British Empiricism Research Articles

Sensation, Nominalism, and the Elements of Experience

ABSTRACTCharles Sanders Peirce and Maurice Merleau-Ponty raise the same objection to British empiricism: its foundational tenet—captured in Hume's Copy Principle, that all of our ideas are fainter copies of our impressions—is nominalist. It is not clear what this objection amounts to, however, since the British empiricists are nominalists of one stripe or another. I canvass different ways to construe this objection. Three different construals of it fail. A fourth construal succeeds, but in a way that leaves the foundational tenet of British empiricism intact. The problem is not that the tenet is false (it may be) but that it cannot be adopted as a foundation on which to build a philosophical account of those elements of an experience that are contributed by the world and those that are contributed by the experiencing subject.

Estética de la recepción e Historia de las ideas en el siglo XVIII. La virtus y el honestum ciceronianos en el “honor nobiliario“ de Montesquieu y la “educación cívica“ de Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos

A través de la metodología de una selección de teóricos de la“estética de la recepción”, pretendemos analizar la interrelaciónentre el “horizonte de expectativas” (en terminología deGadamer y de Jauss) de Marco Tulio Cicerón, con el de losintelectuales ilustrados Montesquieu y Gaspar Melchor deJovellanos. A partir de ahí, pretendemos rellenar los “vacíos”(según la terminología de Iser), o los misunderstandings (enpalabras de Hirsch) que la lectura ilustrada hace de la éticapolítica ciceroniana en el término concreto de la “virtud” y la“honestidad”. Así pues, desarrollaremos estos conceptos segúntoda la cosmovisión ciceroniana en contraste con la ilustradade Montesquieu y Jovellanos, y resaltaremos, de este modo,aquellos puntos de cambio y aquellos de enraizamiento en elpensamiento del propio Cicerón. En definitiva, responderemosa la pregunta de hasta qué punto el rhetor romano condicionó laconcepción política de la virtud y honestidad tanto en el ilustradofrancés como en el español (en los que también se tendrá encuenta la destacada interferencia del empirismo inglés), a lavez que, de qué forma estos autores “modernos” readaptaron ytransformaron el pensamiento del “clásico” según sus propios“horizontes de expectativas”.

“I Know the Man”: Evidence, Belief, and Character in Victorian Fiction

Focusing in particular on Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (1875) and Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux (1873), this essay examines the manner in which Victorian novels grapple with various forms of evidence, ranging from the forensic and detective knowledge of the police to a knowledge of another person's character that is often termed “belief.” The author elaborates the complex role belief plays in British empiricist texts by John Locke and David Hume and in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century treatises on evidences directly influenced by empiricist philosophy, where one could distinguish what one might call a “belief-in-evidence” from a “belief-against-the-evidence.” This essay then demonstrates how episodes of character witness in Victorian legal fictions become venues for addressing the value of belief in others and its complex participation in the attempt to discover truths. Belief, in these novels, is frequently more correct than the evidence marshaled by the police. That this is so often the case suggests an idealistic desire to imagine continuities and forms of knowledge more complete than those accommodated by the epistemology of detection.

Constituting Knowledge: German Literature and Philosophy Between Coleridge and Crabb Robinson

ABSTRACTSamuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson were their generation’s prime connoisseurs of German intellectual life. Both had lived and studied in Germany—Coleridge between 1798 and 1799, Robinson from 1800 to 1805. Similarly, albeit independent of each other, they took the step from English empiricism to Kant’s critical philosophy and beyond, towards idealist speculation. As Coleridge gained increasing notoriety for obscurity of thought and allegations of plagiarism, Robinson explained and defended his works publicly. How he did so, and the role that German philosophy and literature (in particular the works of C. L. Heyne and Jean Paul) played in this, is the topic of this essay. Robinson was uniquely qualified to interpret and disseminate Coleridge’s esoterica. From him, we learn how Coleridge placed the individual’s conscience at the heart of an idealist philosophy and subsequently elaborated the Will as the key concept of practical morality that also granted ontological validity to the affections. Ideas are constitutive, as opposed to regulative, in this process: they are the lively offshoots of a formative mind generating knowledge, not merely categorizers of worldly appearances. Literature emerges, between Coleridge and Robinson, as a compelling reflection on morals through the ideas’ involvement of the affections.

