On Certainty (Uber Gewissheit) Ed
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Rethinking Fideism Through the Lens of Wittgenstein's Engineering Outlook
University of Dayton eCommons Religious Studies Faculty Publications Department of Religious Studies 2012 Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook Brad Kallenberg University of Dayton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub Part of the Catholic Studies Commons, Christianity Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Other Religion Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons eCommons Citation Kallenberg, Brad, "Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook" (2012). Religious Studies Faculty Publications. 82. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub/82 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Religious Studies at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religious Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Note: This is the accepted manuscript for the following article: Kallenberg, Brad J. “Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71, no. 1 (2012): 55-73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11153-011-9327-0 Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook Brad J. Kallenberg University of Dayton, 2011 In an otherwise superbly edited compilation of student notes from Wittgenstein’s 1939 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond makes an false step that reveals to us our own tendencies to misread Wittgenstein. The student notes she collated attributed the following remark to a student named Watson: “The point is that these [data] tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way: only the tables together with certain scientific theory determine that.”1 But Diamond thinks this a mistake, presuming instead to change the manuscript and put these words into the mouth of Wittgenstein. -
Testimony Using the Term “Reasonable Scientific Certainty”
NATIONAL COMMISSION ON FORENSIC SCIENCE Testimony Using the Term “Reasonable Scientific Certainty” Subcommittee Reporting and Testimony Type of Work Product Views Document Statement of the Issue It is the view of the National Commission on Forensic Science (NCFS) that legal professionals should not require that forensic discipline testimony be admitted conditioned upon the expert witness testifying that a conclusion is held to a “reasonable scientific certainty,” a “reasonable degree of scientific certainty,” or a “reasonable degree of [discipline] certainty.” The legal community should recognize that medical professionals and other scientists do not routinely use “to a reasonable scientific certainty” when expressing conclusions outside of the courts. Such terms have no scientific meaning and may mislead factfinders [jurors or judges] when deciding whether guilt has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Forensic science service providers should not endorse or promote the use of this terminology. The Commission recognizes the right of each jurisdiction to determine admissibility standards but expresses this view as part of its mandate to “develop proposed guidance concerning the intersection of forensic science and the courtroom.” Forensics experts are often required to testify that the opinions or facts stated are offered “to a reasonable scientific certainty” or to a “reasonable degree of [discipline] certainty.” Outside of the courts, this phrasing is not routinely used in scientific disciplines, a point acknowledged in the Daubert decision (“it would be unreasonable to conclude that the subject of scientific testimony must be ‘known’ to a certainty; arguably, there are no certainties in science.”). Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., 509 U.S. 579, 590 (1993). -
Al-Ghazali and Descartes from Doubt to Certainty: a Phenomenological Approach
AL-GHAZALI AND DESCARTES FROM DOUBT TO CERTAINTY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH Mohammad Alwahaib Abstract: This paper clarifies the philosophical connection between Al-Ghazali and Descartes, with the goal to articulate similarities and differences in their famous journeys from doubt to certainty. As such, its primary focus is on the chain of their reasoning, starting from their conceptions of truth and doubt arguments, until their arrival at truth. Both philosophers agreed on the ambiguous character of ordinary everyday knowledge and decided to set forth in undermining its foundations. As such, most scholars tend to agree that the doubt arguments used by Descartes and Al-Ghazali are similar, but identify their departures from doubt as radically different: while Descartes found his way out of doubt through the cogito and so reason, Al-Ghazali ended his philosophical journey as a Sufi in a sheer state of passivity, waiting for the truth to be revealed to him by God. This paper proves this is not the case. Under close textual scrutiny and through the use of basic Husserlian-phenomenological concepts, I show that Al-Ghazali's position was misunderstood, thus disclosing his true philosophic nature. I. Introduction This paper clarifies the philosophical relation between Al-Ghazali, a Muslim philosopher (1058--1111), and the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596--1650), with the objective of articulating the similarities and differences in their famous journeys from doubt to certainty. Historical evidence on whether Descartes did in fact read or had knowledge of Al-Ghazali’s work will not be discussed in this paper. Instead, this paper focuses primarily on the chain of their reasoning, starting from their conceptions of truth and the arguments used by each to destroy or deconstruct the pillars of our knowledge and thus reach truth. -
