What is the contrary of pleasure? “Pain” is one common answer. This paper argues that pleasure instead has two natural contraries: unpleasure and hedonic indifference. This view is defended by drawing attention to two often-neglected concepts: the formal relation of polar opposition and the psychological state of hedonic indifference. The existence of mixed feelings, it is argued, does not threaten the contrariety of pleasure and unpleasure.

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson is increasingly recognised as an important predecessor of ordinary language philosophy. He emphasizes the authority of ordinary language in philosophical theorizing. At the same time, however, he circumscribes the limits of that authority and identifies cases in which it threatens to mislead us. My aim is to consider in detail one case where, according to Cook Wilson, ordinary language has misled philosophical theorizing. Judgement was one of the core notions of the logic, epistemology, and philosophy of mind (...) of Cook Wilson’s time. Cook Wilson rejects this notion, in the form developed by his contemporaries, in part because it is based on a problematic analogy between ordinary language and the thoughts expressed in that language. Cook Wilson’s discussion of judgement also highlights the extent to which Cook Wilson was critical of, but also responsive to, his contemporaries. In addition, variants of the language-thought analogy Cook Wilson opposes continue to feature in 21st century epistemology and philosophy of mind. Cook Wilson’s criticism of the analogy thus raises questions about recent work as well as the theories of his contemporaries. (shrink)

The nineteenth century saw the development of reductive views of attention. The German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) proposed an original reductive view according to which attention is nothing but interest and interest itself is a positive feeling. Stumpf’s view was developed by Francis Bradley (1846-1924), George Frederick Stout (1860-1944), and Josiah Royce (1855-1916), but has been overlooked in the recent literature. In this paper, I will expound Stumpf’s view of attention, trace it back to its Aristotelian roots and (...) defend the version offered by Stout and Royce. In this version a new kind of feeling, feelings of interest, and value, intellectual value, take centre stage. (shrink)

What is the exact relationship between analytic philosophy and philosophy of science? In this paper, I will address this question from the perspective of research traditions, with the help of recent histor- ical studies on analytic philosophy. The two groups are particularly focused: the Polish philosophers and the logical empiricists in Berlin. Neither of them is unknown to us. However, by taking seriously their connection to the development of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science as research traditions, I believe, the (...) understanding of our own tradition may be improved. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to assess Husserl’s debt to Lotze’s philosophy during the Halle period (1886-1901). I shall first track the sources of Husserl’s knowledge of Lotze’s philosophy during his studies with Brentano in Vienna and then with Stumpf in Halle. I shall then briefly comment on Husserl’s references to Lotze in his early work and research manuscripts for the second volume of his Philosophy of Arithmetic. In the third section, I examine Lotze’s influence on Husserl’s antipsychologistic turn (...) in the mid-1890s. The fourth section is a commentary on Husserl’s manuscript entitled “Microcosmus,” to which he explicitly refers in his Prolegomena, and which he planned to publish as an annex of his Logical Investigations. This work contains a detailed analysis of the third book of Lotze’s 1874 Logic. The last section examines Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism in his Prolegomena, which I discuss through the lens of Stumpf’s critique of psychologism in his paper “Psychology and theory of knowledge”. I argue that Stumpf’s early works on this topic make it possible to establish a connection between Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s theory of Ideas and Husserl’s antipsychologism. My hypothesis is that Stumpf’s analyses represent the background of Husserl's critique of logical psychologism in his Logical Investigations. I shall conclude this study by showing that Husserl’s position with respect to Lotze’s philosophy remains basically unchanged after the publication of his Logical Investigations, and that Husserl’s main criticism of Lotze pertains, in the final analysis, to the absence of a theory of intentionality in Lotze’s philosophy. (shrink)

In this article I want to create a presumption in favor of a nonreductive analysis of emotional phenomenology. The presumption relies on the claim that none of the nonemotional elements which are usually regarded as constitutive of emotional phenomenology may reasonably be considered responsible for the evaluative character of the latter. In section 1 I suggest this is true of cognitive elements, arguing that so-called ‘evaluative’ judgments usually result from emotional, evaluative attitudes, and should not be conflated with them. In (...) section 2 I argue the same holds true for conative attitudes. And in section 3 I briefly mention some salient aspects of the version of nonreductive analysis I lean toward. (shrink)

