Philosophical Disputes Research Articles

Epistemic Permissiveness and the Problem of Philosophical Disagreement

AbstractEpistemic uniqueness is the view that there is at most one rational doxastic response to a given batch of evidence E, while epistemic permissiveness is the denial of epistemic uniqueness. As several authors have noted, one of the attractions of epistemic permissiveness is that it allows us to believe that more than one doxastic response may be rationally faultless, and so permits us to respect the epistemic credentials of all parties to a dispute. I argue that permissiveness is unable to deliver on this claimed benefit in many philosophical disputes.

N.V. Ustryalov's philosophical dispute with Slavophiles in the light of modern events.

The object of the research is the actual problems of Russian philosophical thought related to the issues of power and society, the spiritual and historical basis of national existence, in the context of modernity. The article attempts to reveal the meaning of the philosophical polemics of N.V. Ustryalov, the leader of the smenovekhovstvo, and Slavophiles, in which, according to the author of the article, these topics are most acutely raised. The main triad in Ustryalov's political ontology is distinguished (power, nationality, religion, which should be based on a creative idea) and compared with the well-known triad of Slavophiles (Orthodoxy-nationality-autocracy). It is shown that Ustryalov, in the "power-people" bundle, gives priority to power, mystifying and psychologizing it, whereas, according to Slavophiles, state power is a manifestation of the people's will, whose mind is in churches and universities. It is argued that the main disagreement between Ustryalov and the Slavophiles was how they treated Orthodoxy. Ustryalov believed that not only religion, but also philosophy can become the spiritual basis of society's life, but only if it carries a creative beginning. He was close to the principle of religious tolerance. The Slavophiles believed that power should be based on the spiritual foundation that develops historically: without relying on it, it is impossible to resist the new-fangled ideas that are masterfully introduced into people's consciousness. The article concludes that Ustryalov, seeing Romanticism in the political doctrine of the Slavophiles, was not free from it himself. He did not fully think through the idea of national policy, which is especially relevant in modern times.

The Logicality of Language: Contextualism versus Semantic Minimalism

AbstractThe logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties of logical form—roughly, the level of linguistic representation which feeds into the interpretation procedures—and have substantial implications for traditional philosophical disputes about the nature of language. Specifically, contextualism and semantic minimalism, construed as competing hypotheses about the nature and degree of context-sensitivity at the level of logical form, suggest different approaches to the over-generation problem. In this paper, I explore the implications of pairing logicality with various forms of contextualism and semantic minimalism. I argue that to adequately solve the over-generation problem, logicality should be implemented in a constrained contextualist framework.

Academic discipline of economics as hedonist philosophy

Contemporary mainstream economics cannot be seen as disconnected from philosophical concerns. On the contrary, it should be understood as a defence for a specific philosophy, namely, crude quantitative hedonism where money would measure pleasure and pain. Disguised among a great mathematical apparatus involving utility functions, supply, and demand, lies a specific hedonist philosophy that every year is lectured to thousands of economic and business students around the world. This hedonist philosophy is much less sophisticated than that in ancient hedonist philosophers as Epicurus or Lucretius. Furthermore, it does not solve any of the systematic difficulties regularly faced by hedonist philosophy. However, the argument that economics is detached from philosophy works as a rhetorical artifice to protect its dominant underlying philosophy: Philosophical disputes would have to be addressed within the biased mathematical apparatus of quantitative hedonism. Economists and business students must learn to identify the underlying philosophy in mainstream economics and alternative philosophical systems.

What is Causal Specificity About, and What is it Good for in Philosophy of Biology?

The concept of causal specificity is drawing considerable attention from philosophers of biology. It became the rationale for rejecting (and occasionally, accepting) a thesis of causal parity of developmental factors. This literature assumes that attributing specificity to causal relations is at least in principle a straightforward (if not systematic) task. However, the parity debate in philosophy of biology seems to be stuck at a point where it is not the biological details that will help move forward. In this paper, I take a step back to reexamine the very idea of causal specificity and its intended role in the parity dispute in philosophy of biology. I contend that the idea of causal specificity across variations as currently discussed in the literature is irreducibly twofold in nature: it is about two independent components that are not mutually entailed. I show this to be the source of prior complications with the notion of specificity itself that ultimately affect the purposes for which it is often invoked, notably to settle the parity dispute.