Critique of Continental Feminism

Critique of Continental Feminism Elaine P. Miller It could be argued that nominally continental feminism emerged as a category of philosophy in 2007 with the founding of philoSOPHIA: A Society for Continental Feminism by Kelly Oliver, even though, of course, philosophers such as Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and even Simone de Beauvoir had already been de facto writing in the genre for decades. As part of the initial group of continental feminist philosophers who met and formed the society and the journal, we to a certain degree assumed the self-evidence of our identity: we were all feminists whose work in continental philosophy had already established us to some degree as professional philosophers, and the feminist perspective allowed us to both turn a critical eye toward and bring new meaning out of the classical texts that were most often our subject of research. Today, as that self-evidence is being queried and sometimes critiqued, a demand arises to look more closely into the meaning of the designation "continental feminism." What do we mean when we name this category? In particular, we must ask ourselves if, in aligning ourselves, however non-mindfully, with the "continent" of Europe, we repeat injustices inherent in Western language and systems of thought. In addition, we might inquire into the value of reading canonical texts from the history of European philosophy, and ask if this can be done in a way that exhumes and reinvigorates rather than entombs the ideas within them. I will proceed by looking at the meaning of the word "continent," its terrain and its implications, as does one of my co-discussants in this roundtable, Jami Weinstein. "Continent" comes from the roots continens, or continuous, and terra, or earth. Although, as Andrew Cutrofello notes, the very notion of continental philosophy is in large part a negative, "Anglo-American disciplinary [End Page 149] formation" (Continental Philosophy, 25), continental philosophy has embraced its given name. The continent of Europe, in contradistinction to the island countries that neighbor it, connects many nations to each other, allowing them to share some kind of common identity, one that is continually being negotiated even today. Not coincidentally, questions of earth, territory, and the related concepts of blood, kinship, nation, and race, are concepts that, predominating in Western philosophy as a whole, also mark continental philosophy, although it prides itself in subjecting the history of metaphysics and all its stable categories and concepts to critique. What, then, does it mean to "add" feminism to continental philosophy, and can this new discipline really be considered an addition, an accretion, or is it important, necessary even, that feminism, along with antiracism, anticolonialism, and attention to disability and sexual identity, disrupt the continuity, the disavowed yet omnipresent assumption of totality, foundationalism, and belonging that the word terra evokes? Andrew Cutrofello discusses continental philosophy as a divergent (from that of Anglo-American philosophy) approach to the conclusions of Kant. Both schools of thought wrestled with the clear distinction Kant draws between concept and intuition, seeking to overcome this dichotomy either by sensualizing concepts (British empiricism) or by intellectualizing appearances (German idealism). Continental philosophy in a sense emerges out of the impossible task of attempting to overcome what Kant took to be a necessary and insurmountable division.1 Cutrofello argues that it is Kant's conception of reflective judgment, which Kant introduces in the Critique of Judgment, that is the inspiration for much of continental philosophy's ability to go beyond analyzing the basic building blocks of reality or the conditions under which we may know or should act. Cutrofello allies reflective judgment with the "spontaneous receptivity" of intuition as opposed to the "receptive spontaneity" of the understanding; rather than subsuming an object of intuition under a pre-given concept of the understanding, reflective judgment calls attention to our inability to subsume a form under any concept that we possess (2). Reflective judgment's promise is thus one of possible newness, opening to a universal that is not predetermined. As such it has been associated with aesthetics, just as determinative judgment is associated with science, and, as Cutrofello points out, it is also at the origin of Hegel's and Schelling's...

Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction by Anthony J. Lisska

Reviewed by: Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction by Anthony J. Lisska David L. Whidden III Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction. By Anthony J. Lisska. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 353. $99.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19-877790-8. At the beginning of this monograph, Anthony Lisska quotes Dorothea Frede’s observation that “the vis cogitativa is, for Aquinas, ‘an embarrassment’” (4). In the remainder of this very helpful book, Lisska provides a sustained rebuttal to Frede’s statement by arguing that the vis cogitativa is crucial to Aquinas’s overall theory of perception because it “is the faculty by which human perceivers are aware of individuals as individuals of a natural kind” (4). In the course of this argument, Lisska makes an important contribution to our understanding of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, beginning with a detailed analysis of his understanding of sensation and ending with a description of how phantasms work with the agent and possible intellects. Because the vis cogitativa plays an important role in how we come to perceive objects as individual objects, which can later be abstracted, Lisska carefully walks the reader through each step of the process of sensation, perception, and abstraction, with a special emphasis on Aquinas’s understanding of the inner senses. In pursuing his analysis, Lisska engages with two sets of conversation partners. First, among contemporary philosophers, he is primarily engaged with other analytical Thomists and at times affirms and at times corrects the work of Robert Pasnau, John Haldane, Eleonore Stump, and Anthony Kenny, among others. Part of his disagreement with some of these contemporary Thomists is methodological, as he argues that Aquinas offers a more robust account of sensation and the inner senses in his commentary on De anima than the more commonly preferred Summa theologiae, which offers an abbreviated account of his philosophy of mind since it is focused on theological issues. In engaging his second set of interlocutors, Lisska demon-strates his concern with the negative impact the British Empiricists (Hume, Locke, Berkeley, et al.) have had upon contemporary philosophies of mind and sees Aquinas’s theories of sensation and cognition as a helpful antidote to the philosophical cul-de-sacs into which their approaches to sensation have led us. In his first chapter, Lisska raises the fundamental question of the book, which is how Aquinas understands our ability to be aware of individuals as individuals rather than as a bundle of sensations. As Lisska is describing this problem, he also argues for the importance of Aquinas’s metaphysics for understanding his overall philosophy of mind, especially perception, adopting Haldane’s maxim “that there is ‘no epistemology without ontology’” (11). Additionally, Lisska provides his methodological case for the superiority of the commentary on De anima over the Summa theologiae with regard to understanding Aquinas’s theory of perception, arguing that the Summa theologiae focuses on the intellect and will and so does not contain a full account of perception, because the theological commitments of the Summa [End Page 625] limit Aquinas’s need to treat perception (23–27). This is not to say that Lisska ignores the Summa, but rather that he finds the commentary on De anima to provide a fuller account of perception, one that can help us better to interpret the Summa on perception or to fill in blanks that the Summa leaves in Aquinas’s overall theory of perception. In his next two chapters, Lisska provides his understanding of the metaphysical framework in which Aquinas’s theory of perception operates. In the second chapter, he gives an account of Aquinas’s theory of intentionality, arguing in six propositions that Aquinas is both an ontological and epistemological realist, that “esse intentionale is the cognitive content of an act of awareness” and is dependent upon the ontological status of the knower, and that Aquinas is an externalist in his philosophy of mind (37). Lisska points out that the foundation of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is his distinction between act and potency, so that our senses and intellects must be properly disposed to receive forms. In the third chapter, Lisska puts Aquinas’s philosophy of...

British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason by Timothy Michael

BOOK REVIEWS 293 feminist theory. While Robinson’s literary catalogue of women’s writing certainly works to revise women’s literary reputations, one can’t help but wonder what kind of future-looking ecriture feminine Robinson’s unique post-Della Cruscan style might sketch. Cross importantly explores how Robinson’s tactics of gendered author­ ship could be expressed as a more full-blown theory of Romantic gender. Robinson’s loquacious dialogues bridge gender with voices that play and intertwine regardless of or underneath bodily difference, even while they implicate the socio-political and economic structures that instantiate gender normativity. What is more, we might extend the implications of this model—obviating gender difference while valorizing its role in instigating poetic acts—to suggest that gender becomes an essential motor of Roman­ ticism. As a theory of poetics, Robinson’s tropic play throws authorial dif­ ference into relief even as it retroactively alters the very grounds ofpoesis for all Romantic poets. Kate Singer Mount Holyoke College Timothy Michael. British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. 283. $54.95. In British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason, Timothy Michael argues that crises of political knowledge are not aberrations in modernity but, instead, one of its foundations. After the bloody turn taken by the French Revolution, writers and artists from across Europe had to cope with widespread failure of Enlightenment ideals—rationalism, secular gov­ ernance, and the rhetoric of liberation—to live up to their utopian prom­ ises. One name for this coping strategy was Romanticism, the aesthetic and political movement whose figures, Michael says, had to undertake “an as­ sessment of what [could] be rescued from Enlightenment models of ratio­ nality and an evaluation of how what remains of them might be deployed in postrevolutionary political contexts” (3). According to Michael, the models of knowledge that Romantic writers rescued after the breakdown of Enlightenment politics were numerous. They included the preservation of reason (now tempered by sensation and pleasure), a conservation of the idea of the “autonomous” poet by placing her in the messy cultural condi­ tions in which she lived, and a recommitment to a style of inwardness that accommodated history and institutions (instead ofavoiding them) (5). If all of this sounds very Burkean, then the governing thesis of British Romanti­ cism is more radical. Michael argues that, at root, questions of political knowledge inevitably become in the Romantic imagination questions of SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) 294 BOOK REVIEWS freedom (5). The critique of existing models of understanding—be it a hard-nosed English empiricism or “the dream of pure reason”—could still be in the service of liberation (38). Michael’s book participates in a long tradition in Romantic studies that sees Romanticism as a negotiation—and not an outright repudiation—of Enlightenment rationalism and secularization. It includes texts such as James Engell’s The Creative Imagination, Frances Ferguson’s essays and book on Romantic-era utilitarianism, and Colin Jager’s work on religious thought and institutions after the disenchantment brought on by a secular age. However, if British Romanticism reframes the epistemology of political thought in this transitional period, it’s also an unusually old school book: Michael constructs a traditional intellectual history that avoids the cultural materialist methodologies that we’ve come to expect in most first mono­ graphs written under the rubric of the New Historicism. Instead, Michael concentrates on ideas themselves, as well as the fertile connections between them. While reading, I regularly thought about historians ofRomantic ide­ ology from the early to mid-twentieth-century, such as A. O. Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin, by whom Michael admits to being influenced (19). But Mi­ chael’s analyses are less linear and more dialectical than Lovejoy’s or Berlin’s. He is not telling a story about the evolution ofideas, but building a network out of their recurrence and reappraisal. Indeed, Michael’s em­ phasis on pure concepts—his “commitment to the history of philosophy, especially philosophies of mind and knowledge”—seems to echo the re­ constructed idealism of the authors whose work he analyzes (24). In other words, the intellectual history of the late-eighteenth and early...

