Analytic Philosophy Research Articles

How to do things with “the Fact of Reason”: A new interpretation of a well-known concept in Kant’s philosophy

There have been numerous studies on Kant’s concept of the ‘Fact of Reason’, drawing on various intellectual resources, ranging from metaphysics to psychology, from Aristotle to Mencius, from analytic philosophy to phenomenology, and beyond. How should we evaluate these studies? Is it possible that these studies can contribute both to an understanding of Kantian philosophy and to an understanding of Western philosophy as a whole, as well as shed light on the development of philosophy after Kant and on the philosophical questions of our own era? In order to at least partially clarify the above questions, this article will draw on the work of philosohers such as Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, C.I. Lewis, Jin Yuelin and Feng Qi, and discuss how certain presuppositions of communicative action can be both regulative and constitutive, how the same propositions can be both empirical and a priori, how the same concepts can both describe reality and regulate it, and how the ‘Fact of Reason’ can be understood as the ‘Fact of Learning’, in order to offer a new interpretation of Kant’s concept of the ‘Fact of Reason’.

The Problem of Realism in Vihalemm

The Estonian philosopher Rein Vihalemm (1938–2015) wished to reform realism in the philosophy of science. He was dissatisfied with the mainstream analytic philosophy of science—scientific realism and the various anti-realisms alike. He considered these approaches theory-driven and hence too distanced from actual scientific practice. His alternative, which he called practical realism, was inspired and influenced by Joseph Rouse’s original reading of Thomas Kuhn. Moreover, Vihalemm viewed as important some lessons from Marxism, which was prevalent in Estonian philosophy during the Soviet occupation. For him, Marx himself inaugurated practical realism with his novel notion of practice that does not consider agency distinct from nature. He also mentions Kant, interpreted in a realistic manner, as a significant influence for his thesis that concepts only apply to practice. In this article, I will critically examine practical realism from the standpoint of classical pragmatism. My primary question is: what kind of realism practical realism can possibly be.

‘I don't know my way about’: Mirror reversal as a curiously instructive analogue of philosophical perplexity

AbstractWittgenstein said in the Investigations, ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don't know my way about”’ (§ 123). The problem of mirror reversal—specifically the twentieth‐century transatlantic controversy between the psychologist Richard Gregory, the mathematical columnist Martin Gardner, the physicist Richard Feynman and various analytic philosophers, including David Pears, Ned Block and Don Locke—is presented here as an instructive case of our not knowing our way about. ‘Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down?’ We discover that our perplexity disappears as we get clearer about the employment of the familiar oppositions left and right, up and down, back and front, and others. Finding our way about in these logico‐grammatical fells, we see connections with our troubles in more vertiginous landscapes. Our disquietude may not be deep (§ 111) but the ‘battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence’ (§ 109) is surprisingly severe.

The recent turn in analytical sociology: The dismissal of general theories, mental states, and analytic philosophy – and the old issue of mechanism explanations

Analytical sociology is a sociological approach whose advocates share two methodological doctrines: sociology should be a rigorous discipline and focus on action-based explanations of social processes. This article analyzes some recent methodological innovations of analytical sociology: (1) it is proposed to abandon general theories, in particular rational choice theory. We raise several objections against this claim. The major argument for applying general theories is that an empirical comparison with middle range theories implies conditions for their modification and at the same time tests the general theory. Another flaw of the critique of rational choice theory is that the target is not a wide ‘bounded rationality’ version that is increasingly applied in the social sciences. Instead, an outdated narrow version is attacked; (2) a new demand is to give up explanations with mental states such as goals and beliefs and focus on situational factors. It is argued that this leads to false explanations because the impact of situational factors on action depends on mental states. Omitting mental states thus leads to invalid explanations; (3) a major unresolved issue is the thesis that mechanism explanations are a special kind of explanation that do not need to apply theories. It is shown why this demand is mistaken.

