Introduction

Notes Introduction 1 . Much ink has been spilled trying to assess the validity of these terms (were Carnap and Wittgenstein not born on ‘the continent’?), to define the essential traits of the two traditions (argumentative style and logical clarity vs. oblique prose and historical consciousness?) and to trace the origin of the parting of ways (Carnap vs. Heidegger? Brentano’s legacy? Frege’s revolution in logic?). These are worthy enterprises, but it seems to me that more often than not the earnest focus on ‘reconciliation’ gets in the way of the more pragmatic strategy of acknowledging the socio-institutional division whilst rejecting its philosophical meaning. Hence my use of the word neglect . My sincere hope is to see, in a few decades, a new generation of philosophers taking over, having been educated by teachers who thoroughly neglect this division. For these young scholars the labels ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ will be mere objects of historical curiosity, and they will look down upon those hard-headed philosophers still proudly self-identifying as ‘analytic’ or ‘continental’ as quaint, and somewhat amusing, relics of a bygone era. 2 . I borrow this useful term, indicating proficiency in both continental and analytic methods and vocabularies, from Rorty (in Prado 2003). 3 . By my reckoning, Moore is an exemplar synoptic philosopher, defining himself as a ‘philosophical generalist’ (2012: xviii–xix), and lamenting that ‘the narrowness of focus that we see nowadays within philosophy poses a threat to its being pursued at all, in any meaningfully integrated way’ (2012: xix). 4 . Throughout this book I shall prefer the term ‘universe’ to ‘world’ or ‘external reality’. It seems to me that, first, the term ‘world’ is an anachronistic piece of metonymic philosophical lexicon (see Cazeaux 2007, Chapter 6 for a discussion of the ‘world’ metaphor in epistemology). Yet it is still ubiqui- tously used in contemporary philosophy, often with ontologically extrava- gant connotations (see, for example, Goodman 1978; Lewis 1986; Gabriel 2011; Kuhn 2012). In our collective consciousness we have long since moved our abode from a finite world to an infinite universe, and it seems mistaken to employ the term ‘universe’ to refer exclusively to the infinite and star- spangled expanse of space beyond the confines of our planetary atmosphere, as this seems to reinstate an arbitrary form of dualism between our familiar ‘homey’ world and the alien, hostile universe. Moreover, the term, in its vagueness, lends itself to the kind of anti-realist, semantic deflation operated by the likes of van Fraassen, who invites us to interpret ‘world’ as ‘a context- dependent term that indicates the domain of discourse of the sentence in which it occurs, on the occasion of utterance’ (2002: 24). Second, the quali- fier ‘external’ seems to me, again, to rely on a tacit dualism between internal and external which the naturalist simply does not acknowledge. There is but one reality, the very same reality both inside and outside of our skulls. 149 150 Notes Additionally, I will refrain as far as possible from using the noun ‘nature’ in these contexts; doubtlessly one of the most semantically loaded terms in Western languages I prefer to use the no less complex but somewhat more circumscribable term ‘reality’. 5 . As Beiser puts it ‘to historicize our thinking means to recognize that every- thing in the human world – culture, values, institutions, practices, ration- ality – is made by history, so that nothing has an eternal form, permanent essence or constant identity which transcends historical change’ (2011: 2). 6 . See, in particular, Hallward (2003); Norris (2009); Pluth (2010). 7 . I take issue with the regulative role that politics all too often assumes in Badiou’s ontological system-building. No good realist ontology is built upon ethico-political commitments (but a successful one can be: ask Paul of Tarsus). On the other hand, a truly emancipatory politics requires a suitably robust ontology, to offer a metaphysical map of reality for generations of militants to explore. I will very elliptically buttress this claim with a single word: Spinoza. 8 . The term ‘bold naturalism’ is employed by McDowell (1996) as a foil against his own ‘naturalism of second nature’. Liberal naturalism is a McDowell- inspired stance defended by a number of philosophers, articulated most clearly in two anthologies edited by De Caro and Macarthur (2004, 2010) and defined as a naturalism that ‘offers a broader, more expansive conception of nature that makes room for a class of nonscientific, but nonetheless nonsu- pernatural, entities’ thus occupying ‘the typically overlooked conceptual space between Scientific Naturalism and Supernaturalism’ (2010: 4, 9). 