Political philosophy, executive constraint and electoral rules

This paper explains the choice of electoral rule by the difference in the ease of implementing targeted transfer. By modeling the choice of electoral rule as a decision by the ruling rich-elite party before universal suffrage is enacted, this paper predicts that a loose constitutional constraint on targeted transfers is conducive to the adoption of proportional representation. To complete the theory, this work argues that the British empiricism and the Continental rationalism have their own views concerning the role and the power of a state, leading to differential levels of constraints on redistribution. Thus the theory explains why Anglo-Saxon countries tend to maintain majoritarian electoral rule. Employing the event history analysis with the two-stage-residual-inclusion approach, this work shows that countries with poorer executive constraints are more likely to adopt proportional representation. Meanwhile, we find evidence supporting that countries with British origin have been associated with tighter constraint upon the executive.

Conservatism and Common-Sense Realism

I. INTRODUCTIONPaul Engelmann, Austrian architect who became friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein's during World War I, writes that although notion of a God in sense of Bible, image of God as creator of world, hardly ever engaged Wittgenstein's attention, idea of last judgement of profound concern to him. ?When we meet again at last judgement' was recurrent phrase with him, Engelmann explains, which he used in many conversation at particularly momentous point. He would pronounce words with an indescribably inward-gazing look in his eyes, his head bowed. Wittgenstein saw life as task, looking upon features of life as it is, that is to say upon all facts, as an essential part of conditions of that task. Wittgenstein, Engelmann continues, consistently held that if there was discrepancy between himself and world, the reason discrepancy lies in himself alone, thus rejecting the belief that changes in external facts may be necessary and called for (Engelmann 1967, 77, 79).The stance here described by Engelmann is one of humbleness, stance I take to be characteristic of conservative mentality-and there is no doubt that Wittgenstein held conservative views. In what follows I will refer to some further aspects of conservative mentality, and attempt to explicate notoriously elusive notion of conservatism, before returning to issue of what Wittgenstein's conservatism involves. I will then argue that alternative, left-wing/Iiberal, mentality clearly tends to lead to epistemological and ontological positions of relativism and constructivism. The conservative stance, by contrast, should lead to realism, and ultimately to common-sense realism.The author whose work first alerted me to connection between conservatism and realism is Gestalt psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Amheim. In his essay Wertheimer and Gestalt Psychology written in 1969 Amheim noted contrast between, on one hand, British empiricist philosophy proudly asserting dominion of individual's views and judgments over environment, and, on other hand, worldview of Gestalt psychologists, who showed respect structure of physical world as it impinges upon nervous system, affirming that it is man's task to find his own humble place in world and to take cues his conduct and comprehension from order of that world. In social realm, Amheim went on, Gestalt theory demanded of citizen that he derive his rights and duties from objectively ascertained functions and needs of society (Amheim 1969, 34).I will come back to Arnheim's conservative views below. For moment I want merely to point out that Arnheim was central figure heralding iconic turn- turn to visual thinking-today gradually gaining ground in humanities,1 even perhaps in philosophy. Arnheim stressed primordial and continuing significance of visual thinking, of autonomous pictorial meaning ultimately founded on so-called descriptive gestures, and of motor dimension inevitably involved in understanding of images. Now if Arnheim was on right track in all of this, as I believe he was, then lesson philosophy is that ontology cannot remain satisfied with being based merely and entirely on intuitions suggested by structure of verbal language, and epistemology cannot go on ignoring fact that our knowledge of world out there is founded more on immediate visual images than on mediating capacity of words.I will argue that not only Amheim but also Wittgenstein followed path from conservatism to realism. Wittgenstein in his later philosophy gradually worked out elements of novel, sophisticated, common-sense approach to both ontology and epistemology, one of these elements being rudimentary theory of pictorial meaning.2 Because mainstream view associates him with relativism rather than with realism, Wittgenstein might seem an unlikely candidate conservative exponent of realist philosophy. …

