EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

Although it has become increasingly common to theorize about dehumanization, there is a lack of even basic agreement as to how to define the concept, nor is it clear why theorists should prefer one rival concept over another. So, which concept of dehumanization should we use? I propose that this question is best addressed by considering what the concept's function(s) might be, what the concept is for—specifically, which concern(s) the concept might satisfy. I then argue that one function of the concept of dehumanization is to satisfy our need for moral understanding of inhumanity, rather than just psychological or sociological understanding. In light of this view of the concept's functions, I also advance a particular definition of dehumanization: dehumanization consists, in the first instance, of agential activities on the part of moral agents that embody disregard for the humanity of a person or group, where such disregard amounts to treating or regarding the dehumanized party as nonhuman. Finally, I contend that the concept's orientation to moral understanding gives us reason to accept two further claims: that acts and attitudes can dehumanize, and that objectification is one form of dehumanization.

This paper challenges a key assumption shared by current readings of Heidegger's account of assertions in Being and Time §33 and provides a Heideggerian analysis of predication. Previous readings disagree about whether assertions can make us aware of or be about beings in the mode of Zuhandensein (practical significance) because they disagree about whether a principle of determination that characterizes assertions, Vorhandenheitsbestimmung, is supposed to apply to all assertions or only extreme cases. I argue that while Vorhandenheitsbestimmung is responsible for bringing about an awareness of properties entities might instantiate independently of the practical significance they have for us (Vorhandenheit), Vorhandenheitsbestimmung does not stop a practically significant context from contributing to the contents assertions convey. This allows us to accept Heidegger's analysis of assertions without endorsing a conception on which assertions cannot bring about an awareness of the kinds of beings that Heidegger claims we for the most part have to do with, and lets us better understand the relationship between assertions, perceptions, and truth in the context of Being and Time.

Lichtenberg's remarks are a driving force of The Practical Self. On Gomes's interpretation, Lichtenberg is presenting a challenge to theoretical knowledge of one's cognitive agency. Gomes argues that this challenge is insuperable, thereby making room instead for faith in one's cognitive agency. I question both the interpretation of Lichtenberg and the insuperability of the challenge, before explaining why a challenge which is more usually read into Lichtenberg's remarks is problematic for Gomes's project. I close by sketching on Gomes's behalf a response to this challenge.

Lichtenberg's enigmatic remarks on the cogito form the backbone to The Practical Self. Rory Madden raises a set of rich questions about their proper interpretation and the argumentative work to which they are put.

Lichtenberg writes that to say cogito is already too much as soon as one translates it as I am thinking. Madden contrasts two readings of this line. The traditional reading takes Lichtenberg to be raising a challenge to the claim that I am the subject of my episodes of thinking on which those episodes depend. The revisionary reading—and the one offered in The Practical Self—takes Lichtenberg to be raising a challenge to the claim that I am the sometime agent of my thinking. The final sentence of the passage, on this reading, responds to the challenge by suggesting that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.

Madden worries about the translation of this final line and, with it, the claim that it offers practical grounds for assuming the I. Lichtenberg writes: Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis. Günter Zöller translates the final word as ‘requirement’ (1992, p.418); Stephen Tester as ‘necessity’ (2012, p.152). Madden suggests that ‘need’ is a closer translation and that this deflates the suggestion that Lichtenberg is adverting to practical grounds. A practical need is not a necessary condition on some state of affairs but a pressing or basic impulse, like the need to stretch one's legs.

My account of the practical grounds available for our sense of ourselves as intellectual agents is modelled on Kant's account of the practical postulates. These are claims which Kant says must be assumed (CPrR 5:121, 126) or postulated (5:122, 125) in virtue of their connection to the demands of practical reason. In particular, they must be assumed or postulated in virtue of a connection to what Kant calls ‘a need [Bedürfnis] of pure practical reason’ (5:142). A need of pure practical reason—a practical need—contrasts with a need of inclination. It is a need based on duty. We might say, then, that to assume these claims about God, freedom, and immortality, to postulate them, is, for Kant, a practical need based on duty—a practical requirement. This is the context in which to understand Lichtenberg's final sentence. Madden's deflationary suggestion severs these connections.

What about the target of those sentences? Madden notes the difficulty of interpreting an aphoristic writer such as Lichtenberg. In The Practical Self I made the case for the revisionary reading by appeal to other passages in his writings—including, crucially, a passage in the notebooks where Lichtenberg returns to the contrast between ‘I am thinking’ or ‘it is thinking’.1 Madden is right that these are not determinative—even if the later passages show a con

The Practical Self is a Kantian book three times over. First, it is, in many parts, a book about Kant; the overarching aim of the book is to revive and if possible to complete the Kantian and Cartesian projects of moving from the resources available to the self-conscious thinker to the establishment of the existence of an objective external world — and to do this, Gomes must critically work through various moves from those earlier attempts. Secondly, Gomes takes, in several parts, key arguments and concepts from Kant's critical and practical philosophy as live argumentative tools for his own purposes. But even in the parts of the book not directly concerned with Kant's proprietary argumentative ends and means, this is a deeply Kantian book in flavour — that is the third Kantianism of the book. At every turn, we see unabashedly full-strength claims how things must be, given other ways things must in turn be, or the elimination of ways things cannot be, or ways in which we cannot but think of them as being.

