METAPHILOSOPHY最新文献

This article endeavors to conduct a comparative analysis between the philosophical systems of Plotinus and classical Sāṃkhya, two distinct philosophical traditions characterized by their substantial historical and cultural contexts. The primary aim of the study is to discern and evaluate the fundamental themes inherent in these philosophical systems. To facilitate this comparative exploration, the article employs Plotinus's seminal work, the Enneads, as the representative source for Neoplatonism, and Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṃkhyakārikā, recognized as the earliest extant treatise within the Sāṃkhya tradition. This comparative analysis seeks to illuminate both the commonalities and divergences that exist between Neoplatonism and Sāṃkhya, thereby providing insights into their historical evolution, the influence of cultural factors, and the nuanced interplay between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. It emphasizes the paramount importance of acknowledging the intricate philosophical potential within religious traditions and their intricate dialogues with philosophical discourse.

Nancy Holland (1990, 1) defines “women's philosophy” as philosophical work that “arises from, explicitly refers to, and attempts to account for the experience of women.” A “women's” philosophy, distinct from “feminist” philosophy, would depict the lived reality of women's experiences without an explicit or self-conscious desire to construct oppositional theories or arguments. This paper builds on Holland's discussion of a women's philosophy to propose a new perspective on the role and function of the philosophy curriculum. The paper shifts the conversation from one concerning whether a women's philosophy is “possible” to one that directly asks how we can build this philosophy. It argues that creating space for a women's philosophy need not require the reimagining of philosophical norms. Instead, the task should be understood as broadening perceptions of what counts as philosophy. The central claim is that we should witness curriculum construction as a tool for metaphilosophical intervention and as the first step towards building a women's philosophy. The paper shows how the incorporation of feminist autoethnography (a research approach and body of literature) into curriculums is particularly fruitful.

Analysis of the feeling of shame plays a crucial role in classical phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, and shame has increasingly become a core topic in Anglo-American moral philosophy since at least the publication of Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity in 1993. While Williams's philosophical approach to the deep moral implications of shame was indeed groundbreaking, previous philosophical readings of the emotion were already in the offing, including Jean-Paul Sartre's prodigious representation of the moment shame reaches consciousness in Being and Nothingness, first published in 1943. This paper compares Sartre's and Williams's interpretive frameworks for understanding the rich (first-personal) experience of shame, explaining in detail how they not only complement but also illuminate each other, thereby offering a novel understanding of shame's relation to the moral, nonmoral, and ethical self.

A key question in contemporary metaphilosophy of thought experiments is the “wheat from chaff” problem: How can we separate the good and trustworthy thought experiments from the untrustworthy ones? This article examines this problem by viewing thought experimentation as a form of mental simulation. It argues that we should approach the limitations of thought experiments in light of the general shortcomings of our capacity to run mental simulations. Furthermore, the article proposes an answer to the wheat from chaff problem by presenting three danger signals for untrustworthy thought experiments. These are (1) high counterfactuality of the imagined scenario, (2) complexity of the imagined scenario, and (3) a large psychological distance to the imagined scenario.

Freedom is an eternal theme of thought in modern Europe. In philosophers, freedom is embodied in the freedom of reason, and in poets, freedom is embodied in the freedom of human nature. Unlike the philosopher Kant, who defined a person as the subject of practical reason and took the realisation of the supreme good—that is, the freedom of the moral person—as the goal of his thought, the poet Schiller understands the person as a “beautiful personality” harmonising sensibility and rationality, and the fulfilment of human nature as the ultimate goal of his thought. Here, the motive of Schiller's thought is embodied in an ideal, which is manifested in the pursuit of human nature to reach infinity—that is, sanctity. At the same time, in ideal art, what emerges from the unity of body and spirit, sensibility and reason, is the personality as an idea in itself, with its own stipulation of beauty.

According to a popular theory in philosophical methodology, there is a widespread misconception among philosophers as to their own methods. This misconception is that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. This is a fascinating theory, for various reasons. Some of those reasons pertain to what the theory predicts about what philosophers are teaching their students, and whether the theory puts us on the pathway to pedagogical reform. The current paper does not answer those questions but uses them to demonstrate hitherto unrecognized fascinating aspects of the idea that there is a widespread misconception among philosophers as to their methods. Advocates of the theory end up needing to make surprising further claims about the nature of the profession, and to revisit debates they have dismissed as a big mistake.

Philosophers who study moral progress often hold a largely unacknowledged conception of moral history, which one may call the problem-solving conception of moral progress. This conception pictures humans as problem solvers, who make progress by advancing morally significant values in society. This conception, however, overlooks the conflict of values. In response, this paper proposes the dual-character conception of moral change to guide the study of the historical change of morality. This conception tracks a self-limiting structure of moral change—since not all values are compatible and combinable, our efforts to actualize certain values entail our neglect and sacrifice of alternative values. In consequence, the “progress” we make actually limits us from experimenting with other ideal forms of life and society. As calling a change process progress keeps us in a state of neglecting alternative values, we should discard the moral-progress thinking and stay aware of the limitations of our moral efforts.

This paper comments on Lawrence Cahoone's essay “Naturalism and the Cartesian ghost,” published in this issue of Metaphilosophy. Agreeing with Cahoone's criticism of reductive naturalism while identifying differences in our versions of non-reductive naturalism, the paper focuses on questions concerning ontological dependence and the relation between naturalism and humanism.

Sami Pihlström's non-reductive naturalism seeks to naturalize the transcendental. His Kantian version of liberal naturalism incorporates an affiliation with Strawson and Quine on perspective “relativity.” His insistence on the irreducibility of the agent perspective, and its inclusion in nature, is arguably right. But this can be achieved more simply by recognizing two points non-reductive naturalists often fail to note. First, physicalism is inadequate not merely to the human but also to the nonhuman world. That world is complex, requires multiple sciences, and includes the mental activity of purposive animals of which we are a remarkably special case. Second, the relativity of our truth claims to human agency is only one instance of the objective relativity of natural systems to one another. Once we recognize these two points, a fallibilist realism can support and be supported by the non-reductive naturalism Pihlström and I both seek.

Many philosophers equate naturalism with physicalism. Non-reductive naturalists object that physicalism is inadequate to human agency. Despite their disagreement, both labor under a vestigial Cartesianism that regards the human mind as the sole exception in an otherwise monolithic physical nature. But nonhuman nature is complex, exhibits emergence, and requires multiple sciences. This paper argues that nonhuman nature cannot be adequately understood by physicalism with its doctrine of the causal closure of the physical. At the same time, non-reductive naturalism cannot deny the dependence of human processes on nonhuman nature. A pluralistic naturalism can acknowledge this dependency without accepting physicalism. The Cartesian ghost can only be exorcized by thinking through the complexity of the nonhuman nature that is our home. This permits us to accept the realist, albeit fallibilist, truth of human cognition of the nature that evolved it.