Wielding Natural Methodism: Prospect’s Retrospection

Previous articleNext article No AccessWielding Natural Methodism: Prospect’s RetrospectionRichard E. BrantleyRichard E. BrantleyUniversity of Florida Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 47, Number 1Winter 2016Romantic Religion Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC47010003 Views: 6Total views on this site © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

On the evolution of scientific thought

The Nominalists of the XIV century, precursors of modern science, thought that science's object was not the general, vague and indeterminate but the particular, which is real and can be known directly. About the middle of the XVII Century the bases of the modern science became established thanks to a revolution fomented essentially by Galileo, Bacon and Descartes. During the XVIII Century, parallel to the development of the great current of English Empiricism, a movement of scientific renewal also arose in continental Europe following the discipline of the Dutch Physicians and of Boerhaave. In the XIX Century, Claude Bernard dominated the scientific medicine but his rigorous determinism impeded him from taking into account the immense and unforeseeable field of the random. Nowadays, we approach natural science and medicine, from particular groups of facts; that is, from the responses of Nature to specific questions, but not from the general laws. Furthermore, in recent epistemology, the concept that experimental data are not pure facts, but rather, facts interpreted within a hermeneutical context has been established. Finally a general tendency to retrieve philosophical questions concerning the understanding of essence and existence can frequently be seen in scientific inquiry. In the light of the evolution of medical thought, it is possible to establish the position of scientific medicine within the movement of ideas dominating in our time.

Eine peinliche Verwechselung

The paper aims at showing that Husserl’s phenomenology is not to be understood as a transcendental philosophy. First, I argue that Husserl’s concept of the Transcendental embraces a complex set of problems that are already present in the texts written before the so-called transcendental turn and in the British empiricism. Secondly, I highlight the ideological motivations of Husserl’s tie with the German idealistic tradition and I argue that Husserl – in contrast to transcendental philosophy – conceives of the conditions of possibility of experience as immanent to experience itself and as grounded on sensuous contents. This implies that the constitution of the world presupposes a specific lawfulness characterizing sensuous contents, which cannot be traced back to consciousness and to its performances. Finally, I develop an account of the specific kind of subjectivism that lies in Husserl’s thought. Particularly, I argue that Husserl’s subjectivism is not grounded upon the phenomenological reduction but rather derives from Brentano’s psychological approach. In fact, such subjectivism is based on the understanding of the primitive elements of constitution as immanent and formless contents (data), viz. on a conception that is developed before the so-called transcendental turn and that is in contrast to some basic principles of phenomenology itself.

