I offer an interpretation of Carnap and Quine’s views on cognitive significance and insignificance. The basic idea behind their views is as follows: to judge an expression is insignificant is to recommend it not be used in or explicated into languages used to express truth-valued judgments in inquiry; to judge an expression is significant is to recommend it be used in or explicated into such languages. These judgments are pragmatic judgments, made in light of purposes for language use in inquiry. (...) For Carnap at least, these pragmatic judgments are non-cognitive. This basic idea is only a roughly correct statement of their views. This is because the details of the scientific languages they recommend for inquiry are necessary to understand their views and the way they understand their own views. Even so, I offer two reasons to suggest that this basic idea is worthy of our consideration today. First, it provides a conception of significance that captures the natural thought that epistemological concerns can lead us to consider expressions to be insignificant without requiring an objectionable form of verificationism. Second, if we appeal also to Carnap and Quine’s pluralistic attitude toward explication, we can make a pragmatic judgment that an expression is insignificant while judging it to be significant on a distinct explication of significance fit for describing and explaining natural language. (shrink)

The difference between Carnap and Quine over analyticity is usually thought to turn on a disagreement as to whether there is a notion of meaning, or rules of language, which enable us to define that idea. This paper argues that the more important disagreement is epistemological. Quine came to accept a notion of analyticity. That leaves him in a position somewhat like Putnam's in ‘The Analytic and the Synthetic’: that there is a notion of analyticity, but that it is of (...) no philosophical importance. But their reasons for thinking analyticity unimportant are quite different: for Putnam it is because all analytic truths are trivial; for Quine, the notion of analyticity itself is unimportant. I contrast Putnam's position with that of Carnap, and also contrast Carnap and Quine. Analyticity only has the force that it has for Carnap because he accepts the Principle of Tolerance, the idea that changes within a language and changes of language are subject to justification in different senses. Quine rejects that idea. That is why he does not take analyticity to be philosophically important or useful. (shrink)

This paper investigates the strange case of an argument that was directed against a positivist verification principle. We find an early occurrence of the argument in a talk by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden at the 1934 International Congress of Philosophy in Prague, where Carnap and Neurath were present and contributed short rejoinders. We discuss the underlying presuppositons of the argument, and we evaluate whether the attempts by Carnap (especially) actually succeed in answering this argument. We think they don’t, and offer (...) instead a few sociological thoughts about why the argument seems to have disappeared from the profession’s evaluaton of the positivist criterion of verifiability. (shrink)

This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant during the first three decades of the century. Beginning in (...) the 1930s and 1940s, however, the middle third of the century witnessed the rising influence in America of what would become known as “‘analytic philosophy’,” with its primary roots in Europe: in the Cambridge philosophical analysis of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein; logical empiricism and positivism on the continent; and linguistic analysis and ordinary- language philosophy at Oxford. This overview stresses the persistence of pragmatist themes throughout much of the century, while emphasizing the mid-century transformations that resulted from developments primarily in analytic philosophy. These combined influences resulted at the turn of the millennium in the flourishing, among other developments, of distinctively analytic styles of pragmatism and naturalism. (shrink)

When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...) relation between fetus and mother (connection, parthood, dependence). (shrink)

: This paper discusses the origins of two key notions in Foucault's work up to and including The Archaeology of Knowledge. The first of these notions is the notion of "archaeology" itself, a form of historical investigation of knowledge that is distinguished from the mere history of ideas in part by its unearthing what Foucault calls "historical a prioris". Both notions, I argue, are derived from Husserlian phenomenology. But both are modified by Foucault in the light of Jean Cavaillès's critique (...) of Husserl's theory of science. On Husserl's view, we demand that propositions holding of scientific objects be intersubjective and invariant, but this demand conflicts with our immediate experience, which is essentially bound to a subject's perspective. Thus the mathematical and physical sciences must utilise formal languages to fix these truths independently of the thoughts of a particular subject. This necessary procedure leads to the sedimentation of these formal systems: we forget their source in the concrete experiences of individuals, and use them as purely technical means. The technique of reactivating the intentional acts in which sedimented formal systems originated is thus, in Fink's terminology, an archaeological method. Foucault and Cavaillès retain the general outlines of this archaeology of the sciences, but they reject its appeal to conscious acts of meaning, to what Cavaillès calls "the philosophy of consciousness". I conclude by discussing the implicit difficulties in the "linguistic transcendentalism" proposed as an alternative by these French critics of Husserl. (shrink)

