Twentieth-century Philosophy Research Articles

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF RUSSIAN SPIRITUAL ACADEMIES’ TEACHERS OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

The paper deals with the analysis of philosophical and theological creativity of Russian theological academies’ teachers of the early 20th century. The aim of this study is to identify the impact of methodological foundations’ changes of philosophical-theological quest on the teachers of Russian theological academies and the educational process itself in theological schools. Methods. The author focuses on the content of training courses delivered in the theological academies in the first two decades of the 20th century; problem statement peculiarities; aspect and priority choice in the fundamental researches conducted by the teachers of these schools. The applied methods include the comparative method, analysis, synthesis, method of abstraction, other philosophical and scientific methods. Results. The author comes to the conclusion that the changes of methodological installations in scientific research representatives of spiritual and academic theism beginning of the 20th century can be compared with similar studies of the nineteenth century. It is mentioned that reorientation of a number of prominent representatives of spiritual and academic theism from scholastic methods, speculative psychology and metaphysics towards Patristics, asceticism and personal experiences allows us to propose this movement as West-European Philosophy searches of the same period. Thus, V. I. Nesmelov sees the basis of any religious teachings in the experience of human cognition. M. M. Tareev draws up his own moral theology reading course based on the personal experience living the Gospel Book. Archimandrite Sergious (Stragorodsky) interprets the topic of finding salvation not against the background of the changes in God, but from the standpoint of the changes that occur in humanity. Bishop Theodore (Pozdeevsky), Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) and Bishop Barnabas (Belyaev) make known scholasticism as epistemological malice characterizing the specifics of theological knowledge necessary to base their intellectual efforts on the personal experience of the struggle against the passions; therefore, they see the new basis of theology in asceticism. Professor S. V. Troitsky considers marriage as the key problem for religion and philosophy of the early 20th century. Professor S. S. Glagolev sees the descent of a man as the crossing point of religion and science. The author mentions that despite some heterogeneity of the proposed concepts, there is an obvious General anthropological orientation that had an impact on the educational process changes in theological academies (seminaries). Scientific novelty. The author systemizes and sums up anthropologic views of the most recognizable ecclesiastical academics in the early 20th century. Representation and analysis of anthropologic problematics in philosophical and religious papers of the Russian ecclesiastical education stage of development signify essential agreement among Russian and Western sophists; they had been discussing the same problem – a human being. The author points out that their discussions were not absolutely the same, but it gives the reason to regard the anthropology of the early 20th century as modern Philosophy; and this difference allows academic anthropology to avoid classic and non-classic types of philosophy. Practical significance. The research outcomes can be used for further understanding development of the all European searching process of the early 20th century. Received by the author of the study findings provide its scientific innovation. The results of this study can be used in assessing the role of theological academies in European cultural processes and culture of the Russian society of the early 20th century; research findings can enrich the content of the lectures on the History of Philosophy, Russian History, European History, Cultural Studies and other Humanities (non-science disciplines).

Lessons for the Relationship of Philosophy and Science From the Legacy of Henri Bergson

One of the many narratives of twentieth century philosophy regards the relationship of philosophy to science: the opinions and arguments over whether philosophy as a discipline should be an assistant, critic, or master over science, and what particular ways philosophy could articulate these roles. One can interpret most of the major conflicts and disciplinary divisions of philosophy as having to do with its relationship with science. The conceptual roots of the general acceptability of a convergence of science and metaphysics would appear to lie in the focus of both subjects, broadly conceived: investigating the nature of existence. Yet, after the rise of post-modernism in many humanities fields, dialogue between philosophy and science on many important issues has become impossible, scientifically-minded intellectuals having no expectation that humanities can contribute usefully to the disciplines of science.

Hans Jonas and Classical Jewish Sources: New Dimensions

There is growing interest in the Jewish dimensions of the life and thought of Hans Jonas, a twentieth-century philosopher whose increasingly influential teachings address some of the most vexing philosophic and public policy challenges of modern times. This essay aims to clarify the reasons why Jonas might be reckoned as a Jewish thinker while calling into doubt recent claims of his major significance as a modern Jewish thinker, some of which go so far as to urge his addition to the canon of great twentieth-century thinkers, alongside Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Strauss, Levinas, and Kaplan.

