Does art have ethical possibilities? Can literature disclose our responsibilityfor other people? This short text aims to unfold some nuances of responsible and irresponsible art as they appear in Emmanuel Levinas's sparse remarks on aesthetics. We examine some common ways of conceiving Levinas's thoughts in literary studies, followed by a closer discussion of his ideas on the possibilities of art in "Reality and Its Shadow" and his late interviews on Vasily Grossman and Sacha Sosno.

Reviews of Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity, Sacha Golob (Cambridge University Press) • Crowell (Rice), Philosophy in Review, pages 2-7. • Cregan (Oxford), International Journal of Philosophical Studies, pages 8-13. • Campbell (Nazareth College of Rochester), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, pages 14-18. • Keiling (Freiburg), Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, pages 19-21.

This article advances a new account of Kant’s views on conceptualism. On the one hand, I argue that Kant was a nonconceptualist. On the other hand, my approach accommodates many motivations underlying the conceptualist reading of his work: for example, it is fully compatible with the success of the Transcendental Deduction. I motivate my view by providing a new analysis of both Kant’s theory of perception and of the role of categorical synthesis: I look in particular at the categories of (...) quantity. Locating my interpretation in relation to recent research by Allais, Ginsborg, Tolley and others, I argue that it offers an attractive compromise on this important theoretical and exegetical issue. (shrink)

This book offers a fundamentally new account of the arguments and concepts which define Heidegger's early philosophy, and locates them in relation to both contemporary analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind and on Heidegger's lectures on Plato and Kant, Sacha Golob argues against existing treatments of Heidegger on intentionality and suggests that Heidegger endorses a unique position with respect to conceptual and representational content; he also examines the implications of (...) this for Heidegger's views on truth, realism and 'being'. He goes on to explore Heidegger's work on the underlying issue of normativity, and focuses on his theory of freedom, arguing that it is freedom that links the existential concerns of Being and Time to concepts such as reason, perfection and obligation. His book offers a distinctive new perspective for students of Heidegger and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

In Sein und Zeit Heidegger makes several claims about the nature of ‘assertion’ [Aussage]. These claims are of particular philosophical interest: they illustrate, for example, important points of contact and divergence between Heidegger's work and philosophical movements including Kantianism, the early Analytic tradition and contemporary pragmatism. This article provides a new assessment of one of these claims: that assertion is connected to a ‘present-at-hand’ ontology. I also indicate how my analysis sets the stage for a new reading of Heidegger's further (...) claim that assertion is an explanatorily derivative phenomenon. I begin with a loose overview of Heidegger's position and then develop a sharper formulation of the key premises. I go on to argue that existing treatments of the supposed link between assertion and the ‘present-at-hand’ are unsatisfactory, and advance a new, ‘methodological’, interpretation of that link. Finally, I sketch the implications of my interpretation for the further claim that assertion is explanatorily derivative. (shrink)

Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves together virtue ethics and existential phenomenology: the influence of Heidegger and Levinas, in particular, is clear throughout. This paper provides a summary of McMullin’s elegantly argued position and raises a number of possible concerns, particularly regarding the interaction of Aristotelian and Phenomenological assumptions. I focus specifically on the role of the 2nd-person perspective, on the links between exemplars and socialisation, and on the problem of those who, as Nietzsche put it, “are (...) both evil and happy – a species on which the moralists are silent”. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 235-253, December 2015.

This paper proposes a new reading of the interaction between subjectivity, reflection and freedom within Foucault’s later work. I begin by introducing three approaches to subjectivity, locating these in relation both to Foucault’s texts and to the recent literature. I suggest that Foucault himself operates within what I call the ‘entanglement approach’, and, as such, he faces a potentially serious challenge, a challenge forcefully articulated by Han. Using Kant’s treatment of reflection as a point of comparison, I argue that Foucault (...) possesses the resources to meet this challenge. The key, I contend, is to distinguish two related theses about reflection and freedom: Foucault’s position is distinctive precisely because he accepts one of these theses whilst rejecting the other. I conclude by indicating how this reading might connect to the longstanding question of Foucault’s own right to appeal to normative standards. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions concerning Kant’s views on non-rational animals: do they intuit spatio-temporal particulars, do they perceive objects, and do they have intentional states? My aim is to explore the relationship between these questions and to clarify certain pervasive ambiguities in how they have been understood. I first disambiguate various nonequivalent notions of objecthood and intentionality: I then look closely at several models of objectivity present in Kant’s work, and at recent discussions of representational and relational theories of (...) intentionality. I argue ultimately that, given the relevant disambiguations, the answers to all three questions will likely be positive. These results both support what has become known as the nonconceptualist reading of Kant, and make clearer the price the conceptualist must pay to sustain her position. (shrink)

