The Task of Philosophy

The article addresses the current discussion about values in general sense and about traditional spiritual and moral values in particular from the standpoint of modern social philosophy. The purpose of the study is to show the modernity, contemporaneity and consistency of traditional values in a specific historical situation. To do this, the author identifies the most significant aspects in the reflection on the concept, focusing on the social thought of the last few decades. The result of this is the explication of a specific understanding of values as autonomy only partially dependent on the context. The socio-philosophical discourse on values intersects with those more familiar to philosophy regarding the topic, i.e. axiological, political, ethical or aesthetic, but does not completely coincide with them. Its actualization was caused by the historical events, but it always had its groundings in theoretical contradictions that philosophy has faced. The article provides an outline of the position of values in socio-humanitarian thought, deconstructs some of the foundations of the hierarchy of values proposed by default within globalized thought. The author also demonstrates that posing the question about values in a national context does not contradict the theoretical foundations and the very tasks of philosophy. On the contrary, the need for philosophy, including social philosophy, to pose and answer the question about values is only increasing. On the base of a priori self-worth of traditional spiritual and moral values, the author concludes that one of the most important tasks of social philosophy is to actualize their content and ways of practical integration into modern life in accordance with the spirit and needs of the time.

Abstract: A close examination of the relation between philosophy and myth reveals important functional parallels in some of their basic means of operation that helps shed some light on philosophy's overall task. A crucial aspect of the structural similarity between philosophy and myth is the generation of what Hans Blumenberg calls “significance.” I argue that the preservation and enhancement of significance (through a strong affinity to myth) is an essential and overlooked aspect of philosophy's task, one best accomplished through the world‐orienting work of speculative philosophy. By weaving the fragmented insights, criticisms, lessons, and methods of the more “specialized” analytic, pragmatic, critical, postmodern, deconstructivist, and other methods of thought together in a systematic way, speculative philosophy may be able to provide us with the kind of world orientation needed for developing a healthier, richer, more profound understanding of ourselves and our proper place within the world.

ABSTRACTJean-François Lyotard famously described the task of philosophy as “bearing witness to the differend”, a differend being a conflict that cannot be equitably solved due to the lack of a rule applicable to all parties involved. Lyotard expanded the notion of differend in his later works. With the name of “the differend itself”, Lyotard seeks to signal a more radical conflict: between articulate meaning and affect. This development changes the task of philosophy. In this article, bearing witness to the differend itself is conceptualized as a twofold process, consisting of a negative and a positive aspect. On the one hand, the differend itself cannot as such be written into language. On the other hand, however, philosophizing presupposes affect as its impetus. To signal this, an openness to affect and a freedom with regard to style are required, thereby showing that reason and affect are not opposed but presuppose each other.