Person and Disability: Legal Fiction and Living Independently

Without extending the historical analysis, this article analyzes the relationship between the legal concept of person with regard to the notion of living independently. The concept is normatively established in Article 19 of the CRPD and is presented as a legal fiction. The legal technique of fictio iuris is the premise for analyzing contemporary problems, for example, the attribution of responsibilities to non-human personalities, such as robots. The article, however, develops the problem of attributing rights to persons with disabilities. The contraposition of robots and disabled people, understood as opposing visions of anthropological and human models, is part of the philosophical dispute between humanism and post- or transhumanism. The conception of man appears different if created in the image and likeness of God, or as the fruit of evolution from primates, or as a transhumanist entity that can be replaced by the robot. The latter vision is rooted in the mechanization of the mind triggered by cybernetics and cognitive sciences and referable to problems of justice theory and political philosophy concerning the inclusion in society of disabled people. In this article I will limit myself to analyzing, against the background of this complex problem, the link between person, legal fiction and the right to disability starting from the criticism addressed by Nussbaum to Rawls based on the convention and following the methodology developed by Marchisio and Curto in order to clarify the legal connection between thirdness, disability, and person.However, I go one step further by including the issue of disability as justice within the evolution of the notion of the legal person, through the inclusion of fictio iuris and rhetorical methodology in positive law, as a criterion for the interpretation of art. 19 CRPD.

Сила философии, философия силы

Selfless search for truth does not only make sense of philosophy and science, but also involves participating in a competition between rival theories and hypotheses. Truth is not an ultimate criterion in this process, especially after Michel Foucault revealed its inclinations towards violence. Questioning the position of truth opens the door to different criteria, among them - power. Using the argument of power in philosophical disputes and scientific controversies has a long tradition and nowadays with the unprecedented development of technology it has been offered new tools. Majcherek Janusz A. Sia filozofii, filozofia siy // Argument. 2020. Vol. 1(10). Pp. 11-25.

МИСТЕЦТВО МИСЛИТИ ЛОГІЧНО ТА ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ФІЛОСОФСЬКОЇ АРГУМЕНТАЦІЇ

Argumentation, as an assemblage of proofs in defense of the stated positions is always present in philosophical dispute, and the extent to which you are conclusive in this dispute depends on your skills of argumentation. That is why this article is devoted to the examination of philosophical argumentation and its use of formal logics.

Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body by Anton Wilhelm Amo

Reviewed by: Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body by Anton Wilhelm Amo Yual Chiek Anton Wilhelm Amo. Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body. Edited and translated by Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 252. Cloth, $74.00. Replete with insightful historical commentary on the life of Ghanaian-German Enlightenment philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo, this fascinating volume by Stephen Menn and Justin Smith (henceforth "MS") offers a detailed study of two of Amo's most important works. In addition, the book offers a careful study of both the intellectual and political context in which Amo wrote and the reception of his work in the centuries following. The book is divided into four parts. The first part houses a substantial introduction, while the second part is devoted to notes on the texts and translations of Amo's dissertations. The third part contains the Latin text alongside MS's English translations of Amo's Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind (Impassivity). The fourth part houses Amo's Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of Those Things That Pertain Either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body (Distinct Idea), with, likewise, the Latin text and MS's translation. Section 1 of the introduction begins with a brief general overview of Amo's life and philosophical achievements. MS then take the reader through a discussion of the complex and rapidly changing social status of Africans in eighteenth-century Germany. In this section, MS discuss not only Amo but other notable Africans in eighteenth-century Germany and Europe. Here we find an examination of Amo's life, including a careful analysis of documents [End Page 686] bearing on the circumstances surrounding Amo's arrival in Germany, his identification in Germany, and the financial difficulties that befell him as a result of the death of Duke Ludwig Rudolph of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, the last of his patrons. In this section too is a discussion of his entrance into the University of Halle, his studies at the University of Wittenberg, and his tenure at the University of Jena. We are also introduced to Amo's two principal works: De Jure Maurorum in Europa (On the Right of Moors in Europe), and Tractatus de Arte Sobrie et Accurate Philosophandi (Treatise on the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately). Section 2 gives an in-depth discussion of the history of the reception of Amo's life and work. MS trace the reception of Amo, from the mention of him by eighteenth-century white antiracists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to twentieth-century African and African-American writers like Kwame Nkrumah and William E. B. Du Bois, and the use of his work in twentieth-century debates about the delineation of African philosophy (49). MS argue convincingly that attempts to cast Amo as an African philosopher are mistaken: Amo was an early modern German philosopher. As such, Amo's philosophical views should be assessed against the intellectual context in which they were written (44–51). Section 3 treats of the political and intellectual climates at Halle and Wittenberg, the two institutions Amo was most closely affiliated with, by giving a fascinating study of the complex interplay between the more conservative Pietists and the liberal advocates of Enlightenment sensibilities in eighteenth-century Protestant Germany. MS trace the development of the two camps, starting from the founding of Wittenberg and Halle universities, to well-known controversies between Leibniz and Wolff and Pietistic thinkers like Georg Ernst Stahl. Considered "one of the most prominent Wolffians," Amo was affiliated with Leibnizian-Wolffianism (30). MS emphasize, however, that the two schools were not clearly delineated sects, and that antagonism was often confined to individual thinkers. Section 4 adumbrates the conventions and purposes of eighteenth-century dissertations, and their differences with modern-day dissertations. Sections 5 and 6 are devoted to a discussion of ancient and modern debates on action, passion, and sensation, as well as an explanation of the arguments of Impassivity and Distinct Idea. It is in this section that MS offer their interpretation of Amo's dissertations. MS situate both of Amo's dissertations in the modern debates about action/passion and...