One of the strongest motivations for conceptualist readings of Kant is the belief that the Transcendental Deduction is incompatible with nonconceptualism. In this article, I argue that this belief is simply false: the Deduction and nonconceptualism are compatible at both an exegetical and a philosophical level. Placing particular emphasis on the case of non-human animals, I discuss in detail how and why my reading diverges from those of Ginsborg, Allais, Gomes and others. I suggest ultimately that it is only by (...) embracing nonconceptualism that we can fully recognise the delicate calibration of the trap which the Critique sets for Hume. (shrink)

This article juxtaposes two of the most influential thinkers of the previous century, Georges Bataille and Martin Heidegger: my overarching claim will be that a contrastive approach allows a better understanding of two central dynamics within their work. First, I show that both were deeply troubled by a certain methodological anxiety; namely, that the practice of writing might distort and deform their insights. By employing a comparative strategy, I suggest that we can gain a better understanding of the very specific (...) form this fear takes in them: in each case, it is articulated and justified in terms of the ‘chose’ or ‘Ding’ (‘thing’) or the ‘objet’ or ‘Objekt’ (‘object’). Second, I argue that close textual comparison allows us to identify an important, new dimension in their reactions to this shared anxiety: the thing or object which was originally the site of the anxiety gradually becomes, through series of ontological and textual shifts, the solution to it. I track this transformation across a range of case studies including Heidegger’s later work on the term ‘Ding’ and Bataille’s treatment of prostitution. I close by indicating how these results might create avenues for further research. (shrink)

There are three obstacles to any discussion of the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and ethics. First, Heidegger’s views and preoccupations alter considerably over the course of his work. There is no consensus over the exact degree of change or continuity, but it is clear that a number of these shifts, for example over the status of human agency, have considerable ethical implications. Second, Heidegger rarely engages directly with the familiar ethical or moral debates of the philosophical canon. For example, both (...) Sein und Zeit (SZ) and the works that would have completed its missing third Division, works such as his monograph on Kant (Ga3), and the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Ga24), place enormous emphasis on the flaws present in earlier metaphysics or philosophies of language or of the self. But there is no discussion of what one might think of as staple ethical questions: for example, the choice between rationalist or empiricist meta-ethics, or between consequentialist or deontological theories. The fundamental reason for this is Heidegger’s belief that his own concerns are explanatorily prior to such debates (Ga26:236–7). By extension, he regards the key works of ethical and moral philosophy as either of secondary importance, or as not really about ethics or morals at all: for example, Ga24, when discussing Kant, states bluntly that “‘Metaphysics of Morals’ means the ontology of human existence” (Ga24:195). Essentially his view is that, before one can address ethics, construed as the question of how we ought to live, one needs to get clear on ontology, on the question of what we are. However, as I will show, the relationship between Heideggerian ontology and ethics is more complex than that simple gloss suggests. Third, the very phrase “Heidegger’s ethics” raises a twofold problem in a way that does not similarly occur with any other figure in this volume. The reason for this is his links, personal and institutional, to both National Socialism and to anti-Semitism. The recent publication of the Schwarze Hefte exemplifies this issue: these notebooks interweave rambling metaphysical ruminations with a clearly anti-Semitic rhetoric no less repulsive for the fact that it avoids the biological racism of the Nazis (see, for example, Ga95:97 or Ga96:243). In this short chapter, I will take what will doubtless be a controversial approach to this third issue. It seems to me unsurprising, although no less disgusting for that, that Heidegger himself was anti-Semitic, or that he shared many of the anti-modernist prejudices often found with such anti-Semitism Sacha Golob (sacha[email protected]) Forthcoming in the Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press: 2016). 2 among his demographic group. The interesting question is rather: what are the connections between his philosophy and such views? To what degree do aspects of his work support them or perhaps, most extremely, even follow from them? Yet to answer this question, one needs to begin by understanding what exactly his philosophical commitments were, specifically his ‘ethical’ commitments. The purpose of this chapter is address that question. (shrink)