The Problem of Justifying Torture in Analytical Ethics in the 1970s-1980s

The article reconstructs a brief period of intensive debates on the legitimacy and justification of torture in the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. It is shown that the emergence of the discourse on the morality of torture was influenced by the following factors. Firstly, the formulation of the “dirty hands” dilemma, which in the analytical tradition became a crucial tool for analyzing the relationship between ends and means. Secondly, the establishment of a theoretical and applied field of philosophical research known as the just war theory. Although it should be acknowledged that the transfer of heuristics from the just war theory as a means of argumentation in favor of torture proved to be a philosophical deadlock, it allowed for the exploration of possibilities and limitations of new theoretical developments in the field of moral philosophy, which is always a necessary stage for the reiteration of debates.

The extimate core of understanding: absolute metaphors, psychosis and large language models

AbstractThis paper delves into the striking parallels between the linguistic patterns of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the concepts of psychosis in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacanian theory, with its focus on the formal and logical underpinnings of psychosis, provides a compelling lens to juxtapose human cognition and AI mechanisms. LLMs, such as GPT-4, appear to replicate the intricate metaphorical and metonymical frameworks inherent in human language. Although grounded in mathematical logic and probabilistic analysis, the outputs of LLMs echo the nuanced linguistic associations found in metaphor and metonymy, suggesting a mirroring of human linguistic structures. A pivotal point in this discourse is the exploration of “absolute metaphors”—core gaps in reasoning discernible in both AI models and human thought processes and central to the Lacanian conceptualization of psychosis. Despite the traditional divide between AI research and continental philosophy, this analysis embarks on an innovative journey, utilizing Lacanian philosophy to unravel the logic of AI, using concepts established in the continental discourse on logic, rather than the analytical tradition.

Approaches to Metaphor: Cognitive-linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives

Metaphor has been a significant topic of discussion in several academic fields besides being extensively used in daily life. This article explores the interdisciplinary study of metaphor, a complex and connotative concept that has been the primary concern across various disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, literature, and other humanities. The article presents multiperspective theories and metaphor analysis from the said disciplines to provide a more holistic understanding of metaphor. This includes analyzing metaphors in analytic philosophy and cognitive science, primarily focusing on the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, complemented by analysis of the relevance theory, the blending theory, etc. While there are criticisms of CMT, it remains an influential theory in studying metaphor. The article also discusses the relevance theory, which suggests that using metaphors in speech can help achieve optimal relevancy, and the blending theory, which proposes that metaphors involve mapping elements from one mental space onto another to create a blended mental space that combines elements of both. This paper also addresses continental philosophers' usage or account of metaphor, from Kant to Derrida, in establishing their arguments. The essay then discusses and integrates ideas in metaphor studies from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. Finally, the article emphasizes the importance of bridging the gap between abstract conceptualizations and concrete linguistic expressions to gain a holistic understanding of metaphor.

Margaret Macdonald, Philosopher of Language

Abstract I chart the philosophical development of neglected figure Margaret Macdonald and situate that development in the context of mid-century analytic philosophy more broadly. I examine Macdonald’s changing attitude towards verificationism, and show that these changing views led her, in 1950 and beyond, to a very thorough appreciation of language use as capable of being employed in the execution of distinctive kinds of performative act. I compare Macdonald’s views with the far better known work of J. L. Austin, and I emphasise the extent to which she has, despite her insightful contributions, been omitted from the history of philosophy.

The state of the question in early Heidegger studies

AbstractThis article surveys the state of the literature in English‐language scholarship on Heidegger's early work (1919–29). The survey falls into roughly two halves. The first is devoted to scholarship on Heidegger's intellectual development during the 1920s, focusing on four themes: Heidegger's relationship to Husserl; Heidegger's early phenomenology of religious life; Heidegger's appropriation of Aristotle; and Heidegger's retrieval of Kant's First Critique. The second half focuses on work on the early Heidegger that has arisen out of the reception of his early thought into mainstream Anglophone philosophy. It examines Hubert Dreyfus's interpretation of Heidegger, the status of “das Man” and social normativity, Heidegger's concept of death, Heidegger's conception of authenticity, and truth (with a very brief overview of further topics).