The Politics of Military Force uses discourse theory to examine the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that (...) result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally. (shrink)

According to a popular interpretation, Carnap’s interpretation of probability had evolved from a logical towards a subjective conception. However Carnap himself insisted that his basic philosophical view of probability was always the same. I address this apparent clash between Carnap's self-identification and the subsequent interpretations of his work. Following its original intentions, I reconstruct inductive logic as an explication. The emerging picture is of a versatile linguistic framework, whose main function is not the discovery of objective logical relations in the (...) object language, but the stipulation of conceptual possibilities. Within this representation, I map out the changes that the project went through. Seen from such an explication-based perspective, inductive logic becomes quite hard to categorize using the standard labels. (shrink)

In his Notes on Philosophy , which he began writing in 1796, Friedrich Schlegel asserts that ‘The fact that one person understands the other is philosophically incomprehensible, but it is certainly magical.’ In the interim a large amount of philosophical effort has been expended on trying to refute Schlegel's first claim. The fact is, though, that what Michael Dummett calls a ‘fullblooded theory of meaning’ is now looking less and less like a really feasible philosophical enterprise, so Schlegel may have (...) actually been right. Dummett maintains that a ‘full-blooded theory of meaning’ ‘must give an explicit account, not only of what anyone must know in order to know the meaning of any given expression, but of what constitutes having such knowledge’. However, as I shall try to show via aspects of the hermeneutic tradition, it is precisely this way of talking about meaning and understanding that renders them incomprehensible. The differences between approaching the issue of understanding from the hermeneutic tradition and approaching it from the analytical tradition can, I want to suggest, tell us something important about the state of philosophy today. My aim is eventually to suggest that we need to understand the analytical version of the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy as a perhaps rather questionable aspect of a much more important ‘hermeneutic turn’, whose implications are now becoming apparent in more and more diverse areas of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This paper takes distances from two influential images of Wittgenstein's philosophy: the image of a primarily ethical philosopher defended by the so-called «resolute» interpreters and that of an ascetically "analytical" philosopher transmitted by the standard interpretation. Instead of contrasting images (that of Wittgenstein as an "aesthetic" philosopher and that of the "ethical" Wittgenstein), this paper focuses on the analysis of the fractures and tensions characterizing not only the relationship between Wittgenstein's philosophy and aesthetics, but also the very style of Wittgenstein's (...) thought. Addressing a specific issue from a conceptual and textual standpoint (the unity of Ethics and Aesthetics in the Tractatus) seems to the author to be a fruitful strategy that allows us not only to understand whether and how determinant and central the aesthetic problem is for Wittgenstein, but also to see how aesthetics itself can be radically reshaped through the filter offered by his thought. In the first place, then, it is clarified what the Tractatus claim that ethics and aesthetics «sind eins» might entail. Secondly, it is checked if and how the conceptual consistency of the «being one» of ethics and aesthetics is transformed during the 1930s, to the point that it requires a different configuration: the metamor¬phosis of the logical unity between the two conceptual fields into an analogical affinity. Analyzing this conceptual metamorphosis the paper considers also the idea of an asymmetry of the aesthetic over the ethical as already evident, despite appearances, in the 1929 Lecture on Ethics. This asymmetry is then developed focusing the image of grammatical mechanism with its degrees of freedom of which Wittgensteins writes from 1930. In connection with this image the author outlines finally the idea of an aesthetic mechanism arising from primitive reactions and strictly related with the genesis of language games. (shrink)