In this second part of his lecture, Geiger deals with the question of empathy for non-human entities, like various kinds of objects. Again, Geiger differentiates between various questions that are usually mixed together in the relevant literature. Thus, he distinguishes the question of fact from the psychological theories about possible mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon. In the last part there is an interesting debate showing how different is the approach between experimenters and philosophers. In his conclusion, Geiger stresses again that (...) conceptual clarification is needed in order to avoid confusion in research designs. Finally, two commentaries emphasize how much empathy could be important in the context of psychiatry. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy commonly regard as antipodal Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl, the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. This paper, however, establishes that during a formative phase in both of their careers Russell and Husserl shared a range of seminal ideas. In particular, the essay adduces clear cases of family resemblance between Husserl’s and Russell’s philosophy during their middle period, which spanned the years 1905 through 1918. The paper thus challenges the received view of Husserl’s relation to early (...) analytic philosophy and this by pursuing two strategies of exposition. One involves comparing Husserl with Russell, and not, as has been the usual practice, with Frege. The other, which follows the first, foregrounds Husserl’s thinking vis-à-vis Russell’s from 1905 onward, a move that constitutes a break with what has become the standard approach of emphasising the relatedness of Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900/1) to analytic philosophy. Moreover, this approach discloses two chief grounds of relatedness between the middle Husserl and the middle Russell. One is their shared interest in exploring philosophical “fundamentals”. The second consists of common elements shared by their epistemologies and philosophies of mind. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore one particular dimension of Brentano’s legacy, namely, his theory of mental analysis. This theory has received much less attention in recent literature than the intentionality thesis or the theory of inner perception. However, I argue that it provides us with substantive resources in order to conceptualize the unity of intentionality and phenomenality. My proposal is to think of the connection between intentionality and phenomenality as a certain combination of part/whole relations rather than as a supervenience (...) or identity relation. To begin, I discuss some reasons for being a (neo-)Brentanian about the mind and briefly introduce the main characteristics of Brentano’s internalist description program. Then, I turn to the current “inseparatist” way of dealing with intentionality and phenomenality, focusing on the demand for unity coming from advocates of phenomenal intentionality. I suggest that the unity of the mind may be put in a new light if we put aside metaphysical–epistemological questions, go back to Brentano’s description program, and endorse his thesis that the mental is something unified in which various parts must be distinguished. In the last section, I draw some lessons from this approach, holding that, for any representational content R, R is (in Brentano’s terms) an abstractive or “distinctional” part of the relevant state and that, for any qualitative aspect Q, Q is an abstractive or “distinctional” part of the relevant representational content R. (shrink)

Hermann Lotze argued that the fact that consciousness simultaneously “holds objects together as well as apart” such that they can be compared implies (a) that there is a simple thinker and (b) that consciousness is an ‘indivisible unity.’ I offer a reconstruction and evaluation of Lotze’s Argument from Comparison. I contend that it does not deliver (a) but makes a good case for (b). I will relate Lotze’s argument to the contemporary debate between “top-down” and “bottom-up” views of the unity (...) of consciousness and locate it in its historical context. (Kant and Herbart figure prominently here.). (shrink)

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine-grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse-grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if (...) the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence-based correspondence. (shrink)

In 1956, a series of BBC radio talks was published in London under the title The Revolution in Philosophy . This short book included papers by prominent British philosophers of the day, such as Sir Alfred Ayer and Sir Peter Strawson, with an introduction by Gilbert Ryle. Although there is precious little in it concerning the precise nature of the ‘revolution’ alluded to in the title, it is quite clear that these lectures were meant to celebrate in an insular manner (...) the birth of ‘analytic philosophy’ at the hands of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The use of the word ‘revolution’ to describe the birth of ‘analytical philosophy’ and its rise to near complete dominance in the British universities thus carries with it connotations of a forcible substitution of one philosophical order by a new one that itself owed nothing to the past. To me, however, this talk of ‘revolution’ carries with it a false view of the history of British philosophy: it isn’t ‘historical’ at all, just ideological; it was introduced for a strategic purpose, namely that of encouraging new generations of students to avoid reading the work of earlier philosophers or becoming interested in the problems that concerned them. I shall sketch the broad outlines of a landscape that involves, when limited to the specific topic of the theory of knowledge, no radical break, where no entirely new order replaces an older one: the options, so to speak, and even some of the arguments are the same before and after the soi-disant ‘revolution’. (shrink)