Heidegger’s debt to Aristotle is, of course, vast: Volpi went so far as to ask whether Being and Time was a translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. In this chapter, I want to investigate a fundamental divergence between the two, a rejection by early Heidegger of one of the central tenets of Aristotelian ethics. This rejection begins in the years before Being and Time and the forces behind it extend into the post-war period. I will focus in particular on Ga18, 1924’s (...) Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy: what Heidegger’s Aristotle rejects there, in effect, is the notion of character. -/- What makes this rejection so complex and so revealing is that Heidegger’s interpretative approach forces him to present disagreement as discovery, as an insight into a true Aristotle who has remained concealed. My claim here is not the familiar one that Heideggerian history of philosophy is exegetically ‘violent’ or that it frequently tells us more about Heidegger than about its supposed target. Rather, it is more specific. Texts such as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy present a unique exegetical situation. This is because Heidegger lacks several of the interpretative tools that will justify his radical reading of Kant just a few years later: I will examine in particular his changing conception of “philology”. The result is that, whilst commentators routinely talk of Heidegger’s “appropriation” of Kant, Heidegger’s early use of Aristotle is simultaneously more complex and less refined. “Perversion” is, one might think, scarcely a rigorous term, but it is, I will argue, the best description of what follows. (shrink)

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger’s 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger’s reading of Kant, one must resolve two (...) questions. First, how does Heidegger’s Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger’s reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam’s model of a self-directed transcendental argument, and the second by examining the relationship between Kant’s doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume’s attack on metaphysics. I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger’s own thought. Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger’s commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality. (shrink)

With fifty-four chapters charting the development of moral philosophy in the Western world, this volume examines the key thinkers and texts and their influence on the history of moral thought from the pre-Socratics to the present day. Topics including Epicureanism, humanism, Jewish and Arabic thought, perfectionism, pragmatism, idealism and intuitionism are all explored, as are figures including Aristotle, Boethius, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Rawls, as well as numerous key ideas and schools of thought. Chapters (...) are written by leading experts in the field, drawing on the latest research to offer rigorous analysis of the canonical figures and movements of this branch of philosophy. The volume provides a comprehensive yet philosophically advanced resource for students and teachers alike as they approach, and refine their understanding of, the central issues in moral thought. (shrink)

This paper addresses a number of closely related questions concerning Kant's model of intentionality, and his conceptions of unity and of magnitude [Gröβe]. These questions are important because they shed light on three issues which are central to the Critical system, and which connect directly to the recent analytic literature on perception: the issues are conceptualism, the status of the imagination, and perceptual atomism. In Section 1, I provide a sketch of the exegetical and philosophical problems raised by Kant's views (...) on these issues. I then develop, in Section 2, a detailed analysis of Kant's theory of perception as elaborated in both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment; I show how this analysis provides a preliminary framework for resolving the difficulties raised in Section 1. In Section 3, I extend my analysis of Kant's position by considering a specific test case: the Axioms of Intuition. I contend that one way to make sense of Kant's argument is by juxtaposing it with Russell's response to Bradley's regress; I focus in particular on the concept of ‘unity’. Finally, I offer, in Section 4, a philosophical assessment of the position attributed to Kant in Sections 2 and 3. I argue that, while Kant's account has significant strengths, a number of key areas remain underdeveloped; I suggest that the phenomenological tradition may be read as attempting to fill precisely those gaps. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the sublime makes frequent appeals to infinity, appeals which have been extensively criticised by commentators such as Budd and Crowther. This paper examines the costs and benefits of reconstructing the account in finitist terms. On the one hand, drawing on a detailed comparison of the first and third Critiques, I argue that the underlying logic of Kant’s position is essentially finitist. I defend the approach against longstanding objections, as well as addressing recent infinitist work by Moore and (...) Smith. On the other hand, however, I argue that finitism faces distinctive problems of its own: whilst the resultant theory is a coherent and interesting one, it is unclear in what sense it remains an analysis of the sublime. I illustrate the worry by juxtaposing the finitist reading with analytical cubism. -/- . (shrink)