Stress, Political Instability, and Differences between British and Franco-German Twentieth Philosophy

It is widely accepted amongst philosophers that twentieth century British philosophy is distinct from the dominant philosophical schools in Germany and France. Termed 'Continental Philosophy,' the dominant viewpoint in France and Germany was characterized by a rejection of scientism, an acceptance of historicism, and an ethical mission. The dominant British school is termed 'Analytic Philosophy.' It modeled philosophy on science to a greater extent, rejected historicism, and tended to reject moral absolutes in favor of carefully establishing a shared vantage point from which an ethical case could logically follow. In this article, we will try to explain why the dominant philosophy in Britain was so different from the dominant philosophies in France or Germany. It is question-begging to put these differences down to historical differences, either in the development of the nation's philosophy or its broader political and social system, because this simply raises the question of why there were historical differences.We define the word 'dogmatic,' for the purposes of this discussion, in the purely psychological sense. A person is high on dogmatism if he asserts propositions to be true despite there being relatively little evidence for them. The more confidently he asserts these propositions, the more dogmatic he is. Ideologies can be described as dogmatic in the sense that they are constructed around moral or historical absolutes. A form of philosophy can, therefore, be described as 'dogmatic' if it is constructed around such absolutes and less dogmatic if there are no absolutes or if these absolutes are cautiously held to. Thus, asserting that, 'We have a moral duty to do unto others as we would have them do unto us' is more dogmatic than carefully establishing that this might be a reasonable starting point for pursuing an ethical discussion but accepting that there are problems with it. We hypothesize that Britain developed a dominant philosophy that was less dogmatic because its people were subject to lower levels of stress during the twentieth century. By contrast, France and Germany developed a philosophy that was more dogmatic and closer to the archetype of ideology because its people were subject to higher levels of stress. Specifically, we argue that those who were the leading philosophers in these countries during the twentieth century would have suffered from higher levels of stress during childhood.We have chosen to focus here on twentieth century philosophy. It could be argued that British and Franco-German philosophy diverged in the late eighteenth century. Even at that point, Franco-German philosophy tended towards absolutist schools, which assumed that knowledge could be reached by contemplation and that there were certain foundational truths. By contrast, British philosophy followed a more empiricist method, in line with such figures as David Hume, and Analytic philosophers generally have a greater respect for science than do Continental. It has been argued that, with the union of Scotland and England in 1707, Great Britain, as an island, became uniquely politically stable, in part because there was no longer any realistic threat of foreign invasion. Indeed, it has been suggested that this is one of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain; the country was safe and stable, and this encouraged investment and innovation (Clark, 2007). Accordingly, though we will not concentrate on this, the historical divergence in dominant philosophy between Britain and Continental Europe could be regarded as congruous with our thesis insomuch as it would seem to reflect lower levels of stress in Britain even prior to the twentieth century, and an apparent relationship between this and a form of philosophy that was rather different from that practiced in France or Germany.1. Continental Philosophy versus British PhilosophyThe term 'Continental philosophy' is generally used as shorthand for a number of related schools. …

