After more than three centuries, Molyneux's question continues to challenge our understanding of cognition and perceptual systems. Locke, the original recipient of the question, approached it as a theoretical exercise relevant to long-standing philosophical issues, such as nativism, the possibility of common sensibles, and the empiricism-rationalism debate. However, philosophers were quick to adopt the experimentalist's stance as soon as they became aware of recoveries from congenital blindness through ophtalmic surgery. Such recoveries were widely reported to support empiricist positions, suggesting that (...) the question had found its empirical answer. Contrary to this common view, we argue that studies of patients recovering from early blindness through surgery cannot provide an answer. In fact, because of the very nature of such ophtalmological interventions it is impossible to test the question in the empirical conditions outlined by Molyneux. Thus we propose that Molyneux's question be treated as an early thought experiment of a specific kind. Although thought experiments of this kind cannot be turned into actual experimental conditions, they provide a conceptual restructuring of theories. Such restructuring in turn leads to new predictions that can then be tested by normal experiments. In accord with this interpretation, we show that Molyneux's question can be analyzed into a hierarchy of specific questions about vision in its phenomenal and sensory-motor components. Some of these questions do lead to actual experimental conditions that could be studied empirically. (shrink)

Aksumite elites electively identified themselves as “black” in relation to the paler integument of other Mediterranean peoples. Prior to the fourth century CE, the proper noun Aithiopía referred to the area of northern Sudan. Aksum, however, deliberately appropriated the Greek term for its own geopolitical purposes, partly as a way to write itself both into the grand narratives of Graeco-Roman history, where “Ethiopians” recurrently figure as morally “blameless,” as well as—with their conversion to Christianity—into Old and New Testamental eschatologies that (...) consistently position “Ethiopians” as first in the sight of God. This process of self-definition—achieved under the formative gaze of Hellenic, Roman, and Levantine Others—ultimately allowed ‘Ityȯpyā to become a key, if nonetheless still liminal and rogue, player in the post-Constantinian politico-religious arena, in such a way that both economic and cultural capital accrued to the benefit of Aksum. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

Elämä on nähty merkittävänä aiheena Bergsonin filosofiassa. Elämän filosofinen merkitys Bergsonilla ilmenee selvästi hänen pääteoksessaan L'évolution créatrice (Luova evoluutio, 1907), jossa hän keskittyy inhimillisten tietokykyjen evolutiivisen alkuperän rekonstruointiin ja tieto-opillisiin seurauksiin. Bergsonin mukaan biologia tarjoaa filosofialle tietokykyjen kehitysteoreettisen näkökulman, ja filosofia metafysiikkana täsmentää biologialle sopivaa epistemologiaa. Tässä artikkelissa esittelen Bergsonin filosofisen teorian biologian ja epistemologian vastavuoroisesta suhteesta. Aloitan epistemologian, tieteen ja metafysiikan välisen suhteen selventämisellä Bergsonin teoriassa. Sen jälkeen esittelen, kuinka Bergson näkee tietokykyjen kehittymisen olennaisena osana eläinten yleistä kehityshistoriaa. Analysoimalla (...) eläinkunnan kognitiivisten kykyjen kahta taipumusta, älykkyyttä (intelligence) ja vaistoa (instinct), Bergson kehittää näkemyksen metafysiikasta, jonka avulla on mahdollista selvittää epistemologian ja biologian keskinäistä riippuvuutta ja vastavuoroisuutta. Lopuksi valaisen tätä vastavuoroisuutta Bergsonin analyysilla käsitteellisen tiedon muodostumisesta. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the sensualist naturalism in the Logic of the priest and French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. This author has been very little studied in our language; being almost non-existent in philosophy journals published in the Hispanic world. This paper is divided into four parts. A first part, where whoever reads us will find the most general naturalism as the humus of the logic written by Mureaux’s priest. In the second part, we will (...) study the reasons for the sensualist qualifier that underlies this original logic and, finally, in the third part, we will show how to articulate the images, genres, classes in the simplified language of a logic that is in accordance with the sensitive organic system of the human being, along with the other important sciences. We will finish this work with our conclusions on how Condillac, moved by his naturalistic and sensualistic background, admonished the essentialist and synthesist logic of his time, rehearsing a renewal through an unusual critical sagacity. (shrink)

: In the context of nineteenth-century philosophical reflection, Francesco Bonatelli set himself the following goal: to defend the pillars of Spiritualism and ontology through an careful examination of psychic contents and consciousness, while closely contesting both the psychology and the psychophysiology of Positivism and Spiritualism itself, La coscienza e il meccanesimo interiore and Percezione e pensiero Bonatelli puts forward his “critical experience-grounded philosophy” and proposes an original solution to the problem of the nature of the subject, consciousness and its unity, (...) using an analysis of “sentiments” to reveal the inseparable tangle of the cognitive and ontological dimensions of the self. Keywords : Positivism; Consciousness; Self-consciousness; Actus essendi ; Substance; Gnoseology Francesco Bonatelli: un approccio critico alla coscienza e al soggetto umano tra spiritualismo e positivismo Riassunto : Nel contesto della riflessione filosofica dell’Ottocento, Francesco Bonatelli scelse come proprio ufficio la difesa dei capisaldi dello spiritualismo e dell’ontologia, mediante un attento esame dei contenuti psichici e della coscienza stessa, in un serrato confronto con la psicologia e psicofisiologia del positivismo e con lo spiritualismo stesso. In opere come Pensiero e conoscenza, La coscienza e il meccanesimo interiore e Percezione e pensiero, Bonatelli espose la propria “filosofia critica a base sperimentale” e propose una soluzione originale al problema della natura del soggetto, della coscienza e della sua unità, mostrando come nell’analisi dei sentimenti si riveli l’inscindibile intreccio delle due dimensioni, cognitiva e ontologica, dell’io. Parole chiave : Positivismo; Coscienza; Autocoscienza; Actus essendi ; Sostanza; Gnoseologia. (shrink)