Mathematical Scepticism: the Cartesian Approach Luciano Floridi
Mathematical Scepticism: the Cartesian Approach1 Luciano Floridi Wolfson College, Oxford, OX2 6UD, UK [email protected] - www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi Introduction Paris, 15 February 1665: Molière’s Don Juan is first performed in the Palais-Royal Hall. Third Act, First Scene: the most daring of Don Juan’s intellectual adventures takes place. In a dialogue with his servant Sganarelle, Don Juan makes explicit his atheist philosophy: SGANARELLE. I want to get to the bottom of what you really think. Is it possible that you don’t believe in Heaven at all? D. JUAN. Let that question alone. SGANARELLE. That means you don’t. And Hell? D. JUAN. Enough. SGANARELLE. Ditto. What about the devil then? D. JUAN. Oh, of course. SGANARELLE. As little. Do you believe in an after life? D. JUAN. Ha! ha! ha! SGANARELLE. Here is a man I shall have a job to convert. […] SGANARELLE. But everybody must believe in something. What do you believe in? D. JUAN. What do I believe? SGANARELLE. Yes. D. JUAN. I believe that two and two make four, Sganarelle, and four and four make eight. SGANARELLE. That’s a fine thing to believe! What fine article of faith! Your religion is then nothing but arithmetic. Some people do have queer ideas in their heads, and those that have been educated are often the silliest. I never studied, thank God, and no one can boast he taught me anything. But, to my poor way of thinking, my eyes are better than books. I know very well that this world we see around us is not a mushroom grown up in a single night. -
The Nature of Certainty in Wittgenstein's On
THE NATURE OF CERTAINTY IN WITTGENSTEIN’S ON CERTAINTY THE NATURE OF CERTAINTY IN WITTGENSTEIN’S ON CERTAINTY By COLIN MCQUAID, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts McMaster University © Copyright by Colin McQuaid, March 2012 McMaster University MASTER OF ARTS (2012) Hamilton, Ontario (Philosophy) TITLE: The Nature of Certainty in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty AUTHOR: Colin McQuaid, B.A. (UNBSJ) SUPERVISOR: Professor Ric Arthur NUMBER OF PAGES: iv, 92 ii Abstract In this thesis I examine the concept of certainty in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a focus on the collection of remarks entitled On Certainty. In the first part I examine two essays of G.E. Moore that initiated Wittgenstein’s discussion of certainty and critique of Moore’s two essays. As I show, Wittgenstein believes that Moore misunderstood the use of the expression of I know in relation to the propositions of common sense. Instead, Wittgenstein believes that the common sense propositions stand for a certainty that belongs to the language-game itself, a certainty that stands fast for everyone who participates in the language-game, like hinges on which the rest of our knowledge and doubt turn. The rest of my thesis is spent examining three different interpretations of this notion of hinge certainty. The first is hinges as presuppositions to combat skeptical arguments, offered by the philosophers Crispin Wright and H.J. Glock. The second is that hinges are Wittgenstein’s version of foundationalism, serving as the foundational framework of human language, a notion primarily advocated by the philosophers Avrum Stroll and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. -
Philosophy Sunday, July 8, 2018 12:01 PM
Philosophy Sunday, July 8, 2018 12:01 PM Western Pre-Socratics Fanon Heraclitus- Greek 535-475 Bayle Panta rhei Marshall Mcluhan • "Everything flows" Roman Jakobson • "No man ever steps in the same river twice" Saussure • Doctrine of flux Butler Logos Harris • "Reason" or "Argument" • "All entities come to be in accordance with the Logos" Dike eris • "Strife is justice" • Oppositional process of dissolving and generating known as strife "The Obscure" and "The Weeping Philosopher" "The path up and down are one and the same" • Theory about unity of opposites • Bow and lyre Native of Ephesus "Follow the common" "Character is fate" "Lighting steers the universe" Neitzshce said he was "eternally right" for "declaring that Being was an empty illusion" and embracing "becoming" Subject of Heideggar and Eugen Fink's lecture Fire was the origin of everything Influenced the Stoics Protagoras- Greek 490-420 BCE Most influential of the Sophists • Derided by Plato and Socrates for being mere rhetoricians "Man is the measure of all things" • Found many things to be unknowable • What is true for one person is not for another Could "make the worse case better" • Focused on persuasiveness of an argument Names a Socratic dialogue about whether virtue can be taught Pythagoras of Samos- Greek 570-495 BCE Metempsychosis • "Transmigration of souls" • Every soul is immortal and upon death enters a new body Pythagorean Theorem Pythagorean Tuning • System of musical tuning where frequency rations are on intervals based on ration 3:2 • "Pure" perfect fifth • Inspired -
