Philosophical Appeal Research Articles

The playing field of empirical facts: on the interrelations between moral and empirical beliefs in reflective equilibrium

AbstractWhat exactly is the role of empirical beliefs in moral reflective equilibrium (RE)? And if they have a part to play, can changes in our empirical beliefs effectuate changes in the moral principles we adopt? Conversely, can empirical beliefs be adjusted in light of certain moral convictions? While it is generally accepted that empirical background theory is of importance to the method of wide reflective equilibrium (WRE), this article focuses on a different aspect, namely the role of empirical beliefs that is intrinsic to the coherence relation of moral beliefs in any (narrow or wide) conception of RE. First, it is shown that in the application of RE, empirical beliefs are crucial to the procedure of matching principles to considered judgments. Changes in our empirical beliefs may therefore upset the relevant coherence relation and motivate changes in the moral principles we adopt. This more detailed account of the interplay between empirical and moral beliefs can help evaluate the overall philosophical appeal of RE. Finally, it is argued that, at least in WRE, the relation between empirical and moral beliefs need not be a one-way street, that is, moral convictions can provide us with some epistemic means of adjudicating between competing empirical descriptions of the world.

Transparenz, Erklärbarkeit, Interpretierbarkeit, Vertrauen: digitalethische Doppelgänger des Verantwortungsbegriffs

Abstract The paper examines four key concepts of digital and AI ethics, which make normative (“ought”) claims: “transparency,” “explainability,”“interpretability,” and “trust.” The idea is that with the help of these concepts, digital transformation should be “responsibly” shaped, and there is even an aspiration to establish an independent digital ethics. The analysis in this paper questions approaches of this type. It elaborates differences between the tradition of philosophical appeals to responsibility and the digital-ethical buzzwords. The concept of responsibility may be a vague concept and have traits of a mere moral-ethical signalling. However, its digital-ethical lookalikes are not even normative; they stand for technical quality criteria or product features of a descriptive nature. The phrase “digital ethics” is used misleadingly to suggest the existence of an ethical dimension.

Emergent agent causation

In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist framework. According to my proposal, a free agent is a causally powerful substance that emerges in an anomic way from her constitutive mental events, downwardly constraining, selecting and, in this way, having control on them. As we shall see, this particular concept of agent causation not only makes sense of the deep insight behind agent libertarianism, but it also provides us with the resources to solve some of the main objections that have been raised against it. It is true that here I cannot develop a complete defense of the evidential credentials of emergentism. Still, even if the considerations that follow do not serve to convince detractors of agent causal libertarian accounts of free will, they do suggest that libertarian agent causation is more promising than is typically acknowledged.

Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, RobertSokolowski, Catholic University of America Press, 2022 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3518‐9), xiv + 326 pp., pb $34.95

Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, RobertSokolowski, Catholic University of America Press, 2022 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3518‐9), xiv + 326 pp., pb $34.95

Representation of two Contrary States of Human Soul: Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

It is difficult to ignore the basic point about William Blake that though chronologically he is an eighteenth-century poet, he is a highly gifted and immensely successful lyric poet. While Blake’s poetry may or may not have the pleasantness of great poetry, it is perhaps true that Blake has no notable predecessors and no followers. He consistently stresses the importance of freedom, as opposed to the tyranny that he feels to be characteristic of the government of his day, and attacks negative moralizing, which he associates with the church, as opposed to a true sense of religion. The Songs of Innocence and of Experience occupy a vital place in the corpus of Blake’s poetical writings. This is so because these Songs are as much the product of Blake’s earlier writings as the pointer to his future writings. The kind of philosophical tone that we encounter in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience is indeed astounding. It is said that Blake looked upon poetry as something that is dictated by spirits, or as the result of inspiration, but he was also aware of the role of the poet to bring out certain truths of human life in front of the people in a symbolic way. There is no doubt about the fact that in the corpus of English Poetry no other poet has got as much success, if equal but certainly not more, as Blake. The present paper is mainly focused on the philosophical appeal and symbolic portrayal of human existence that the Songs of William Blake illustrate to us.

Gilbert Ryle’s adverbialism

ABSTRACTGilbert Ryle famously wrote that practical knowledge (knowing how) is distinct from propositional knowledge (knowing that). This claim continues to have broad philosophical appeal, and yet there are many unsettled questions surrounding Ryle’s basic proposal. In this article, I return to his original work in order to perform some intellectual archeology. I offer an interpretation of Ryle’s concept of action that I call ‘adverbialism’. Actions are constituted by bodily behaviours performed in a certain mode, style or manner. I present various challenges to adverbialism – scenarios in which it seems we publicly behave one way, but privately feel another. And I offer a response – Ryle’s stated practice of re-describing those situations in ways that pose no threat to his adverbialism. I also present an interpretation of practical knowledge in Ryle’s work. Knowing how is a special kind of action, undertaken only when we progressively self-modify our behaviours in the presence of new challenges or opportunities.

Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal

Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal

Reading Silence

Stanley Cavell roams across a wide range of fields in his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? most obviously those of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. But nowhere in the book’s ten essays does he advance an explicit political theory. Still, this book, published in 1969 and written over the course of the preceding decade, quietly poses persistent political questions, even in essays on such topics as skepticism and King Lear, Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler and Beckett’s Endgame, atonal music and ordinary language philosophy. Just who is the “we” spoken of in the book’s title (we philosophers? we Americans? we human beings?)? Is there any relationship between democratic equality and the philosophical appeal to our everyday language, as described in the book’s eponymous essay? 1 Does the account that Cavell offers in his piece on Wittgenstein of practices and behaviors shared across cultures—the “whirl of organism” of our forms of life—suggest a nascent theory of human solidarity? Our freedom in language and the responsibility we bear for meaning, topics of the book’s opening essays, raise the question of what we might owe to one another and how we might offer—or withhold—it in our choices of words. Is this the beginning of a theory of justice? The concept of acknowledgment, described in the book’s final essays as a response to the challenge of skepticism, shifts the problem from what I can know to what I might do. Is this a theory of moral or political action (or both)?

The demand for contrastive explanations

A “contrastive explanation” explains not only why some event A occurred, but why A occurred as opposed to some alternative event B. Some philosophers argue that agents could only be morally responsible for their choices if those choices have contrastive explanations, since they would otherwise be “luck infested”. Assuming that contrastive explanations cannot be offered for causally undetermined events, this requirement entails that no one could be held responsible for a causally undetermined choice. Such arguments challenge incompatibilism, since they entail that causal determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. However, I argue that for a significant class of choices, even if we stipulate that they are determined, we will be unable to provide a relevant contrastive explanation. Hence causal determinism is no remedy for luck infestation, and compatibilists do not fare much better than incompatibilists in the face of this requirement. This should serve to weaken its philosophical appeal.

Down The Methodological Rabbit Hole

This article surveys methodological matters that shape, drive, and plague analytic legal philosophy. Section 2 briefly explicates conceptual analysis, analytic definitions, and family resemblance concepts. It also argues that central cases are used in more than one way. Section 3 presents criticisms of those concepts and methods, and suggests that some of these difficulties are due to the lack of a shared paradigm regarding a counterexample’s impact. Section 4 explains “metatheoretical” desiderata. It contends that, to date, legal philosophical appeals to such norms have not been as helpful as some suggest. Section 5 returns to the issue of concept selection by addressing whether legal theorising is an invariably “normative” enterprise. It argues that certain “normativist” methodologies, such as Dworkin’s constructive interpretation and Finnis’ appeal to the central case of the internal point of view, are unnecessary.

Refusal and disowning knowledge: re-thinking disengagement in higher education

This paper addresses both ‘student engagement’ in contemporary universities, and student ‘disengagement’ – where the latter is often seen as a failure of performance, or absence of will. In a bold move, the paper asks whether students should be engaged in their university education, and whether there is value in forms of disengagement. It finds an original way in which student disengagement can be understood by drawing on the writings of Stanley Cavell – on the philosophical appeal to what we say, our search for criteria, and on ideas of acknowledgement and avoidance in his work on Shakespearian tragedy. It shows what is at stake in our attunement with, and dissent from, criteria, and how such dissent can be educative. The paper considers the film ‘Stella Dallas’, in which Stella’s aversion to, her disengagement from, her culture’s criteria, is not a passive withdrawal, but rather the finding of voice, her education as a grownup. The paper concludes that disengagement, understood as aversion, dissent and refusal of voice, is not to be seen always as a lack of action or of care, but as the opposite: the active voicing of what we will, or will not, consent to in our education.

Down the Methodological Rabbit Hole

This article surveys methodological matters that shape, drive, and plague Analytic Legal Philosophy. Section II briefly explicates conceptual analysis, analytic definitions, and family resemblance concepts. I also argue that central cases are used in more than one way. Section III then presents some (well- and lesser-known) criticisms of those concepts and methods, some of which are due to the lack of a shared paradigm regarding a counterexample’s impact. Section IV then briefly explains ‘meta-theoretical’ desiderata: norms by which to help construct, evaluate, and compare concepts and theories. I argue that, to date, legal philosophical appeals to such norms have not been as helpful as some suggest. Finally, Section V returns to the matter of concept selection by addressing whether legal theorising is an invariably ‘normative’ (in the sense of morally or politically evaluative) enterprise. I argue that certain ‘Normativist’ methodologies, such as Dworkin’s Constructive Interpretation and Finnis’ appeal to the central case of the internal point of view, are unnecessary.

Fundamentality without Metaphysical Monism: Response to Critics of Reason in the World

AbstractThis article is a reply to comments by Franz Knappik and Robert Stern on my book, Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal. Issues addressed include the systematicity of Hegel’s philosophy, the prioritizing of metaphysical over epistemological questions in his arguments, Hegel’s response to Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason, and my conclusion that there are senses in which Hegel’s own position is both ambitiously metaphysical and also monist, but that the monism present there is epistemological, and the ambitious metaphysics is non-monist.

