Kind Of Philosopher Research Articles

Right today – between old issues and new challenges or about Justice in a digital world

Our approach to scientific research is intended to be a novelty in terms of Romanian legal doctrine, by addressing a topical issue - the contingency of artificial intelligence with law and justice, associating the two seemingly irreconcilable elements: on the one hand, artificial intelligence - this tool universal, in full ascent, which is portrayed by IT specialists as the solution to all social problems and tasks, a kind of Philosopher's Stone of the future - and right next to the judiciary, on the other hand - two ancient "bastions" that are left hardly conquered by futurists armed with algorithms and computers. The study addresses some issues related to the value of artificial intelligence in its connections with justice and law through a three-pronged approach: artificial intelligence as a possible subject of law, as a tool for achieving justice, but also as a possible criminal means. As for the extremely technical information, we will use a simple and comprehensive way, so that even uninitiated readers of IT secrets can understand what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is and how it works.

«АУФШТАНД» ЯК ОСОБЛИВИЙ ВИД ПРОТЕСТУ ФІЛОСОФА

The truth of philosophical ideas related to the sphere of political power is tested by death, as in the example of Socrates, who demonstrated an «aufstand» at the trial — a special kind of philosopher’s protest that has nothing to do with the concept of protest in the sociological or political sense. Still, according to Plato, a philosopher, as the bearer of the Idea in the world of things, faces reality as a Platonic matrix of five forms of government, which change each other from better to worse. The philosopher, as the bearer of the Idea, acquires such a purity of mind within which the Idea, according to H. Hegel, can realize itself and, being immortal, can sacrifice the philosopher, on the example of Socrates, to penetrate the realm of things in one form or another. The presentation of the Platonic matrix of five forms of government in the form of a cycle with «aufstand» as a point of transition from tyranny to aristocracy is of practical use for predicting political processes in the world and corresponds to the principle of isonomy of Democritus within the framework of Anaximander’s cosmology regarding the unity of physical and political dimensions.

Formation of Philosophical Views of Anatoly Lunacharsky. Nietzschean Empirio-criticism

The article is devoted to an integral part of Russian philosophy - Russian positivism, and first of all to empirio-criticism - a philosophical trend that captured the minds of the Russian left-wing intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the brightest representatives of this trend in Russian philosophy was Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, who made the path of Marxism to empirio-criticism. This distinguishes him from many other revolutionary philosophers. He also took part in the creation and work of the Vperyod group, organizing together with other Vperyodists party schools for Russian workers in Capri and Bologna. But unlike his Vperyod friends Bogdanov and Bazarov, he did his best to maintain normal relations with V.I. Lenin, therefore, did not fall under the blow of "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism". It is important that Lunacharsky's empirio-criticism differed from Bogdanov's empirio-monism. The direction of Russian philosophy, of which he was a supporter, was called Nietzsche's empirio-criticism. Despite his non-participation in the intra-party struggle and the traditional support of the winners, he, according to Trotsky, remained a foreign figure in the ranks of the Bolsheviks to the end. Lunacharsky was not only a kind of philosopher and party functionary (he held the position of People's Commissar of Education for a long time), but also a very interesting writer and playwright. The role of Lunacharsky in Russian philosophy and culture cannot be overestimated; part of his intellectual heritage is analyzed in this article.

The Role of Reasoning in Pragmatic Morality

Abstract Charles Sanders Peirce offers a number of arguments against the rational application of theory to morality, suggesting instead that morality should be grounded in instinct. Peirce maintains that we currently lack the scientific knowledge that would justify a rational structuring of morality. This being the case, philosophically generated moralities cannot be otherwise than dogmatic and dangerous. In this paper, I contend that Peirce’s critique of what I call “dogmatic-philosophical morality” should be taken very seriously, but I also claim that the purely instinctive morality Peirce endorses is liable to a danger of its own, namely fanaticism. Indeed, Peirce himself recognizes this danger. As an alternative, I sketch a form of “pragmatic morality” that attempts to sidestep the dogmatism of philosophical morality and the fanaticism of instinctive morality. This form of morality avoids philosophical dogmatism by treating extant instincts as the postulates and materials with which it works. It avoids instinctive fanaticism by allowing a role to reason. By exhibiting fallibilism, revisability, pluralism, and meliorism, this type of reasoning can avoid the dogmatism of the philosophical kind of morality Peirce critiques.

