50,376 research outputs found
Reasons and causes: the philosophical battle and the meta-philosophical war
Since the publication of Davidsonâs âActions, Reasons and Causesâ the philosophy of action has been dominated by the view that rational explanations are a species of causal explanations. Although there are dissenting voices, anti-causalism is for the most part associated with a position that tended to be defended in the 1960s and that was successfully buried by Davidsonâs criticism of the logical connection argument. In the following I argue that the success of causalism cannot be fully accounted for by considering the outcome of first-order debates in the philosophy of action and that it is to be explained instead by a shift in meta-philosophical assumptions. It is the commitment to a certain second-order view of the role and character of philosophical analysis, rather than the conclusive nature of the arguments for causalism, that is largely responsible for the rise of the recent causalist consensus. I characterise the change in meta-philosophical assumptions in Strawsonian terms as a change from a descriptive to a revisionary conception of metaphysics and argue that since the disagreement between causalists and non-causalists cannot be settled at the level of first-order debates, causalists cannot win the philosophical battle against anti-causalists without fighting the meta-philosophical war
The impact of science on metaphysics and its limits
The paper argues for three theses: (1) Metaphysics depends on science as a source of knowledge. Our current scientific theories commit us to certain metaphysical claims. (2) As far as science is concerned, it is sufficient to spell these claims out in such a way that they amount to a parsimonious ontology. That ontology, however, creates a gap between our experience and the scientific view of the world. (3) In order to avoid that gap and to achieve a complete and coherent view of the world including ourselves, we have to enrich that ontology at its foundations, thus making it less parsimonious. The criterion of the integration into a complete and coherent view of the world including ourselves is the way in which the interpretation of scientific theories depends on metaphysics. These three theses are argued for and illustrated by means of two examples from the philosophy of time (eternalism vs. presentism) and the philosophy of mind (mental causation)
Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography Is in the Photography of James Welling
Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting.1 Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent
writing attends in detail to the materials and processes of photography, the agency
of photographic artists, and the social determinants of the production and reception
of photographs. As such writing makes plain, photographs cannot be reduced to mechanical traces.2 Yet background conceptions of photography as trace or index persist almost by default, as no framework of comparable explanatory power has yet emerged to replace them. A conception of photography adequate to developments in recent scholarship is long overdue. Rather than constructing such a conception top-down,
as philosophers are wont to do, this paper articulates it by examining selected works
by James Welling.3 There are several reasons for this: Wellingâs practice persistently explores the resources and possibilities of photography, the effect of these explorations is to express a particular metaphysics of the mindâs relation to its world, and appreciating why this metaphysics is aptly expressed by exploring photography requires a revised conception of what photography is. In as much as it provides a framework for a richer interpretation of Welling, the new conception is also capable of underwriting a wide range of critical and historical approaches to photography
How to Turn from Language Back to Things in Themselves
Although many philosophers today have turned away slightly from the linguistic turn, their methods, e.g. conceptual analysis, are still linguistic. These methods lead to false results. The right method in philosophy, like in other disciplines, is to try to perceive the object and to collect and weigh evidence. We must turn back to things in themselves
We Don't Need No Noumena? Freedom Through Rational Self-Cultivation in Kant
In this paper I argue that we find in Kant a more plausible alternative to
his transcendental conception of freedom. In the Metaphysics of Morals
in particular, we find a naturalistic conception of freedom premised upon
a theory of rational self-cultivation. The motivation for a naturalising
reading of Kant is two-fold. On the one hand, a naturalistic conception of
freedom avoids the charges levelled against Kantâs 'panicky metaphysics',
which both forces us to accept an ontologically extravagant picture of the
world and the self, and also commits us to understanding freedom in nonspatiotemporal
terms, thus excluding the possibility that the process of
becoming free is progressive. And second, on a naturalistic reading we
can repackage normativity back into Kantâs account of freedom, which
has seemed to scholars unacceptably absent. I explain how the process of
becoming free, on the naturalistic view, involves cultivating certain
'aesthetic preconditions of the mindâs receptivity to concepts of duty'.1
Happily, these conditions incur no unpalatable ontological penalties;
rather, they constitute an achievement of the rational aspect of the self.
Pointedly, this is not a self who is free only in virtue of having membership
in the noumenal realm. Rather, effortful self-development entails a
battle to become practically free, and thereby moral. The primary attraction
to this reading of Kant is that it describes freedom as a naturalistic
achievement, rather than a metaphysical given. Thus I show that by jettisoning,
or at least naturalising, the picture of noumenal selfhood we not
only find a theory that is poorer in panicky metaphysics, but much richer
in normative force
The Self-Undermining Arguments from Disagreement
Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among a certain group of people. Then, some skeptical or anti-realist-friendly conclusion is drawn. Chapter 2 proposes that arguments from disagreement share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single, powerful objection: they self-undermine. For each formulation of the argument from disagreement, at least one of its premises casts doubt either on itself or on one of the other premises. On reflection, this shouldnât be surprising. These arguments are intended to support very strong metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality. They must therefore employ very strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy, especially about metaphysics and epistemology, very strong premises are virtually certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreementâprecisely the sort of disagreement that proponents of these arguments think undermine moral claims. Thus, these arguments undermine their own premises. If Chapter 2âs argument is sound, it provides realists with a single, unified strategy for responding to any existing or forthcoming arguments from disagreement
Transcendental Idealism among the Jersey Metaphysicians
A discussion van Fraassen's book Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective that focuses on his account of time as a logical space and on his attitudes towards metaphysics
Positive Duties, Maxim Realism and the Deliberative Field
My goal in this paper is to show that it is not the case that positive duties can be derived from Kantâs so-called universalizability tests. I begin by explaining in detail what I mean by this and distinguishing it from a few things that I am not doing in this paper. After that, I confront the idea of a maxim contradictory, a concept that is advanced by many com- mentators in the attempt to derive positive duties from the universalizability tests. I ex- plain what a maxim contradictory is and how the concept is used to derive positive duties. Then I argue that the notion of a maxim contradictory presupposes an objectionable form of maxim realism. I move from there to the idea of a maxim contrary and the deliberative field. These two ideas are used in tandem by commentators who do not appeal to maxim contradictories. I explain how these concepts are used to derive positive duties and then I argue that there is a systematic error in the derivations that enables one to see that they cannot work
Kant\u27s Metaphysics of Permanent Rupture \u3cem\u3eRadical Evil and the Unity of Reason\u3c/em\u3e
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