The God of Philosophers: An Individual Interpretation of Transcendence and the Problem of Interplay

The article discusses the understanding of the Transcendental Beginning in the philosophical teachings of the XIX-XX centuries, which fulfills the function of replacing the deity in them. The authors reveal ad hoc individual motivation for the meeting of a philosopher with the Transcendence. At the same time, it is not always an obvious, sometimes carefully hidden, mutual influence of leading philosophers, which is likely to be contradictory cooperation in polemics reminiscent of theological disputes of the distant past. For every philosopher, what is declared to be universal human values is not conventions, but unshakable constants. At the same time, in a philosophical (as well as in a theological) dispute, they defend even the highest values — universal or divine — as the only possible ones for themselves. The insight into the origin of the world, which gives it a beginning, is considered in the material of the works of A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson and M. Heidegger (the authors of the article show both similarities and differences in philosophical ideas about the fundamental ontological).

Jaka teoria działania? O Mechanice działań Michała Barcza

This is a review of Michal Barcz’s book Mechanika dzialan. Filozoficzny spor wokol przyczynowej teorii dzialania (Mechanics of Actions: Philosophical Dispute over the Causal Theory of Action). The book discusses various causal accounts of intentional action and presents several arguments against them. The review focuses on accuracy in presentation of different causal theories of action and soundness of arguments presented against them by the author. At the end, I discuss some methodological issues raised by the book.

¿Qué es una postura en filosofía? Un enfoque pragma-dialéctico

En pragma-dialéctica se distingue entre diferencias de opinión mixtas, en las que ambas partes en disputa sostienen una posición, y diferencias de opinión no-mixtas, en las que solamente una de las partes sostiene una posición, mientras que la otra simplemente tiene dudas sobre la cuestión en disputa. En este artículo se sostiene que, al menos para las disputas filosóficas necesitamos introducir un tercer tipo de diferencia de opinión, en que una parte toma posición frente a la cuestión en disputa, mientras que la otra parte pone en duda no esa posición sino la cuestión misma. Se ilustra esto con ejemplos y se argumenta además que toda disputa filosófica es inestable, de forma que el segundo tipo, los desacuerdos mixtos (dudas sobre la posición del otro), fácilmente se convierten en el tercer tipo (dudas sobre la cuestión). Finalmente, se argumenta que esto ocurre dentro y fuera de la filosofía profesional.