Prowling Foucault: A review of Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros

Prowling FoucaultA review of Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros Britton Edelen (bio) Huffer, Lynne. Foucault’s Strange Eros. Columbia UP, 2020. Lynne Huffer’s Foucault’s Strange Eros is a translation, but not in the usual sense. This original work translates not a text from one language to another, but a person: Michel Foucault. Huffer invites us to perceive Foucault differently, with slightly squinted eyes and perked ears, so that we may see the lacunae in and hear the “strange murmuring[s]” of the archive (1). Like all good translations, Huffer’s brings to light something that went unnoticed in the original—eros. Prowling for this, Huffer uncovers the ethopoietic movements in ourselves and in the world that pulse just beneath the surface and offer strange possibilities for inhabiting the present. The change in our perception of Foucault issues from a change in designation: Foucault is not a philosopher, but something else. Huffer briefly characterizes the kind of philosopher that Foucault is not by referring to Simon Critchley’s 2013 New York Times essay “When Socrates Met Phaedrus,” which deals specifically with the presence of eros in philosophy. Critchley shows that the philosophical discipline’s longstanding commitment “to keeping everything but the rational mind outside its gates” is a quixotic, impossible dream (Huffer 31). Philosophy is not immaculate; the stain of irrational eros is always already there. But something is rotten in the philosophical eros that Critchley identifies. His reading of Plato’s Phaedrus “links eros to rhetoric, the art of persuasion . . . ‘the art by which the philosopher persuades the nonphilosopher to assume philosophical eros, to incline their soul toward truth.’” Philosophy’s task is to “tell people what they should do,” and eros is deployed in the service of this goal, which Huffer sees as dangerous because it “is a moralizing art bound up with the history of a rationalist violence” (31). Foucault, and Huffer with him, unequivocally rejects this moralizing. Huffer cites a 1980 interview in which Foucault exclaims, “I’m not a prophet; I’m not an organizer; I don’t tell people what they should do. I’m not going to tell them, ‘This is good for you, this is bad for you!’” (31). And if he isn’t a philosopher, someone who “tells people what they should do,” then what is he? There are numerous possible answers, but Huffer settles on one that, like eros, comes to us from ancient Greek sources. Foucault is the other of the philosopher: a poet. The poet and the philosopher stand on opposite ledges of a deep—but not uncrossable—chasm, and Huffer carries Foucault across (translatio). But is this reparative gesture necessary? Are philosophy and poetry distinct enough to require metamorphic translation? Huffer does not wade into this millennia-old debate or change its terms; she instead chooses, for better or worse, to take for granted the possibility of finding firm footing on the dichotomy’s now-shaky foundation. By “translating him as a poet,” Huffer asks us to see Foucault’s works as poetry, a category she avoids explaining in concrete terms (1). She presents only two definitions: Poetry is “narrative’s circuit breaker, an erotic counterviolence that dedialectizes history” (89); and, citing Foucault, a form that “opens language to ‘the void in which the contentless slimness of ‘I speak’ [and] is manifested [as] an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject—the ‘I’ who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space’” (74). Huffer thus highlights the concordance between poetry, a form literally and metaphorically formed by and conducive to rupture, and Foucault’s genealogical method, which carefully attends to “breaks, gaps, and discontinuities” (36). The strongest testimonial for Huffer’s redesignation comes from the “poet” himself. Foucault calls for this reading through his career-long assertion “that truth, history, and life itself—all fundamental elements of biopower— are made, fashioned, and invented” (10). Foucault’s word for this making is “fictioning”: “fictions can ‘induce’—or ‘fiction’—‘effects of truth’” (11). Huffer asks us to listen to the murmur of Greek in the word poet(ry): “poiein, to make” (10). In this sense, Foucault is unequivocally a poet. Just...