Professor Plantinga's “scandalous” conclusion thatIf my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latterrests in part on the twin claims that the best reason we have for belief in other minds is the analogical argument, and the best reason we have for belief in God is the teleological argument. The conclusion also rests on Plantinga's analyses of these two arguments, which show that both fail for (...) very similar reasons. Thus the beliefs based on these arguments are “in the same epistemological boat,“ and Plantinga draws his conclusion. This is, as James Tomberlin says, “an ingenious argument for the conclusion that belief in God is justified in the absence of any good reason whatever.“In this paper I wish to consider the two claims mentioned above, that the best reasons we have for belief in other minds and belief in God are the analogical and teleological arguments, respectively. (shrink)

In recent years, a renascent form of pragmatism has developed which argues that a satisfactory pragmatic position must integrate into itself the concepts of truth and objectivity. This New Pragmatism, as Cheryl Misak calls it, is directed primarily against Rorty's neo-pragmatic dismissal of these concepts. For Rorty, the goal of our epistemic practices should not be to achieve an objective view, one that tries to represent things as they are 'in themselves,' but rather to attain a view of things that (...) can gain as much inter-subjective agreement as possible. In Rorty's language, we need to replace the aim of objectivity with that of solidarity. While the New Pragmatists agree with Rorty's 'humanist' and .. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between 'I' as principle of transcendental philosophy and its ordinary use as first-personal pronoun. This relationship is a central issue in the philosophy of J. G. Fichte. Fichte was concerned to secure the gains made by Kant's Critique against what he called the 'dogmatism of the so-called Kantians' as well as against the attack of the skeptics, by grounding philosophy in a first principle which he called 'I'. To say what Fichte means by (...) 'I' is to give an account of his philosophy, for, according to him, nothing is to be assumed outside of this 'I'. For Fichte the dogmatism of the 'so-called Kantians' consists in the idea that even when the formal conditions of experience have been established, a non-conceptualized content needs to be given to the mind from outside in order to produce empirical knowledge. This way of conceiving empirical constraints of thought, according to Fichte, threatens the results of Kant's critical philosophy, because it is inconsistent with the theoretical spontaneity and the practical autonomy that are crucial to Kant's conception of reason. Fichte argues that adequate empirical constraints can only be deduced from within the 'I'. To do this we must radically rethink our received concept of an 'I', a rethinking which in essence has already been effectuated by Kant, and which Fichte merely wants to make explicit and bring to fruition. Adequate constraints can be seen to be generated internally, once we realize that the standpoint of the 'theoretical I' is derivative from the standpoint of the 'practical I'. A result of Fichte's emphasis on the practical aspect of reason is a heightened awareness of the concept of the individual person and its status vis-a-vis the 'I' as philosophical principle. To be consistent with his principle, and indeed to prove his point, Fichte must 'deduce' the 'I' as individual. (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The (...) centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time. (shrink)