John Locke in the Twenty-First Century

John Locke in the Twenty-First CenturyEtienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag and Introduced by Stella Sandford (London/Brooklyn: Verso, 2013)Poor Descartes. The seventeenth-century French tried to naturalize the mind by doubting everything and restarting from what he thought was unarguable: I think, therefore I am. The mind was a thinking substance with innate a priori ideas, while the body was a separate extended substance whose senses supplied us with less reliable a posteriori ideas. Since the Cartesian cogito began in an individual mind, the problem immediately arose as to how to connect that interiority to an exteriority: its own body and a world of other minds and bodies. So, while Descartes is credited for starting a modern psychology incorporating a conscious self, he is blamed for generating modern dualism and a corresponding state of alienation between mind and body, subject and object-a breach every subsequent philosophical innovation has addressed one way or another. An early effort was that of British empiricist John Locke, who declared the mind a tabula rasa; our ideas were all acquired a posteriori through lived impressions.Locke is also known as the architect of the liberal revolution that substituted an atomistic individualism and bourgeois property rights for divinely ordained land-based feudal aristocracy. Nonetheless, in Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, Marxist Etienne Balibar has now withdrawn credit from Descartes for conceiving our modern notion of consciousness and a rationalist psychology, to instead bestow it on Locke! Balibar justifies his ironic choice in an intriguing analysis of Locke's discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Of Identity and Diversity, Book II, xxvii, 1694 edition). Balibar's essay is sixteen years old, but has now been translated into English by theorist Warren Montag and ably introduced by British philosopher Stella Sandford. The book contains a new preface and significant appendices, including a detailed Philosophical and Philological Glossary and a second essay on Spinoza and Locke.We attend particularly closely not only since Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Universite de Paris X and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, but because he is embedded in the critical post-structuralist pantheon as co-author with Louis Althusser of Reading Capital (1965) and, like Althusser and Montag, a distinguished Spinoza scholar. The other rationalist, Spinoza, born in 1632, the same year as Locke, had argued in the opposite direction when answering Cartesian dualism: the universe was one Substance Absolutely Infinite conceived as either mental or material and incorporating everything. He called it God or Nature and defined our chaotic emotions as bodily affects resulting from our situations within this larger matrix. In the essay on Spinoza and Locke, Balibar suggests that after Descartes, psychology had two radical naturalistic possibilities: Spinoza's rationalistic materialism or Locke's rationalistic empiricism.Balibar's further purpose is to find points of contact between the Anglophone and Continental philosophic traditions in response to the rift that developed after the Second World War between European critical philosophy (phenomenological, existentialist, and Marxist), which allows for theoretical questions of Being, desire, and political engagement, and the analytic school (positivist, empirical, emphasizing the use of symbolic logic). Despite the latter's important sources in 1920s Middle Europe, the two strands developed independently with little crossover and much alienation. Analytics dominated in Britain and America during the Cold War, but the critical theorists ascended in Europe after 1968. …

Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid by Louis E. Loeb (review)

Reviewed by: Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid by Louis E. Loeb Kevin Meeker Louis E. Loeb. Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 369. ISBN: 978-0-19-536876-5, Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-536875-8, Paper, $45.00. This book is (almost entirely) a collection of previously published essays by Louis Loeb. The first three essays focus primarily on advancing the general interpretive claim that Descartes’s main epistemological goal is achieving unshakable beliefs. While essays 5–10 address many topics in Humean interpretation, they all contribute in various ways to supporting Loeb’s claim that Hume’s primary epistemological goal is achieving stable beliefs. Essay 12 compares the naturalisms of Hume and Reid. All of the collected essays are excellent. Such excellence is not surprising, for Loeb is an influential interpreter of early modern philosophy, justly renowned for the ingenuity of his readings. Spanning the last three decades, these essays display many fine qualities that have helped make Loeb such a prominent historian. Here I will briefly mention three of these qualities. First, Loeb has remarkable command of the primary historical texts and the secondary literature. This mastery is perhaps best seen in his “What is Worth Preserving in the Kemp Smith Interpretation of Hume?” (essay 9). In addition to providing a detailed exposition of a wide range of texts from Hume and Norman Kemp Smith, Loeb also makes adroit comments about the literature discussing the secondary literature when he addresses the “Canonical Understanding” of Kemp Smith (246–47). Second, Loeb effortlessly integrates historical and contemporary concerns. His “Hume’s Agent-Centered Sentimentalism” (essay 8), for instance, has [End Page 257] an interesting discussion of how Hume’s moral theory might aid contemporary utilitarians (238–44). Moreover, essays 5 (“Integrating Hume’s Accounts of Belief and Justification”) and 10 (“Psychology, Epistemology, and Skepticism in Hume’s Argument about Induction”) fruitfully discuss Hume’s epistemology in light of issues important to the contemporary distinction between internalism and externalism. Third, Loeb’s intuitive knack for isolating important connections amongst various texts and figures allows him to tell a concise story about the evolution of certain philosophical ideas that panoramically covers large portions of the history of philosophy. His “Locke and British Empiricism” (essay 11), which connects epistemological themes in Locke with Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Malebranche, and Reid, among others, is one example. (Because this essay is, as of this writing, still forthcoming, it is the only essay that is not previously published.) Finally, all three of these qualities are prominently on display in “Sextus, Descartes, Hume, and Peirce” (essay 4), which interestingly uses contemporary views about belief (especially as developed by David Velleman) to understand Descartes and Hume “against the backdrop of Sextus and Peirce” (107). To my mind this essay is the best in the book. There are at least two main advantages of collecting these excellent essays into a book. First, the collection allows Loeb to systematically emphasize the similarities between different early modern thinkers in a way that typically strengthens the cumulative case he makes for his readings of these philosophers. Second, the volume permits us to catch a rare glimpse of how an interpreter’s views can change over time. Considering the cumulative effect of the arguments as well as the changes in Loeb’s views also provides us with a great opportunity to reflect critically on many important issues in a fruitful way. The rest of this review will focus on such critical reflections. Let us start with Descartes, as Loeb does. In his introduction to the essays, Loeb helpfully contextualizes his discussions of Descartes. He points out that his paper “Was Descartes Sincere in His Appeal to the Light of Nature?” (not included here) maintains that the arguments Descartes presents are so poor that they “suggest” that “Descartes was insincere in offering his proofs of the existence of God and in appealing to Divine veracity to validate clear and distinct perception” (9; cf. 35). Of course others have likewise contended that Descartes was a dissimulator. But in the first four chapters...