Practical Role of Philosophy in Sport: Case of Philosophical Consultation

Abstract The process of philosophical questioning has the power to form not only our way of thinking, but also the way we live. Both my sporting and academic career have made me think about the importance of asking good questions and undergoing the process of answering them. I decided to create a profession of philosophical consultation in sport which works with athletes and coaches of various ages. Consultants and athletes (clients) engage in a dialogue about important and interesting questions/topics in client’s life. This dialogical process is called philosophical consultation. It focuses on critical evaluation and development of client’s thinking, self-cognition, and attitudes/worldviews. Philosophical consultation helps athletes and coaches to look for their identity and achieve better self-awareness. It can be argued that consultation offers what Patočka calls the “care of the soul” (epimeleia peri tês psychês) or what Foucault calls the “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou), which are based on Socrates’ kind of philosophizing. It helps to achieve ancient ideals of kalokagathia and gnôthi seauton. The potential of using philosophy in sport hasn’t been fully discovered. Philosophical consultation is presented as a process of self-cognition and inner development. It has the potential to influence the care for well-being of athletes and coaches. I aim to explore the practical role of philosophy in sport. I will present possible connections between philosophy and sport and the historical predecessors of the concept of philosophical consultancy in sport. As well, we will discuss what philosophical consultancy is, how philosophical consultant works, and finally what are the challenges in bringing philosophical consultation into sport. Methods that are used in this interdisciplinary article are critical textual analysis, description, and interpretation of data.

New Principles of the Classical Reason <i>(Translated from French by: Liudmila Komissarova)<i>

The classical Reason is too often linked with the conquest of Nature and with modern scientific and technological world. But Bruno Pinchard shows that this kind of philosophizing is a source of freedom in the relation that is endeavored to be established between Faith and Rationality. The classical Reason is equidistant from the might of science and the dogmas of faith. This Reason is an actualization of pure thought. In this perspective, the author declares 12 propositions that would need to be developed with historical proves to be fully justified. Meanwhile, these first steps have a systematic aim, like all the conceptual constructions of classical thought. The paper is concluded with a short “Coda” about the necessity of love to give strength to the reason to achieve ultimate goals of the latter. The translation is made according to the text which is a revised and updated version of the article: Pinchard B. Quelques principes de raison classique. L’Archicube, n° 24, juin 2018, pp. 156–164. Paris: École Normale Supérieure.

Understanding Institutions without Collective Acceptance?

Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala’s critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean version of collective acceptance theory can be defended against Guala’s critique and question the sufficiency of Guala’s account of the ontology of the social world.