Kreines on the Problem of Metaphysics in Kant and Hegel

AbstractThis article offers a discussion of James Kreines’s book Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. While broadly sympathetic to Kreines’s ‘concept thesis’ as a conceptual realist account of Hegel, the article contrasts two Kantian arguments for transcendental idealism to which Hegel’s position may be seen as a response—the argument from synthetic a priori knowledge and the argument from the dialectic of reason—and explores the implications of Kreines’s commitment to the latter over the former.

Knowledge means ‘all’, belief means ‘most’

We introduce a bimodal epistemic logic intended to capture knowledge as truth in all epistemically alternative states and belief as a generalised ‘majority’ quantifier, interpreted as truth in most (i.e. a ‘majority’) of the epistemically alternative states. This doxastic interpretation is of interest in knowledge-representation applications and it also holds an independent philosophical and technical appeal. The logic comprises an epistemic modal operator, a doxastic modal operator of consistent and complete belief and ‘bridge’ axioms which relate knowledge to belief. To capture the notion of a ‘majority’ we use the ‘large sets’ introduced independently by K. Schlechta and V. Jauregui, augmented with a requirement of completeness, which furnishes a ‘weak ultrafilter’ concept. We provide semantics in the form of possible-worlds frames, properly blending relational semantics with a version of general Scott–Montague (neighbourhood) frames and we obtain soundness and completeness results. We examine the validity of certain epistemic principles discussed in the literature, in particular some of the ‘bridge’ axioms discussed by W. Lenzen and R. Stalnaker, as well as the ‘paradox of the perfect believer’, which is not a theorem of .

Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal by James Kreines

Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal by James Kreines

The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell

AbstractIn ‘Aesthetics Problems of Modern Philosophy’ Stanley Cavell proposes, first, that Kant's characterization of judgments of beauty may be read as a Wittgensteinian grammatical characterization, and, second, that the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’ partakes of the grammar of judgment of beauty. I argue first that the expression of the dawning of an aspect partakes of the grammar of judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant, and may also be seen—on a prevailing way of thinking about concepts and how they relate to their instances—to have the same kind of significance that judgments of beauty have according to Kant. And then I argue that there are good (Wittgensteinian) reasons for being suspicious of the prevailing conception of concepts, and therefore good reasons for being suspicious of the proposed understanding of the significance of aspect perception—an understanding that has attracted many readers of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects. This leads me to suggest that it is actually the philosophical appeal to ordinary language that has the kind of significance that the Kantian picture attributes to judgments of beauty and to the seeing of aspects. In this way, I offer a way to vindicate Cavell's second proposal.

Djuna Barnes in a Material World: Fashion and Transatlantic Modernity in the 1910s

AbstractFashion is becoming a highly productive context in which to study modernist literature, and its relevance to the work of Djuna Barnes is an exciting ground for further exploration. The untimely qualities that critics have come to regard as so central to her art have troubled her relationship to modernity, but this article suggests that Barnes was invested in fashion as a paradigm for transatlantic modernity and a material example of its effects. With its conceptual and philosophical appeal, and central place in print and popular cultures, fashion provides a way of relating Barnes's complex attitude towards time and the contemporary resonances of her work. The article opens up a relationship between Barnes's early output – journalism, short stories, illustrations and, notably, the 1915 collection of poetry and drawings The Book of Repulsive Women – and transatlantic fashions in the 1910s. In so doing, it considers the place of both Barnes and fashion in the new modernist studies.

PLATO'S DEMIURGE AS PRECURSOR TO THE STOIC PROVIDENTIAL GOD

There is a striking resemblance between the physical theory of Plato'sTimaeusand that of the Stoics; striking enough, indeed, to warrant the supposition that the latter was substantially influenced by the former. In attempting to trace the main lines of this influence, scholars have tended to focus attention almost exclusively on the Stoics' choice and characterization of the world's ultimate constituents: a rational principle (strongly reminiscent of Plato's World Soul) that pervades and controls a material principle (reminiscent of Plato's Receptacle). In this paper, I offer some suggestions about how the early Stoics may have reacted as readers to Plato's literary presentation of the dialogue's cosmogonic myth. On this basis I consider the proposal that the crucial philosophical appeal of theTimaeusfor the Stoics – and perhaps the reason it attracted their interest in the first place – lay not in its claims about the Receptacle and World Soul, but rather in its portrayal of the Demiurge who designed the cosmos.

CRITICAL NOTICE OF HILARY KORNBLITH'S ON REFLECTION

AbstractHilary Kornblith's On Reflection is a sustained and detailed criticism of philosophical appeals to reflection. Kornblith argues, on both conceptual and empirical grounds, that a large number of appeals to reflective belief and desire in philosophical theorizing about knowledge and justification, reasoning, free will and normativity are deeply flawed. In this paper, I discuss Kornblith's arguments, finding some quite compelling and some wanting. Moreover, I argue that an important ambiguity about the nature of reflection renders the book less clear than it ought to be and undermines some of the book's criticisms.