I Act Therefore I Live? Autopoiesis, Sensorimotor Autonomy, and Extended Agency

This paper aims to determine whether extended human-machine cognitive systems and group systems can be regarded as autonomous agents. For this purpose, I compare two notions of agency: one developed within analytical philosophy of action and based on the concept of intention, and the other introduced by enactivists via the concepts of autopoiesis and sensorimotor autonomy. I argue that only the latter approach can be used to demonstrate autonomous agency in respect of systems that are not humans as such, though they contain humans as their elements. After introducing Maturana and Varela’s conception of minimal autonomy as a kind of generalization of autopoiesis, I present the three conditions of agency put forward by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde, noting that they do not invoke the property of being alive as necessary in that respect. I argue that both extended and group systems can satisfy these conditions of agency, even though they are not alive as such. The fulfillment of these conditions, however, is ensured by the autopoietic nature of the living components of these systems. That being said, an autonomous system itself does not need to be alive in the biological sense. Sensorimotor, adaptive agency could emerge out of other processes than those responsible for biological life. The article concludes with a suggestion that this is exactly what will happen if an autonomous system is ever artificially created. It would be functionally indistinguishable from a living organism, though not alive in a biological sense.

Editors’ Introduction: Fictions in Law, Literature, and Philosophy

While several collections have been published recently from the perspective of common law focused specifically on jurisprudence and from the perspective of both literary theory and the philosophy of language, a more integrative approach that sharpens the underlying fundamental concept(s) by bringing together insights from legal theory/history, doctrinal legal scholarship, literary studies, and analytic philosophy has been missing so far. Not only has an examination of a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective been rare in research on fictions and fictionality, but also a decidedly integrative view of European and Anglo-American research approaches has been the exception. This special issue both addresses and seeks to bridge this research gap. In shedding light on the family resemblances and differences of “fiction(s)” in each of the aforementioned disciplines, we hope to identify blind spots and offer some fresh ideas with regard to a transdisciplinary theory of fiction(s) which considers their conceptual, functional, as well as historical characteristics. A particularly significant aspect of this project is that it fuses contributions from an anglophone law and literature perspective with contributions from European continental contexts, offering perspectives from related but also distinct legal and literary traditions.

Navigating the Pitfalls of Counterfactuality: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Legal Fictions

The introductory essay on legal fictionality engages with the practice of legal fictions from Roman Law to the twenty-first century, and with the attempts of legal scholarship to conceptualize this particular form of legal imagination. It will discuss the major questions established in the past, with a particular emphasis on the classical understanding of legal fictions as “untrue” or “counterfactual” assumptions—a dichotomy that has pervaded legal thinking for centuries. It will argue that the classical approach is outdated and in urgent need of revision, also demonstrating that theories of other disciplines are better equipped to adequately deal with the issue, from the early debates on truth to more recent positions, such as possible world theory and institutional theories of fictionality. The essay will mainly draw on analytic philosophy and literary theory, but will also invoke more recent legal scholarship that engages with inter- or transdisciplinary approaches. Authors include James, Bradley, Kelsen, Vaihinger, Cohen, Lewis, Meinong, Fuller, Neurath, Rescher, Habermas, Rorty, Glasersfeld, Goodman, Routley, Searle, Genette, Beardsley, Wolterstorff, Currie, Walton, Eco, Anderegg, Doležel and Pavel.