Postlude

Postlude Isabelle Stengers (bio) Reading this collection of articles is a troubling experience because, each in their own manner, they produce something like a “portrait of a philosopher with her problem” – to recall Gilles Deleuze’s proposition about how to characterize the work of a philosopher. I am most grateful to Martin Savransky and those who accepted his invitation because, in order to obtain such a “portrait,” they needed not to stop at the obvious but respond, each in her or his own way, to what has been a learning process rather than the obstinate development of one ever- recurring problem. Indeed, as many of the contributors emphasize, my work can hardly be associated with such a development. It may rather look like an opportunistic trajectory related to encounters and collaborations. When questioned about this trajectory, I used to describe it as an amoeba-like locomotion – as when a pseudopod encounters what might be food and the whole amoeba follows, shifting its form around it. Obviously, the point of this image is not capture and digestion, but it nevertheless refers to sustenance. It may well be that I became the kind of philosopher whose portrait, here proposed, cannot be separated from what I first felt as my “personal” problem: the incapacity to feel sustained by the resources my “milieu” provided me with. This looks like a psychological problem – the feeling of not fitting, the desire to be like others who seemed to be satisfied with the available resources and would actively compete for their possession; the temptation to just mimic them, but with the “idiotic” awkwardness which comes from being unable to really enjoy what you wish to be satisfied with. Gilles Deleuze’s idiot, the one who slows down where others rush, as if “there was something more urgent, but she does not know what,” has since come to matter for me, but the idiot is the figure of a force, a conceptual persona, who can make you think but cannot sustain you. It may be that in another epoch I would have fitted the psychosocial type of the Lacanian hysteric, the one who looks for a master, only to convince him, or herself, of his imposture, and I might have turned into a reflexive, critical thinker. I believe that my luck was to have effectively felt that “another life was possible,” that maybe the lack of sustaining resources was not “my” problem but that of the milieu, when that milieu was suddenly affected by the ripples of the May 1968 event, but also through what I learned from the feminist so-called second wave. [End Page 146] The capacity of situated collectives to generate, as a transformative truth, the experience that “the personal is political” was the first “pseudopodal” encounter with a resource to think with, that is, to live with. It was also my first encounter with what I would later call a practice, with its pragmatic artificiality. In such encounters, personal experiences were convoked but not as confessions or as indictments. They were not to be discussed or interpreted. It is the way they made sense for others, the way they entered into resonance with each other, that transformed their signification, separating them from their hold, “depsychologizing” them. Laughing together was both a challenge and the transformative realization of the commonality of what we had experienced as our own shameful inadequacy. However sustaining and generative, this experience has not turned me into a feminist militant. It may be because I was not ready to engage in the feminist theoretical enterprise, to become an analyst of “the power” at work beyond or behind gender differentiation. What I had encountered was not the call to go beyond or behind. It was an experience that can only be cultivated, not theorized. Donna Haraway has written that I embraced “the pragmatism of witches in order to stay true to the crafts of sciences” and, as usual, she touches on the vital point. What I have stayed true to is the way such crafts, in spite of their epistemological theorization, are able to transform their practitioners, to produce a form of collective intelligence I had never experienced with militants. Philosophy, as...

Thabo Mbeki: Understanding a Philosopher of Liberation

ABSTRACTThe political thought of Thabo Mbeki, South African President from 1999 to 2008, has attracted much scholarly and popular attention in South Africa and beyond. In this article I argue that Mbeki's socialisation in apartheid South Africa, his education, training, and travel of the world radicalised him into a philosopher of liberation, a kind of philosopher that does not only love wisdom but has the wisdom and courage to love under social and political conditions that do not permit love. Even as he personally insists that he is a simple product of the teaching and example of African liberation leaders from Gamal Nasser to Nelson Mandela, this article notes that Mbeki was conditioned and shaped by his geographic and intellectual travels into a post-continental and a planetary liberation philosopher. In that way, the intersection of geographic travel, radicalisation by oppression, and epistemic journeying combined to produce a philosophical sensibility in search for liberation and rehumanisation. To critically establish Mbeki's philosophy of liberation that has a post-continental and planetary political sensibility, this article navigates a multiplicity of other scholarly, journalistic and popular understandings of Mbeki as a philosopher king, an enigma and a revolutionary prophet on the positive side. On the negative side, Mbeki has been understood and described as a scheming and calculating Machiavellian, an imperial president, race essentialist, HIV and AIDS denialist, and a sympathiser with tyrannical leaders of Africa such as Robert Mugabe. I argue that these prevalent understandings and descriptions of Mbeki not only simplify his complicated political thought but they also uncritically conceal the reality of a philosophy of liberation that is born of the conditions of domination, dehumanisation and exploitation of the peoples of South Africa, Africa and the entire Global South.