In this work I will evaluate the functions of rights within the moral discourse, and I will point out the benefits and the characteristics of a moral theory that takes rights seriously. In the first chapter I will sketch a definition of rights as a moral category that can be distinguished from categories such as the ones of juridical rights and natural rights. In the second chapter, I will propose a hohfeldian analysis of the normative syntax of rights, and I (...) will focus on the key problem of the relation between rights and duties. The issue I will deal with in the third chapter is the general function of specific rights. On this matter I will draw an hybrid solution between the orthodox proposals of the so-called interest and choice theories, and the more recent approaches provided by the past ten years literature. In the fourth and fifth chapters topics such as the conflict of rights, their violations and infringements will allow me to go deeper in the context and premises of the model of moral theory that I will take into account in the last section of this work. In the sixth chapter I will give an answer to the central questions of this research, and I will also provide a general model of abstract rights, by shading light on their original normative functions. I will use this model to investigate the possibility of justifying a moral theory on its ground, and I will compare this kind of theory with other theories structured upon different categories of normative objects – like duties and goals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bibliography of the New Rhetoric ProjectDavid A. Frank and William DriscollScholars do not have access to a complete bibliography of the new rhetoric project. We have redressed this problem by compiling what we believe is the most comprehensive bibliography to date of the works of Chaïm Perelman and of those he coauthored with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The bibliography includes all the English and French titles, as well as titles (...) that saw first publication in other languages. Translations we believe Perelman may have authorized or endorsed are included.With this bibliography, scholars can now better understand how the new rhetoric project was conceived and how it unfolded. Within the larger constellation of the project, Perelman's bibliography is the most extensive, numbering almost three hundred entries. The trajectory of Perelman's scholarship reveals the origins of the new rhetoric project and how it evolved between the time of his announcement in 1949 that he and Olbrechts-Tyteca had embarked on a program designed to rehabilitate reason and the period of his final articles in the 1980s. A review of the articles and books that came out of the Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca collaboration reveals both a phase of conceptualization and development of the project and a phase of culmination. In the first phase, commencing with Rhétorique et philosophie, the authors established the need for a rhetorically grounded philosophy. As they built toward the publication of the Traité, [End Page 449] the culmination of their ten-year effort, they wrote articles elaborating on "notions" in argumentation (1955) and on the tenets of the "new rhetoric" (1956). In 1958, the year the Traité appeared, they published articles on classical and romantic loci in argumentation and on time in argumentation. With the exception of a 1983 tribute to the theorist Pareto, they did not write together after 1958 but instead pursued separate lines of research out of their collaboration. A significant number of theses entries rehearse and embellish notions introduced between 1947 and 1958, the years of the genesis, development, and culmination of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's new rhetoric project.AbbreviationsChALe champ de l'argumentationDMPDroit, morale, et philosophieEDEthique et droitIJPAThe Idea of Justice and the Problem of ArgumentJLAJustice, Law, and Argument: Essays on Moral and Legal ReasoningNRHThe New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and Its ApplicationsJJusticeJRJustice et raisonRPRhétorique et philosophie pour une théorie de l'argumentation en philosophieBibliography1931 "Esquisse d'une logistique des valeurs." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 36 (3–4): 486–96. Google Scholar1932 "A propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 37 (3): 385–99. Google Scholar1933 "De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance." Archives de la Société belge de philosophie 5 (3): 5–44. Google Scholar"Le statut social des jugements de vérité." Revue de l'Institut de sociologie 13 (1): 17–23. Google Scholar1935 "Réflexions sur l'assimilation." La tribune Juive 12:51–52. [End Page 450]Google Scholar1936 "L'antinomie de M. Gödel." Bulletins de l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 22 (6): 730–36. Google Scholar"Les paradoxes de la logique." Mind 45 (178): 204–8. Google Scholar1937 "L'équivalence, la définition et la solution du paradoxe de Russell." L'enseignement mathématique 36 (5–6): 350–56. Google Scholar"Metafizyka fregego." Kwartalnik filozoficzny 12 (2): 121–42. Google Scholar"Réponse à MM. Grelling et Beth." Mind 46 (182): 278–79. Google Scholar"Une solution des paradoxes de la logique et ses conséquences pour la conception de l'infini." In Congrès Descartes: IXe Congrès international de philosophie, 6:206–10. Paris: Hermann. Google Scholar1938 "Etude sur Frege." PhD diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles.1939 "Etude sur Gottlob Frege." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 44 (2): 224–27. Google Scholar"De logica en het vrije onderzoek." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 44 (2): 209–19. Google Scholar"La morale des forts et la morale... (shrink)

SÍNTESE - Facilmente lê-se Descartes como autor de um projeto de reforma do conhecimento, estranhando- se mesmo a presença da moral, na parte terceira do Discurso. Uma análise aprofundada do projeto cartesiano mostra, entretanto, que na economia complessiva intelectual projetada por ele, a moral representa ao mesmo tempo o pressuposto e o ponto alto de tal reforma.