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.
{"title":"The Dissatisfactions of Self-Consciousness","authors":"Joseph K. Schear","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13002","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"919-925"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142404778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>There is a problem which often arises during the course of various discussions in action theory and related fields about how exactly we are to characterise the relation which obtains between an agent and her (token) actions. An agent is a particular individual; it is often assumed that any token action of hers must be another.<sup>1</sup> But what is the relation between these two particulars, when the agent is the agent of the action in question? Obviously, one asymmetric relation between them is this: the agent, S, <i>is the agent of</i> the action, A. But is there a <i>further</i> relation between agent and action <i>in virtue of which</i> it is correct to say that A is S's action? The idea that agency must be reducible to something assumed to be more basic, such as causation, has sometimes tempted philosophers to think so – and there are also fairly common locutions which can make it seem as though S's being the agent of an action, A might hold in virtue of another, perhaps more basic relationship – ‘execution’ or ‘performance’, or simply ‘doing’, for example. But as I shall try to show below, it is not at all easy to make any of these ideas work.</p><p>In order to have a handy label for the problem which attaches to this search for a relation to undergird propositions of the form ‘S is the agent of A', I am going to call it the ‘agent-action problem’. The problem has rarely been acknowledged as a <i>general</i> difficulty – although it gives rise to various sub-problems, which have been often enough remarked upon.<sup>2</sup> Moreover, even when the sub-problems are observed, they are sometimes noted merely as passing curiosities which perhaps constitute nothing more than minor linguistic inconveniences to the philosopher of action. In a way, then, neither the sub-problems nor the fundamental problem which in my view underlies the sub-problems has really received any serious, sustained scrutiny of a properly wide-ranging sort. In this paper, I want to suggest, however, that it deserves such scrutiny – and that a failure properly to get to grips with the general form of the problem is indicative of philosophy of action's failure to get a decent ontological understanding of its own subject matter. This failure, I believe, is connected to some of the puzzles in which philosophers find themselves embroiled, with respect to such issues as whether agents are causes of their actions<sup>3</sup>; whether the agent ‘disappears' in a problematic way from certain pictures of what action involves<sup>4</sup>; and which physical events, precisely, compose or constitute our actions.<sup>5</sup> I want to argue that once we understand the true source of the agent-action problem, it can be seen that the problem is related in certain interesting ways to the philosophical difficulty which has come to be known as ‘Bradley's Regress'. The range of options for responding to it can, I think, therefore be usefully illuminated by reflecting on those that have be
我们当然会经常提到人们做的事情，也会谈论我们做过的事情--我们可能会自然而然地认为，我们做的这些事情一定就是我们的行动。但是，正如霍恩斯比在其（1980 年）一书中有力地论证的那样，我们说我们做的这些事情当然不可能是象征性的行为。为了用英语谈论个人行为，哲学家们通常会使用所谓的 "完形助词"--"我举起手臂"、"凯撒越过卢比孔河"、"奥斯瓦尔德射杀肯尼迪 "等形式的表达。这些句子是由我笼统地（并不令人满意地）称之为'动作句'的句子6 （为了目前的目的，我认为这些句子是SUBJ + VERB ± OBJ形式的基本句子--如'我举起了我的手臂'、'凯撒越过了卢比孔河'、'奥斯瓦尔德射杀了肯尼迪'等句子）通过一个我们可以大致这样描述的方法派生出来的：使用动名词结构对动词进行名词化，将主语转换为适当的所有格形容词，并插入一个适当的介词（通常是 "的"）来连接句子的宾语（如果有的话）。7通过这种方法，我们可以得出像上面这样的名词性表达式，这类表达式似乎是指特定的动作。但这些表达式不能在 "S does/did A "模式中代替 "A"。例如，我没有举起手臂；凯撒没有越过卢比孔河；奥斯瓦尔德没有射杀肯尼迪。这些表达显然不合语法。正如霍恩斯比指出的，我们在 "你做了什么"、"她做了什么 "等语境中使用 "做 "时，应该把它看作是一个图式动词8 。根据对 "行为 "一词的理解，"举起手臂"、"跨过卢比孔河"、"过河"、"向某人开枪"、"向肯尼迪开枪 "都是行为。霍恩斯比（Hornsby）认为，我们所做的事情正是后面这些事情，即行为而非单个行动。但我并没有做铺床、吃早餐和赶火车的事。如果有人在回答 "你做了什么？"这个问题时提供的不是一个完整的命题，而是一个单数词，那么他就会给出一个无穷式结构--"关上大门"；"在圣杯里下毒"；"点火"。或者考虑一下下面的例子："凯撒死前要做的是修改他的遗嘱"。(维金斯，1985：285）。在这里，凯撒要做的事（他要做的事情）显然不可能是一个单独的行为，因为 "凯撒要做的事 "这一表述并没有因为凯撒被刺杀而失去所指，因为凯撒被刺杀阻止了任何这种单独的遗嘱改写行为的发生。即使凯撒从未做过，但他仍有事情要做。如果他做了，同样的事情就会变成凯撒做过的事情。但这意味着，如果我们认真对待语法结构，人们所做的事情就必须是事情的类型；它们不可能是单独的行为。此外，由于'做'在这种语境中是一个图式动词，我们与这些行为之间甚至不存在'做'的关系，更不用说我们与我们的象征性行为之间存在这种关系了。例如，"I do raise my arm "是不合语法的（除非 "do "被当作助动词来读，只是为了强调动词 "raise "在英语中一般用现在时的习惯读法，如 "I do raise my arm when I have a question to ask!"）。而'Do'则代替了这些其他动词短语，当我们想笼统地谈论行为时，'Do'就代替了它们（例如，'I did lots of things this morning - I made my bed, cleaned the bathroom and prepared lunch'）。在这里，"做了很多事情 "是泛指，而 "铺床"、"打扫卫生间 "和 "准备午餐 "提供了相关 "所做事情 "的一些具体说明。因此，即使在这里，"做 "本身也不是行为主体与任何事物的关系。它并没有把行为主体与行为类型联系起来，就像它没有把行为主体与行为标记联系起来一样。哲学家在探讨行为主体与行为之间的关系时，另一个常用的方法是哲学上的多用途工具--"执行"。据说，行为是我们执行的事情。与 "do "不同，"perform "的确可以代表一种关系--就像它在这些句子中所代表的那样：唱诗班演奏了亨德尔的《弥赛亚》；"我表演了福斯伯里空翻"；"乔治表演了海姆立克急救法"。