Discarded Preface to A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 37 (summer 2017): 245–51 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3701\red\rj 3701 134 red.docx 2017-08-24 10:06 DISCARDED PREFACE TO A CRITICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEIBNIZ Bertrand Russell Nicholas Griffin, Introduction Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 ngriffin@mcmaster.ca here is a puzzle about the dating of the preface to A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz that was actually published in the first edition. As published, the preface is dated “September 1900” though the manuscript for it is dated “August 1900”. There is nothing untoward there: the date was merely moved forward to reflect when the book actually went to press. The proofs for the preface and the other front matter are date-stamped 15 August and nothing seems untoward there, except that on 31 July Russell left for Paris to attend the International Congress of Philosophy at which he first came across the work of Peano. He was at the conference from 1 to 5 August and then travelled on holiday in France from 6 to 15 August, returning to England on the 15th. The only way the date on the proofs and that on the manuscript could both be correct is if Russell wrote the preface in France, and probably at the congress (to allow enough time for the manuscript to travel to Cambridge and be typeset by 15 August). Alternatively, Russell wrote the preface in late July and post-dated the manuscript to reflect when he expected the book to go to press. It is difficult to decide which of these scenarios is least unlikely. The preface which appeared in the book would not have taken him long. It’s concerned with the usual business of prefaces: a brief account of the book and acknowledgements. He does start by drawing a distinction between two types of history of philosophy—the historical, which describes a philosopher’s thought, traces its development, and identifies the historical factors which shaped it; and the philosophical , which lays out a philosopher’s views systematically and evaluates which are correct and which mistaken—and he places his own book firmly in the second category . But he does this briskly and unapologetically, as part of the normal task of a preface alerting the reader about what to expect. The published preface, however, replaced an earlier one, of a very different character , which is printed below. The composition of the rejected preface evidently gave Russell some trouble, to judge at least by the unusually large number of alterations q= 246 bertrand russell c:\users\ken\documents\type3701\red\rj 3701 134 red.docx 2017-08-24 10:06 c:\users\ken\documents\type3701\red\rj 3701 134 red.docx 2017-08-24 10:06 he made to the text, before he abandoned it, incomplete, mid-page. Indeed, its style, both oracular and oratorical, contrasts oddly, not just with the plain and straightforward style of the published preface, but with the style of the whole book. Compared to the book, it seems rather old-fashioned and Victorian—though Russell used similar rhetorical language a few years later in works such as “The Free Man’s Worship” and “On History”. As in the published preface, Russell begins by distinguishing the two types of history of philosophy, but in the rejected preface he attempts, against “the historical spirit” of the age, a full-fledged apologia for the philosophical kind of history of philosophy that he had undertaken. It is not clear what Russell meant by “the historical spirit”. He may have meant nothing more than the tendency of late nineteenthcentury historians of philosophy, especially those in Germany where the art was practised on a scale not approached in the English-speaking world, to concentrate on describing the development of philosophical positions rather than critiquing them. But his subsequent argument suggests that the fashionable approach he is rejecting is one which not merely avoids critiquing the philosophies it describes, but holds that critique is impossible, for he goes on to defend...

Ellis, Fiona. God, Value, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 pp. $99.00 (cloth).

Ellis, Fiona. <i>God, Value, and Nature</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 pp. $99.00 (cloth).

Late Bergman: The Lived Experience of the Absence of God in Faithless and Saraband

Acclaimed as one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman is for many an arch-modernist, whose work is characterized by a high degree of self-conscious artistry and by dark, even nihilistic themes. Film critics increasingly identify him as a kind of philosopher of the human condition, especially of the dislocations and misery of the modern human condition. However, Bergman’s films are not embodiments of philosophical theories, nor do they include explicit discussions of theory. Instead, he attends to the concrete lived experience of those who, on the one hand, suffer from doubt, dislocation, and self-hatred and, on the other, long for confession and communion. In the middle of his career, especially in his famous faith trilogy of the early 1960s, Bergman investigated the lived experience of the absence of God. It is commonly thought that after this period, the question of God disappeared. However, in his last two films, Faithless and Saraband, Bergman explores the lived experience of the absence of God. Indeed, he moves beyond a simple negation to explore the complex interplay of absence. He even illustrates the possibility of a kind of communion for which so many of his characters—early, middle and late—long.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Jenseits von Gut und Böse