Some thoughts just come to mind together. This is usually thought to happen because they are connected by associations, which the mind follows. Such an explanation assumes that there is a particular kind of simple psychological process responsible. This view has encountered criticism recently. In response, this paper aims to characterize a general understanding of associative simplicity, which might support the distinction between associative processing and alternatives. I argue that there are two kinds of simplicity that are treated as characteristic (...) of association, and as a result three possible versions of associative processing. This provides a framework that informs our understanding of association as a current and historical concept, including how various specific versions in different parts of psychology relate to one another. This framework can also guide debates over normative evaluations of actions produced by processes thought to be associative. (shrink)

The question I shall attempt to address in what follows is an essentially historical one, namely: Why did analytic philosophy emerge first in Cambridge, in the hands of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and as a direct consequence of their revolutionary rejection of the philosophical tenets that form the basis of British Idealism? And the answer that I shall try to defend is: it didn't. That is to say, the ‘analytic’ doctrines and methods which Moore and Russell embraced in (...) the very last years of the nineteenth century were not revolutionary, did not emerge first in Cambridge, were the creation of neither Russell nor Moore and cannot be explained by appeal to facts concerning British Idealism. The adoption of the doctrines and methods which characterised the earliest manifestations of British analytic philosophy are to be explained neither by reference to anything specifically British, nor by appeal to anything unproblematically philosophical. Or so I shall argue. (shrink)

In Nyāya philosophy, a special kind of extraordinary sensory connection is admitted named jñānalakṣaṇā pratyāsatti or jñānalakṣaṇa sannikarṣa. It is held that sometimes our sense-organ can be connected to such an object which is not amenable to the operating sense-organ. In such cases, cognition (jñāna) plays the role of sensory connection and connects the content of itself to the operating sense-organ. The paradigmatic example of jñānalakṣaṇa perception is to ‘see’ fragrant sandal through visual sense from non-smellable distance. This hypothesis of (...) jñānalakṣaṇa has been criticized by the opponents being considered as counterintuitive, mysterious and theoretically overloaded. This paper tries to demystify the notion. It shows that although it seems to be metaphysically mysterious phenomenon at first sight, it is not so at all. The paper explores the psychological process involved in this sensory connection. The hypothesis is shown to have sufficient explanatory power, because the Naiyāyikas have used this hypothesis to explain five different epistemic situations. Hence, this paper argues that it is not a theoretical overload. The opponents counter-argue that all those five cognitive situations can be explained without admitting jñānalakṣaṇa. Moreover, if we admit jñānalakṣaṇa, then a particular kind of inference will become redundant. The paper answers all those objections and defends the hypothesis. The second part of the paper presents an empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis. The arguments leveled against the hypothesis of jñānalakṣaṇa can be contested on the ground that they try to disprove something which is supported on experimental ground. Experiments represent universally acceptable objective facts supported by experience—denying which amounts to anubhavavirodha, which philosophers would want to avoid. Hence, supporting jñānalakṣaṇa on the ground of scientific experiments can be considered as a philosophical stand. Now, there is a clinically recognized and neurophysiologically proved condition, called synaesthesia, where stimulation of a particular sensory modality automatically and involuntarily activates a different sensory modality simultaneously without a direct stimulation of the second modality. As for example, when a sound → colour synaesthete listens to a particular tone such as C-sharp, she visualizes particular colour, such as blue, in her mind’s eye; for a grapheme → colour synaesthete a particular number or alphabet is always tinged with a particular colour. This paper shows that the cognitive process involved in synaesthesia lends support to the hypothesis of jñānalakṣaṇa pratyāsatti. It has been proved through several experiments that it is a genuine perceptual phenomenon and is not a confabulation of memory. There are several alternative theories which explain the phenomenon neurophysiologically. The paper discusses the most popular one: the cross-activation hypothesis. There are two major objections against the project of comparing jñānalakṣaṇa with synaesthesia. First, synaesthesia is a neurological condition present in a few numbers of people whereas jñānalakṣaṇa is claimed to be universal phenomenon. Second, syneasthesia is a sensory experience whereas jñānalakṣaṇa involves application of concepts. The paper answers these questions. Firstly, multimodal processing in the brain is a universal phenomenon; secondly, there is a form of synaesthesia where top-down processing is involved. In those cases, concepts play important role for having synaesthetic experience. (shrink)