EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

This article brings two outstanding figures into conversation about the problem of fictional entities and their indeterminacies: Roman Ingarden and David Lewis. Lewis's account of fiction lacks an adequate ontology of ficta-qua-objects. Relying on his modal realism does not help, for it would make ficta “concrete” entities that merely indexically differ from our world's entities. In this regard, I refer to Ingarden's “purely intentional entities.” I read Lewis's possible worlds in terms of Ingarden's ontology; hence establishing what I term “Purely Intentional Modal Fictionalism.” In so doing, the demarcation between fiction and actuality is preserved. In return, Lewis's “Analyses” adequately account for Ingarden's “spots of indeterminacy.” Therefore, my proposal reconciles Ingarden's ficta with Lewis's possibilist approach to truth in fiction. This approach grounds Lewis's account in a less problematic ontology with a distinct sui generis status for ficta and provides Ingarden's ficta with better determination principles.

The discipline of philosophy has been critiqued from both within and outside itself. One brand of external critique is associated with Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the view that human cognition is partially structured by pervasive and automatic mappings between conceptual domains. Most notably, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) claimed that many central philosophical concepts and arguments rely on an unacknowledged metaphorical substructure, and that this structure has sometimes led philosophy astray. The purpose of this paper is to argue that Lakoff and Johnson's critique is anticipated by the work of post-Tractarian Wittgenstein and his student, Margaret MacDonald. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein outlines a method for identifying and resolving philosophical puzzles generated by misused grammatical analogies, although his discussion lacks a precise characterization of exactly how and why such analogies lead to trouble. In a 1938 paper, MacDonald offers such a characterization, which I outline and then connect back to Wittgenstein. In addition to this interpretive work, I supplement Wittgenstein and MacDonald's diagnosis using evidence from CMT which suggests that linguistic metaphors and analogies often originate in or are motivated by more fundamental analogical mappings in cognition. The supplemented account carries implications for how philosophical arguments ought to be formulated and critiqued.

Nineteenth century treatments of attention often argued that analysis (attention singles out an object) and synthesis (attention unifies some objects) are inseparable aspects of this activity. Subsequent philosophical work on attention concentrated on the analytic aspect and exploited William James's characterisation of attention as focussing on one object among others. The aim of this paper is to give a more balanced account of the history of philosophical work on attention as well as the activity theorised by highlighting the synthetic aspect of attention. The paper is centred on Hermann Lotze's (1817–1881) work on attention. According to him, attention is constituted by comparing. I will motivate Lotze's main thesis and expound his supporting argument in detail by locating it in his work on vision. The paper will draw on George Dawes Hicks engagement with Lotze and assess Francis H. Bradley's criticism of Lotze's main thesis.

How do we come to understand the nature of the thoughts that we and others have? And how do we come to have the conceptual resources needed to formulate such understanding? Many would say we understand the nature of thoughts simply by being subjectively aware of our own conscious thoughts. But it is unclear how consciousness could, on its own, provide the conceptual resources required for such understanding. An alternative account holds that we understand the nature of thoughts in a third-person way, by appeal to the speech acts that can express those thoughts. Such an account readily explains how we come to have the required conceptual resources. Wilfrid Sellars, in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and elsewhere, developed a view along those lines, appealing to considerations related to and in the spirit of the foregoing concerns. I'll describe and defend that view against two main objections. And I'll argue that any picture of consciousness on which it could reveal the nature of thoughts is independently untenable, and also that such a picture underlies what Sellars denounced as the Myth of the Given. In closing I explain how, given that we understand the nature of thoughts in such a third-person way, some of our thoughts come to be conscious.

A key contention of Nietzsche's philosophy is that art helps us affirm life. A common reading holds that it does so by paving over, concealing, or beautifying life's undesirable features. This interpretation is unsatisfactory for two main reasons: Nietzsche suggests that art should foreground what is ‘ugly’ about existence, and he sees thoroughgoing honesty about life's character as a requirement on genuine affirmation. The paper presents an alternative reading. According to this reading, artworks depicting something terrible give us a feeling of fearlessness or courage by enabling an extraordinary state of affective distance from their content. The value of art lies in the fact that the aesthetic state resembles and invites us to pursue a psychic condition Nietzsche valorises. In making this case, the paper reveals a surprising continuity between an important strand in nineteenth-century aesthetic thought and contemporary distance theories of aesthetic engagement. It also casts new light on Nietzsche's famous criticisms of Kant's notion of disinterested aesthetic appreciation.

In this article, I develop a new account of Wolff's theory of consciousness. In contrast to the received view, I argue that Wolff's texts can be better made sense of by reading ‘perception’ and ‘apperception’ as two radically different acts, each one accounting for radically different aspects of the consciousness of an object and both necessary for its possibility. ‘Perception’ accounts for the intentional component of our representations, that is, for their being about a certain object. Apperception accounts instead for the fact that there is something it is like for us to have a perception of the object in question, without turning the perception in question into one of the intentional objects of consciousness. I also analyse the role played by distinguishing all the other acts that Wolff declares to be necessary for consciousness (attention etc.) and show how they are all necessary for perception to fulfil its role of providing consciousness with its intentional object. On these grounds, I then analyse also Wolff's understanding of self-consciousness and show how this supports the here proposed reading. Lastly, by comparing their texts, I argue that Wolff's theory of consciousness in his German Metaphysics is fundamentally in line with the one from its Latin counterparts: although in the first the notion of apperception is completely lacking, this does not result into a contrast with the theory from the Latin psychologies, but only in an inferior degree of detail.

This article puts forward the thesis that Schelling's philosophical engagement with chemistry plays a key role in his project of a philosophy of nature. I claim that Schelling takes Lavoisier's new chemistry to indicate that Kant's dynamical theory of matter could provide the basis for a unified account of nature. By dynamical theory of matter, I understand a philosophical explanation of matter based on the fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion. I argue that Schelling combines Kant's dynamics with Lavoisier's new chemistry into what he calls dynamical chemistry, and that this notion of dynamical chemistry underlies his attempt at a unified system of nature.

Proust wrote vividly about grief, but he has not been recognised or studied as a philosopher of grief. It is time that he was. For a powerful and compelling philosophy of grief emerges from the pages of his magnum opus. Though philosophical work on Proust has not turned to this theory of grief, philosophers writing about grief have often drawn on Proust, both explicitly and implicitly, without an awareness of an underlying Proustian theory. This paper fills the gap by placing this philosophically informed, Proustian theory of grief before our eyes. Proust builds on contemporary discussions of habituation (habitude), the process whereby new sensations and new actions become both less salient, intrusive or demanding of our attention, and more crucial for our equilibrium and our continued short-term functioning. Applying this to the social realm, Proust theorises love in terms of habituation to another person, and grief in terms of a sudden inapplicability or unsuitability of our habits to the world that person has left behind, followed by the painful, uneven and intermittent process of habituating to that new world. The paper explains this theory and charts its relation to some contemporary discussions of grief. Doing so places Proust back into a conversation he has already influenced.