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Perspectives International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy Volume III, 2010 Andrew O’Connor, Lisa Foran Seferin James, Rozemund Ulj´ee Editors Andrew O’Connor Lisa Foran Seferin James Rozemund Ulj´ee Founding Editors Anna Nicholson Luna Dolezal Sheena Hyland International Board of Advisors Lilian O’Brien Anil Gomes Paul O’Grady Christopher Lindsay Nick Tosh Jason Turner Joel Walmsley Thanks to Maria Baghramian Margaret Brady Christopher Crowley Helen Kenny James O’Shea LATEX by Seferin James Cover Design by Patrick McKay, Advantage Point Promotions Published in association with the School of Philosophy, UCD Dublin, 2010 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Fran- cisco, California, 94105, USA. 2010 Contents Editorial 6 Interview Modality & Other Matters: An Interview with Timothy Williamson 16 By Paal Antonsen (Trinity College Dublin) Articles Searle, Materialism, and the Mind-Body Problem 30 By Erik Sorem (UCD Dublin) David Lewis’s Neglected Challenge: It’s Me or God 55 By Andrew Stephenson (Merton College, Oxford & Stiftung Maximilia- neum, Munich) Book Reviews Derrida From Now On, Michael Naas 73 By Paul Earlie (Balliol College Oxford & Ecole Normale Sup´erieure) Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, Constantin Boundas (ed.) 80 By Andrea Janae Sholtz (Southwestern University) The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, Michel Serres 88 By Jacob Vivian Pearce (University of Melbourne) Ideology: Comparative and Cultural Status, Mostafa Rejai (ed.) 96 By Ariane Fischer (Temple University, Philadelphia) Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (ed.) 104 By Andrew Turner (University of Nottingham) About the Contributors 112 Editorial Welcome to the third volume of Perspectives: International Post- graduate Journal of Philosophy. This journal is an annual, peer re- viewed, postgraduate publication featuring interviews, articles and book reviews from both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. The third volume of Perspectives is the first volume produced since the departure of its founding editors—Anna Nicholson, Luna Dolezal and Sheena Hyland—from practical editing duties. We wish them a fond farewell and hope that we have done justice to the spirit of the project they started with the current issue. This year has been a transitional period for Perspectives in more than one sense. Perspectives has, up to this point, been published in both print and online form. Printing a journal is expensive. The money for printing the first two volumes of Perspectives had been secured through application and re-application to grant schemes within the university and subsidised by the School of Philosophy here in UCD Dublin. Depending on annual grant re-applications is a precarious way to fund a periodical. It was perhaps inevitable that there would come a year when all funding applications were rejected, but this year the event was dramatically precipitated by the collapse of the Irish property bubble, followed by the effective collapse of the banks and then the government. The EU and the IMF stepped in to deal with the crisis of un- payable debts through a huge injection of more unpayable debt. This has been referred to as a bail out and not a bail in for reasons that no one can really understand. Unemployment, emigration, house repos- sessions and bankruptcy are on the rise. There have been huge cuts across the state sector and those institutions heavily dependent on state funding—such as the universities—have also suffered. Some- where on the fringe of this economic mess stretching from Greece to 6 Editorial Wall Street is a small postgraduate philosophy journal called Per- spectives with no money to print its third volume. The impossibility of securing funding to print the third volume of Perspectives is cause for some slight regret. It is frustrating not to be able to continue on with a project precisely as before and at the very time when we first feel most responsible for it. Philosophy is a rather intangible practice and being able to hold a physical manifestation of all that hard work helps one to maintain a little sanity. The current issue is ready to be published and we have decided to proceed with its publication in online form despite our inability to fund a print run at this time. Making this decision involved con- fronting the question of whether we feel it to be absolutely necessary to maintain a print run in addition to online publication. In con- fronting this question we decided that this issue represents far too much work by contributors, peer reviewers and ourselves to be put indefinitely on hold while we wait for the economy to improve or finish us off completely. The financial situation may improve and Perspectives may make a return to the printed form in future issues. While we do not believe a print run to be absolutely necessary, the question remains of whether a return to print would be desirable. We are not sure that we could unambiguously recommend a future return to print even if the chance to do so should present itself. There are disadvantages as well as advantages to maintaining a print run of the journal and these must be evaluated in relation to what Perspectives is and what it is trying to achieve. Perspectives is an independent journal that has been set up to publish peer reviewed postgraduate philosophical research. Is there a need for a journal to publish postgraduate philosophy? Postgradu- ates are certainly capable of publishing philosophy at a professional peer reviewed standard. A PhD thesis is required to meet this cri- teria and while it may be more challenging for masters students to reach the same standard, this does not mean that they are incapable of doing so. 7 Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy Yet, if postgraduates are capable of producing philosophy of a professional standard then why not encourage them to publish in a professional philosophy publication rather than a postgraduate one? We know that there are some postgraduates that will only submit their work to professional philosophy journals. Such students feel an obligation to do so. They feel an imperative to strategically max- imise their career capital before they hit the academic job market by publishing as much work as possible in journals that are as pres- tigious as possible. From this point of view, there is no place for a postgraduate journal because a postgraduate journal will always be less prestigious than a professional journal. This kind of thinking would imply that it is counter productive for Perspectives to continue to identify itself as a postgraduate philosophy journal. It implies that it would be better for Perspectives to reposition itself as a philosophy journal that would remain open to submissions from postgraduates but no longer characterise itself as a postgraduate philosophy journal. It seems to us that the attitude of strategic maximisation risks effacing not only the role of a postgraduate journal like Perspectives but also the meaning of philosophy in general. That people would study philosophy at all is incomprehensible from such a point of view. Strategic maximisers study things like medicine, engineering, business and law. Strategic maximisers do not study philosophy and yet philosophy remains a popular subject for undergraduate and postgraduate study. We must grasp a factor other than strategic maximisation to begin to come to terms with the phenomenon of philosophy. Philosophy is interesting. It has cultural value. It expands intel- lectual horizons. It gives people perspectives. 8 Editorial The cultural value of philosophy creates the demand to study the subject. The demand to study the subject perpetuates philosophy as a profession. It is not a very big profession. Only a tiny frac- tion of people that ever study philosophy will be paid to teach it at university level and studying philosophy doesn’t feed directly into any other career paths (at least in Ireland where there is no oppor- tunity to teach philosophy as a secondary school subject). This is a real source of anxiety for postgraduate students who have already devoted a not-inconsiderable part of their lives and socio-economic capital to the cultural value of philosophy before they find them- selves approaching the job market that could flip them from being what is effectively a paying customer of a university to an employee of one, or push them out into the cold. We know that there would be life after philosophy but we imagine it to be considerably less interesting. Anxiety about the future can suddenly induce an un- characteristic proclivity towards strategic maximisation in the being of postgraduate philosophers. We appreciate the anxiety postgraduate philosophy students can feel about their future employability. At the same time we want them to remember why they started doing philosophy in the first place and the value of what they are doing at the moment. It is only in the cultivation of this impulse that professional philosophy becomes a social and economic possibility. Postgraduates spend weeks, months, years, writing in an area that interests them and we want to give them a chance to share the work that they can be most proud of with people that share those interests. It matters to them and it matters to us. A postgraduate philosophy journal offers a transitional space for publication. A space where people can submit work to be consid- ered on its own merits, without the concern that an editor may be biased against publishing their work because they are an early stage researcher. Perspectives seeks to facilitate the publication of postgraduate research but we do not indiscriminately publish postgraduate writ- ing.
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