Readings of Wittgenstein's on Certainty
CRITICAL NOTICE Readings of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty Edited by Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and William H. Brenner, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. 352, £ 20.99 ISBN-13: 978-0-230-53552-7 (paperback) Reviewed by Derek A. McDougall There can be little doubt that had the opportunity been available to him, Wittgenstein would have pruned and rearranged, in this case perhaps to a greater degree than in others, the rough and unrevised notes which Anscombe and von Wright first published in 1969 under the title of On Certainty. Described in their Preface to the work as ‘a single sustained treatment of the topic’, separately marked off in his notebooks, which he ‘apparently took up at four separate periods’ during the last eighteen months of his life, with his last entry only two days before his death, it must appear to even the most casual reader that the same questions arise time and time again, with Wittgenstein often providing only slight variations in his numerous approaches to them. For that reason, it is only natural to assume that he would have with time selected and organised his remarks with the sole aim of directing the reader’s attention to the identifiable goal towards which he must surely have intended them to point. But what can that goal have been ? This is the moot question which this, for the most part outstanding selection of essays attempts to answer, and these answers may seem as much at odds with one another as the bewilderment provoked by the work itself might lead one to expect, a bewilderment which the editors see as integral to the ‘distance and deference’ with which it has so often been regarded: clearly recognising the ‘unpolished gem’ which On Certainty is, readers have been unable to reach agreement on the nature of the message they naturally assume that it must be attempting to convey. -
Value in Experience, Thoughts on Radical Empiricism; Reflections on Frankenberry and Stone1
Value In Experience, Thoughts on Radical Empiricism; Reflections on Frankenberry and Stone1 David W. Tarbell Modern philosophy, going back to Descartes and Locke, has given preferred status to the kind of judgments that we find within the mathematical sciences and has made it difficult to support judgments of value and meaning. In Chapter Four of his book, The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence, Jerome Stone describes what he calls a "Generous Empiricism." He is building on the tradition of radical empiricism, and presents a transactional understanding of experience that allows him to support empirically grounded value judgments. I argue that a critique from the perspective of Heidegger and others of the continental tradition may present problems to Stone's approach. I then propose a modification of Stone's notion that I think would answer such criticisms. This leads me to the notion that our value judgments have an aesthetic component, and that we can find pragmatic support for the belief that there is an aesthetic tendency in the world of which we are a part. There is something divine and possibly transcendent in that thought. I. The Value Problem: One of the factors affecting the moral, ethical, and political climate of our present culture is diversity of judgment on matters of value. Some have said that the presence of so much diversity argues against our ability to resolve questions of truth in these areas. Their positions vary among skepticism, denying that we can know moral truth, nihilism, questioning that there is such a thing as moral truth, or relativism, claiming that moral truth is conditional on social and/or cultural circumstances. -
To a Moral Certainty: Theories of Knowledge and Anglo-American Juries 1600-1850 Barbara J
Hastings Law Journal Volume 38 | Issue 1 Article 2 1-1986 To A Moral Certainty: Theories of Knowledge and Anglo-American Juries 1600-1850 Barbara J. Shapiro Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Barbara J. Shapiro, To A Moral Certainty: Theories of Knowledge and Anglo-American Juries 1600-1850, 38 Hastings L.J. 153 (1986). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol38/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hastings Law Journal by an authorized editor of UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. "To A Moral Certainty": Theories of Knowledge and Anglo-American Juries 1600-1850 by BARBARA J. SHAPIRO* In many American jurisdictions the jury is instructed that the prose- cution must prove the defendant's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty." At first glance, "to a moral certainty" appears to be one of those typical redundancies of common law that seek to cure ambiguity by compounding it. Because it troubles us that "beyond rea- sonable doubt" conveys no very precise meaning, we add a second phrase, "to a moral certainty," but it conveys even less meaning and makes our whole problem worse. Only a few quite well-educated older people who have read a great deal of nineteenth-century literature are likely even to have said, "I am morally certain that you left your coat in the restaurant" or "Are you morally certain that you came into the room before he did?" It is the kind of phrase that a screenwriter might put in the mouth of a country storekeeper to suggest a slightly bookish, straight-laced, religious old man still living in an earlier age. -