Friedrich Nietzsche: Jenseits von Gut und Böse

Plato and Anaximenes

In Timaeus 49, Plato sympathetically describes Anaximenes’ theory of matter, with its seven states of matter, its contrary mechanisms of rarefaction and condensation, and notion that the birth of one elements is the death of another. Plato treats Anaximenes as a kind of philosopher of process rather than a material monist, as Aristotle portrays him. From this perspective, Anaximenes can be seen as a forerunner of Heraclitus rather than of Diogenes of Apollonia. Plato seems to introduce Anaximenes’ theory as an approximation of his own theory of matter. Plato’s interpretation may be inspired by the readings of Cratylus and other Heracliteans and have its roots in a pre-Parmenidean world-view. Although it conflicts with Aristotle’s better-known and more Eleatic interpretation, Plato’s interpretation is at least as old, and deserves serious consideration as the only other early understanding of Anaximenes.

The Dethroning of Ideocracy

Robert Musil was not a professional philosopher. He was a novelist-and according to the widely accepted canon, his contribution to the twentieth-century novel is only matched by very few.Why then should there be a special issue on him in The Monist? The reason is that Musil was a philosopher-just a different kind of philosopher. He was trained in philosophy (he wrote his Ph.D. on Ernst Mach) and gave up a promising career in academia, turning down a job offer in Meinong's department because he thought it better to express his philosophical ideas by means of writing novels.While Musil is often considered to be the 'philosophical novelist'par excellence, his attitude towards the 'philosophical novel', that is, a novel expressing philosophical views, is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he did believe that philosophy, science, and literature all do the same thing, just by different means (Notebook 5, 1911, October 14 [Musil 1976]). And his explicit reason for giving up academic philosophy was that philosophizing by means of writing novels was more efficient. At the same time, he warned against the obvious pitfalls of philosophical novels. As he said, usually it is not a pleasant experience when writers philosophize and formulate their thoughts directly (Musil 1999, 409). This is very similar to Proust's famous dictum in Time Regained, according to which work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. Is this a contradiction then? Was Musil for or against the philosophical novels he later became so closely associated with? I don't think there is a contradiction here. Musil was committed to philosophizing by writing novels, but he didn't do it directly. He did so, to use a distinction from Philip Kitcher's framework of talking about the philosophical content of novels, by showing and not by saying (Kitcher 2013, Chapter 1 as well as Kitcher's paper here; see also Nanay [2013b]).Musil does not give us explicit philosophical theories. He simply shows us characters in various situations. But if we manage to put together these situations in the right way, we encounter philosophical ideas as clearly as if they were explicitly explained. A quick example. The protagonist of The Man Without Qualities is Ulrich and one of the least likable characters in the book is Amheim. But their general outlook is very similar in many respects. Most importantly, they are both against taking the human mind to be fully and entirely rational and they both emphasize the nonrational elements in human behavior and life. But the similarity of their views highlights the very few but nonetheless even more important differences-that the denial of rationality can lead to a pan-romantic attitude and also to a cheerfully skeptical antiromantic attitude. Musil doesn't explain this as if he were writing a carefully argued philosophy paper about the way the mind works, but by showing us two examples that have so much overlap that we immediately focus on the differences and the reasons for these differences.In this introduction, I would like to focus on what I take to be the main focus of Musil's philosophy, his account of the way the human mind works. I will largely ignore his extremely complex and sophisticated accounts of free will, moral responsibility, emotions, aesthetics, ethics, nominalism and naturalism. Many of these ideas foreshadow some important debates in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. To mention just a few, he gives early formulations of the idea of moral luck, the narrative conception of the self, a neoformalist account of aesthetic experience, a fairly strong version of the embodiment of the mind, a similarly strong version of philosophical naturalism, and an outright radical account of human freedom (see Wilson's paper on some of these). But what I take to be the underlying theme of most of these ideas is Musil's insistence on, or maybe we should say obsession with, thinking of the human mind in a way that does not consider the functioning of the mind to be fully and completely rational. …