Strange Life of a Sentence

SAUSSUREANISM AND STRUCTURALISMWithin twentieth-century philosophy and human sciences, Course in General Linguistics attributed to Ferdinand de functions primarily as a site of official doctrine closely associated with structuralism, that is, as a statement of familiar oppositional pairings between signifier and signified, la langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony. Barthes argued that a reliance on these oppositional pairings in process of mapping out many aspects of human reality (such as kinship arrangements, neurotic symptoms, literary genres) may in fact be a hallmark of activity, one which distinguishes it from other traditions of inquiry (Barthes 1972, 213). Structuralism can therefore be defined as direct application of 'Saussurean doctrine' to many fields of study dealing with cultural signification in a social context. Considering hold that had on Saussure's linguistics within twentieth-century European philosophy and related fields, it is usual to consider these oppositional pairings as a distinctive feature and a shared trait of Saussureanism and structuralism. They figure as general principles that were applied to linguistic study in Course in 1910s, and then extended to broader field of philosophy and human sciences within post-Second World War French (and then challenged within post-structuralism, notably by Derrida).This assumed continuity between a 'proto-structuralist' doctrine and properly so-called can also be rendered by fact that it is usual in scholarship to define proper as an intellectual movement with a distinctive Saussurean lineage, and to exclude strands of scholarship that do not share in Saussurean legacy. Hence, it is usually allowed that term structuralism covers a large and varied territory of knowledge, and arguably one finds elements throughout written history of Western philosophy in many attempts to characterize objects in terms of a combination of structural elements within a system (Culler 2006, 5). However, it is standard to qualify as in proper sense of term movement that displays a direct lineage to Saussurean linguistics as presented in Course only; a number of scholarly works devoted to testify to this trend. Culler notes that the term is generally used to designate work that marks its debts to structural linguistics and deploys a vocabulary drawn from legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure. . . . There are many writings, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky, that share propensity to analyze objects as products of a combination of structural elements within a system, but if they do not display a Saussurean ancestry, they are usually not deemed structuralist (Culler 2006, 5). Sturrock states that, The founding father of structural linguistics in Europe, and man frequently looked on as patron of whole Structuralist movement, was Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Sturrock 2003, 26). And Dosse observes that structuralism's (in proper sense) central core, its unifying center, is model of modern linguistics and figure of Ferdinand de Saussure, presented as its founder (Dosse 1997, 43). (The return to Saussure would belong to period's prevailing theme of returning to foundational figures, like Marx and Freud [Dosse 1997, 43]). In sum, structuralism's identity is widely recognized as closely bound up with its historical foundation in Great Book authored by Ferdinand de Saussure.The shared Saussurean/structuralist commitment to familiar oppositional pairings between signifier and signified, la langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony was made possible by production, replication, and reception of Course as a site of official doctrine. …

Conceptual History, Cultural History, Social History

V. M. Zhivov’s introduction to Studies in Historical Semantics of the Russian Language in the Early Modern Period (2009), translated here for the first time, offers a critical survey of the historiography on Begriffsgeschichte, the German school of conceptual history associated with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, as well as of its application to the study of Russian culture. By situating Begriffsgeschichte in the context of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century European philosophy, particularly hermeneutics and phenomenology, the author points out the important, and as yet unacknowledged, role that Russian linguists have played in the development of a native school of conceptual history. In the process of outlining this alternative history of the discipline, Zhivov provides some specific examples of the way in which the study of “historical semantics” can be used to analyze the development of Russian modernity.

Reviews and Interviews

Gschwandtner begins by warning that the two loaded terms found in the title (postmodernism and apologetics) are, for many, incompatible. If apologetics is, as she contends, a militant defense of Christian beliefs (or at least of the existence of a monotheistic God), and postmodernism a militant rejection of any such worldview, how then can the two be reconciled? What's more, of the twelve twentieth-century philosophers covered in the book's thirteen chapters, how many could rightly be characterized as either postmodernists or apologists, let alone both?These are the questions that Gschwandtner opens with. If the reader maintains a second-century view of apologetics and a 1960s view of postmodernism, these questions will remain unanswered. If, however, we stretch our understanding of apologetics to the exploration and justification of faith within contemporary thought, and limit our understanding of postmodernism to skepticism towards metanarratives (and of objective, distantiated truth claims), we see how the two may relate. And, on these terms, they do.Postmodern Apologetics? is a compelling study of how twentieth-century philosophy stemming from the phenomenological tradition has impacted on, and enabled, contemporary trends within philosophy of religion. The book is in three parts: Preparations, Expositions and Appropriations. Part 1 (Preparations) outlines the foundational contributions of three major thinkers: Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida. While often characterized by their ambivalence towards theological questions and concerns within their oeuvres, these three philosophers are seen by Gschwandtner to have set the groundwork for contemporary debates on both religious experience and religious language. Part 2 (Expositions) considers how the phenomenological ideals identified in Part 1 were expounded upon by a variety of contemporary French thinkers, ranging from the late Paul Ricoeur to Emmanuel Falque. Part 3 (Appropriations) tracks how key aspects of twentieth-century continental philosophy have recently been appropriated by three philosophers in the United States for the purpose of formulating a modern Christian apologia.PART 1: PREPARATIONSThe focal point of Part 1 is the commentary of Heidegger in the first chapter. Gschwandtner maintains that various aspects of Heidegger's ontology set the phenomenological context in which all subsequent thinkers operated, even when aspects of his thought were challenged (38).Gschwandtner begins by offering a precis of what she terms Heidegger's phenomenology of religion. Her emphasis is placed on two fundamental concepts which would be seen to impact on the French and American based philosophers discussed in later chapters. The first of these is Heidegger's understanding of onto-theo-logy as derived from his deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition. Here, Heidegger contends that ontology and theology had been problematically conflated from the very origins of metaphysics. By proposing a conceptual distancing of the two modes of thought, Heidegger is seen by Gschwandtner to have opened a different way to speak about the divine (30). This, in turn, has enabled much of the thinking of Marion and a host of other, more religiously motivated, theorists.The second crucial concept, stemming from Heidegger's hermeneutical writings, is his understanding of truth as aletheia (or un-concealment). Truth, in this respect, is seen as distinct from the objective, verifiable truth sought by the natural sciences. Though an often-neglected feature of Heidegger's work, Gschwandtner correctly observes that his existential understanding of truth (and the concept of meditative thinking which follows from it) offers a basis for twentieth-century hermeneutical philosophy. This chapter discusses neither the romantic hermeneutical origins of this line of enquiry, nor how it was later developed by H. Gadamer. It does however convincingly argue that this is perhaps Heidegger's greatest contribution to critical theory, underpinning the critiques of art laid out by Marion and Chretien (33), and heavily informing Ricoeur's conceptual distinction between verification and manifestation (34). …