Siła filozofii, filozofia siły


 
 
 The power of philosophy, philosophy of power: Selfless search for truth does not only make sense of philosophy and science, but also involves participating in a competition between rival theories and hypotheses. Truth is not an ultimate criterion in this process, especially after Michel Foucault revealed its inclinations towards violence. Questioning the position of truth opens the door to different criteria, among them — power. Using the argument of power in philosophical disputes and scientific controversies has a long tradition and nowadays with the unprecedented development of technology it has been offered new tools.
 
 

Genius Unbound: Capitalism, Culture and the Dialectic

Why have the cultural wars become so divisive? Why are science, religion, and even the fine arts becoming so politicized? Why are dialectic swings in approaches to political economy becoming so dramatic - exemplified by dramatic swings between internationalism and xenophobic nationalism - occurring? Why is national consensus, civil unity, so hard to achieve? This book argues that the answer lies in the growing complexity of societies globally. On the one hand this growing complexity has husbanded a golden era in which the standard of living is rising throughout most of the world; on the other hand it has laid the groundwork for the total destruction of the human race. At the heart of the problem is the tension, the often bitter conflict, between the two forces unleashing modern complexity and its global outreach: creativity enhanced by and impeded by efforts to instill cooperation facing the turmoil creativity has wrought. That reliance on competitive markets, a hallmark of mainstream economics, may offer a panacea is an unfortunate delusion based on a failure to take into account the law of unintended consequences particularly those undergirding ideology and power. Using examples from European history – emphasizing disputes in philosophy, science, art, politics, and political economy – this book offers a framework for understanding conflict in the modern world. There is no shelter from the storm, here, there, or everywhere.

Francis Hutcheson on Liberty

AbstractThis paper aims to reconstruct Francis Hutcheson's thinking about liberty. Since he does not offer a detailed treatment of philosophical questions concerning liberty in his mature philosophical writings I turn to a textbook on metaphysics. We can assume that he prepared the textbook during the 1720s in Dublin. This textbook deserves more attention. First, it sheds light on Hutcheson's role as a teacher in Ireland and Scotland. Second, Hutcheson's contributions to metaphysical disputes are more original than sometimes assumed. To appreciate his independent thinking, I argue, it is helpful to take the intellectual debates in Ireland into consideration, including William King's defence of free will and discussions of Shaftesbury's views in Robert Molesworth's intellectual circle. Rather than taking a stance on the philosophical disputes about liberty, I argue that Hutcheson aims to shift the focus of the debates towards practical questions concerning control of desire, cultivation of habits, and character development.

A case for integrative epistemology

Western analytic epistemology is undergoing an upheaval: the importance of social justice concerns is becoming increasingly recognized. Many of us want epistemology to reflect our lived experiences, and to do real work for us on issues that matter. Motivated by these concerns, researchers are increasingly focusing on ameliorating our epistemic concepts: finding ones that contribute to social justice. At the same time, however, many epistemologists claim that their project is purely metaphysical and thus value-neutral: epistemology is just about the truth, the facts! Ethics and politics thus have no place in epistemology proper. I will argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, these ameliorative and objectivist projects are not in conflict. Indeed, because the same concepts are our tools for both theoretical and practical reasoning, properly carrying out either project must be done in an integrated way with the other. I’ll use the example of medical research to show how social justice concerns can deeply influence scientific practice in ways that contribute to, rather than threaten, its claims to objectivity. I then develop an integrative epistemology on analogy with medical research to resolve both longstanding philosophical disputes and support our understanding and healing of public discourse.

Philosophical Speech Acts

AbstractThe prevailing view among contemporary analytic philosophers seems to be that, as philosophers, we primarily issue assertions. Following certain suggestions from the work of Rudolf Carnap and Sally Haslanger, I argue that the non-assertoric speech act of stipulation plays a key role in philosophical inquiry. I give a detailed account of the pragmatic structure of stipulations and argue that they are best analyzed as generating a shared inferential entitlement for speaker and audience, a license to censure those who give uptake to the stipulation but do not abide by this entitlement, and as justified on the basis of the speaker and audience's shared ends. In presenting this account, I develop a novel taxonomy for making sense of criticisms of speech act performances generally and clarify the notions of successful speech act performance and uptake. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this view of stipulation for recasting and advancing philosophical disputes, I apply my account to two case studies – the first concerns Iris Marion Young's analysis of the concept of oppression and the second involves Saul Kripke's and Hilary Putnam's accounts of the concept of reference.

