EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

Our social world is governed by norms. But do we have reason to follow them? On the one hand, critical theorists deny this: just because gendered norms tell women to cook and racialized people to serve does not mean that they should. On the other, critical theory relies on immanent critique. Recent literature on what it means for social critique to be immanent collapses the answers to a metanormative and a social ontological question. I call this the ‘collapse assumption’: a putative normative standard acquires normative authority for those engaged in a social practice via being suitably embedded in that practice. However, on this understanding, critical theorists face a dilemma: Either they grant normative authority to de facto governing norms, which renders social critique structurally conservative. Or they deny it, in which case immanent critique loses its normative bite.

This paper argues that this understanding of immanent critique is confused and offers a different understanding according to which this dilemma does not arise. Immanent critique must not rely on the collapse assumption to meet the immanence constraint. Rather, the specificity of the method is that it clarifies immanent contradictions. Individual reasons thus become secondary to social theory.

This paper reconstructs what I call Sellars's ‘master argument’ for conceptualism regarding Kantian intuitions—a coherent argumentative thread that appears throughout his works beginning with Science and Metaphysics. In contrast to standard interpretations that focus primarily on the role of the categories, I demonstrate that Sellars defends a robust form of conceptualism in which empirical concepts also play a constitutive role in intuition. The master argument proceeds through three key moves: defining Kantian intuition as a (singular) ‘representation of a manifold’; showing that such a representation is necessarily conceptual; and employing an Aristotelian reading of intuition as a ‘this-such’ or ‘tode ti’. This reconstruction not only clarifies Sellars's distinctive position in the conceptualism/non-conceptualism debate but also provides resources for addressing some contemporary objections, particularly those concerning animal cognition and the content of intuitions.

I argue that Kant's Formula of Humanity should incorporate the category of treating as a mere enemy in the form of a strict prohibition against this form of mistreatment. My proposed expansion will allow Kantian ethics to account for persons being mistreated due to their instrumental disvalue or perceived danger. Treating persons as mere enemies can take the form of murder and genocide, but also of exclusion and marginalization. I explain why we need this category on top of the prohibition against treating as mere means and the broader command to treat others as ends. Moreover, I analyse the different types of mere enemies (devils and vermin) that we find in ideology and discourse leading up to some of the most disturbing moral violations. Finally, I look at the complex interplays between mere enemies and mere means.

Commentaries on the B-Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason tend to focus on Kant's so-called Copernican turn. Much less attention has been paid to the fact that the B-Preface compares the achievement of the Critique to two different scientific procedures: the act of demonstrating a counter-intuitive hypothesis and the act of verifying its correctness by means of a cross-check. Whereas the first procedure seeks to prove that objective cognitions of noumena are impossible, the second procedure seeks to confirm the result of the first. In an allusive and elliptical footnote, Kant compares the second procedure to a procedure carried out by chemists. Deviating from the interpretations put forward by Falkenburg and Schmid, my reconstruction of this footnote puts Kant's use of the terms ‘metaphysician’ and ‘separated’ center stage. Drawing on Kant's distinction between general and special metaphysics in the B-Preface and the Architectonic, his comments on Plato, and other relevant texts, I argue that the footnote addresses, in an extremely compressed manner, Kant's largely implicit conception of the relation between the history of metaphysics, its projected scientific elaboration, and the tasks carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason.

The imagination seems to enjoy a conceptually unstable double-life within Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Oscillating between a Kantian use of the term, as a ‘necessary ingredient of perception itself’ and a Sartrean depiction of what appears when say, viewing a painting or visualising an absent friend, as a nothingness that is of an entirely different ‘flesh’ to that of the perceived. If we take the Phenomenology in isolation and try to extract an account of the imagination, we do not emerge with a unified picture that incorporates both accounts. In this paper, I will demonstrate that when we turn to Merleau-Ponty's later works, specifically his analysis of paintings in Eye and Mind, we see that his view on the imagination is fleshed out and his position with respect to Sartre has been clarified. I will offer an interpretation of Eye and Mind that picks up on implicit themes that connect back to the Phenomenology and argue that, for Merleau-Ponty, paintings disclose something about how we come to obtain an awareness of ‘things’ in the world, which I will elucidate through appeal to his notion of style and his implicit treatment of Kantian imagination in the Phenomenology. I will argue that, for Merleau-Ponty, it is only through understanding the role of the imagination in making the world present in perception, that we can make sense of our capacity to imagine (in the more commonsense, Sartrean use of the term) and the quasi-presence of what appears when we do so.

Both Wittgenstein and Cavell see riddles as a model of intellectual difficulty. By drawing attention to it, they remind us that not all of our intellectual challenges take the form of empirically answerable questions—there may be cases of our not merely lacking knowledge, but of being caught in the fantasy that a certain type of knowledge can be had. They further remind us what is involved in solving riddles, namely the transformation of our initial understanding of the problems. I argue that these insights guide Cavell's diagnosis of the problem of skepticism as the tragic expression of our modern human condition. In comparing the problem of skepticism to a riddle, Cavell proceeds to ask: If the skeptic's conjuring trick consists in leading us to treat an essential aspect of our life as a merely epistemological problem, what ulterior motive does this serve? Cavell here appeals to the Nietzschean idea that the skeptic's theoretical riddle serves to conceal that which it would be too painful to find out, namely the real, practical problem of our finitude and separateness. What is needed, in order to acknowledge the truth of skepticism and overcome it, is a radical transformation of the human.

In a number of papers and a book over the past thirty years, John Hyman has developed a unified account of knowledge that builds on Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein's conceptions of knowledge as closely linked to ‘ability’. On Hyman's account, knowledge that p is the ability to be guided by the fact that p. In recent work, he has argued that such a notion of factual knowledge makes Ryle's notion of knowledge-how superfluous: knowledge-how, for Hyman, just is such factual knowledge. This paper defends Ryle against these arguments, in part by bringing out an unnoticed aspect of Ryle's discussions of knowledge-that: namely, that he discusses two distinct notions of knowledge-that, only one of which he himself endorses. In investigating this notion of knowledge-that, as well as Ryle's arguments for the claim that knowledge-how is logically prior to such knowledge-that, it is argued both that Hyman's arguments against Ryle fail - meaning that his attempt to unify knowledge-how and knowledge-that is unsuccessful - and that he lacks a plausible response to Ryle's logical priority arguments.

To yearn for freedom is to want to be seen by others as someone. Rousseau, I believe, held such a conception of freedom, alongside his intricate theory of human passions. This essay examines how freedom relates to such passions, and in particular, to the Rousseauian notion of amour-propre. Importantly, the aim here is both interpretive and positive. The essay seeks to locate Rousseau within the old republican tradition in a manner that parts ways with most contemporary readings of Rousseau. But, in doing so, it argues that republican freedom essentially involves a particular status and the recognition of such status by others. On this Rousseauian view, one is free to the extent that others see one as a limit to their arbitrary interference and as entitled to interfere with them non-arbitrarily. Finally, republican freedom, so understood, is shown to be essential to meeting the demands of healthy amour-propre, thereby bringing Rousseau's political and psychological theories closer together.