Résumé J’examine la thèse défendue par Donald Davidson selon laquelle un être ne peut avoir des pensées que s’il a été en communication linguistique avec quelqu’un d’autre par le passé. Cette thèse, que j’appelle « l’interprétationnisme radical », dérive de la thèse A selon laquelle il est nécessaire d’avoir les concepts de croyance et de vérité objective pour avoir des croyances, et de la thèse B voulant que la communication linguistique soit requise pour l’acquisition du concept de vérité objective. En (...) réponse à A, je préconise un point de vue contextualiste, selon lequel les normes d’attribution de croyances dépendent du contexte conversationnel. Le contextualisme entraîne non pas que A est fausse, mais qu’elle doit être relative à un contexte. Je montre par ailleurs que contrairement à ce qu’affirme B, l’interaction avec autrui n’est pas nécessaire pour acquérir le concept de vérité objective. Je conclus que les arguments de Davidson soutiennent au mieux l’interprétationnisme modéré, c’est-à-dire l’idée selon laquelle un être a des pensées si et seulement si ces pensées sont interprétables par un interprète pleinement informé.I examine Donald Davidson’s thesis that a creature cannot have thoughts unless it has had a linguistic communication with another creature. This thesis, which I call “Radical Interpretationism”, derives from the claim that it is necessary to have the concepts of belief and objective truth in order to have beliefs and the claim that linguistic communication is required to acquire the concept of objective truth. In response to, I put forward a contextualist viewpoint, according to which the norms of belief attribution are context-dependent. Contextualism entails not that is false, but that it must be relativised to a context. I then show that contrary to what says, interaction with others is not necessary to acquire the concept of objective truth. I conclude that Davidson’s arguments at best support moderate interpretationism, that is, the view that a creature has thoughts if and only if these thoughts are interpretable by a fully-informed interpreter. (shrink)

From Herder to Benedict Anderson, language and nation have been at the centre of ideas about community. This hypothesis, however, poses a problem for analysing ideas about Europe. How can we understand “Europe” as a concept or form of identity when language and nationality are considered the foundation of imagined communities and loyalties? This article addresses this difficulty. It uses J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of “sub-languages” to suggest that one can investigate the rhetorical strategies, images and vocabularies with which (...) texts articulate ideas about Europe. These sub-languages evoke imagined communities, most obviously when texts name and identify particular groups of people as “Europeans.” But by using images and rhetorics about Europe, these texts also appeal to a readership that comprehends—even if it does not fully accept—certain assumptions about the continent. In this way, texts evoke an imagined community of readers who purportedly share a similar way of understanding Europe, or who can perhaps be persuaded to think about it in similar terms. These processes are historically particular, and so the article concludes with concrete examples. It focuses on how early-nineteenth-century philhellenes evoked a European imagined community to solicit support for the Greek Revolution. (shrink)

This article explores the aportation of Adam Smith’s Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages to the rest of his work. It starts analyzing its internal structure in the light of its documented sources, of which it follows a linguistic model that is more constructive than referential. From the initial approach that language, first of all, communicates needs, the author connects this germ of the process of socialization with Smith’s published works, explaining them as a semiotic development of the fundamental (...) idea that the human being has not a definite Nature, but an open history in which he must make to himself. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine some aspects of the debate between a perceptual model of communication, according to which testimony is a source of knowledge about the communicated fact, and an inferential model of communication, according to which testimony requires from the hearer an inference from the used signs, the speaker’s mental states, and other features of the context. From a reflection on the nature of the capacity for metarepresentation, and its dependence on the capacities of social perception and simulation, (...) I show that the ascription of even complex mental states to the speaker does not preclude communication from functioning on a mode in which the hearer directly inherits the information transmitted by the speaker. Understanding is grounded on the natural tendency to accept what is intelligibly presented to us as true. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: If research devoted to the clandestine literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is today enjoying considerable expansion in the scholarly world, it tends, nonetheless, to be restricted to materialist considerations. However, other themes are open to exploration, such as the immaterialist one which is explicitly mentioned in two manuscripts. After presenting and analyzing these two texts, we argue that this clandestine account of immaterialism could explain both the evolution of this theory during the Enlightenment and the misunderstanding of (...) Berkeley’s philosophy. (shrink)

A exortação de Rousseau, feita dois séculos antes de Lévi-Strauss, de levar a vista ao longe, observar as diferenças entre os homens para conhecer o homem em sua especificidade e propriedade dá o tom do que se poderia chamar de antropologia rousseauísta. O conhecimento sobre o homem não é obtido ao olhar para o lado e tomar como referência um tipo qualquer imediatamente disponível. Ao contrário, é preciso de viagens bem regradas, de uma educação do olhar e da organização dos (...) dados colhidos pela observação. (shrink)

Marx: Later Political Writings brings together the most important texts in political philosophy written by Marx after 1848. All are in new translations, and the collection is introduced by the leading Marx scholar Terrell Carver. Unlike other collections, the works are presented complete, according to their earliest edition or manuscript text, and include the Manifesto of the Communist Party, and the little-known Notes on Adolph Wagner. These texts allow the close contact between Marx and contemporary politics to emerge in a (...) clearer light. (shrink)