This article examines the phenomenon of thought insertion, one of the most extreme disruptions to the standard mechanisms for self-knowledge, in the context of Kant's philosophy of mind. This juxtaposition is of interest for two reasons, aside from Kant's foundational significance for any modern work on the self. First, thought insertion presents a challenge to Kant's approach. For example, the first Critique famously held that " The 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations " (Kant, KrV, B132). (...) Yet thought insertion raises the problem of representations which are 'mine' by many natural criteria, and yet which I am unwilling to self-ascribe. Ultimately, my argument will be that thought insertion simultaneously problematises, and yet to some degree also vindicates, the complex distinctions between activity and passivity which underlie Kant's system. Second, I argue that Kant's position contains resources that allow us to model thought insertion, and its broader implications for self-knowledge, in an interesting and distinctive manner. Kant himself held an extreme view of philosophy's competence in the study of mental disorder: in the Anthropology, he suggests that courts must refer such cases to philosophers, rather than medics (Kant, Anth, p.214). My aim is much more modest: to suggest that a Kantian treatment of thought insertion deserves consideration by both philosophers and clinicians. (shrink)

Critical Notice of Kant's Transcendental Deduction, by Henry Allison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. Xv + 477.

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In section 4, I (...) show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a 'public health approach', in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan. (shrink)

The structure of this article is very simple. In the first half, I will introduce a sophisticated way of reading Heidegger as a relativist; I draw here on the work of Kusch and Lafont. In the second half, I present the counter-argument. As I see it, Heidegger is not a relativist; but understanding the relations between his approach and a relativistic one is crucial for an evaluation of both his own work and the broader trajectory of post-Kantian thought.

This paper examines Heidegger’s position on a foundational distinction for Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy: that between acting ‘in the light of’ a norm and acting ‘merely in accordance with it’. In section 1, I introduce the distinction and highlight several relevant similarities between Kant and Heidegger on ontology and the first-person perspective. In section 2, I press the Kantian position further, focusing on the role of inferential commitments in perception: this provides a foil against which Heidegger’s account can be In (...) section 3, I contrast this Kantian approach with Crowell’s highly sophisticated reading of Heidegger on care: I argue that, subject to certain conditions on how we view explanation, the two approaches are compatible and indeed mutually supporting. I close in section 4 by addressing an importantly distinct dimension of normativity, that marked by critique, broadly construed. I argue that we ultimately need to locate Heidegger in a context that. (shrink)

In the context of a history of the emotions, Martin Heidegger presents an important and yet challenging case. He is important because he places emotional states, broadly construed, at the very heart of his philosophical methodology—in particular, anxiety and boredom. He is challenging because he is openly dismissive of the standard ontologies of emotions, and because he is largely uninterested in many of the canonical debates in which emotions figure. My aim in this chapter is to identify and critique the (...) distinctive role which Heidegger allots to the emotions, focusing on Sein und Zeit's famous treatment of anxiety. Having outlined his position, I close by considering a number of challenges, both methodological and substantive, to Heidegger's approach. (shrink)

The complex issue of fake news has been approached extensively by many disciplines in academia. Despite this variety of approaches, the concept of fake news still lacks a reasonable degree of definitional unicity. This paper critically analyzes a sample of definitions from the current literature. By diving into the set of definitions, it will exhibited a total of ten necessary conditions that scholars generally consider: imitation, falsity, deception, bullshit, purpose, morality, assessability, virality, channel, and appeal. Current definitions of fake news (...) have certain blindspots and leave too much leeway for interpretation. This leeway is utterly problematic because it creates a grey zone in which articles are left stranded halfway between fake news and factual news articles. However, it has the crucial advantage of opening up new epistemic paths of inquiry regarding fake news. As a conclusion, we will summarize the conditions one can accept or reject to define fake news. (shrink)