What’s in a Name? Legal Fictions and Philosophical Fictionalism

This paper uses analytic philosophy to prevent merely verbal disputes about the concept of fiction within discussions on fictiones iuris. It provides a survey of potentially fruitful connections between legal fictions and fictionalism. More specifically, I will argue that by enriching current accounts of legal fictions in legal theory with insights from (1) the philosophy of language on fictional speech and from (2) contemporary metaphysics on philosophical fictionalism, it seems natural to explore the position that talk involving fictiones iuris is structurally an exemplification of elliptical speech. Such fictionalism about legal fictions illuminates why prominent condemnations of fictions in law – e.g. as blatant falsehoods, shady fraudulences, or legal defects – are theoretical myths, since they fail to distinguish between analytically distinct (ontological, epistemic, alethic, semantic, and evaluative) levels. Moreover, a fictionalist account might even sharpen our sense of which legal fictions are more “innocent” than others. I will begin by introducing philosophical fictionalism (II), before the fictiones iuris will be characterized as an operation in legal reasoning by consulting the Leibnizian reconstruction of Roman Law’s epistemology (III). Sections IV and V seek to provide further clarifications on the ‘fictional’ / ‘fictitious’ distinction as well as the heterogeneity of fictionalist research questions. Section VI then contains a little guided tour through the different analyses of the concept of fiction(s) within fictionalism. Subsequently, I will show how insights from those discussions contribute to demystify some of the most prominent allegations raised against legal fictions (VII). Fictionalism about legal fictions, Section VIII tentatively suggests, might not only harmonize with both classic and recent treatments of legal fictions, but help to also highlight their epistemic values. In slogan form: fictiones iuris are instruments to preserve legal truths worth having.

On Discussing What We Should Do

AbstractMany of the good things which make human life worthwhile are essentially social, cannot be enjoyed by one person unless they are enjoyed together with others. And it is obvious that thinking in terms of the first-person plural, we/us, plays a large part in everyday life as people consider puzzlements (‘What should we do?’) and remark on the success of what they decided on (‘That worked out really well for us!’). Analytic philosophers should accept this at face value, recognising that human beings are often co-subjects with each other, that there is irreducible plural intentionality. The paper explores how the existence of plural intentionality manifests itself in our concepts and ways of proceeding and how attempted ‘analysis’ of what goes on as the assemblage of many interlocking instances of singular intentionality distorts and misleads.

Knowledge, Opinion, Belief: The Dialectical Challenging

This paper is written in the continental tradition – facing the analytic one – and advocates the knowledge first thesis, reviewing the entailment thesis (where believing is knowing, because to know entails to believe). It starts from the ancient distinction between knowledge and opinion and develops criteria for distinguishing knowledge, opinion and belief. The demonstration necessarily arrives to the kinds of beliefs and thus, to the relationships between knowledge and these kinds. While the distinction of kinds of beliefs leads to the understanding of why the knowledge belief problem did appear in epistemology, the analysis with this distinction is not rigid and can be approached dialectically. This standpoint is aiming at contributing to the debate of knowledge belief problem and to warmer relations between the continental and the analytic philosophy. Keywords: epistemology, knowledge, opinion, belief, truth, cognisance, system, criteria, dialectic.

Poetic Difficulty and Epistemic Authority

Whatever an analytic philosophy of poetry is, one achieves a sense of it by exploring the debates that animate it, which is likely all that constitutes its identity as a field. To give a sense of what is ›analytic‹ about these debates, I explore two topics that enlist poetry to approach issues of general interest in core areas of analytic philosophy: meaning and the self, with particular emphasis on motivating a concept of meaning-as-aboutness. I will suggest that, contrary to common practice, we ought to approach these two debates as implicitly linked, since this helps bring to our attention a matter that should be more central to contemporary philosophy of poetry: a statement of how lyrically-mediated self-images tell us something interesting about the relationship between language and personhood. That is, I outline how these recent debates can help shed light on what philosophers like to call the ›cognitive value‹ of poetry, which is to say, its ability to communicate, through poetic form itself, forms of understanding of the world and human predicament.