Ideology and the Reform of Public Higher Education

In this article, I critically examine calls for reform of public higher education. I construct a counter-intuitive alliance between the conservatism of twentieth-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the more recent thinking associated with post-structuralism. It is argued that in Oakeshott and post-structuralism, we find a similar critique of the idea behind these reforms as imposing instrumental or productivist values on higher education. What is produced is a type of person organized to produce more and to demand of herself greater production. This critique is associated with a broader criticism of liberalism found both in Oakeshott and post-structuralism that the liberal order produces a normalized and docile individuality. Conversely, it is argued that theories of higher education in Oakeshott and post-structuralism inform a broader positive idea of individuality, enacted in a “style,” having intrinsic worth, and never reducible to any finished form.

Personhood and Subjectivation in Simondon and Heidegger

Twentieth century philosophers such as Simondon and Heidegger propose theories of subjectivation that inform our thinking about the definition of personhood and how it arises, including in the potentially wide-ranging context of personhood beyond the human. Simondon’s theory of transindividuation unfolds as a series of decenterings that provides a context for future persons that is a dynamic world of processes without fixity or attachment to any one kind of subject. Subjects participate in but do not cause individuation, and they exist on a spectrum of capacity for action with other living beings including animals, human persons, and possibly a variety of future persons. The role of collectivity in the form of the other has been an important aspect of individuation, however I claim that the function of alterity need not be provided exclusively by a self-similar subject. Philosophical individuation theories serve as a foundation for an approach that opens up greater possibility for individuation in the context of future persons by identifying and alternatively fulfilling the underlying functionality required by individuation.

Walter Hopp, Perception and Knowledge: a Phenomenological Account

Perception and Knowledge 1 is a book that sets out to enrich the vast field of contemporary debates about the justificatory relation between perception and thought with some of the goods phenomenology has to offer. Many major figures of Modern philosophy, such as Locke, Kant and Husserl regarded the nature of this relation as one of the greatest mysteries in philosophy. Its complexity results from the way it touches upon some of the most obscure and all-encompassing philosophical issues, such as the nature and limits of human knowledge, the inner workings of experience, and humanity’s place in reality. Especially since the works of mid twentieth century philosophers such as Quine and Sellars, who challenged the assumptions of logical positivism and empirical foundationalism, perception is usually denied the special role of offering direct insight into external reality. By contrast, it is today quite commonplace to think of beliefs as being justified by other beliefs only, as Davidson famously put it. These considerations have in turn led some of the most influential epistemologists today to think of the contents of perception as entirely conceptual. Spurred by McDowell’sMind and World (1994), they want to abide by the Sellarsian principle that nothing in our sensory experience can function like a hinge between beliefs and a lawful, external reality. Instead, what we perceive is always already a part of the ‘space of reasons’ (McDowell 1994, p. 7), both informed by and open to our network of rational capacities. Whether I look at the cup of coffee on my desk or simply use it prereflectively by drinking from it, the perception and act respectively can be ‘exploited in active thinking’ (ibid., p. 47), and to that extent their contents are said to be conceptual. The conceptualist thesis further stresses that it is our upbringing in cultural practices Phenom Cogn Sci (2015) 14:1185–1191 DOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9382-y

