to this objection, it faces its own serious challenges. In short, the proactive approach would place a heavy burden on users to verify their own content, a burden that is exacerbated by and is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities. (shrink)

Ideology criticism, like scepticism, calls into question the objective or justified status of beliefs. However, where scepticism only refutes, and never puts forward, a substantive claim about anything, the ideology critic must maintain some criterion for distinguishing ideas which support relations of domination from those that do not, in virtue of her criticism of a particular set of ideas as “ideological”. The trouble for the ideology critic is that the sceptical methods she deploys undermine any critical thesis, including her own. (...) Thus, the theory of ideology tends to undercut ideology criticism with a fundamental problem of self-implication. This paper draws on the epistemological problem of the criterion to explain and define a basic problem of justification for the theory of ideology. A problem of self-implication is introduced in part one. I argue that the basis for ideology criticism inevitably succumbs to the very doubt it puts forward. I draw on various criticisms of ideology criticism to formulate a specific account of the basic, fundamental problem for the theory of ideology. I show how norms for ideology criticism are vulnerable to an Ancient sceptical problem for epistemic criteria, which brings the ideology critic to a dilemma: either (i) find independent grounds for criticism, immune to ideology, or (ii) show how ideology is self-undermining. Each horn of the dilemma is ideological. (shrink)