{"title":"Bradley's Regress and a Problem in Action Theory","authors":"Helen Steward","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There is a problem which often arises during the course of various discussions in action theory and related fields about how exactly we are to characterise the relation which obtains between an agent and her (token) actions. An agent is a particular individual; it is often assumed that any token action of hers must be another.<sup>1</sup> But what is the relation between these two particulars, when the agent is the agent of the action in question? Obviously, one asymmetric relation between them is this: the agent, S, <i>is the agent of</i> the action, A. But is there a <i>further</i> relation between agent and action <i>in virtue of which</i> it is correct to say that A is S's action? The idea that agency must be reducible to something assumed to be more basic, such as causation, has sometimes tempted philosophers to think so – and there are also fairly common locutions which can make it seem as though S's being the agent of an action, A might hold in virtue of another, perhaps more basic relationship – ‘execution’ or ‘performance’, or simply ‘doing’, for example. But as I shall try to show below, it is not at all easy to make any of these ideas work.</p><p>In order to have a handy label for the problem which attaches to this search for a relation to undergird propositions of the form ‘S is the agent of A', I am going to call it the ‘agent-action problem’. The problem has rarely been acknowledged as a <i>general</i> difficulty – although it gives rise to various sub-problems, which have been often enough remarked upon.<sup>2</sup> Moreover, even when the sub-problems are observed, they are sometimes noted merely as passing curiosities which perhaps constitute nothing more than minor linguistic inconveniences to the philosopher of action. In a way, then, neither the sub-problems nor the fundamental problem which in my view underlies the sub-problems has really received any serious, sustained scrutiny of a properly wide-ranging sort. In this paper, I want to suggest, however, that it deserves such scrutiny – and that a failure properly to get to grips with the general form of the problem is indicative of philosophy of action's failure to get a decent ontological understanding of its own subject matter. This failure, I believe, is connected to some of the puzzles in which philosophers find themselves embroiled, with respect to such issues as whether agents are causes of their actions<sup>3</sup>; whether the agent ‘disappears' in a problematic way from certain pictures of what action involves<sup>4</sup>; and which physical events, precisely, compose or constitute our actions.<sup>5</sup> I want to argue that once we understand the true source of the agent-action problem, it can be seen that the problem is related in certain interesting ways to the philosophical difficulty which has come to be known as ‘Bradley's Regress'. The range of options for responding to it can, I think, therefore be usefully illuminated by reflecting on those that have be","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"629-643"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142404779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"The Exteriority of Thinking: Hegel and Heidegger","authors":"Thomas Khurana","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13000","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In <i>The Culmination</i>, 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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"949-958"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon","authors":"Iain Macdonald","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13003","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In what follows, I present my replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon's reflections on my <i>What Would Be Different? Figures of Possibility in Adorno.</i> 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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"983-992"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Attention and Attendabilia: The Perception of Attentional Affordances","authors":"Tom McClelland","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13010","url":null,"abstract":"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 <jats:italic>attendabilia</jats:italic>. 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 <jats:italic>affordances</jats:italic>. 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 <jats:italic>as grippable</jats:italic> 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 <jats:italic>as attendable</jats:italic>. 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.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>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.</p><p>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 <i>passim</i>, 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.</p><p>Gordon clearly thinks that an orientation towards human flourishing has much to recommend it, albeit he does not offer an indepen