As a face in the mirror, so the morals of men are easily corrected with an exemplar.As Christopher Janaway observed, “the topic of Schopenhauer as Educator is really education rather than Schopenhauer.”2 Indeed, Nietzsche described it as addressing a “problem of education without equal”.3 This article reconstructs the pedagogical challenge and solution presented by Nietzsche in that text. It is obvious that Schopenhauer’s example is meant to underpin Nietzsche’s new pedagogy; what is less obvious is how exactly that exemplary role (...) is meant to work. I concentrate on three issues: the exact nature of the pupil’s relationship to the exemplar, the institutional context of education, and... (shrink)

This paper aims to advance our understanding of Heidegger's politics as it is laid bare within the 'Schwarze Hefte'. Yet my interest is not in Heidegger's first order political views, but rather in his conception of the political sphere per se. Beginning from a close analysis of the earliest volume of the notebooks, Gesamtausgabe Bd.94, I suggest that the dominant characterisation of the political space within Heidegger's text is as a threat-to philosophy and to ontology. Underlying that characterisation, however, it (...) is simultaneously possible to identify another pattern, one on which the political is itself gradually suppressed or occluded by the ontological. This tacit occlusion has, I suggest, a number of deeply problematic consequences. I close by indicating how the argument might be extended to the question of a Heideggerian ethics. (shrink)

he relationship between decadence and aesthetics is an intimate and complex one. Both the stock figure of the aesthete and the aestheticism of ‘art for art’s sake’ are classic decadent tropes with obvious sources in figures such as Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Yet the links between aesthetics and decadence are more conflicted than might first appear: historically, aesthetics has served both as a site for the theorisation of decadence and as the basis of an attempt to stem it. (...) The purpose of this chapter is to examine these intricate ties. (shrink)

Condition essentielle de la responsabilité civile, la notion de causalité reste aujourd’hui difficile à saisir et sujette à nombreuses discussions. Les contributions présentées dans cet ouvrage abordent la question à nouveaux frais, en adoptant un point de vue résolument interdisciplinaire mêlant philosophie, droit et économie. Sont envisagées successivement des difficultés que le contentieux de la causalité met régulièrement en évidence. Ainsi, la difficile articulation entre causalité juridique et causalité scientifique conduit à s’interroger sur le rôle de la science : doit-elle (...) guider le droit ou faut-il considérer que la causalité en droit n’est qu’un “construit” juridique dégagé de toute perspective scientifique ? Sont également évoquées les diverses tentatives de formalisation analytique de la causalité comme l’analyse contrefactuelle, le critère NESS et les définitions probabilistes de la causalité, ainsi que leur capacité à répondre aux questions redoutables suscitées par la présence de co-auteurs multiples ou d’hypothèses de “surdétermination causale”. Ces réflexions fondamentales ouvrent alors sur les autres aspects clefs de la causalité en droit et en économie comme la preuve et le rôle du raisonnement probabiliste, ou les modalités de la contribution à la dette de réparation en présence d’une pluralité de co-auteurs. Est alors mis en évidence l’apport des sciences économiques, qui permet de classer les différentes techniques d’attribution de la responsabilité et de discuter des propriétés économiques des règles de répartition de la charge de la dette de réparation. Cet ouvrage s’adresse aux chercheurs et aux praticiens confrontés aux questions délicates posées par la causalité dans le droit de la responsabilité civile. (shrink)

Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we (...) investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)

A coherent practice of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action’s outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas (...) a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law. (shrink)

The concept of the analyst's presence gained attention almost 60 years ago through the writings of the French analyst Sacha Nacht and the Hungarian-British Michael Balint. Anna Freud earlier spoke of the related, but rather ambiguous term "real person of the analyst," which has been widely discussed by many authors since. Both terms- presence and real person- appear frequently in the psychoanalytic literature, usually without much definition or conceptual clarity. Authors have used them in different ways, but in general (...) their intention has been to contrast the analyst's reality as a person with his function as a transference and fantasy object, perhaps as a corrective to the perceived austerity of the classical « one-person » model. Lacan's work represents an exception in attempting to escape the dialectic between intra and inter-psychic, but at the cost of eliminating the influence of the analyst as another subject. In contrast to metapsychologic theories of the mind, the author argues that "real presence" can be better understood as part of the phenomenologic experience of intersubjectivity, The co-presence of the analyst is fundamental to the encounter, rather than an accidental or intentional disruption. (shrink)