Kants Transcendental Idealism: an Interpretation and Defence Pdf, Epub, Ebook

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Kants Transcendental Idealism: an Interpretation and Defence Pdf, Epub, Ebook KANTS TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM: AN INTERPRETATION AND DEFENCE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Henry E. Allison | 560 pages | 02 May 2011 | Yale University Press | 9780300102666 | English | New Haven, United States Kants Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defence PDF Book This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti-realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database. Bennett, J. Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Nothing about this conclusion, or how Kant argues for it, is prima facie incompatible with a qualified phenomenalist reading of transcendental idealism, or even a strong phenomenalist one. Feder, raised an issue that has been discussed ever since. The reduction thesis is an ontological thesis, and the idealism based on it is ontological idealism — a contrary to philosophical naturalism. Is this itself brute, or a last turtle? While this is not conclusive, it is evidence that the identity phenomenalist interpretation should be abandoned. Vaihinger, H. If space is an epistemic condition of outer objects for us then this entails that objects we cognize are in space simpliciter. Some of the questions posed by PrEP are not specific to HIV prophylaxis, but simply standard public health considerations about resource allocation and striking a balance between individual benefit and public good. The relevance and significance of the first-person perspective for transcendental arguments does not go completely unnoticed, 33 but the bearing it has on the justificatory strategy of transcendental philosophy remains unclear, and peculiarly, nothing has been said in response to the problematic supposition that, if self-directed transcendental arguments are to reveal the structure of our cognitive faculties, the mind is transparent to itself. Kant, of course, claims that appearances are transcendentally ideal and yet empirically real. If this is true, then transcendental philosophy, as a project that aims at a priori self-cognition that is, cognition of forms of cognition , is committed to the view that certain relevant aspects of our beliefs, desires, and perception must be transparent to us. McCormick, M. Classifying Emotions Varieties of Emotion, Misc. There are serious objections to both of these extremes, and the aim of this paper is to develop a middle ground between the two. And would you ultimately describe Kant as an idealist or a cynic? Commitment to the reduction thesis has a deflationary impact insofar as it claims for the mind-dependence of all possible objects of experience by invalidating their independent mode of existence. One reaction would be to conclude that the interpretive options are simply more complex than is usually appreciated:. There is only one experience, in which all perceptions are represented as in thoroughgoing and lawlike connection […] If one speaks of different experiences, they are only so many perceptions insofar as they belong to one and the same universal experience. Thus the Critique would make the metaphysical assertion about grounds. But it is clear that Kant cannot hold that the existence of an object in space is grounded in our direct perception of that object, for that would be incompatible with the existence of unperceived spatial objects. As he would write several years later in response to Eberhard, the Critique. Strawson on Kant. Objection: The point of the Critique is not entirely negative, nor entirely about epistemic limits. B—4 Once again, this is a case of Kant emphasizing that his view is not idealist in the specific sense of idealism we have seen so far —denying either that objects exist in space or that we can know that they do. Section 7 is devoted more narrowly to the nature of things in themselves, topic b , and the related Kantian notions: noumena , and the transcendental object. Since the inference from a known effect to an unknown cause is always uncertain, the empirical idealist concludes we cannot know that objects exist outside us in space. Jacobi, Werke , vol. Immanuel Kant Interview Philosophy. London: Garland. Humility We cannot know anything about things in themselves. Kant argues that it is the faculty of reason that can lead us astray, and into metaphysical error—and that it can do so because of principles Kant himself formulates very generally in terms of the notions of conditions and the unconditioned. This might be thought to directly entail phenomenalism, for, if appearances would not exist without subjects to experience them, but things in themselves would, then a fortiori appearances and things in themselves are distinct. Parallel reasoning applies to any proposed categorical ground CG for a disposition D : On the one hand, it cannot be in virtue of the very nature or essence of CG that an object having the property CG must also have the property D; for then CG would be relational, not categorical. Since Non-spatiality makes only a negative claim, it may be easier to make it consistent with Humility. What were some of these ideas he assailed? Remember Me. But consider me apart from my shoes: so considered, am I barefoot? Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Section 2. And among the moderns who had the greatest impact in addition to Hume were Gottfried von Leibniz, John Locke, and Rousseau. What can we say positively about them? For Fichte, the procedure of this transcendental deduction is nothing other than exposing all the necessary conditions involved once one accepts the fundamental principles of reason. Granted, the position of the Critique is that the nature of reason itself makes this kind of reasoning attractive and commonsensical, and even nearly irresistible. Since the identity of intentionality is not grounded on the existence of objects, it can only be grounded on the nature of the subject that is capable of entertaining intentions. Needless to say, much more would need to be done to develop such an interpretive approach. Kants Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defence Writer If the conditioned as well as its conditions are things in themselves, then when the first is given … the latter is thereby already given along with it. Humility We know nothing about things in themselves. II, —; Fichte raises the same objection in the Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre ; cf. Guyer, P. But Kant continues to do this in the B Edition, not only in sections that were heavily revised for the B Edition [ 17 ] but even in passages that were added to the B Edition e. At first blush Allison's transposition of the anti-realist structure which Dummett elaborates with respect to empirical knowledge, and which Kant invokes to dissolve the similarly empirically-concerned mathematical antinomies, to the context of things in themselves, appears odd: Kant's explanation for how it is possible to avoid regarding appearances as forming a sum-total that must be either finite or infinite -- namely, that appearances are not things in themselves -- employs a contrast between a kind of thing whose being is fully determinate and one whose being is not, a contrast between a realm of objects fit for truth and one fit for mere warranted assertibility. We have sufficiently proved in the Transcendental Aesthetic that everything intuited in space or in time, hence all objects of an experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances, i. Transcendental idealism is a form of empirical realism because it entails that we have immediate non-inferential and certain knowledge of the existence of objects in space merely through self-consciousness:. While it can be denied that transcendental realism is available as an interpretation of empirical cognition without it being denied that empirical cognition has objective reality, since its objects may be and, if Kant is right, must be appearances, to deny that transcendental realism is available as an interpretation of pure reason just is , it would seem, to deny the possibility that its ideas have objective reality: its would-be concepts of objects cannot be concepts of appearances, and so have nowhere to go for the possibility of an object. We can think of this in terms of the image of the earth resting on a stack of turtles, with turtles all the way down. However, if one thinks that claims of identity between appearances and things in themselves are contentless see section 5. We refer to certain Kantian works by the following abbreviations: [ Prolegomena ] Prolegomena to any future metaphysics. Perhaps the best statement of the phenomenalist interpretation of things in themselves is given by Erich Adickes 14—19 : things in themselves are a plurality of mind-independent centers of force. But these assumptions are inconsistent if we assume the following plausible principle:. This entry provides an introduction to the most important Kantian texts, as well as the interpretive and philosophical issues surrounding them. Given appearances as essentially involving relations to us , it would follow immediately that there must be properties that are essentially independent of us even if not independent of all relations —just the modest claim we seek. This has contributed to the emergence of the common attitude that transcendental arguments better fare without transcendental idealism. Having determined the sense of the constitution thesis with reference to the alternative, Fichtean account of non- introspective self-awareness, we are now in a position to make an overdue response. The way in which the question ''Are we really free? The textual case for 4 is weaker, though not absent. Considered in the former way, the object must conform to our a priori intuitional forms, so it is in space and time. Prichard and Strawson, the present horizon of Kantian studies includes also, among others, Paul Guyer, Rae Langton, and Karl Ameriks, all of whom have criticised Allison and formulated opposing positions on the nature of transcendental idealism.