Bernhard, Suffering, and the Value of Language

It is almost a truism to say that twentieth‐century philosophy has been concerned to a large degree with the question of the relation of language to meaning. Much of the concern has had to do with making more precise or more perspicuous the relation of language to thought and to the world. The twentieth century was also a time of immense human suffering, but the relation of suffering, as both a dimension of the world and as an aspect of thought, to its linguistic expression has received less philosophical attention. This paper forwards select works from across the writings of the Austrian novelist and dramatist Thomas Bernhard as investigations of these topics. In setting out and evaluating some of Bernhard's signal artistic considerations of the topic, I argue that understanding his work as a literary equivalent to Wittgenstein's more philosophical treatment of some of the same issues does not limn the deepest structure of Bernhard's thought—even though Bernhard often encourages this identification. Bernhard is even more pessimistic than Wittgenstein on a number of core issues; consideration of Bernhard's work in light of Schopenhauer—also a thinker important for Wittgenstein—is more revealing.

Russell's Logical Atomism, by David Bostock.

Hearing people talk, you would think Russell was ‘a big numpty’ (to use the Scottish phrase), a second-rate thinker compared to Frege or Wittgenstein. All this goes back to the Tractatus where Wittgenstein took pains to contrast ‘the great works of Frege’, and implicitly his own, with ‘the works of my friend Bertrand Russell’, providing an impression of their relative merits that happens to have stuck. But is it obvious that Russell was second rate compared to them? Hasn’t Russell’s philosophy of logic and mathematics, and his epistemology and metaphysics, had a deep and abiding influence upon all of us? Conjure before your mind an alternative history bereft of his influence: one where Russell never emerged from the bath of German idealism in which he had been plunged by McTaggart and Stout, so twentieth century philosophy proceeded absent an appreciation of either Russell’s paradox or his theory of descriptions. That is an intellectual dystopia, if anything is.

Habit in A la recherche du temps perdu

This article explores the role of habit in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in light of the history of the concept of habitude in French philosophy. Taking the miniature process of habituation detected in the madeleine scene as a guiding thread, it examines the major aspects of habit that this passage signals and that return in different forms to play an important role in both the narrator's life and the birth of his narrative. These include habit's impact on perception and artistic creativity, on the experience of the body and space, and on will, and the role of habit in shaping identity. The reflections on habit of Ruskin and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers, in particular Felix Ravaisson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricœur, help to explicate the background and implications of the narrator's experiences and account of habit's actions in these areas. While Beckett's influential reading of the novel focused exclusively on habit's negative effects, and subsequent Proust criticism has canonized his interpretation, this article argues that the image of habit is far more complex in A la recherche. More than a simple obstacle to perception and art, it is deeply embedded in, and indispensable for, both.

Naming the Indescribable: Woolf, Russell, James, and the Limits of Description

This essay examines a preoccupation in early twentieth century literature and philosophy with the limits of describing first-person experience in language. Reading Virginia Woolf’s novels together with the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and William James, I argue that the indescribable in modernism is not so much a sublime beyond comprehension but rather the particularities of feelings that we ourselves know too well. These idiosyncratic experiential textures escape full expression by words that are inevitably general, but I suggest that Woolf stages this descriptive limit by exploiting a set of nondescriptive terms, whose distinctive features are elucidated by the remarks of James and Russell. The aim of this paper is to trace a less familiar intellectual history of literary modernism by highlighting its connections to early analytic philosophy, while at the same time working across literature and philosophy in a way that does not take recourse to the model of a “lens” or an influence study, but that instead examines the two fields” shared preoccupation with similar problems, which they elaborate in distinct ways.

