{"title":"Obscure representations from a pragmatic point of view","authors":"Francey Russell","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12986","url":null,"abstract":"Kant's most sustained discussion of obscure representations can be found in the first book of his <jats:italic>Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View</jats:italic>. What is puzzling is that in the middle of the section devoted to the topic, Kant asserts that “because this field can only be perceived in his passive side as a play of sensations, the theory of obscure representations belongs only to physiological anthropology, and so it is properly disregarded here.” So, do obscure representations belong to pragmatic anthropology or not? Kant's official position is that they do not, yet the textual evidence—we find discussions of obscure representations in 20 years of his work on pragmatic anthropology—suggests that they do, in fact, belong here. Most of the literature on obscure representations focuses on their contribution to cognition and none has clarified what it would mean to assume a “pragmatic point of view” on obscure representations, and to study them in the context of pragmatic anthropology. My aim in this paper is to provide such clarification, focusing on Kant's discussion of our propensity to “play with” obscure representations and what he calls our “art of obscuring.”","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141574825","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":"The generality problem of perception","authors":"Farid Zahnoun, Luca Roccioletti, Erik Myin","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12984","url":null,"abstract":"Much of contemporary philosophy of perception revolves around the question of whether perceptual experience has representational content. On one side of the debate, we find representationalists claiming that perceptual experience is representational in that it always presents the world as being a certain way. Perceptual experience is therefore said to have content, which can be evaluated for truth or accuracy. Against the idea that perception has content, relationalists have leveled an argument based on the generality of content, which we shall here refer to as the generality problem of perception (GPP). We will analyze and assess existing replies to the GPP. Based on these analyses, we will conclude that representationalists have as yet not offered a convincing answer to the problem and that, after almost 20 years, the problem still stands.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141574822","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":"The Kantian origin of Adorno's concept of metaphysical experience","authors":"Farshid Baghai","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12985","url":null,"abstract":"Metaphysical experience is one of the most obscure concepts in Adorno's <jats:italic>Negative Dialectics</jats:italic>. The obscurity stems partly from the way in which metaphysical experience is antinomic. To describe the antinomic character of metaphysical experience, Adorno situates it in relation to Kant's first <jats:italic>Critique</jats:italic>. He distinguishes two conceptions of antinomy in the first <jats:italic>Critique</jats:italic>: first, the explicit conception of antinomy that the transcendental dialectic exposes and resolves; and second, the implicit conception of antinomy that remains insoluble and structures the first <jats:italic>Critique</jats:italic> and Adorno's own concept of metaphysical experience. Yet Adorno does not clarify what he means by the antinomic structure of the first <jats:italic>Critique</jats:italic> and how this structure underlies his own concept of metaphysical experience. Nor does the scholarship on Adorno. This article reconstructs Adorno's response to these questions, and, in so doing, demonstrates the Kantian origin of Adorno's concept of metaphysical experience in <jats:italic>Negative Dialectics</jats:italic>.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141574823","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":"Who are Nietzsche's slaves?","authors":"Ken Gemes","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12979","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that Nietzsche is deliberately imprecise in his characterization of what he calls the slave revolt in morality. In particular, none of the people or groups he nominates as instigators of the slave revolt, namely, Jewish priests, the Jewish people, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul, were literally slaves. Analysis of Nietzsche's texts, including his usage of the term “slaves,” and his sources concerning those he nominates as the instigators of the slave revolt, make clear that Nietzsche knew none of these were literally slaves. He calls it a slave revolt because he means that the propagators of that revolt preached what he takes to be the slavish values, including, humility, compassion, obedience, and lack of egoism. He uses the high loaded term “slave” both to disparage those values and, most importantly, to bring home to his readers the message that they, as inheritors of Judeo‐Christian values, actual adhere to and practice the debased slavish values preached, but not necessarily practiced, by the original instigators of the slave revolt. For Nietzsche, his readers are strangers to themselves, thus he notes “slavery is everywhere visible, although it does not call itself as such.”","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141574981","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":"Modalization and demodalization: On the phenomenology of negation","authors":"Kyle Banick","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12983","url":null,"abstract":"Negation is widely thought to be uniquely captured by the usual extensional Boolean connective in the setting of classical logic. However, there has been recent interest in a <jats:italic>modal</jats:italic> approach to negation. This essay examines the problem of modal negation with an Husserlian phenomenological lens. I argue that the Husserlian approach to negation contains an ambiguity which points to a pluralism about negation. On this view, negation begins its life as a modal notion with nonclassical properties, and the question of classical negation is a question of its demodalization. I reconstruct a phenomenological legitimation of the demodalization, but I remain skeptical about its wider prospects. Nevertheless, the phenomenological‐modal approach to negation answers the skepticism about the very possibility of debates about negation and gives valuable insight into the fundamental nature of the problem. The argument should be of interest both to those who are specifically interested in Husserl's logic and the relationship of phenomenology to intuitionistic (and other nonclassical) logics, as well as to philosophers of logic more generally interested in obtaining different angles on the problem of negation from a systematic perspective.