Recommended publications
  • Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza's Ethics
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVI (2002) Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza’s Ethics STEVEN NADLER I Descartes famously prided himself on the felicitous consequences of his philoso- phy for religion. In particular, he believed that by so separating the mind from the corruptible body, his radical substance dualism offered the best possible defense of and explanation for the immortality of the soul. “Our natural knowledge tells us that the mind is distinct from the body, and that it is a substance...And this entitles us to conclude that the mind, insofar as it can be known by natural phi- losophy, is immortal.”1 Though he cannot with certainty rule out the possibility that God has miraculously endowed the soul with “such a nature that its duration will come to an end simultaneously with the end of the body,” nonetheless, because the soul (unlike the human body, which is merely a collection of material parts) is a substance in its own right, and is not subject to the kind of decomposition to which the body is subject, it is by its nature immortal. When the body dies, the soul—which was only temporarily united with it—is to enjoy a separate existence. By contrast, Spinoza’s views on the immortality of the soul—like his views on many issues—are, at least in the eyes of most readers, notoriously difficult to fathom. One prominent scholar, in what seems to be a cry of frustration after having wrestled with the relevant propositions in Part Five of Ethics,claims that this part of the work is an “unmitigated and seemingly unmotivated disaster..
    [Show full text]
  • Identity, Personal Continuity, and Psychological Connectedness Across Time and Over
    1 Identity, Personal Continuity, and Psychological Connectedness across Time and over Transformation Oleg Urminskyi, University of Chicago University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Daniel Bartels, University of Chicago University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Forthcoming, Handbook of Research on Identity Theory in Marketing 2 ABSTRACT: How do people think about whether the person they’ll be in the future is substantially the same person they’ll be today or a substantially different, and how does this affect consumer decisions and behavior? In this chapter, we discuss several perspectives about which changes over time matter for these judgments and downstream behaviors, including the identity verification principle (Reed et al. 2012) — people’s willful change in the direction of an identity that they hope to fulfill. Our read of the literature on the self-concept suggests that what defines a person (to themselves) is multi-faceted and in almost constant flux, but that understanding how personal changes relate to one’s own perceptions of personal continuity, including understanding the distinction between changes that are consistent or inconsistent with people’s expectations for their own development, can help us to understand people’s subjective sense of self and the decisions and behaviors that follow from it. 3 A person’s sense of their own identity (i.e., the person’s self-concept) plays a central role in how the person thinks and acts. Research on identity, particularly in social psychology and consumer behavior, often views a person’s self-concept as a set of multiple (social) identities, sometimes characterized in terms of the category labels that the person believes apply to themselves, like “male” or “high school athlete” (Markus and Wurf 1987).
    [Show full text]
  • The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity Author(S): James Giles Reviewed Work(S): Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol
    The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity Author(s): James Giles Reviewed work(s): Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 175-200 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1399612 . Accessed: 20/08/2012 03:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy East and West. http://www.jstor.org THE NO-SELF THEORY: HUME, BUDDHISM, AND JamesGiles PERSONAL IDENTITY The problem of personal identity is often said to be one of accounting for Lecturerin Philosophy what it is that gives persons their identity over time. However, once the and Psychologyat Folkeuniversitetet problem has been construed in these terms, it is plain that too much has Aalborg,Denmark already been assumed. For what has been assumed is just that persons do have an identity. To the philosophers who approach the problem with this supposition already accepted, the possibility that there may be no such thing as personal identity is scarcely conceived. As a result, the more fundamental question-whether or not personal identity exists in the first place-remains unasked.
    [Show full text]
  • Ludwig.Wittgenstein.-.Philosophical.Investigations.Pdf
    PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS By LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Translated by G. E. M. ANSCOMBE BASIL BLACKWELL TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Copyright © Basil Blackwell Ltd 1958 MY acknowledgments are due to the following, who either checked First published 1953 Second edition 1958 the translation or allowed me to consult them about German and Reprint of English text alone 1963 Austrian usage or read the translation through and helped me to Third edition of English and German text with index 1967 improve the English: Mr. R. Rhees, Professor G. H. von Wright, Reprint of English text with index 1968, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, Mr. P. Geach, Mr. G. Kreisel, Miss L. Labowsky, Mr. D. Paul, Miss I. 1981, 1986 Murdoch. Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be NOTE TO SECOND EDITION reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or THE text has been revised for the new edition. A large number of otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. small changes have been made in the English text. The following passages have been significantly altered: Except in the United States of America, this book is sold to the In Part I: §§ 108, 109, 116, 189, 193, 251, 284, 352, 360, 393,418, condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re- 426, 442, 456, 493, 520, 556, 582, 591, 644, 690, 692.