Justin Clarke-Doane* Morality and Mathematics.

This excellent book compares and contrasts morality and mathematics. Their similarities and differences are not what one might naïvely suppose, as the author demonstrates. The book is highly recommended to philosophers interested in both subjects, and to anyone who seeks a global understanding of how morality and mathematics fit into our belief system. In Chapter 1 the reader is introduced to the author’s understanding of two key terms: realism and objectivity. One overarching opinion presented in this book is that these notions are in tension, and here the motivation for this view is put forward. First, a general recipe for a ‘realist’ view of some subject matter F is devised, with candidate ingredients being examined one by one before being either included or rejected. In the end, the author advocates an understanding of ‘F-realism’ as the view that F-sentences should be interpreted at face-value, that they are commonly used to express beliefs and typically have truth values, that some atomic F-sentences (not merely tautologous compounds) are true, and finally that the F-truths hold independently of mind and language. Surprisingly, among the ingredients rejected by Clarke-Doane is objectivity. Though he denies that the term is being used here in a revisionary or technical sense, he also wishes to deny that ‘objectivity’ should be taken to mean the same as either intersubjectivity or mind-independence. Rather, objectivity here just means a kind of anti-pluralism: we can call the answer to a question an objective one just in case that answer is uniquely correct. Now the idea of treating a matter as objective just in cases where there is only ‘one right answer’ seems, at first blush, to accord with common usage. It is only when the author begins to push on this line that it shows itself to be rather more radical. To use his own example: it is not an objective matter whether the parallel postulate holds (as a pure mathematical conjecture), even if robust platonism is true, since it is true in Euclidean space but not in hyperbolic space (or rather, true of Euclidean lines, but not of hyperbolic lines). There is thus not a unique right answer to the question ‘Is the parallel postulate true?’ To go in for an illustrative moral example, error theorists about morality could plausibly be called moral objectivists (though importantly, not realists) in Clarke-Doane’s sense, given that they give one and only one answer — namely, ‘no’ — to any question at all of whether something is right, wrong, good, bad, etc. The idea of separating the notions of realism and objectivity, if cogent, is clearly one with a great deal of potential, ripe for application to more diverse areas of philosophical dispute. In one light, the present monograph might be seen as a proof-of-concept for a more general metaphilosophical project, the broader horizons of which are sketched in the Conclusion.

Jain Philosophers in the Debating Hall of Classical India

The practice of rational debate between philosophers from different traditions, especially between Hindu—Naiyāyika and Mīmāṃsaka—, Buddhist and Jain philosophers, is unique in classical India. Around the 7th c., a pan-Indian consensus was achieved on what counts as a satisfactory justification. The core of such discussions is an inferential reasoning whose structure is such that it ensures that its conclusions are recognised as knowledge statements, irrespective of the obedience of the interlocutor. In this line, stories of conversion following those philosophical debates are commonplace in the narratives of the different traditions and regularly involve the conversion of a royal patron. Beside the influence of argumentative practices on social and political changes, theories of argumentation have deeply influenced the whole edifice of philosophy in pre modern India, since no philosopher can claim a thesis without being committed to defend it in this highly regulated dialogical framework. Moreover, the characterisation, as well as the methods to test the validity of this justification, raised the question of the existence of shared principles and was a battlefield for the different traditions to establish their own conceptions on the constitution of the world and on our ability to know it. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the contribution of the minority tradition that is Jainism to the framework of philosophical disputation in India.

MARIA GAETANA AGNESI, ENFANT PRODIGE, MATEMATICA, PIA NOBILDONNA

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) was a prominent figure in eighteenth-century Milan. A child prodigy, and an attraction in the scientific and philosophical disputes organized in the paternal home, she was the first woman to publish a mathematical treatise, the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748), a clear and systematic presentation of both Cartesian geometry and infinitesimal analysis. Among the curves studied in that work is the versiera, (witch) the cubic curve that is still associated with her name. Appointed by Pope Benedict XIV in 1750 on the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna, she did not accept that assignment. After her father’s death in 1752, she left mathematics to devote herself entirely to pious works, and to taking care of poor and infirm women in the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, where she spent the last fifteen years of life.