Teleology in the Ethics of Buridan JAMES J. WALSH I. TO SET THE STAGE FOR THIS STUDY, let me invoke an impression developed by Vernon Bourke from the careful researches embodied in his History. of Ethics. It is Bourke's view that there was a significant shift in emphasis in ethical thought during the fourteenth century, from traditional teleology to modern deontology. Thus, for many ancient thinkers, man is by nature ordered to an ultimate end, and the philosopher's task is to formulate the end and show how it may be attained. But for many moderns, man's moral situation is oriented rather to the law. The philosopher's task is to spell out that law and justify the obligation to obey it. Bourke finds the thought of William of Ockham leading the way toward the modem conception and links this move to Ockham's nominalism and voluntarism. Without a common nature, man can hardly be oriented by nature to any ultimate end; he is thus left, as it were, face-to-face with the omnipotent divine will, obligated to obedience to divine commands which are without natural foundation . Whether or not this is the standard interpretation of Ockham's significance on this topic, it is hardly idiosyncratic. 1 cite Bourke here only because of his laudable effort to assess the significance of fourteenth-century thought in the wider framework of the history of ethics, and because of the straightforwardness of his formulations. I shall not be directly concerned with the accuracy of this interpretation. 1 shall operate rather on what I hope is a relevant tangent, using this view of Ockham as a deontological pioneer only as a point of departure. One presumes, pending possible reassessments of later medieval intellectual alignments, that the major vehicle for Ockham's influence was the via moderna, the nominalist curriculum in many universities, especially in central and eastern Europe. In those universities, ethics was studied through the standard set-text, the Nicomachean Ethics. But Ockham did not write a commentary on the Ethics. His moral doctrine is found in his Commentary on the Sentences and the Quodlibeta Septem, aimed for the most part at graduate theologians. To see the ethics taught in the nominalist curricula, one must look at commentaries on the Ethics by nominalist masters. A few of these have been studied, with some curious results. Albert of Saxony, a leading nominalist at Vienna, drew heavily from Walter Burley for his commentary. Burley was a famous opponent of Ockham on many issues and drew in turn from St. Thomas. ~ The most popular commentary seems to have been by John I wishto thank Bonnie Dornck Kent,John Favareau, and ProfessorPaul Kristellerfor help with thisstudy. I should record the view of Mrs Kent that important background materials can be found m St. Anselm and Duns Scotus. She may well be right, but one has to limit such studies severely. I See V. Bourke, History,ofEthics (GardenCtty, N.Y.: Image Books, 1970),vol. 1, pp. 10, 153ff. Among many possible confirming studies, see especially A. Garvens, "Die Grundlagender Ethik Wilhelms von Ockham ," FranziskamscheStudien 21 (1934):243-73, 360-408. esp. 249. 2The standard study of Albert of Saxony's commentary ts G. Hetdmgsfelder, "Albert yon Sachsen: Sein Lebensgang und sein Kommentar zur Nicomachischen Ethlk des Anstoteles,'" Beitrage zur Geschwhte der Philosophw des Mtttelalters 22 (1921), pts. 3-4 Burley's commentary has been studiedby G Gomes, m [265] 266 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Buridan, the leading nominalist at Paris. Manuscripts abound, there were several printed editions, and Buridan's work influenced commentaries by many others) It, too, contains material drawn from an opponent of Ockham, material pertinent to our topic, which will be pursued in detail shortly. Some time ago I presented a study of Buridan's commentary which argued that although on some points it is nominalist in method, the substantive ethical doctrine differs significantly from what is usually attributed to Ockham .4 A part of that difference involves teleology. Ockham claimed that it cannot be proved for any given occurrence that it has a final cause, nor can it be proved by natural reason whether or not everything is oriented to a single...

This paper considers the extent to which Kant’s vision of a distinctively ‘transcendental’ task for philosophy is essentially tied to his views on the foundations of the mathematical and physical sciences. Contemporary philosophers with broadly Kantian sympathies have attempted to reinterpret his project so as to isolate a more general philosophical core not so closely tied to the details of now outmoded mathematical-physical theories (Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics). I consider two such attempts, those of Strawson and McDowell, and argue that they fundamentally distort the original Kantian impulse. I then consider Buchdahl’s attempt to preserve the link between Kantian philosophy and the sciences while simultaneously generalizing Kant’s doctrines in light of later scientific developments. I argue that Buchdahl’s view, while not adequate as in interpretation of Kant in his own eighteenth century context, is nonetheless suggestive of an historicized and relativized revision of Kantianism that can do justice to both Kant’s original philosophical impulse and the radical changes in the sciences that have occurred since Kant’s day.

How are we to construe the relationship between language and economy? The work of Walter Benjamin offers a particularly helpful resource for thinking this question through. Capitalism for him is defined by a rent between the word and the worker; from the nineteenth century onwards, language will be incessantly alienated from economy. The task of philosophy – and the cosmic society it endeavours to bring about – is to reunite language with economy in a manner that does not simply collapse them into each other. Dwelling on an age-old debate between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem concerning metaphysics and materialism, this article proceeds to evaluate more contemporary writings on language and economy before concluding that only a philosophy strong enough to join the two together will be adequate to the binds of our times.

In this text, readers are taken on a journey into the mind of John Dewey. By analyzing Dewey's attempts to revise the introduction to one of his most important books, Experience and Nature, Philip W. Jackson explores Dewey's efforts (both intellectually and emotionally) to explain the relationship between philosophy and human affairs. This story of Dewey's life-long struggle with a complex philosophical question (one that continues to challenge philosophers) is also the story of Jackson's own struggle to understand Dewey's quest. Written for anyone interested in philosophy or the writings of Dewey, this book should be useful for understanding the philosophic method and the philosopher's task of inquiry.