    [Show full text]
  • Leibniz: Personal Identity and Sameness of Substance
    ROCZNIKI FILOZOFICZNE Tom LXV, numer 2 – 2017 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18290/rf.2017.65.2-5 PRZEMYSŁAW GUT * LEIBNIZ: PERSONAL IDENTITY AND SAMENESS OF SUBSTANCE Leibniz’s view on personal identity has been the object of numerous dis- cussions and various interpretations.1 Among others, the controversies re- volve around the following questions: (1) What is the relation of Leibniz’s conception to the Cartesian view on personal identity? Is it a completely new idea or some modification of Descartes’? (2) To what extent did Locke’s ideas lay the basis for Leibniz’s conception of personal identity, especially Locke’s distinction between being the same substance, organism, and per- son? (3) What role did psychological continuity play in Leibniz’s conception of personal identity? Did he indeed claim that a person’s identity cannot solely arise out of sameness of substance? (4) Is Leibniz’s solution to the problem of personal identity compatible with his deepest metaphysical com- mitments? Can it be seen as a conclusive solution to the problem? (5) Is Leibniz’s effort to offer an account of personal identity by combining the 2 substance-oriented view with the psychological view a coherent solution? Dr hab. PRZEMYSŁAW GUT, Prof. KUL – Katedra Historii Filozofii Nowożytnej i Współ- czesnej, Wydział Filozofii, Katolicki Uniwersytetu Lubelski Jana Pawła II; adres do korespon- dencji: Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin; e-mail: [email protected] 1 The abbreviations I use are: Erdmann = Gottfried Wilhelm LEIBNIZ, Opera philosophica om- nia, ed. Johann Eduard Erdmann (Berlin: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1840); GP = Die philosophischen Schriften von G.W.
    [Show full text]
  • Overturning the Paradigm of Identity with Gilles Deleuze's Differential
    A Thesis entitled Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Chair Dr. Benjamin Grazzini, Committee Member Dr. Benjamin Pryor, Committee Member Dr. Patricia R. Komuniecki, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2014 An Abstract of Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2014 Taking Gilles Deleuze to be a philosopher who is most concerned with articulating a ‘philosophy of difference’, Deleuze’s thought represents a fundamental shift in the history of philosophy, a shift which asserts ontological difference as independent of any prior ontological identity, even going as far as suggesting that identity is only possible when grounded by difference. Deleuze reconstructs a ‘minor’ history of philosophy, mobilizing thinkers from Spinoza and Nietzsche to Duns Scotus and Bergson, in his attempt to assert that philosophy has always been, underneath its canonical manifestations, a project concerned with ontology, and that ontological difference deserves the kind of philosophical attention, and privilege, which ontological identity has been given since Aristotle.