Rorty and the philosophical tradition: comment on professor Szubka

I am grateful to Professor Szubka for the stimulus of his paper 1 and the op� portunity it presents to think about the relationship between Richard Rorty's later pragmatic philosophy and the socalled tradition he came to repudi� ate. I am in agreement with Professor Szubka's central thesis, namely, that there is a partial continuity between the Rorty of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his later writing, and the Rorty of the 1960s: Rorty was not the diehard philosopher who then, suddenly and inexplicably, gave up on the whole business. His metaphilosophical work in that decade, especially as exemplified in The Lin� guistic Turn, signaled quite clearly his misgivings about the philosophical project typically associated with the analytic tradition (which at that time, at least, was not yet moribund). I will offer some additional support for Professor Szubka's thesis drawn from Neil Gross's recent biography of Rorty, which illuminates both Rorty's education at Chicago and Yale in the 1940s and 1950s and the context in which he became a kind of philosopher at Princeton in the 1960s 2 . I shall then suggest that the more striking question about Rorty is not why he gave up on philosophy, but why he gave up on philosophy , that is, on a two� thousand year tradition stretching back to antiquity, one which nothing in his pre� Princeton education and experience would have led us to expect. Rorty's radical break was not with 'analytic' philosophy — a point often obscured in popular presentations of his work — but with philosophy itself. And it is that that demands some explanation. As Neil Gross demonstrates, the two formative influences in Rorty's phi� losophical education were the historical orientation of the University of Chicago (especially under the tutelage of Richard McKeon), where he was an undergradu� ate, and the metaphysical and even theological orientation of the Yale Univer� sity department, where he was a graduate student. Indeed, speculative metaphys�

Hanging together, falling apart

Joe Pitt is the kind of philosopher who invites his readers to disagree with him (vii, 186). Indeed, he paves the way by disagreeing with himself, thereby opening up important areas of contention and trajectories for further questioning, even where he does not follow these trajectories himself. A critical engagement with his book might therefore delineate some of these areas of contention, moving from the more superficial to some deeper issues and discovering at the end a particularly fruitful area for further questioning. The book features a selection of papers with the aim to exemplify a particular philosophical approach to engineering and technology. It thereby seeks to remedy ‘‘what is wrong with the philosophy of technology’’ (56). In a section dedicated to this question, Pitt finds that extant philosophy of technology is often, if not generally, ideological, especially when it develops a critique of technological civilization. Indeed, he finds fault even with judgments of the sort that particular technologies are dangerous—such claims, Pitt argues, violate the is/ought distinction and represent a form of intellectual bullying as the authority of science is wrapped into a value judgment (12). This being said, Pitt engages in delightful bullying and technology-bashing when he rants against the I-Pod as a perniciously unsocial tool (20)—a rant, moreover, that follows upon the observation that people choose themselves and thereby make themselves through their choice of artifacts, that they thus become artifacts of their own design, and that we should look at this design process in terms of the opportunities it affords (9f.). Indeed, Pitt’s conviction ‘‘that we are our technologies’’ may well explain his harsh judgment against the

