Maria Rosa Antognazza's work has issued a historical challenge to the thesis that the analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) attacked by epistemologists from Gettier onwards was indeed the standard view traditionally upheld from Plato onwards. This challenge led to an ongoing reappraisal of the historical significance of intuitive knowledge, in which the knower is intimately connected to what is known. Such traditional accounts of intuition, and their accompanying claims to epistemological primacy, constituted the precise target of Moritz Schlick's (...) critique. Schlick engages with this topic throughout his oeuvre, from some of his early epistemological writings, to his anti-metaphysical stance as a leading Logical Empiricist. Schlick crucially distinguishes knowledge from mere acquaintance, denying that the latter has epistemic status. He therefore argues that the very notion of ‘intuitive knowledge’ is a contradictio in adjecto. (shrink)

The common thought that Husserl was committed to a Platonist ontology of essences, and to a mysterious epistemology that holds that we can ‘intuit’ these essences, has contributed substantially to his work being dismissed and marginalized in analytic philosophy. This paper aims to show that it is misguided to dismiss Husserl on these grounds. First, the author aims to explicate Husserl’s views about essences and how we can know them, in ways that make clear that he is not committed to (...) a traditional Platonism, or a mystical epistemology. Second, the author argues that Husserl’s approach was an important source for Carnap in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”, where Carnap tried to overcome the empiricists’ qualms about referring to abstracta. Finally, the author will argue that Husserl’s approach can be reconstructed in contemporary analytic terms by appeal to the idea of pleonastic transformations. By seeing both Husserl’s views and their influences on later analytic work more clearly, the hope is to build bridges and make clear that the approach is of lasting value and interest. (shrink)

I reconstruct the notion of significance [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] in the later Husserl, with attention to his conceptions of judgment and transcendental logic. My analysis is motivated by the idea that an account of significance can help to connect analytic, Anglo-American conceptions of meaning as a precise, law-governed phenomenon investigated via linguistic analysis and Continental European conceptions of meaning in a broader “existential” sense. I argue that Husserl’s later work points to a transcendental-logical conception of a founding level of _significance_ [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] prior (...) to language, and that this conception meets characteristically analytic demands for precision and governance by logical constraints. At the same time, since it is based in descriptions of perceptual intentionality at the level of essential possibility, it leaves room for an account of meaning as a partially undetermined phenomenon of lived experience, and not just of our language and concepts, and thereby meets the characteristically Continental demand to take at face value meaning’s vagueness and indeterminacy in everyday human life. (shrink)

I document Husserl’s growing interest in the foundational character of Greek philosophy for Western culture and show what is unique about Husserl’s appropriation of certain Greek thinkers and conce...

If we examine the discussion between Carnap and Heidegger about metaphysics, we can easily see that epistemological, logical, and ontological issues were at the forefront of that debate, whereas at...

At B19, Kant summarizes the general problem of pure reason in the problem of synthetic a priori judgments. The vicissitudes that have affected last century’s philosophy are, in this sense, a confirmation of its significance: the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge has indeed crossed all the major philosophical currents of the twentieth century, being treated in a wide variety of ways by phenomenologists, logical empiricists, and pragmatists. One of the most original treatments of the issue is that offered by (...) the young Wilfrid Sellars between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, consisting of a hybridization of different traditions. In this paper I will present Sellars’ unique re-elaboration of the notion of the synthetic a priori as it is elaborated in his early writings, showing how his interweaving of themes from pragmatism, phenomenology and logical empiricism leads not just to what I believe is the only possible approach for a realist philosopher, but also to an unexpected Kantian solution in spirit. (shrink)