    [Show full text]
  • Theories of Personal Identity
    Dean Zimmerman Materialism, Dualism, and “Simple” Theories of Personal Identity “Complex” and “Simple” Theories of Personal Identity Derek Parfit introduced “the Complex View” and “the Simple View” as names for contrasting theories about the nature of personal identity. He detects a “reductionist tradition”, typified by Hume and Locke, and continuing in such twentieth‐century philosophers as Grice, Ayer, Quinton, Mackie, John Perry, David Lewis, and Parfit himself. According to the Reductionists, “the fact of personal identity over time just consists in the holding of certain other facts. It consists in various kinds of psychological continuity, of memory, character, intention, and the like, which in turn rest upon bodily continuity.” The Complex View comprises “[t]he central claims of the reductionist tradition” (Parfit 1982, p. 227). The Complex View about the nature of personal identity is a forerunner to what he later calls “Reductionism”. A Reductionist is anyone who believes (1) that the fact of a person’s identity over time just consists in the holding of certain more particular facts, and (2) that these facts can be described without either presupposing the identity of this person, or explicitly claiming that the experiences in this person’s life are had by this person, or even explicitly claiming that this person exists. (Parfit 1984, p. 210) Take the fact that someone remembers that she, herself, witnessed a certain event at an earlier time. When described in those terms, it “presupposes” or “explicitly claims” that the same person is involved in both the episode of witnessing and of remembering. Purging the psychological facts of all those that 1 immediately imply the cross‐temporal identity of a person will leave plenty of grist for the mills of psychological theories of persistence conditions.
    [Show full text]
  • 436 Béla Szabados Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, And
    Philosophy in Review XXXII (2012), no. 5 Béla Szabados Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as a Personal Endeavour. Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press 2010. 300 pages $129.95 (cloth ISBN 978–0–7734–3817–0) As should be clear enough from the title, this is ‘essentially’ a book about Wittgenstein—about the man and his philosophy and what Bela Szabados convincingly argues to have been the intimately close relationship between the two. For Szabados, one of the most significant differences between the ‘earlier’ and the ‘later’ Wittgenstein lies in what he calls (and endorses as) “his turn away from Tractatus-style essentialism” (125) in favour of a ‘family resemblance’ account of meanings, yet he himself, as Laurence Goldstein pointed out in his perceptive review of this book (Notre Dame’s electronic journal of Philosophical Reviews for 2010.08.07), is prepared to “claim that since philosophy is essentially a personal endeavour in truth and in Wittgenstein there is no facet of Wittgenstein’s personality which can be said in advance to be irrelevant to an understanding of his philosophy.” (2) This sentence provides, incidentally, a not too untypical example of those which justify Goldstein’s grumble that “this is a book that deserved better editing”, and deserved it not least because Szabados writes overall in an engagingly direct and personal style. I have to confess that, unlike both Goldstein and Szabados himself, I am no sort of Wittgenstein specialist as such. That said, I found myself fascinated by Szabados’ detailed discussions of the evolution of Wittgenstein’s views on women, music (and more especially on Mahler), and his own Jewish roots, based, as his discussions are, on an extensive and careful use of Wittgenstein’s personal notebooks, his correspondence and other material never intended for publication, but now publicly available.
    [Show full text]
  • A a a How to Achieve the Physicalist Dream Theory of Consciousness
    Draft May 2020 For G. Rabin Grounding and Consciousness (Oxford) How to Achieve the Physicalist Dream: Identity or Grounding?* Adam Pautz Brown Imagine [a picture] with a million tiny pixels. The picture and the properties reduce to the arrangement of light and dark pixels. The supervenience of mind and all else upon the arrangement of atoms in the void — or whatever replaces atoms in the void in true physics — is another case of reduction. David Lewis (1995) The reader is welcome to label ground physicalism a form of “dualism” or “emer- gentism” (or perhaps a new position entirely), so long as she recognizes that ground physicalism is built around the thesis that the mental is not fundamental but rather grounded in the physical. Jonathan Schaffer (2020) Most of nature is pretty is boring: just different arrangements of atoms in the void. But consciousness seems special. When brains reached a certain complexity, a miracle hap- pened. There appeared properties of a wholly novel type: conscious experiences. To explain this, we may have no choice but to posit special “psychophysical laws”. There are possi- ble worlds where these laws don’t obtain, the miracle doesn’t happen, and we are all zombies. This is property dualism. In “Sensations and Brain Processes”, J. C. Smart articulated just how unappealing property dualism is. It provides a complex and nonuniform picture of reality. And he put forward an alternative physicalist dream picture of reality. In sentient as well as in- sentient nature, “there is nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents” (1959: 142).