Put altogether, it's natural to think that the result of all of this will be a book that is aloof or inaccessible; beyond reach or regard by those of us who don't normally swim in Kantian waters. Nothing could be a less apt description of this book. In Gomes' hands, the Kantian and Cartesian grand projects find a tractably sober presentation; the selected moves from Kant and other historical figures are given lucid and unharried exposition; the active Kantian concepts and argumentative tools are deployed in ways that shed dependence on the more arcane aspects of the Kantian framework; and the fierce standards of argument make for an exceptionally exciting read — on every page, one feels, there is something to jump up and down about.

Of the many points in the book ripe for discussion, my response will focus on the first positive turn in the book – an argument that comes in the chapter on Faith (Chapter 4), in which Gomes argues that we have a distinctively practical reason to assent to the claim that we are the agents of our own thoughts. In what follows I'll first set out the context in which this argument comes up in the book, then I'll set out the argument itself, and I'll end by raising a number of critical questions for it.

First, then, some stage-setting. In order to proceed in his project of moving from the resources available to the self-conscious thinker to the establishment of an objectively existing world, Gomes must address Lichtenberg's complaint that the most the self-conscious thinker can posit is that ‘there is thinking’, on the model of ‘there is lightning’; ‘One should say it is thinking, just as one says, it is lightning. To say cogito is already too much as soon as one translates it as I am thinking.’ (Lichtenberg K76, cited in Gomes p.131). What emerges from his insightful extended discussion of Lichtenberg in Chapter 3 is an original understanding of what it would take

Ordinarily, we consider ourselves agents and authors of our own thinking. We experience and conceive of thinking as an activity rather than a process occurring to us that happens to be located in our mind. Furthermore, we consider such activity as autonomous, generated by our own intellectual powers, rather than occasioned by the external environment or hetero-directed. What grounds can we offer to support the claim that we are “practical selves”—that is, the origin and authors of our thinking? Our claims cannot rest solely on agential awareness because there can be activity without an agent, “a deed without a doer” (Gomes 2024, 66). This is Lichtenberg's problem, which Anil Gomes sets out to solve in The Practical Self.

The problem arises for epistemological theories such as Descartes's and Kant's, insofar as they endorse what Gomes calls the “isolationist methodology,” recommending that one start by characterizing thinking as a self-conscious activity to understand what thinking really is (Gomes 2024, 2, 68). As Gomes remarks, the isolationist methodology should not be seen as a sign of confidence but as a way to highlight the centrality of self-reflecting capacities in grounding knowledge of the world. By centering on agential awareness, this methodology brings to the fore the deliberative and first-personal aspect of thinking (Gomes 2024, 73). Thinking is doing—something more akin to action than to an event happening in our mind. Further tightly connected claims follow from this characterization. Firstly, to the extent that thinking is an activity in which we engage, thoughts are deliberations held first-personally: we can assess them in a variety of ways and exercise first-person authority over them.¹ Because we stand in a relation of first-person authority with our thoughts, our assessment of them directly impacts the way we keep, revise, or discard them.² If we see no reason to believe that it is going to rain tonight, we should also think that recurrent thoughts that it is going to rain ought to be discounted and discarded. If we have previously asserted that it was about to rain, then we should stand corrected, take back the assertion, and acknowledge it as false. It is a sign of irrationality to resist one's own authority—and a kind of irrationality more akin to self-alienation than to incoherence. Failing to follow up our own thoughts that some belief should be discarded or revised radically differs from (reasonably or unreasonably) failing to concur with somebody else's view that we should do so. In contrast, we have no such authority over others' states of mind. While we can exercise some (epistemic, moral) authority on others, for instance, by correcting them, showing them that they are mistaken, or corroborating their thoughts with proof, such authority is indirect and may not have any effect on them. Correspondingly, we can resist the authority of others and reject what we provide as evidence:

Hegel's Marxian critics have traditionally rejected his characterization of the modern economy as a “system of needs”, fuelled by the self-interested interactions of particular market agents. This characterization is flawed, so the argument goes, for it fails to identify the true motivation behind the production and exchange of value under capitalism. Challenging this line of criticism, I argue that Hegel does not see the capitalist economic system as a mere addition to a pre-existing substrate of individual needs and desires. On the contrary, he argues that the capitalist drive towards infinite growth tends to subvert the traditional relationship between human needs and the means employed to satisfy them, so that the former become mere vehicles for the self-reproduction of the latter. And this subversion anticipates the drive for self-valorization that lies at the core of the Marxian notion of capital.