{"title":"Misinterpreting Negativism: on Peter E. Gordon's A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity","authors":"Fabian Freyenhagen","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13005","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p><p>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 <i>passim</i>, 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.</p><p>Gordon clearly thinks that an orientation towards human flourishing has much to recommend it, albeit he does not offer an indepen","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 4","pages":"1353-1360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introspection: First-person access in science and agency: By Maja Spener Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780198867449","authors":"Christopher Mole","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13004","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 4","pages":"1384-1388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Two theories dominate the current debate over the nature of verbal irony: the pretence theory and the echoic theory. It is common ground in this debate that irony is sometimes both echoic and enacted through pretence; my concern here is with such cases. I ask how these features interact with each other within a form of irony that has not so far been the focus of theoretical attention: hidden or deceptive irony. This enables us to see that interesting cases of verbal irony often target an outlook or point of view rather than some real or imagined prior utterance. This, in turn, suggests a move from the idea of echoic irony to irony which invokes a defective outlook. Using the tools constructed thus far, I focus on an exchange in Euripides' Medea, indicating how deceptive verbal irony gives rise to situations of dramatic irony, and provides a showcase for exhibitions of mastery by characters otherwise lacking control of their situations. I ask whether such instances of deceptive irony encourage audience members to see themselves as side‐participants in the dramas they witness. The question has an empirical aspect we are in no good position to answer; I offer a version of the idea which has at least the merit of not falling victim to obvious philosophical objections.
{"title":"Irony, Tragedy, Deception","authors":"Gregory Currie","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12997","url":null,"abstract":"Two theories dominate the current debate over the nature of verbal irony: the pretence theory and the echoic theory. It is common ground in this debate that irony is sometimes both echoic and enacted through pretence; my concern here is with such cases. I ask how these features interact with each other within a form of irony that has not so far been the focus of theoretical attention: hidden or deceptive irony. This enables us to see that interesting cases of verbal irony often target an outlook or point of view rather than some real or imagined prior utterance. This, in turn, suggests a move from the idea of echoic irony to <jats:italic>irony which invokes a defective outlook</jats:italic>. Using the tools constructed thus far, I focus on an exchange in Euripides' <jats:italic>Medea</jats:italic>, indicating how deceptive verbal irony gives rise to situations of dramatic irony, and provides a showcase for exhibitions of mastery by characters otherwise lacking control of their situations. I ask whether such instances of deceptive irony encourage audience members to see themselves as side‐participants in the dramas they witness. The question has an empirical aspect we are in no good position to answer; I offer a version of the idea which has at least the merit of not falling victim to obvious philosophical objections.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"281 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anscombe seems to think that, even though “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions” is not “knowledge by observation”, it can be aided by observation. My aim in this essay is to explain how I think we should understand this thought. I suggest that, in a central class of cases, knowledge of one's intentional action is knowledge whose canonical linguistic expression is an utterance of the form “I am doing something to that G": knowledge in which the subject, at once, knows himself “as self" (and so, not by observation), and knows an outer object “as other” (and so, by observation). To characterise this knowledge either as knowledge by observation, or as knowledge not by observation, is to characterise it in a manner that abstracts away from its fundamental unity.
{"title":"Knowledge Aided by Observation†","authors":"Adrian Haddock","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12993","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.12993","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Anscombe seems to think that, even though “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions” is not “knowledge by observation”, it can be aided by observation. My aim in this essay is to explain how I think we should understand this thought. I suggest that, in a central class of cases, knowledge of one's intentional action is knowledge whose canonical linguistic expression is an utterance of the form “I am doing something to that <i>G</i>\": knowledge in which the subject, at once, knows himself “as self\" (and so, not by observation), and knows an outer object “as other” (and so, by observation). To characterise this knowledge either as knowledge by observation, or as knowledge not by observation, is to characterise it in a manner that abstracts away from its fundamental unity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"716-727"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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