Liberalism and Rationalism at the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1902–1903

This article reconstructs and analyzes a debate on “the crisis of liberalism” that took place in a prominent philosophy journal, the Revue de me´taphysique et de morale, in 1902–3. The debate was actuated by combiste anticlerical measures and the apparently liberal demand made by Catholics for freedom of instruction. Participants—all hostile to the church—sought to articulate a principled, rationalist liberalism that could respond to the needs of the republic in the post-Dreyfus era. Participants—including Célestin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, Gustave Lanson, Elie Halévy, and Paul Lapie—balanced each in their own way the demands of rationalism, democracy, and modernity. The debate opens a window onto the transition between the Second Empire’s dissident, neo-Kantian, liberal republicanism and the antitotalitarian liberalism that Hale´vy and his student Raymond Aron would articulate in the interwar years

Georges Sorel’s Diremption: Hegel, Marxism and Anti-Dialectics

Georges Sorel’s use of the term diremption to describe his method has long been found obscure. This paper shows that the term was associated with Hegel, and that interpreting it in this light can help us make sense of Sorel’s method. Sorel, this is to say, in his revision of Marxism and his social theory more generally, was engaging specifically with Hegelian philosophy. In addition to clarifying Sorel’s method, this perspective allows us both to place Sorel more clearly in his fin-de-siècle context and to draw connections between his work and more recent marxisant theory

Making it explicit and clear: From ‘strong’ to ‘hyper-’ inferentialism in Brandom and Peirce

This article explores how Robert Brandom's original "inferentialist" philosophical framework should be positioned with respect to the classical pragmatist tradition. It is argued that Charles Peirce's original attack (in "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" and other early papers) on the use of "intuition" in nineteenth-century philosophy of mind is in fact a form of inferentialism, and thus an antecedent relatively unexplored by Brandom in his otherwise comprehensive and illuminating "tales of the mighty dead." However, whereas Brandom stops short at a merely "strong" inferentialism, which admits some non-inferential mental content (although it is parasitic on the inferential and can only be "inferentially articulated"), Peirce embraces a total, that is, "hyper-," inferentialism. Some consequences of this difference are explored, and Peirce's more thoroughgoing position is defended

The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation)

Citation: Brandom, E. (2015). The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation). German Studies Review, 38(2), 438-439. Retrieved from ://WOS:000355374300027In the 1930s, Alexandre Koyré gave a regular seminar on G.W.F. Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Koyré was born in Russia but left as an adolescent to study with Edmund Husserl in Germany. After a few years he left in turn for Paris. In 1936, Alexandre Kojève—younger than Koyré by a decade but following a similar trajectory from Russia through German universities to Paris—took the place of his older colleague at the head of the seminar, which became a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This seminar became legendary and remains the thing for which Kojève is best known today. Rather than enter the university, Kojève spent the postwar years working in the French ministry of foreign economic relations. He was among the technocrats responsible for setting the course of European economic integration. There is a great deal more to Kojève’s body of philosophical work than the famous seminar, a few polemical or provocative essays—such as the famous exchange with Leo Strauss (reprinted in recent Chicago editions of Strauss’s On Tyranny)—and whatever meaning one might assign to his role in building the European Union. In recent decades, Kojève’s voluminous manuscripts and papers, held at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, have become available to researchers. Hager Weslati, translator of the book under review here, is among a new generation of scholars busily exploiting this material

Violence in Translation: Georges Sorel, Liberalism, and Totalitarianism from Weimar to Woodstock

This paper traces readings of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) from Carl Schmitt to Saul Bellow. The image of Sorel that came out of Weimar-era sociological debate around Schmitt and Karl Mannheim was simplified and hardened by émigré scholars in the war years, put to good use in the anti-totalitarian combat of the 1950s, and finally shattered when applied to the unfamiliar situation of the 1960s in the United States. Scholars taken with the problem of the political intellectual and the closely related problem of the relationship between instrumental and critical reason play the central role in this reception history. Sorel’s commingling of left and right justified attempts to replace this organization of political space with one around totalitarian and free societies

Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies

The issues raised by the design and development of technologies to enhance learning has led to a demand for an appropriate language and form of conceptualisation. However we are insufficiently familiar with the way in which different types of mediated tool use occur, to develop the theoretical models needed for the development of this language and form of conceptualisation. In its absence a somewhat eclectic variety of concepts and research, such as the concept of affordance, are recruited in accounts of learning with new technologies. In looking briefly at the relevant area in philosophy this paper will consider whether or not the use of concepts such as affordance give adequate weight to social practice, meaning and knowledge in the design of educational technology. A fruitful source for work in this field which has not been sufficiently exploited is philosophy, particularly recent work in epistemology

Improving preparedness of medical students and junior doctors to manage patients with diabetes

Journal ArticleOBJECTIVE: New medical graduates are the front-line staff in many hospital settings and manage patients with diabetes frequently. Prescribing is an area of concern for junior doctors, however, with insulin prescribing reported as a particular weakness. This study aimed to produce an educational intervention which aimed to improve preparedness to manage patients with diabetes and evaluate it using a mixed methods approach. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: An e-resource (http://www.diabetesscenariosforjuniordoctors.co.uk) was created to contain commonplace and authentic diabetes decision-making scenarios. -32 junior doctors (n=20) and year 5 students (n=12) in South West England worked through the scenarios while 'thinking aloud' and then undertook a semistructured interview. Qualitative data were transcribed verbatim and analyzed thematically. Participant confidence to manage patients with diabetes before, immediately after, and 6 weeks after the educational intervention was also measured using a self-rating scale. RESULTS: Participants reported that patients with diabetes were daunting to manage because of the wide array of insulin products, their lack of confidence with chronic disease management and the difficulty of applying theory to practice. The e-resource was described as authentic, practical, and appropriate for the target audience. Junior doctors' self-rated confidence to manage patients with diabetes increased from 4.7 (of 10) before using the e-resource, to 6.4 immediately afterwards, and 6.8 6 weeks later. Medical students' confidence increased from 5.1 before, to 6.4 immediately afterwards, and 6.4 6 weeks later. CONCLUSIONS: Providing opportunities to work with authentic scenarios in a safe environment can help to ameliorate junior doctors' lack of confidence to manage patients with diabetes.This work was supported by funding from the Diabetes Research and Education Centre Trust (DIRECT) via the Peninsula Foundation

Distributed utterances

I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context. I consider other applications of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the antinomy of the variable.

Should I believe the truth?

Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi’s criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections parallel to those Bykvist and Hattiangadi advance, although it might initially appear to be. In closing, I consider what bearing the preceding discussion has on important questions concerning the natures of believing and of truth

Leave truth alone: on deflationism and contextualism

According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non-paradoxical) instances of the schema:(DS) It is true that p if and only if pAccording to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth-conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like).On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depends in a non-negligible way on the circumstances. Charles Travis claims that contextualism shows that ‘deflationism is a mistake’, that truth is a more substantive notion than deflationism allows. In this paper, I examine Travis's arguments in support of this ‘inflationary’ claim and argue that they are unsuccessful