The Idea of a Christian Psychology

In response to Paul Vitz's evaluation of three divisions of psychology as: a) neuroscience and cognitive science; b) tests and measurements; c) psychotherapy and personality theory, I offer four reflections: First, neuroscience and cognitive science and the kind of activity that has gone into the production of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are shot through with contestable assumptions of a generally philosophical kind, at least as neuroscience and tests and measurements are often practiced. Second, I contend that what Vitz calls psychology is more subject to scientific information and evaluation than he suggests in some parts of his article. Third, I argue that psychology is inherently more plural and contestable than is suggested by his rather blanket approval of the program of positive psychology. Finally, I suggest that Vitz exaggerates the difference between positive psychology and the negative psychology it is reacting against. The goal of this article is to illustrate and defend these claims, and to sketch what a Christian psychology is.

Back to the Future: Eternal Recurrence and the Death of Socrates

Back to the Future:Eternal Recurrence and the Death of Socrates Tom Stern One sense in which Thus Spoke Zarathustra might indeed be a book "for none" is that none of us can agree what it says. But in the last few decades it seems that certain questions have achieved some recognition as questions that the Zarathustra commentator might want to answer. These questions look something like this: Is it really Nietzsche's most philosophically significant book (as he sometimes claims)? How does it fit together with his other books? Is part IV an embarrassing addition or a central and indispensable conclusion to the book? Is there a coherent conception of the Übermensch ? Does Nietzsche consider the latter desirable or even possible? Does Zarathustra? What is the Eternal Recurrence—a cosmological doctrine or a thought experiment (or something else)? How does the Übermensch (apparently associated with progress) fit together with the Eternal Recurrence (apparently associated with the impossibility of meaningful progress)? The answers to these questions may depend on the answers to deeper questions about how one approaches Nietzsche in general. Do we think of him as the kind of philosopher who buries faintly perceptible clues deep within his works (even those written years apart), which only the bravest and boldest Nietzsche scholars are able to pick out and reassemble? Do we think that the unpublished notes form a kind of "subconscious" in relation to the "conscious" published works, such that scholars can casually dip into the former to reveal what Nietzsche was really thinking in the latter? Do we view Nietzsche as a philosopher who changed his mind frequently about important issues or as a philosopher who had one (very complicated) idea and spent his working life trying to express it? In other words, in Isaiah Berlin's terms, was he a hedgehog (that is, he does one thing very well) or a fox (he does many things fairly well)? Berlin, incidentally, thought hedgehog.1 The connections between answers to the second set of questions and answers to the first set of questions may or may not be obvious. If you think that Nietzsche was, broadly speaking, a consistent philosopher with a single message, then the fact that the Übermensch and the Eternal Recurrence virtually drop out of his writing after Z becomes a matter of significant intrigue. If they seem so important here, then why not there? Perhaps they really are somehow "present" in the later works, but we need a special interpretation to see why. And so [End Page 73] on. If you think of him as changing his mind, then you might just think that he got interested in other things and moved on. The same basic question may also motivate one's attitude to the unpublished notes. If Nietzsche, hedgehog-like, struggles to reveal his one great insight, then the notes and the published works are both simply evidence of that one great struggle. But if we see Nietzsche, like the fox, chasing after different goals in different ways, adapting and changing his mind, then perhaps what he chooses to publish takes on a kind of significance that it otherwise might not. It might matter when he said it and whether or not he finalized it for publication. This then feeds into the Zarathustra questions: much of Nietzsche's writing about the Eternal Recurrence shows up in unpublished notes. These are the only place in which Nietzsche toys with an explicit "proof" of Eternal Recurrence. To some, this must hold the key to understanding Z. To others, it is an interesting piece of trivia. After all, if he had a proof, why didn't he publish it? Or (for those who think that traces of the proof are found in Z) why did he choose to publish it as part of an obscure dialogue between an ancient Persian prophet and a crippled, talking half-dwarf half-mole? Was his claim that he was only to be understood years later an oblique reference to the fact that the answers were in his diaries? Similarly for the significance of his remarks about the importance of Z, even if he claims in one place that it's his...