Conjunctions and/or Disjunctions: Radical Empiricism in the History of Philosophy

William James challenged the traditions of British Empiricism (Hume) on one hand and German Idealism (Kant and Hegel) on the other. James’ “Radical Empiricism” is a via media (“middle road”) between these divergent positions. His central points of contention are the ontological status of relationships and the correct analysis of experience. British Empiricism leaves us with a world of separate, particular facts, based on atomic sense impressions. Idealists, on the other hand, claim that all worldly phenomena are conjoined by one rational principle. According to James’ account, neither side recognizes that both conjunctive and disjunctive relations are integral to experience. Furthermore, James’ critique proved to influence A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy of experience and orientation toward Hume and Kant. This essay situates James’ philosophy in this polemical and historical context.

Remarks on the idealist and empiricist interpretation of frequentism: Robert Leslie Ellis versus John Venn

The goal of this paper is to correct a widespread misconception about the work of Robert Leslie Ellis and John Venn, namely that it can be considered as the ‘British empiricist’ reaction against the traditional theory of probability. It is argued, instead, that there was no unified ‘British school’ of frequentism during the nineteenth century. Where Ellis arrived at frequentism from a metaphysical idealist transformation of probability theory’s mathematical calculations, Venn did so on the basis of an empiricist critique of its ‘inverse application’.

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Deductive Reasoning

This article introduces the first English translation of one of Tanabe’s early essays on metaphysics. It questions the relation of the universal to the particular in context of logic, phenomenology, Neo-Kantian epistemology, and classical metaphysics. Tanabe provides his reflections on the nature of the concept of universality and its constitutive relation to phenomenal particulars through critical analyses of the issue as it is discussed across various schools of philosophy including: British Empiricism, the Marburg School, the Austrian School, the Kyoto School, and Platonism. In this essay, Tanabe reveals his ability to think metaphysically the ground for the possibility of (deductive) reasoning and dares to voice his own thought beyond references to the most prominent thinkers of his time from distinct intellectual traditions in both the east and the west. This essay, therefore, demonstrates that his strong tendency to move beyond the received epistemology and phenomenology of the European intellectual tradition to metaphysics was already present in the early days of his academic life and thereby marks a more general contribution of the Kyoto School of Philosophy to distinct European schools of thought in the early twentieth century.

Husserl’s struggle with mental images: imaging and imagining reconsidered

Husserl’s extensive analyses of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and of the imagination (Phantasie) offer insightful and detailed structural explications. However, despite this careful work, Husserl’s discussions fail to overcome the need to rely on a most problematic concept: mental images. The epistemological conundrums triggered by the conceptual framework of mental images are well known—we have only to remember the questions regarding knowledge acquisition that plagued British empiricism. Beyond these problems, however, a plethora of important questions arise from claiming that mental images are structural moments of imaging and imagining. Any attempt to clarify the structure and conditions for the possibility of aesthetic experience must first provide an unambiguous account of pictorial depiction—a task unattainable through the mental images discourse. Similarly, exposing the import of the imagination for theoretical scientific inquiries (be they positive or eidetic) requires an initial explication of the structure of this consciousness; this explication, however, must address our ability to imagine non-spatially determined objects—something the conceptual framework of mental images utterly fails to accomplish. In this paper I argue against Husserl’s reliance on mental images in his phenomenological analyses of imaging and imagining and propose an alternative structural account for both. This account is free of this reliance and able to steer clear of its insidious implications for epistemology, aesthetics, and methodological reflections. By closely following the development of Husserl’s account I suggest alternative descriptions while building on Husserl’s important work.