보편을 다시 무대에 올리며, 보편의 상 아래에서 말하기 - ‘탈진실’ 시대 진리 개념의 포스트-구조주의적 재구성을 위한 정치철학적 시론 -

The present study takes the politico-philosophical approach of reconstructing the concepts of truth and the universal in a poststructuralist way in order to criticize our present situation of post-truth. This approach takes the following four steps. First, beyond simply diagnosing the present post-truth situation, it also critically analyzes the various discourses that criticize the post-truth situation. The conclusion of this critical diagnosis is that the discourses which criticize the present post-truth situation treat truth in a cognitivist way in accordance with the propositional conception of truth, which is based on a superficial misunderstanding of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Second, in order to criticize these attempts to reduce truth to the dimension of the true, it reconstructs the post-structuralist triangle of truth-history-subject based on French historical epistemology, i.e. the post-structuralist conception of truth. The post-structuralist conception of truth does not reduce truth to a dimension of the true but elevates it to the dimension of truth itself. Third, it defines this post-structuralist triangle of truthhistory-subject as the triangle of the universal, based on the post structuralist philosopher Étienne Balibar’s reflections on the universal. Through an analysis of the history of philosophy, Balibar deduces three qualities of universality - equivocal universality, conflictual universality, universality as translation - from the thoughts of Spinoza-Wittgenstein, Hegel-Marx, Quine-Benjamin. Fourth, in order to address the objection that can be raised against the post-structuralist conception of truth and the universal, which is the problem of the arbitrariness of the standards for truth and the universal, it criticizes the Deleuze-Nietzschean reflection on the courage of the false, based on Balibar’s philosophy of actualityas- structure. Lastly, it reflects on how truth and the universal ought to be thought of from the standpoint of the intellectuals in this post-truth situation. In the end, the aim of this article is to provide a theoretical key to overcoming our current post-truth situation, by thinking about truth and the universal in a different way from current discourses.

Beatrice Edgell’s myth of the given

ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars' ‘myth of the given' had a momentous influence on 20th-century epistemology, putting under pressure the internalist foundationalism so prominent in early analytic philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the core themes in Sellars' argument are anticipated in the work of the London philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell (1871-1948). Edgell explicitly argued that “‘knowledge by acquaintance' is a myth invented by epistemology” (“Is there ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance'?”, 196). In some respects, however, Edgell's argument against the myth of the given is even more compelling than Sellars' - or so I will argue. The core of the paper logically reconstructs and historically contextualizes Edgell's line of argument, as emerging out of a critique of Russell’s epistemology, with the goal of showing that the ‘myth of the given' effectively predated Sellars by four decades.

Rekonstruksi Kurikulum Pendidikan: Sebuah Analisis Filsafat untuk Membangun Kreativitas Siswa

The purpose of writing this scientific article is to find out about the reconstruction of the educational curriculum: a philosophical analysis to build student creativity. Reconstructing the educational curriculum is an important effort to adapt the education system to the demands of the ever-evolving times. This paper aims to provide an analytical philosophy in the context of curriculum reconstruction, with a focus on building student creativity. The philosophical approach provides a theoretical basis for understanding the essence of education and the role of creativity in the learning process. This analysis includes an in-depth understanding of the principles of educational philosophy, such as human essence, educational goals, and views on knowledge. The philosophies of existentialism and progressivism are the main conceptual frameworks that encourage student empowerment to develop their creative potential. Thus, it is hoped that the reconstruction of the educational curriculum based on philosophical analysis can create a generation of students who are not only skilled in terms of knowledge, but also have the ability to think creatively and innovatively in facing future challenges.

I, You, and We: Beyond Individualism and Collectivism

ABSTRACT The contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted several decades, but questions concerning the nature of ‘we’ and the relation between the individual and the community are obviously far older. We can find a particularly rich discussion in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of intentionality a few years later. A distinctive feature of the phenomenological contribution was its exploration of the relation between the first- and second-person singular and the first-person plural perspectives. How are I, you, and we intertwined? The aim of this paper is to present some core insights from this early debate.