EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

In his book The Culmination, Pippin leaves no doubt that he still thinks that German Idealism has achieved a level of understanding and radicality that makes its proponents the best conversational partners to develop an understanding of what philosophy is about. It is the question of the very possibility of understanding that comes to be at the center of their writings and informs every page. Yet this radicality is now seen in a different light. It is now conceived as a culmination, not of an understanding that comes to itself but of a misunderstanding that informs, unavoidably, Western philosophical tradition as a whole. The resources for the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong in the conception of what it is to be a being that is able to know anything at all Pippin finds most vividly and forcefully articulated in Heidegger. I will argue that there is something profoundly true about Pippin's idea that, at the bottom of any knowledge we have of ourselves and the world, there is something that Heidegger calls Stimmung, which is essentially non-discursive. However, I will argue that to defend the latter thought, one has to read Heidegger's notion of Stimmung in a more radical way than Pippin seems to be willing to.

Robert Pippin has long defended the Hegelian ‘satisfactions of self-consciousness’ against virtually all attacks, including Heidegger's. He now concedes in a striking reversal that ‘Heidegger is right’. Pippin diagnoses his past allegiance to the Western rationalist tradition culminating in Hegel as resting on ‘a misplaced confidence in the inescapably self-reflective character of any orientation or attunement to the meaningfulness of Being’. What were once the satisfactions of self-consciousness have become its dissatisfactions. But does Pippin's presentation of the rationalist position ultimately make it too easy for Heidegger to topple it? Will the rationalist impulse, interpreted more charitably, rest undisturbed by Pippin's Heideggerian challenge? I identify three assumptions Pippin's Heidegger makes about the role of reason in our orientation towards the world. If these assumptions are considered not only optional but falsifying by any sound rationalist, this will damage the power of Pippin's Heidegerrian critique. For it is only against the background of a credible picture of the presence of reason in human life that the dissatisfactions of self-consciousness can emerge to reveal a genuine alternative.

A ‘no-ownership’ or ‘no-self theory’ holds that there is no proper subject of experience; the ownership of experience can only be accounted for by invoking a sub-personal entity. In the recent self-versus-no-self debate, it is widely assumed that the no-referent view of ‘I’, which is closely associated with Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, implies a no-ownership theory of experience. I spell out this assumption with regard to both non-reflective and reflective consciousness and show that it is false. If the so-called ‘self’ is an individual, the person, nothing more is required for the ownership of sensations than the non-reflective experiencing, undergoing, or suffering of them, whereas the sense of ‘ownership’ of reflective consciousness varies according to the type of ‘I’-thought in question. Ownership of ‘I’-thoughts about one’s own actions, for one thing, is a matter of being able to fit future actions to them or answer questions as to why one is doing what one does.

Much work in history, anthropology, sociology, and political science has a narrative form — the events described are emplotted into stories. A number of recent critics of narrative have argued that the story form is a poor vehicle for social scientific explanation, as it often misleads us about the causal structure of the social world. Defenders of narrative typically claim that such criticisms miss the point of narrative. Even if narrative is not the best means for providing us with causal information, it can provide us with information about something else of importance such as the events' “meanings” or others' experiences. I reject such defenses of narrative, but I then offer a novel defense in their place. On the view I defend, narratives increase our understanding of the social world not by giving us some kind of special information about the social world but rather by cuing certain kinds of responses to it. I tie this conception of the epistemic function of narrative to the political role that narrative can play in correcting failures of interpersonal recognition and promoting structural change.

In The Culmination, Robert Pippin offers a stunning reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism. Having developed some of the most persuasive defenses of Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin now argues that Heidegger's trenchant critique of Hegel has revealed a dogmatism at the very heart of absolute idealism: an unwarranted identification of what is with what is discursively knowable. This dogmatic identification leads to a distorted understanding of the meaning of Being, a reifying account of beings, and a neglect of our own finitude. In this article, I defend Hegel against these charges. The upshot of this discussion is twofold. Rather than evading the question of the exteriority of being, I argue, Hegel in fact aims to reveal that this exteriority is internal to thinking itself. And rather than identifying the meaning of being with discursive knowability, Hegel shows that the meaning of being resides in a form of freedom that goes beyond the self-transparency of knowing.