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141550864","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":"Acting as causing change","authors":"Maria Alvarez","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12973","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.12973","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The paper defends a version of the view that agency is a causal power, the “causing view.” After sketching the view, and explaining how it differs from its rivals, various challenges are assessed. A family of objections says that causing change is neither necessary nor sufficient for acting. The second challenge centers on an Aristotelian thesis about the relation between an action (A's opening a window) and the corresponding passion (the window's being opened by A). The final objection concerns the dynamic nature of acting: the claim is that a causal view of agency cannot accommodate actions “in progress” or mere activity. I conclude that none of the objections examined presents unsurmountable problems for the causal view of agency which, at least in the version here defended, remains a highly plausible and attractive view.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12973","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141550877","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":"How to decide what to do: Why you're already a realist about value","authors":"Claire Kirwin","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12977","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Metaethical realists and anti-realists alike have typically assumed that deliberation about what to do is, at least sometimes, properly settled by the agent's evaluative attitudes—what she wants, likes, or values—rather than by any objective source of value out in the world. I argue that this picture of deliberation is not one that the deliberating agent herself can accept. Seen from within the first-person perspective, the agent's own evaluative attitudes are not encountered as descriptive psychological facts, but are rather “transparent” to the external world, conceived as a place already suffused with normative significance: they are her finding the relevant parts of the world to be desirable, valuable, and so on. And from the agent's own point of view, these attitudes can do the normative work involved in settling deliberation only because and insofar as they are understood as in this way a warranted response to this desirability or value. Attitudes that the agent does not experience as transparent in this way are attitudes from which she is alienated, and as such she cannot understand them as authoritative over her deliberation. What this means, I argue, is that deliberation about what to do involves a commitment to a particularly substantive form of metaethical realism.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12977","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142404841","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":"A project of “impure” enquiry—Williams' historical self-consciousness","authors":"Miranda Fricker","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12981","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Bernard Williams’ philosophy is shaped by a distinctive and abiding interest in the borderlands between Philosophy and History. He famously considers moral philosophy, and particularly moral theory, to over-step the border that marks the real ‘limits’ of the discipline, and in his later work he explicitly advances the idea of doing ‘impure’ philosophy, by which he meant philosophy that mixed itself with history. By examining the complex impression left on Williams’ historical self-consciousness by his engagements with two very different figures in the history of philosophy, namely Descartes and Wittgenstein, I will explore a number of ways in which philosophy and history are closely intertwined for Williams. This will draw out the positive vision he modelled for us of ‘impure’ philosophy—a philosophical style he took to contribute to nurturing philosophy as a humanistic discipline.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141424929","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":"Vindicating universalism: Pragmatic genealogy and moral progress","authors":"C. Blunden, Benedict Lane","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12975","url":null,"abstract":"How do we justify the normative standards to which we appeal in support of our moral progress judgments, given their historical and cultural contingency? To answer this question in a noncircular way, Elizabeth Anderson and Philip Kitcher appeal exclusively to formal features of the methodology by which a moral change was brought about; some moral methodologies are systematically less prone to bias than others and are therefore less vulnerable to error. However, we argue that the methodologies espoused by Anderson and Kitcher implicitly appeal to the substantive principle of “moral universalism.” This sets up the positive project of the paper: an attempt to vindicate moral universalism with a pragmatic genealogy. Using resources from cultural evolutionary theory and the history of ideas we argue that the universalistic norms widely committed to in many societies today have the function of maintaining cooperation in large anonymous groups. Furthermore, while universalistic norms play this instrumental role, their functional benefits are best secured when people following such norms do so for intrinsic rather than instrumental reasons. Finally, having elaborated our pragmatic genealogy, we close by considering how this genealogy should affect our commitment to moral universalism and how it can complement the methods of Anderson and Kitcher.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141349861","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":"Love's realism: Iris Murdoch and the importance of being human","authors":"Lesley Jamieson","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12978","url":null,"abstract":"Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that Murdoch offers a distinct view of love and is inappropriate to enlist as an ally. This is in large part because they have missed the full sense of what Murdoch means by connecting love and realism. I contend that for Murdoch, to love someone means seeing them in light of a realistic vision of what it means to be human; this includes an appreciation of the limits of freedom, the formative influence of personal history, and the nature and extent of our differences from one another. This helps us to see why Murdoch variously describes loving attention as realistic, compassionate, tolerant, and extremely difficult. It also sheds light on some important and familiar ways that we criticize one another's grounds for love.","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141357895","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}