Deleuze and Kuki: The Temporality of Eternal Return and ‘un coup de dés’

Shuzo Kuki is a Japanese philosopher, belonging to the Kyoto school, who lived about a hundred years ago. He learned philosophy in Europe and developed an original theory of contingency, by accommodating the Asiatic way of thinking on the one hand, and Western philosophy (Bergson, Heidegger and neo-Kantianism) on the other. In this article, I show that we can find similarities between his theory of contingency and the philosophy of Deleuze, especially in regard to the subject of temporality and eternal return. Needless to say, the theory of the third time is a crucial theme in Difference and Repetition, and is closely related to the time of eternity, and the original or primitive contingency. Taking into consideration these aspects of time is indispensable in examining in depth the concepts of difference and virtuality. Kuki's theory of contingency, which incorporates early twentieth-century European philosophy, elucidates these concepts in an unexpected way. Therefore, my aim in this article is not to attempt a comparison between Eastern and Western thought by quoting Deleuze, but to illustrate a hidden lineage of thought, which runs from the nineteenth century (neo-Kantianism, Bergsonism, and so on) into the philosophy of virtuality of the twentieth century. This same lineage appears in Japan in Kuki's theory, and Deleuze's thought is, at least in one aspect, a modern manifestation of the same roots.

La repubblica fra passato e futuro: interpretazione e appropriazione della Filosofia politica di Platone nel XX Secolo

La repubblica fra passato e futuro: interpretazione e appropriazione della Filosofia politica di Platone nel XX Secolo

The poverty of the stimulus: Quine and Wittgenstein

Quine and Wittgenstein were dominant figures in philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century. Many readers, like Quine himself, have felt that there are deep similarities between the two thinkers, though those similarities are difficult to articulate. I argue that they share the project of understanding the meaning of utterances by reference to the environment of the speaker, though they understand that environment in radically different ways. In particular, Quine has a much thinner conception of the environment than does Wittgenstein. For Quine, the stimulus is impoverished in a way that it is not for Wittgenstein. I also argue that they share a certain deflationary approach to ontology.

Edmund Husserl’de ‘Başkasının Beni’ Sorunu ve İntersubjektivite Kavramı

Human being can realize his/her self-existence only within society; hence it is a living entity which acquires all its reality together with others. This attribution brings along numerous discussions. Amongst these discussions one of the most important problems is the problem of co-existence. The main way, among others, of inquiring this problem in terms of philosophy is to examine the issue of the self of other. The problem of ‘other’ is funda mentally a problem of knowledge which rose with modern philosophy. This problem particularly appears as the problem of ‘other minds’ or ‘the self of other’: How can we know ‘the self of other’? Within this framework, the purpose of the article is to examine the basis of relations between humans, in other words how the knowledge of the self of other could be possible and to explain the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ which is an important notion with regard to the problem of co-existence in the axis of this examination. The study will be carried out within the scope of phenomenological approach of Edmund Husserl, one of the most significant philosophers of 20th century.

Phenomenology and non-conceptual content

The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate presents what is likely to be the most complete overview of phenomenology’s partake in debates over non-conceptual content up to date. As the title indicates, the chapters of all fifteen contributors center around McDowell’s conceptualist position, which was first exposed in detail in the already highly influential work Mind and World. Here McDowell argues against any form of non-conceptual content, a move motivated primarily by what Sellars had dubbed the “Myth of the Given”. On McDowell’s (and Sellars’s) understanding, characteristic of Modern philosophy is an ontological separation of two realms of being. Whereas one is that of external reality, supposedly governed by natural law, the other is that of human action and free spontaneity. The Modernist sees man’s place in reality in accord with this: whereas the senses receive information from the external environment which causally impinges upon the senses, our complex thoughts ultimately have to relate back to these bare data. This makes the function of sensations ambiguously two-legged: whereas one has a foothold in thought, the other has a grip in the natural world. The idea that bare sense data bridge the realm of causal nature to thought and thus have an epistemic effect upon our beliefs is what Sellars called the Myth of the Given. For twentieth century philosophers such as Sellars and Davidson, the price for this image is too high, and consequently they deny that the bare Givens our bodies receive from the external world are epistemologically efficacious. However, according to

Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, by Lee Braver

Lee Braver engages with the works of two important—but (he says) ‘obscure’—protagonists of twentieth-century philosophy to traverse the disciplinary divide between analytic philosophy and more Cont...