{"title":"The Practical Self: Replies","authors":"Anil Gomes","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13076","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Lichtenberg's enigmatic remarks on the <i>cogito</i> form the backbone to <i>The Practical Self</i>. Rory Madden raises a set of rich questions about their proper interpretation and the argumentative work to which they are put.</p><p>Lichtenberg writes that to say <i>cogito</i> 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 <i>The Practical Self</i>—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.</p><p>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: <i>Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis</i>. Günter Zöller translates the final word as ‘requirement’ (<span>1992</span>, p.418); Stephen Tester as ‘necessity’ (<span>2012</span>, 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.</p><p>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 (<i>CPrR</i> 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 [<i>Bedürfnis</i>] 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.</p><p>What about the target of those sentences? Madden notes the difficulty of interpreting an aphoristic writer such as Lichtenberg. In <i>The Practical Self</i> 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","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"779-795"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13076","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144117978","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":"Practical assent in The Practical Self by Anil Gomes†","authors":"Léa Salje","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13041","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>The Practical Self</i> is a Kantian book three times over. First, it is, in many parts, a book <i>about</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <i>it is thinking</i>, just as one says, <i>it is lightning</i>. To say <i>cogito</i> 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 ","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"762-769"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144117943","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":"The social dimension of practical assent","authors":"Carla Bagnoli","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 <i>The Practical Self</i>.</p><p>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.<sup>1</sup> 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.<sup>2</sup> 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:","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"770-778"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144117944","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":"Heideggerian Concealment: On Katherine Withy's Heidegger on Being Self-Concealing","authors":"Mark A. Wrathall","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13077","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The project of <i>Being and Time</i> was premised on the idea that being could be grasped in its truth. Heidegger maintained that “being can be something unconceptualized, but it never completely fails to be understood” (SZ 183). “Even if being may perhaps be hidden in its primordial grounds,” he maintained, nonetheless “there is a necessary connection between being and understanding” (SZ 183). Thus Heidegger pursued ontology through an inquiry into the conditions under which being could be manifest or disclosed to the understanding (SZ 183).</p><p>But if Heidegger was confident that being could be grasped or made intelligible through a phenomenological ontology (see SZ §44), the uncompleted second part of <i>Being and Time</i> was premised on the idea that it might be quite difficult to bring being to manifestness – that a historical deconstruction was required to expose the concealments and confusions behind which the meaning of being has lain hidden throughout the history of metaphysics.</p><p>In <i>Being and Time</i>, and for several years after its publication, Heidegger focused on temporality as the primary horizon within which being could be made manifest. And so Heidegger took his project to involve making “temporality visible as the transcendental original structure,” thereby illuminating the “concealed projection of being on time as the innermost event in the understanding of being in ancient and subsequent metaphysics” (GA3: 241–2).</p><p>In the subsequent decade or so, Heidegger developed in his lecture courses and unpublished manuscripts a conception of ontological concealment as something more pervasive and essential than he had previously supposed. For instance, in his 1931 lecture <i>On the Essence of Truth</i>, Heidegger writes that “the entity in its being” has an “authentic, inner drive to remain concealed and, even if it has become unconcealed, a drive to go back into concealment again” (GA34: 14). And in 1942, with the publication of his essay “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger declares publicly that concealment “permeates the essence of being” (GA9: 223). He argues that the pre-Platonic philosophers were the first to have an inkling of the essentially concealed nature of being, and he saw this insight as implicit in the Greek word for truth itself – <i>alētheia</i>. The alpha in <i><span>a-</span>lētheia</i>, Heidegger emphasizes, is an alpha privative, so that truth is literally a privation of concealment. Consequently, Heidegger argues that for the Greek thinkers, it was concealment (<i>lēthe</i>), not truth (<i>a-lētheia</i>), that was the prior and most fundamental condition of being. Heidegger concludes the essay on Plato by insisting on the necessity of returning to the early Greek “appreciation of the ‘positive’ in the ‘privative’ essence of <i>alētheia</i>. The positive [i.e., concealment] must first be experienced as the basic characteristic of being itself” (GA9: 144). This is a striking claim: to understand","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"803-820"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13077","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144117906","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":"The Limits of the Armchair: Boyle on Transparency and Reflection","authors":"Rory Madden","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13074","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This review article makes some critical points about Boyle's <i>Transparency and Reflection</i>. These focus on (1) ‘pre-reflective awareness’ of mental states, and (2) the existence and nature of ‘the subject’ of experience.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"796-802"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13074","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144118173","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":"Bernard Williams and the Relativism of Distance: A Defence","authors":"Paul Sagar","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13070","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Despite his largely deserved reputation as a dense and difficult writer, Bernard Williams displayed a knack for coining memorable and evocative phrases which in due course became broadly synonymous with his own distinct and original claims. “Agent regret”, “moral luck”, “one thought too many”, “government house utilitarianism”, “internal reasons”, “basic legitimation demand”, “vindicatory genealogy” – no matter how much such phrases have gone on to be adopted and employed in wider debates, they remain distinctively <i>Williamsian</i>. And to this list could easily be added another: “the relativism of distance”. Mention this, and anybody familiar with Williams's work, and indeed with the wider literature in moral philosophy, will immediately recognise it as one of <i>his</i> ideas. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to label as canonical Williams's claim that “only when a society is sufficiently ‘close’ to ours, which is to say, roughly, only when it is a real option for us to adopt the ethical outlook of that society, is there any question of appraising its ethical outlook (as ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘unjust’, or whatever)”.<sup>2</sup></p><p>But if so, it is surprising to discover that this evocative phrase, and the distinctive ideas Williams attached to it, have garnered little sustained critical attention. Furthermore, what attention they <i>have</i> received has tended to be negative: commentators largely find the relativism of distance perplexing, theoretically flawed, implausible, or even incoherent.<sup>3</sup></p><p>By contrast this paper offers a defence of Williams. It does so via two interlinked strategies. First, aiming to show that the relativism of distance cannot be understood as a freestanding item, but only makes sense when related to the substantive prior argument in <i>Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy</i> (ELP)<sup>4</sup>, and yet which existing scholarship has so far failed adequately to do. Second, to show that commentary on this matter has been misguided insofar as critics read Williams as offering a <i>metaphysical theory</i> about relativism.<sup>5</sup> As I hope to show, this is not what Williams was doing. Although there are undoubtedly metaphysical aspects to his position, and which must be appreciated if the relativism of distance is to make sense, nonetheless his goal was different. Once we have properly appreciated what that was, we will then be better placed to offer a defence from the criticisms that have been offered.</p><p>The paper proceeds as follows. Parts II and III offer a detailed reconstruction of the background argument of ELP, before turning to the relativism of distance. These sections are highly exegetical, for which I beg the reader's patience. Part of my contention is that Williams has been subtly yet importantly misread, and in part this is a function of the sheer detail and complexity of his position going underappreciated. To enable proper assessment, that detailed complexity must be brou","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 3","pages":"839-853"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927802","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":"Fichte's Social Division of Labour and Its Relation to His Idealism","authors":"David James","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13069","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I argue that Fichte’s account of the type of subject presupposed by idealism entails that certain individuals engaged in mechanical tasks within a social division of labour would be alienated from their own activity even while fulfilling their vocation as human beings, despite how this vocation is incompatible with the reduction of human beings to parts of a machine. Avoiding or overcoming this alienation would require a strong form of moral identification with one’s own activity within a social division of labour. Although this solution is compatible with Fichte’s theory of duty, it is shown to be difficult to reconcile with his commitment to the moral equality of human beings, because some individuals will be required to make a greater sacrifice in relation to the human vocation than others. Another assumption is that certain individuals, the scholar among them, make a greater contribution that offsets the advantage of not having to engage in forms of activity whose alienating character requires a stronger form of moral identification than is demanded of them.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 3","pages":"942-957"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13069","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927692","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":"Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History. by Eli Friendlander Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024, ISBN: 9781503636552","authors":"Alison Ross","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13065","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"827-831"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144118005","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}
{"title":"Marx's Ethical Vision by Vanessa Christina Wills New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 320 pp. ISBN: 9780197688144","authors":"Pascal Brixel","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13067","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"821-826"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144118013","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}
{"title":"Virtue and Our Way of Death","authors":"Jennifer Ryan Lockhart","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13062","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper explores an argument for the claim that human flourishing is not possible. The argument is situated within the context of Aristotelian virtue ethics. It begins with a formal claim about the virtues: whatever substantive account we give of them, they are forms of excellence that equip us to lead flourishing lives. Yet, when we turn to our best substantive account of the virtues by considering those people who seem to be the best candidates for possessing the virtues, these often don't live flourishing lives. Moreover, this fact about them is not an accident, but there is a sense in which it is <i>because of</i> their seeming virtues that they fail to flourish. So, our best candidates for the virtues turn out not, after all, to be true virtues (when considered in light of the formal constraint just mentioned). But we also know that we need the virtues to flourish, since any amount of worldly success without the virtues can never amount to flourishing. Therefore, human flourishing is impossible. I call this condition, of having no true substantive account of the virtues that could constitute a way of life, having a ‘way of death.’ In this paper, I explore the plausibility of the premises of this argument by considering the life of Socrates—whether his life can count as a flourishing life and whether he can be considered truly virtuous. I argue that there is good reason to answer both questions in the negative and that this offers us a deeper understanding of Socratic ignorance and of the significance of <i>aporia</i> for Socratic philosophical activity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 3","pages":"1170-1191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927699","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}