Stanley Cavell's Wittgenstein
WITTGENSTEIN Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein By James Conant HE AIM OF THIS PAPER IS TO PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF ONE ASPECT OF Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein: his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s teaching concerning the relation between meaning Tand use. After furnishing a rough overview of this aspect of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, I shall attempt to bring into focus what is most distinctive and elusive about it by illustrating, by means of some examples drawn from commentators on Cavell’s work, how easy it can be to miss Cavell’s and— if Cavell is right about who Wittgenstein is—Wittgenstein’s point. Now Wittgenstein has become quite famous in recent years for putting forward something that gets called a “use-theory of meaning.” Wittgenstein writes: For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.1 If you look at commentaries on Wittgenstein’s work, you will find that commentators have wildly different understandings of what Wittgenstein is saying in this passage. Here is what Cavell says: “The meaning is the use” calls attention to the fact that what an expression means is a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings. [T]o trace the intellectual history of philosophy’s concentration on the meaning of particular words and sentences, in isolation from a systematic attention to their concrete uses would be a worthwhile undertaking. -
Contextualist Responses to Skepticism
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Philosophy Theses Department of Philosophy 6-27-2007 Contextualist Responses to Skepticism Luanne Gutherie Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Gutherie, Luanne, "Contextualist Responses to Skepticism." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2007. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses/22 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Philosophy at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONTEXTUALIST RESPONSES TO SKEPTICISM by LUANNE GUTHERIE Under the Direction of Stephen Jacobson ABSTRACT External world skeptics argue that we have no knowledge of the external world. Contextualist theories of knowledge attempt to address the skeptical problem by maintaining that arguments for skepticism are effective only in certain contexts in which the standards for knowledge are so high that we cannot reach them. In ordinary contexts, however, the standards for knowledge fall back down to reachable levels and we again are able to have knowledge of the external world. In order to address the objection that contextualists confuse the standards for knowledge with the standards for warranted assertion, Keith DeRose appeals to the knowledge account of warranted assertion to argue that if one is warranted in asserting p, one also knows p. A skeptic, however, can maintain a context-invariant view of the knowledge account of assertion, in which case such an account would not provide my help to contextualism. -
The Complete Stories
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at the end Back Cover : "An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic. numinous and prophetic." -- New York Times "The Complete Stories is an encyclopedia of our insecurities and our brave attempts to oppose them." -- Anatole Broyard Franz Kafka wrote continuously and furiously throughout his short and intensely lived life, but only allowed a fraction of his work to be published during his lifetime. Shortly before his death at the age of forty, he instructed Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, to burn all his remaining works of fiction. Fortunately, Brod disobeyed. Page 1 The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka's stories, from the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Hunger Artist" to less-known, shorter pieces and fragments Brod released after Kafka's death; with the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka's narrative work is included in this volume. The remarkable depth and breadth of his brilliant and probing imagination become even more evident when these stories are seen as a whole. This edition also features a fascinating introduction by John Updike, a chronology of Kafka's life, and a selected bibliography of critical writings about Kafka. Copyright © 1971 by Schocken Books Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.