Hegel’s modal argument against Spinozism. An interpretation of the chapter ‘Actuality’ in the Science of Logic

I propose a new reading of Hegel’s discussion of modality in the ‘Actuality’ chapter of the Science of Logic. On this reading, the main purpose of the chapter is a critical engagement with Spinoza’s modal metaphysics. Hegel first reconstructs a rationalist line of thought — corresponding to the cosmological argument for the existence of God — that ultimately leads to Spinozist necessitarianism. He then presents a reductio argument against necessitarianism, contending that as a consequence of necessitarianism, no adequate explanatory accounts of facts about finite reality can be given

What is Wrong with Blind Necessity? Schelling’s Critique of Spinoza’s Necessitarianism in the Freedom Essay

Spinoza’s necessitarianism—the doctrine that everything that is actual is necessary—is an important matter of debate in German Idealism. I examine Schelling’s discussion of Spinoza’s necessitarianism in his 1809 Freedom Essay and focus in particular on an objection that Schelling raises against this view, namely, that it has “blind necessity” govern the world. While Schelling draws on Leibniz’s critique of Spinoza’s necessitarianism in this context, he rejects the assumption of divine choice that stands behind Leibniz’s version of the charge of blind necessity. I develop an interpretation that shows both how Schelling consistently avoids necessitarianism despite denying divine choice, and how his own version of the charge of blind necessity offers objections against Spinoza’s necessitarianism that focus on the issues of divine personhood and love.acceptedVersio

Brandom on Postmodern Ethical Life: Moral and Political Problems

Under embargo until: 2021-08-07On Robert Brandom’s reading, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel holds that the conceptual content of language, thought, and action is constituted by normative attitudes, through which participants of a discursive practice assign each other authority and responsibility. Pusillanimity is, on Brandom’s account, the characteristic normative meta-attitude of modernity, which replaces the naive form of magnanimity that had characterized ancient ethical life: a form of magnanimity that simply assumed objective norms as given part of reality. This chapter argues that magnanimous trust has deeply troublesome consequences. These consequences provide moral reasons that speak against any attempt to establish postmodern ethical life (PEL) in real practice. PEL in Brandom’s sense also requires trust in a more ordinary sense, namely that of an attitude of assuming that others will respect other persons’ roles as participants in PEL.acceptedVersio

Sellars on Self-Knowledge

Under embargo until: 2021-01-27Wilfrid Sellars had an elaborate theory of self-knowledge about one’s own thoughts that anticipates some crucial claims and topics of current work on self-knowledge. In this contribution, I reconstruct Sellars’s theory of self-knowledge, and explore connections with more recent work on the topic. I argue that Sellars’s account undermines Shoemaker’s and Burge’s influential arguments against “perceptual” accounts of self-knowledge, and I discuss whether Sellars’s position is apt to give a plausible account of the relation between self-knowledge and phenomenal consciousness.acceptedVersio

"An erring conscience is an absurdity": The later Kant on certainty, moral judgment and the infallibility of conscience

This article explores Kant’s view, found in several passages in his late writings on moral philosophy, that the verdicts of conscience are infallible. We argue that Kant’s infallibility claim must be seen in the context of a major shift in Kant’s views on conscience that took place around 1790 and that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. This shift led Kant to treat conscience as an exclusively second-order capacity which does not directly evaluate actions, but one’s first-order moral judgments and deliberation. On the basis of this novel interpretation, we develop a new defence of Kant’s infallibility claim that draws on Kant’s account of the characteristic features of specifically moral judgments.publishedVersio

Gêneros objetivos e teleologia em Hegel: da natureza à sociedade

In this article, I explore the metaphysical foundations of Hegel’s social philosophy. Basing myself on an exegetical approach to Hegel’s general metaphysical framework for finite reality which has been popular in the recent literature on Hegel, and which assigns crucial roles to objective kinds (“concepts”) and teleological structures, I examine to what extent Hegel can be seen as applying this framework also to social entities. After summarizing the general exegetical approach in the first three sections, I argue that Hegel sees social reality as ordered by objective, teleologically structured kinds, and use Hegel’s analogy between organism and state to get clearer about the relevant understanding of teleology (or social functions). I argue that Hegel fails to resolve an important problem for his approach, namely the absence of a proper social analogue to biological reproduction and inheritance, and propose a form of social teleological explanation that is apt to fill the resulting gap in Hegel’s theory. I also indicate ideas in Hegel’s approach to social ontology that are of interest independently of Hegel’s normative views on society and politics.publishedVersio

Confusions about ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Voices: Conceptual Problems in the Study of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

Both in research on Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs) and in their clinical assessment, it is common to distinguish between voices that are experienced as ‘inner’ (or ‘internal’, ‘inside the head’, ‘inside the mind’, ...) and voices that are experienced as ‘outer’ (‘external’, ‘outside the head’, ‘outside the mind’, ...). This inner/outer-contrast is treated not only as an important phenomenological variable of AVHs, it is also often seen as having diagnostic value. In this article, we argue that the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ voices is ambiguous between different readings, and that lack of disambiguation in this regard has led to flaws in assessment tools, diagnostic debates and empirical studies. Such flaws, we argue furthermore, are often linked to misreadings of inner/outer-terminology in relevant 19th and early twentieth century work on AVHs, in particular, in connection with Kandinsky’s and Jaspers’s distinction between hallucinations and pseudo-hallucinations.publishedVersio