9 . Thorough introductions to the arguments of Logics of Worlds are Hallward (2008) and (Pluth 2010, Chapter 4). The best – and profoundly damning – critique is Johnston (2008b). 10 . In an oft-cited paper Flanagan lists no fewer than fifteen different meanings of the term ‘naturalism’ and refers to the rejection of supernaturalism as the ‘one thing about which all card-carrying naturalists agree, or should agree’ (in Clayton and Simpson 2006: 435). Elsewhere, however, Stroud ironically notes that ‘[i]n the sense in which naturalism is opposed to supernaturalism, there has been no recent naturalistic turn in philosophy. Most philosophers for at least one hundred years have been naturalists in the nonsupernatu- ralist sense’ (in De Caro and Macarthur 2004: 23). 11 . Inquiries into the multifaceted, geographically various and at times contra- dictory concept and history of the ‘Enlightenment’ easily comprise one of the most burgeoning fields in the whole of contemporary humanistic academia. Skimming the cream of a vast number of historical monographs on the subject, the work of Peter Gay in the late 1960s (Gay 1966, 1969) and that of Jonathan Israel in the early 2000s (Israel 2001, 2006, 2011) are mandatory mentions (and hefty reads). My own views – perhaps biased by contemporaneity – are particularly influenced by the latter, welcoming his warning that ‘there are sound, even rather urgent, reasons for rejecting [the Enlightenment critics’ arguments] as profoundly misconceived and insisting, on the contrary, that the Enlightenment has been and remains by far the most positive factor shaping contemporary reality and those strands of ‘modernity’ anyone wishing to live in accord with reason would want to support and contribute to’ (2006: v). Notes 151 12 . See Brandom (2002) for an insightful analysis of Kant’s normative turn. 13 . In the early, and perhaps still best, 1798 translation by John Richardson of Kant’s semantically rich ‘Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit ’. 14 . This emerges clearly in Brandom’s (German idealism-inspired) social-prag- matist account of knowledge, where – far from a naively Baconian equa- tion of knowledge with power – the attribution of knowledge to a subject means that such subject is at once entitled and committed to a certain claim. A rational agent can count as ‘knowing’ (and as having the authority that such an epistemic state grants) only to the extent that she binds herself to (assumes responsibility for) the commitive consequences of an assertion and makes herself available to public challenge on (being asked for reasons for) the commitment undertaken. Phrased as a slogan, the knower always owes (to the collectivity of rational agents) as much as she owns . 15 . The realism I defend in this book parts ways with the transcendental idealist when this assumption of responsibility in the normative and epistemic sphere is extended to the ontological one, making the human responsible for the constitution of the real. However, Kant’s transition from a theocentric to an anthropocentric paradigm (terms introduced by Henry Allison 2004) and from an intellectualist to a discursive model of cognition is to be recognised as a momentous philosophical achievement, opening the way to the intrin- sically anti-theological rejection of (in Sellarsian language) the ‘myth of the categorial Given’ or the belief in the direct sensory awareness of a proposi- tionally articulated reality. (This thesis, regrettably, still enjoys some popu- larity among theologians and philosophers of religion. Alvin Plantinga, for example, argues that ‘[f]or science to be successful ... there must be a match between our cognitive faculties and the world’ (2011: 270) a match – if I can be forgiven the pun – clearly made in heaven). The anti-realist outcome of Kantian transcendental idealism can be avoided through a naturalised revi- sion of Kantianism, preserving the ontological dependence of the conceptual on the real. For a reading of Sellars as offering precisely a naturalised Kantianism see O’Shea (2011). 16 . The motley crew of counter-Enlightenment thinkers from Hamann and Jacobi all the way to Heidegger, thinkers keen on the Romanticist substitu- tion of universalised ‘reason’ with contextualised and relativist notions of incommensurable ‘traditions’, personal ‘feeling’ or unanalysable ‘faith’. See Berlin (1980) for a classic exposition of counter-Enlightenment thinkers, Beiser (1987) for a detailed historical reconstruction of the philosophical and cultural milieu in which these ideas first flourished, and Lloyd (2013) for a counter-history of the Enlightenment mindful of its internal contradictions and ‘shadows’. 17 . As Derrida put it, the ideal of Enlightenment critique,

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