First published in 1972, Philosophical Tasks was written to identify and examine some central themes in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The book explores the claim that philosophy is essentially linguistic, and considers in particular such topics as philosophy and science, fact and language, conceptual analysis, first- and second-order tasks, scepticism, ordinary language, and conceptual frameworks.

This chapter considers the significant implications of Marx and Engels’ politics upon Engels’ philosophical undertaking in Dialectics of Nature. It focuses on the (rather naive) questions of where did Engels’ philosophical tasks (‘showing that the dialectical laws are real laws of development of nature’ and rescuing ‘conscious dialectics’ from Idealism) come from, and why did he regard them as crucial issues to be solved. It proposes to gauge Engels’ undertakings against the backdrop of political tasks and philosophical and scientific issues he has set for himself, relocate his achievements within the context of political function of theory, and figure out the relevance of philosophy and natural sciences to it. To this end, it investigates the function of theory and role of intellectuals within the working-class movement.

Professor Schner's paper has raised some interesting issues about the nature of the enterprises of theology and philosophy, and the relationships between them. I find myself in essential agreement with several of his points, but I want to develop in more detail the ways in which philosophy might be of service to theology, and to end by placing emphasis upon one philosophical task which is not, in my opinion, well-appreciated by some theologians.

Although it is now widely accepted that in science, non-cognitive values play a role, it is still debated whether this has implications for its objectivity. It seems that the task of philosophers here is twofold: to flesh out what kinds of non-cognitive values play what kinds of roles, and to evaluate the implications for objectivity. I attempt to contribute to both tasks by introducing the value of egalitarianism, and showing how this non-cognitive value shapes three alternative explanations of the Movius Line. It is argued that although these explanations are motivated by egalitarianism, they are nevertheless objective.

Abstract: Philosophy is often conceived in the Anglophone world today as a subject that focuses on questions in particular “core areas,” pre‐eminently epistemology and metaphysics. This article argues that the contemporary conception is a new version of the scholastic “self‐indulgence for the few” of which Dewey complained nearly a century ago. Philosophical questions evolve, and a first task for philosophers is to address issues that arise for their own times. The article suggests that a renewal of philosophy today should turn the contemporary conception inside out, attending to and developing further the valuable work being done on the supposed “periphery” and attending to the “core areas” only insofar as is necessary to address genuinely significant questions.

Karl Popper introduced a metaphor of demarcation for identification of claims that should not be classified as scientific. This metaphor still dominates the philosophical discussion on pseudoscience. We show that it has hampered the discussion in several ways, most importantly by blocking the insight that determining whether some particular claim is pseudoscientific usually requires specialized scientific expertise. We conclude that it would be better to give up this metaphor and leave room for the two tasks of defining pseudoscience (a task for philosophers) and diagnosing potential cases of pseudoscience (a task for experts in the respective areas of science).

McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message announced a new task for philosophers: gauging the manner and extent to which technological changes transform our basic faculties of (collective) experience (rational thinking, feeling, intuiting, empathizing, imagining). The more traditionally repressed of these basic capacities in philosophical discourse are nevertheless the ones most directly affected by newly emerging media. After 2500 years of exploring reason in the West, it may be time for a deeper exploration into the spontaneous vitality,“the submerged iceberg beyond the mere tip that is reason,” as Ortega y Gasset argues. Ethical questions are not anymore about what is right or good but about the need to transform and overcome our resistance to finitude and mortality by learning to see the concrete circumstances of our words, actions, and feelings as conditions for things’ standing in the world.

In a conference in Feyerabend’s memory 2012, the organizers challenged participants to do justice to the notorious complexity of his ideas and their relevance to ongoing discussions, rather than dismiss him as an irrationalist. For, clearly, he said some outrageous things that he certainly did not consider true. No doubt his work was significant. For one thing, he popularized criticism of very widespread ideas, especially the idea that the task of the philosophy of science is to justify science as objects of rational belief. He found challenge better than discussion of belief. His pioneering work was an effort to bridge the gap between art and science: he thought the task of philosophers is to render science as accessible to common people as art.