    [Show full text]
  • The Logical Analysis of Key Arguments in Leibniz and Kant
    University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2016 The Logical Analysis Of Key Arguments In Leibniz And Kant Richard Simpson Martin University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Martin, Richard Simpson, "The Logical Analysis Of Key Arguments In Leibniz And Kant" (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 755. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/755 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF KEY ARGUMENTS IN LEIBNIZ AND KANT A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Philosophy and Religion The University of Mississippi By RICHARD S. MARTIN August 2016 Copyright Richard S. Martin 2016 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This paper addresses two related issues of logic in the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz. The first problem revolves around Leibniz’s struggle, throughout the period of his mature philosophy, to reconcile his metaphysics and epistemology with his antecedent theological commitments. Leibniz believes that for everything that happens there is a reason, and that the reason God does things is because they are the best that can be done. But if God must, by nature, do what is best, and if what is best is predetermined, then it seems that there may be no room for divine freedom, much less the human freedom Leibniz wished to prove.
    [Show full text]
  • Donald Davidson ERNEST LEPORE and KIRK LUDWIG
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVIII (2004) Donald Davidson ERNEST LEPORE AND KIRK LUDWIG avidson, Donald (Herbert) (b. 1917, d. 2003; American), Willis S. and Marion DSlusser Professor, University of California at Berkeley (1986–2003). Previ- ously Instructor then Professor in Philosophy at: Queens College New York (1947–1950), Stanford University, California (1950–1967), Princeton University (1967–1969), Rockefeller University, New York City (1970–1976), University of Chicago (1976–1981), University of California at Berkeley (1981–2003). John Locke Lecturer, University of Oxford (1970). One of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century, Donald Davidson explored a wide range of fundamental topics in meta- physics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophies of action, mind, and language. His impact on contemporary philosophy is second only to that of his teacher W. V. O. Quine, who, along with Alfred Tarski, exerted the greatest influence on him. Given the range of his contributions, his work emerges as surprisingly systematic, an expression and working out of a number of central guiding ideas. Among his most important contributions are 1. his defense of the common sense view that reasons, those beliefs and desires we cite in explaining our actions, are also causes of them [11], 2. his groundbreaking work in the theory of meaning, and his proposal, based on Tarski’s work on recursive truth definitions for formal languages, for how to formulate a compositional semantic theory for a natural language [29, 46, 47, 50, 51], 3. his development of the project of radical interpretation as a vehicle for investigating questions about meaning and the psychological attitudes involved in understanding action [7, 15, 42, 44, 48], 309 310 Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig 4.
    [Show full text]
  • Idealism: a Love (Of Sophia) That Dare Not Speak Its Name
    Idealism: A Love (of Sophia) that Dare not Speak its Name PAUL REDDINl;' My first experience of philosophy at the University of Sydney was as a commencing undergraduate in the tumultuous year of 1973. At the start of that year, there was one department of philosophy, but by the beginning of the next there were two. These two departments seemed to be opposed in every possible way except one: they both professed to be committed to a form of materialist philosophy. One could think that having a common enemy at least might have been the cause for some degree of unanimity, but no: the traditional enemy of materialism - idealism - was regarded as having been long dead and buried. For the Marxists in the then Department of General Philosophy, it had been Marx who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had 'inverted' Hegelian idealism into a form of materialism, while for the analytic philosophers in the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, it had been Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore who had triumphed over British idealism at the turn of the twentieth. There may have been many things that were atypical about philosophy as it was done at Sydney in the early 1970s, but its resistance to idealism was not among them. Twenty years later, however, there were signs that old certitudes in Anglophone philosophy were changing, and in 1994, two books were published by mainstream analytic philosophers addressing issues central to analytic concern and suggesting that the philosophy of Hegel held the key to their solution. These books were Mind and World * Paul Redding holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Sydney.
    [Show full text]