In what follows, I present my replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon's reflections on my What Would Be Different? Figures of Possibility in Adorno. I begin by summarizing what is at stake in the book. My reply to Nicholas Walker and Taylor Carman focusses on Adorno's criticisms of Heidegger, who claims that the history of metaphysics has blocked our access to an “other beginning” for thinking. This prepares the ground for a comparison of Adorno's and Heidegger's notions of what I call “blocked possibility.” My reply to Peter Gordon clarifies the relation of “blocked possibility” to actuality and, more specifically, to the actuality of happiness in Adorno's writings.

Agents are continually faced with two related selection problems: i) the problem of selecting what to do from a space of possible behaviours; ii) the problem of selecting what to attend to from a space of possible attendabilia. We have psychological mechanisms that enable us to solve both types of problem. But do these mechanisms follow different principles or work along the same lines? I argue for the latter. I start from the theory that bodily action is supported by a sensitivity to affordances. Strong evidence suggests that affordances feature in our perception of the world and that affordance perception can trigger the neural preparation of the afforded act. An agent can thus see a teapot as grippable and their doing so can automatically ready a gripping response. Something affords attending for an agent just in case it is a possible target of their focal attention. I argue that we are sensitive to these attentional affordances in much the same way. First I argue that we perceive things as attendable. Second I argue that our doing so can trigger the preparation of shifts in focal attention. My case for this is based on a variety of phenomenological, neurological and behavioural parallels between our sensitivity to bodily affordances and our sensitivity to attentional affordances. This yields a unified account with specific implications for our understanding of attention and affordance perception and general implications for our understanding of how the mind solves selection problems.

Adorno scholarship has come a long way in the last twenty years. His philosophy was long overshadowed by the accusation of being too negative. This accusation was made not just from outside of the Frankfurt School research tradition, but crucially also within it, especially from Jürgen Habermas, often portrayed as the leading figure of its “2nd generation”. In Habermas's case the accusation took different forms—sometimes it is about Adorno's theory lacking the standing for social critique; sometimes it is about its lacking normative foundations; and sometimes it is about performative contradiction (between the content of saying that the social world is thoroughly distorted by ideology and the act of saying that). The upshot is meant to be the same in each case: we need a positive normative resource which then provides the standard with which to criticise our social world. That led then to various debates about what that positive standard should be—communicative action, recognition/social freedom, or the right to justification (to name three prominent answers by Habermas, Honneth, and Forst respectively). Especially in the last two decades, there has been more push-back against the accusation (and the purported positive standards). Some—including (full disclosure!) I—have insisted that Adorno's taking a negativistic stance is defensible and, indeed, preferable to the supposedly positive alternatives.

It is into this context that Gordon seeks to intervene, with his newest book. He rejects the negativistic revival of Adorno, despite accepting that the textual evidence for a negativist interpretation appear to be strong (p. 5). Like Habermas, he thinks we need a positive standard for social critique, but, unlike Habermas, Gordon thinks that such a positive standard can be found in Adorno's work. He is not alone in thinking this – Gordon Finlayson and Martin Seel are among the earlier examples of interpretations which ascribe a positive core to Adorno's philosophy. What is more specific to Gordon, is that he suggests that the ‘source’ of normativity of Adorno's critical theory of society is a ‘maximalist demand for happiness’ in the broad sense of human flourishing (pp. xvi-xviii and passim, especially Chapter 2). It is this demand that animates Adorno's materialist ‘ethics of vulnerability’ (pp. 15, 196–197). The demand for happiness is immanent in the social world, notably in certain experiences and elements that have anticipatory character (pp. 46, 56–57, 70, 210), pointing to complete flourishing and alluding to the good even in the distorted instances of happiness that the wrong social world affords us (pp. 54–57, 70–71). In this way, precarious happiness (or precarious experience of happiness) gives us a glimpse of complete, comprehensive happiness; and is the source for immanent social critique.

Gordon clearly thinks that an orientation towards human flourishing has much to recommend it, albeit he does not offer an indepen