An Empirical Critique of Empiricism

I. Introduction Empiricism has never been a uniform doctrine. Taken as a general attitude, there is something about empiricism that rings with a robust sense of reality that philosophers and scientists share as human beings who spend most of their waking hours outside of the classroom or laboratory. Most of us have probably come across the Thomas Paines of society who embody an almost self-assured realism that verges on the naive, the kind that professes a healthy dose of skepticism and common sense as antidotes against beliefs that lack empirical rigor: embodied, in short, by the kind of person who thinks he is qualified to make statements about science and religion but is an expert in neither. In addition, there are accomplished scientists who interpret reality according to the scope of a particular field of positivistic science and its theoretical models of phenomena (most of which are mathematical) without examining the philosophical presuppositions that go unnoticed in the process. Given these caricatures, and given the nuances involved, a thorough definition of empiricism is no simple task. In this article, we will instead attempt an overarching exposition of two overlapping but divergent paradigms of empiricism: (a) strict empiricism, representing most of the British empiricists and ancient skeptics and (b) mitigated, or metaphysical, (1) empiricism represented by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Sense experience is the unifying departure point for both, but while (b) says that human knowledge begins with sense experience, (a) tends to ultimately reduce knowledge to sense experience. Concerning structure, our article is divided into two parts. The first consists of two sections: (1) a philosophical critique of strict empiricism from the viewpoint of mitigated empiricism and (2) an account of how both versions of empiricism view causality. The second part consists of a critique of strict empiricism from the point of view of mathematics and modern physics. Since the very scope of these topics has generated a vast literature, the sole aim of our thesis can be only to raise questions about certain empiricist presuppositions that enjoy wide appeal, especially in the English-speaking world. Beyond the philosophical benefits of critiquing the strengths and weaknesses of an influential tradition such as British empiricism against a philosophical tradition that is often neglected or misunderstood, some of the advances in mathematics and the physical sciences over the last 250 years suggest that the complexity involved in the study of the natural world raises serious questions about any version of strict empiricism, specifically, the development of nonlinear dynamical systems, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics, all of which challenge the presuppositions of a strict empiricism. II. Strict Empiricism and Metaphysical Empiricism A. A Critique of Strict Empiricism It may seem irrelevant at this juncture to mention the name Parmenides, but in reality this ancient Greek philosopher represents the state of the question. To Parmenides, the universe offers a convincing impression of motion, multiplicity, and change, all of which are registered by our senses. But human reason sees something the senses do not: that what all things have in common is that they exist. For Parmenides, existence does not come in degrees because: (1) The already existent cannot be the source of more existence (existing is existing, period); (2) The existent cannot emerge from that which does not exist (to say that existing and not existing is the same thing is a contradiction that reality does not permit). If the difference between thing x and thing y is nothing (since they both exist), sense experience and change must be at best an illusion. Unable to arrive at the concept of the potentially existent (not to be confused with possibility, which is a logical category), Parmenides affirms the principle of noncontradiction at the price of severing any causal connections between a conclusion of reason and the input of the senses. …

Lessons Learned from Swinburne: A Critique of Richard Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy

Abstract: At the outset of his book Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (1992), Richard Swinburne differentiates between “sentences” and “statements,” a distinction that disengages his quest for rational revelation from biblical studies and the latter's historical treatment of biblical texts. Not only does this strategy reinstate the obsolete traditional form/content binarism, and presumes a correspondence account of truth, it also ignores the specific socio-cultural contexts and strategic aims behind all biblical texts. Swinburne's assertion that any God, being “God,” would reveal “himself” through prophets, perform miracles, and become incarnate as an atoning saviour, arises out of the culturally specific, Western, Christian tradition. His understanding of biblical miracles as violations of the laws of nature is based on a seventeenth-century understanding of miracles, as propounded by the British empiricist John Locke. His “four tests of [true] revelation” simultaneously grant preferential treatment to the Christian revelation, while facilitating the dismissal of [what he terms] “non-Christian” religions. His newly added section (2007) entitled “Moral Teaching” demonstrates how Swinburne's “revelation” (as a discursive practice) participates in non-discursive apparatuses of power and domination over women and lgbtq communities. Thus, in the end, this neo-conservative philosophical discourse on “revelation” employs the illusion of truth to extend itself as power over those who have been customarily marginalized by traditional forms of Christianity.